Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Eurydice
Dorian trotted the black horse down the cobblestone street, and gazes found us.
Here, people didn’t wear patchwork clothes or scrappy leather shoes.
Men held fine-sanded canes; they doffed top hats as we passed.
Women wore fat-bottomed dresses like the pastries we’d been served in Highmark, pastel and frilly.
They’d tied bonnets at their chins with matching ribbons.
The highborn. Exactly as I’d imagined them.
We in the outer districts survived so they could thrive. We supplied the grimy labor so they didn’t have to callus their hands.
What I hadn’t imagined was their respect for the scouts—the reverence in their gazes as we rode by.
In the southern district, we guard weren’t anything special.
Here, atop this horse, I felt halfway royal.
And that meant something more to me than it did in Sylvanwild.
No one there knew me. But I was, now and always, a daughter of scorn.
And to have these highborn stare at me with wide eyes—to have their well-dressed children watch as we approached and as we left—filled me with something inexplicable.
Resentment, pride. Both.
We arrived at the tall trellis gate to the outer districts just as the sun had begun to heat up my exposed hands around Dorian’s waist. Soon, the scouts would notice their big black gelding was gone.
Dorian had better have a good trick.
He rode us up to the guard, who came to stand directly in the center of the trellis gate with hands clasped behind his back and an unimpressed gaze. A lieutenant, most like, probably twenty-five years old.
Dorian nodded, and the guard nodded back. “Open the gate.”
The guard didn’t move. His gaze flicked to me and back to Dorian. “Where’s the rest of the expedition?”
“On the way. I’m ranging ahead.”
The guard still didn’t move. “On whose orders?”
Come on, Dorian.
A growl reverberated through Dorian’s chest. “On my own.”
“And you are?”
Dorian flicked the lapel of his cloak down. I couldn’t see what the guard’s eyes fell on, but his eyebrows rose. “My apologies, Regiment Commander.” He turned and circled one hand in the air. “Open the gate!”
I almost didn’t hide my smile. If nothing else, Dorian was a clever bastard.
Soon, the clinking of the chains rotating over their axes echoed through the street. Back in the direction of the barracks, no horses had appeared.
The second the jagged teeth of the double gates appeared and rose high enough, Dorian ducked his head and rode us through.
We trotted into the southern district. Back into my home.
The scent hit me at once, foul and pungent. Even the cobblestones sounded different under the horse’s hooves, like the creature trotted on a riverbed instead of a street.
Faces lifted, eyes searching. I pressed my face close to Dorian’s back as the gate lowered behind us.
When you’ve lived twenty years in a place—grown up fighting and sometimes fucking with the people in it—they know your bearing like their own palms. Even hairless. Even with a cloak on and the hood up. Know a person long enough, and you understand them subconsciously, instinctively.
Dorian broke the horse into a canter. One wide road would take us from the middle gate to the outer gate, a straight shot to the wall. My whole life hurried by.
Dorian had told me I could stay here. Could live as I liked for as long as I liked. But who would choose that? Not with these smells, these wretched sounds. Puking, husking, clanking, the green puddles lining the street.
I’d loved the people in this place, but never the place itself. People made a home, and I had no home here anymore. Better to die in the Killing Fields than whistle every night atop that wall, waiting for the threat to return while my toes froze in my boots.
As we rode up to the outer gate, two guard stepped up. I recognized them at once: boys I’d grown up with in the Dip. Finn and Rowe. They’d become day guard.
I lowered my face, gripped Dorian’s sides more tightly.
He brought the horse to a head-rearing stop. “Open the gate.”
“Two scouts on one horse?” Finn always had been questioning and skeptical. “And one of them a child. Or a woman.”
“Where’s the rest of your expedition?” Rowe asked.
“A regiment commander’s given you an order.” Dorian danced the horse in place. “Bad form for two privates not to heed it.”
Dorian may be a fighter, but he didn’t have our military cadence or words down.
“He’s got the pin,” Rowe murmured to Finn.
“Why do you have a woman on the back?” Finn sensed the bluff.
“None of your business,” Dorian growled.
“Hold there,” Finn said. “I’ll go get my regiment commander.”
No, no, no.
Deep in the district, the chains for the middle gate began their clinking. The gate was rising. The scouts were coming. We needed to get through this gate now, or not at all.
Punishment for stealing guard uniforms was one thing. Taking a horse was another. But thefting a regiment commander’s pin?
Death. Swift, merciless death.
We didn’t fuck with authority in this kingdom.
Dorian knew it. I felt him reaching for the sword at his waist—preparing for a slaughter of the two guard, or maybe killing one and forcing the other to raise the gate at the end of his sword.
Finn’s face flashed before me, the child he’d been. A mop of brown hair, always crouching by puddles to observe his dumb face. Shy, closed-off, scrutinizing. Innocent.
I set my hand over Dorian’s. We couldn’t do it like this. I had a better way.
He glanced at me over his shoulder—just before I threw my leg over and slid off the horse. My boots hit the cobblestones and I approached Finn, lifting my hands to my hood.
He stared back at me, brow furrowed, those skeptical brown eyes traveling over me. He didn’t recognize me; why would he expect a ghost?
I came closer, closer, until we stood so close together I could smell his morning breath. I threw my hood back. Exposed my hairless scalp to the light.
“Let us pass, Finn.”
Finn’s skepticism shifted into confusion—then shock. His eyebrows lifted, his eyes opened, and a pang of regret tightened my chest.
It was lovely to have someone remember you. Even when you’d changed so very, very much.
