Chapter 44
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Eurydice
The rain hissed against the cave’s entrance. Outside, the world had become a muddy green. Inside, the horse stood with its nose almost touching the ground, flanks trembling, swaying from exhaustion.
The scouts wouldn’t find us in this. Rain like this drove even the ruthless to shelter; they were likely crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in another cave. Or maybe they’d turned back toward the wall.
But they were our least concern.
I sat against the cave wall, the dagger in my cross-legged lap, while the Unseelie magic did its work on Dorian. He’d passed the point of return. Only the spiritstag and the grove could save him now.
I’d known it when he fell off the horse. Known it when he told me to go; his eyes had been black at the edges.
Now he writhed, groaning, as the magic overtook him. And there was nothing I could do. I had stood in a dragon’s flames, and there was nothing I could do.
Dorian had told me to leave him. He’d told me to take the horse and go.
I’d considered it. Considered it as I considered all options, in a flash. I saw myself riding for Sylvanwild, through the iron gates, taking a horse from the citadel’s stables and galloping for the Killing Fields in time for the trial.
I had the dagger. If I lacked a veyre, then that was one less threat. The word meant queenslayer, for Vaelen’s sake. Blood coated its letters; the syllables were no hollow threat.
But I’d recoiled from the thought—from its vividness, the tug of it. I’d always been a survivor, but I’d never so fully considered abandoning someone like this.
And Dorian wasn’t just someone…
He’ll betray you. He already has.
The words were a song I couldn’t force out. They already haunted me, and I’d only just emerged from the dragon’s lair.
Caustrix had changed me. I’d carried a piece of him with me out of those catacombs, and perhaps it was that piece pulling me toward the horse and Sylvanwild. Or, simply, what kept my fingers wrapped tightly around the dagger long after the choice had been made.
Dorian gritted his teeth, his back bowed, tendons standing out along his neck. At first I’d held his hand through the pain, murmured words, but he didn’t seem to see me or hear me. He’d recessed into a pit inside his body.
I’d stay until he passed. I’d do that.
But wasn’t that its own betrayal? I didn’t accept the inevitable. The Sylvanwild trials had meant inevitable death. Rhiannon’s sword through my heart had been inevitable. The dragon’s flames had promised inevitable burning.
Caustrix had whispered something else to me when his tail was wrapped around me. The words had sunk beneath the waves of everything else. Now they rose.
The tooth does not only cut, child. It drinks. Every magic it touches, it swallows. Every power it meets, it makes its own.
My gaze dropped to the dagger, its eerie glow. My thighs had gone numb where it lay. At the sound of Dorian’s groans, I placed my fingers around its grip.
How did a dagger drink? But this wasn’t a dagger, at least not originally.
It was a tooth.
I moved across the cave’s floor to Dorian’s side with a sudden frenzy in my chest. He didn’t have long; his eyes had already gone fully black.
I held power. Carys’s power. I had no idea how to wield it.
In the battle of the Kingdom of the Plains, she’d draw the dagger across the palms of each of her archers. She’d given them power. And she’d drawn the dagger across her own palm, too.
Dorian’s fist was braced against the cave floor, an unconscious leverage as his body died. I seized his wrist.
“Give me your hand.” The dagger clattered aside as I pulled with both hands, but it was like trying to dislodge a stone from the wall. “Dorian!”
He didn’t hear. Or if he did, he didn’t show it.
I went on pulling, pressing my boots into his side. When that did nothing, I let go and crouched over him, taking his face between my hands.
“Dorian, look at me.”
His face shifted left and right, lips pulled into a grimace. He moved like a possessed animal.
Softness would not save him.
I swung a leg over and straddled him. Drove my fingers into his hair, tugged at his scalp, dragging his face up to mine. Close enough to feel his breath. Close enough to taste death in the air. From deep in my throat: “Veyre, give me your hand.”
His eyes flicked to me. For a moment, he saw me.
Slow and shaking, his fisted hand came up between us. The knuckles blanched white, the veins tar-black, and five lines of blood issued down his palm into the wrist of his guard uniform.
I turned his palm up and one by one wrenched the fingers open. He kicked under me, twisted his head, but my whole world was those five fingers. I couldn’t be stopped.
The fate line lay there. Blackened, but visible.
I swiped the dagger from the floor. In a single stroke, I sliced the tip across his palm.
I’d expected blood. I got it.
The skin split. Black blood rose in defiance of gravity, floating, reaching—then rushing toward the blade like iron to a lodestone. It struck the metal and sizzled. Smoke curled. The corruption burned to nothing, and what remained was pure: feralis, distilled and waiting.
The dagger drank. Took corrupted magic and cleansed it. Held it. It vibrated under my grip, ready to release, to obey.
But that had only been a sip. A shallow cut. I couldn’t cut him everywhere; he didn’t have the time, or the blood.
Back in the Eldermaze, Thalassa had told me that women had far greater wells of magic than men. Our power resided in our potential.
My next choice was obvious.
Cruel bone kissed my palm. The blade opened me in a clean line and before pain could crest, I pressed my bleeding hand against Dorian’s.
Skin to skin.
Palm to palm.
I wrapped my fingers around his and held on. I leaned down, pressing us chest to chest, the dagger still clenched in my other hand.
If nothing else, I could take pain.
At first, nothing.
Then, it hurt. Vaelen’s bleeding sky, it hurt.
The corrupted magic entered me like a spiked bramble forced beneath skin. It branched into two, then four, growing into my bloodstream where our palms joined. Sprouting, spreading, piercing my forearm, my bicep, my shoulder, my chest.