“Eury?” His eyes moved over my head, my clothes, back to my face. “Eurydice Waters?”
Beside him, Rowe observed me like I was a bug. “Can’t be. Eury’s dead. And she had hair.” Rowe was always great at the obvious.
“I know you know it’s me.” I stepped closer to Finn. He was the one I had to convince. “I don’t have time to explain, Finn, but if you don’t open this gate right now, the man on that horse is going to gut you.”
Behind me, the horse’s hoof clopped on the cobblestone as if it understood.
Finn’s attention flicked between us. “What in Arxius’s bloody—”
“Please, Finn.”
Rowe pointed. “Where’s your hair gone?”
No time, no time.
I grabbed Finn’s collar with one hand and yanked my dagger from behind my back. Its blue glow flashed, smoke trailing as I set it to his neck. Numbness. Power. Under the sunlight, it hissed. “Open the motherfucking gate, Finn.”
It hurt to threaten him. But not as much as I’d thought it would.
Fear came into him, paralyzing his whole body. The shy boy. Puddle-starer. He’d always been subservient to me, always treated me like I was somehow better for walking with my chin up. He’d had that wonderful streak of skepticism, but not the balls to follow through on it.
Even now. Especially now.
“Please,” I whispered.
He stared, stared, as though searching me for real intent—and seemed to find it in my eyes. He nodded. “Open the gate, Rowe,” he murmured. “The quick release.”
“But—”
“Do it. Now.”
I held the dagger to Finn’s neck as Rowe moved in my periphery. He crossed to the wheel, engaged the mechanisms I’d watched the guard manipulate so godsdamn many times when the scouts came and went.
The gate clanged, then began to rise. Hooves sounded on the cobblestones, distant but nearing.
“Eury,” Dorian said, low.
I let go of Finn’s collar. Nodded once at him and replaced the dagger under my cloak. I held Finn’s gaze a second longer before I turned.
Dorian’s hand was already reaching out for me. The scouts were galloping now, moving as a unit down the street like a flock of birds.
They knew. They saw us.
I grabbed Dorian’s hand, and he leveraged me up onto the horse’s back behind him.
He started the horse into a circling trot as the gate rose, rose, far too slow. Yells sounded; someone was ordering the gate shut. Probably the scouts’ regiment commander himself sat atop one of those horses.
Before us, the gate’s teeth had nearly risen high enough.
“Hold on,” Dorian said. “We’re going to move, Eury.”
“We can’t outrun them. We’re two on the same horse—”
“Just hold on.”
Now I understood. I pressed my hands all the way around his waist and clasped them tight. My cheek came flush against his back.
Dorian’s heels jerked out and drove into the horse’s sides. It let out a cry, leapt forward, and Dorian ducked. Finn and Rowe stood to the side, and only when we were under the gate and past them did I realize the two guard I’d once known hadn’t obeyed the scouts’ orders.
Rowe could have reversed the wheel, lowered the gate. He didn’t.
One thing you could say for those of us who lived in the Dip: no matter who it was, we were loyal to each other. We were the poorest of a poor district. When you had so little, you made yourself rich in what you could.
We’d been rich in each other.
Carys knew. She’d grown up here, found her way into those sewers. She’d probably seen the inner district herself, seen the ease and wealth. She’d known both sides, felt the kinship and the resentment. Maybe that was why she’d only been partially able to keep her promise to Caustrix.
We passed through the gate and onto the long stretch of plains beyond the wall. The horse moved into a gallop, and I couldn’t help it—I had to look back.
The wall. My wall. My first god. The high place I’d spent my whole childhood imagining the world from atop or behind.
Now I was on the other side of it, looking back in daylight.
Behemoth. Absolutely behemoth.
We rode only half a span before the horses’ hooves thundered over the barren ground. A horn sounded—the scouts’ call. The same bellow they offered up every time they left or approached the outer wall.
A horse was a precious commodity in our kingdom, and they were riding only one to a seat. They would catch us before we reached the tree line.
Every time I glanced back, they rode closer. The first time I could make out bobbing shapes, then I could perceive the riders’ faces, then their horses’ panting reached my ears without turning my head.
“They’ll catch us.” My voice was weak in the wind.
“They won’t.”
“Dorian—”
That was when I felt it. The magic.
I had never touched another fae while magic flowed through them. Had never experienced the sensation of it entering their body—didn’t even know you could feel that.
You absolutely could.
My fingers tingled, then my arms, my head, my torso, legs and toes. Feralis, nature magic. Air magic. It washed over me like a current, so sudden and powerful I gasped.
My cloak no longer blew back. It began to press the other way, the hood flipping up over my head. The black horse’s tail that had streamed behind us now pressed forward, slapping against my leg.
A tailwind. One so powerful, we weren’t pushing but pushed.
Dorian’s magic. I hadn’t seen it since the Eldermaze.
He rode the horse hard, fast. Behind us, the scouts seemed to run for a time at the same pace—and then they fell back. The distance between us grew, grew, grew, until we passed through the tree line and they were obscured from view.
“They’re gone,” I called.
He ignored me. Dorian kept the horse galloping; the wind kept pushing.
“Dorian—”
“Not yet.”
We ran a span, two. We ran until I couldn’t smell the Kingdom of Storms, couldn’t hear the other horses, and ours started hacking.
“Slow him, Dorian. For gods’ sake.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, or didn’t want to. I let go of his waist—and saw his hands on the reins.
Black-veined. Oil under his skin.