I almost let go of his hand. I couldn’t.
This wasn’t like tapping into feralis on my own. Back when I’d used too much of it in my battle with Rhiannon, I’d hardly felt the turn. I hadn’t known what I’d brought on until I looked down at my own blackened hands.
This was no creeping; it was an invasion. Three rungs up the ladder of wrongness. A thing never meant to be done. Pulling another fae’s corrupted magic into you? Not what the fae taught their children under the leafy boughs.
But it was necessary. We were here, and Sylvanwild was days away.
Forget the spiritstag. Forget the grove. Dorian would live, and it would be because of me.
When the thorns hit my heart, I cried out. I held on. They ran jagged and merciless through my lungs, up into my collarbone, pierced my throat until I choked.
The dagger bit into my other palm like a lifeline. If I let go, I’d die. I knew it. I’d collapse over Dorian’s chest, vomiting black bile; my eyes would drown in shadow, and I would rise a wraith.
The magic filled me, pressing toward some unseen brink. Just before it tipped, I tore my hand from his. Air punched into my lungs as I lurched upright, my vision murky.
I uncurled the fingers of my cut hand. It swam before me, bleeding black to my wrist; it wasn’t my hand moving but the whole shrouded world. I swayed atop Dorian, darkness crowding the edges of my sight. I was losing consciousness.
Not yet.
With two quick breaths, I wrapped my hand around the dagger’s blade. The edges pierced my fingers, but the cuts were so fine I didn’t even feel them.
Take it, you bastard.
Nothing happened. The magic swirled in me, closing my windpipe. Darkening my vision. Pulling me under—
Until, with a wrenching pain, it reversed. Inch by inch, faster and faster, raking its way through my veins and out of my hand.
The dagger whined and hissed as the blade drank. Louder, like fatty meat sizzling over a spit. Before me, the corruption twined its way around the bone, the smoke rising higher into the air.
When it had nearly drunk it all, I removed my cut hand from the blade. The corruption floated into the air, swirling toward the dagger. Droplets of magic, moving ink. They reached the blade’s surface, clung, and evaporated.
In my right hand, the dagger thrummed with power. So much, I could barely stand to hold it. So much, I couldn’t imagine not holding it.
As the last of the droplets disappeared, I turned my head and found my own reflection staring back from the wet flat of Caustrix’s tooth. A sharded face. A hairless scalp—blue eyes—distortion where the tooth warped in the middle—and then my mouth.
Who was she? Not me.
Eurydice Waters couldn’t have done that.
Had that counted as using the blade?
You may use it three times, Caustrix had said. And then—
“Eury.” Dorian’s voice echoed in the cave, a barely there rasp. “What’ve you done?”
He lived; he spoke. Some part of me, small and buried, celebrated. Yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the reflection. Couldn’t speak. The amount of power in my hand was narcotic. Heavy. Seductive.
“Is that your blood?”
Blood—my blood?
I focused past the reflection to the blade itself. Bright-red dripped down its edges, over my knuckles, pattering onto the cave floor.
My blood. It was everywhere.
I dropped the dagger with a gasp. It struck rock, clattered. Dorian had already sat up beneath me. His hands came around mine, prying open my bloody palm. “Wildmother.” Blood welled along all my fingers, pooled along my cut fate line. So much of it.
But it was red.
Not black.
Dorian didn’t ask more questions—not right away. His entire focus shifted to stemming the bleeding, bandaging my hand. He was alert, aware, wholly himself. As he worked, I searched his arm, his throat. Not one discolored vein.
Finally, he sat back against the cave’s wall. His gaze flicked from the blood-slick dagger to me. The basics must have been obvious to him, if not the specifics. “Thank you.”
I shook my head. We didn’t thank each other; we did what we had to do.
“I don’t know what you did, Eury.”
I moved next to him, cradling my hand. Exhaustion dragging at my eyelids. Our shoulders didn’t quite touch. Without the dagger in my grip, I felt calmer, more myself. “I don’t, either.”
He let out a one-note chuff. “Then how did you know to do it?”
“My mother always said I had a mind like a trap. I thought she had to say that because she was my mother.” With the fingers of my good hand, I traced points in the air.
“Something Carys did in the third trial. Something Caustrix said to me. When someone’s dying, you put things together more quickly. ”
He leaned his head against the wall. “I think your mother saw you more clearly than you know.”
I kept my face turned away, toward the cave’s mouth. The horse, standing with lowered head, seemed the safest spot to study. “In the flames, I saw her. Over and over and over.”
“I was going to ask, but—”
“I know. There wasn’t time.”
“And I didn’t want to make you relive it.”
I angled closer to him, so our shoulders touched. “I couldn’t escape until I went through a door. Her bedroom door.”
He didn’t speak. His shoulder remained solid, comforting, unmoving.
My head touched his arm. Soft, warm. My eyes slipped closed. “How did you know, Dorian? You told me to look for a door.”
“Long ago,” he whispered, “when Gawain took me to Noctere, he trapped me inside my own mind. He made me face my deepest fear.”
“Which was?”
“A door. The same one you walked through in the inner district.” He meant the door to his home in the Kingdom of Storms. The site of his family’s death. “I couldn’t walk through it. I had to.”
He’d gone easily through that door—the real one—when the time came.
I set my unbandaged hand on his arm. Sleep had nearly pulled me under its waves, but I needed to hear this. “Did you?”
“Of course. I couldn’t escape until I did.” He sighed. “For people like us it’s always a door, Eury.”