Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Dorian
The dawn hawk’s cry pierced the daylight like a spear. Quick, intentional, deadly.
My body moved before my mind could react. Years of training had beaten it into me: if you heard the dawn hawk’s cry, you moved. You survived however you could.
That cry meant death.
I threw myself toward the armor rack, reaching for a shield—
Something hit me from the side. Not an arrow…
a body. Arms locked around my chest and weight slammed into me, bearing me down.
I hit the ground hard on my back and the sky wheeled above me and there was Finch—Finch, who should have been back at Highmark, who should have been nowhere near the Killing Fields—pressed flat on top of me, his face inches from mine, his brown eyes wide and terrified and absolutely certain.
“Stay down, ser—”
The arrows struck.
I heard them before I felt them. The wet, heavy punch of broadheads finding flesh.
One. Two. A third that made Finch’s whole body jerk, that drove his forehead into my collarbone and pushed a sound out of him that I would hear for the rest of my life.
Not a scream, not a cry—a breath. Small and startled, like he hadn’t expected it to hurt that much.
His fingers still gripped my armor. Tight, then tighter, then not tight at all.
Blood on my hands, my neck, my chest. Not mine. All of it not mine. It came from everywhere. His back was a ruin, a thing I couldn’t look at and couldn’t stop looking at, three shafts buried deep between his shoulder blades in a cluster so tight they could have been aimed.
They’d been meant for me. Every single one of them had been meant for me, the veyre, and he had known, he had known, and he had put himself between me and them like it was simple, like it was easy, like I was something worth dying for.
Finch’s fingers uncurled from my armor, one by one, like a decision. And then he was gone.
The arrows kept falling. One hit the ground beside my head. Another drove itself into Finch’s body. Pain pierced my calf like fire. From somewhere, a handmaiden cried out—a sickly, dying sound. Bodies dropped.
Fuck, I couldn’t move the boy. Not until the arrows stopped. They thwicked into the ground. They tore into the tent. They clanged off metal.
Then, they stopped.
My breath sawed in and out, suddenly loud. My calf burned like it had been split open.
Vibrations under my spine. Vibrations through the earth.
Horses’ hooves.
I pushed the two of us upright, holding Finch by the jerkin, and the world came back into brilliant view.
Around me, bodies. Dead handmaidens, sprawled across the grass, arrows jutting from their bodies like needles from a pincushion.
Faun lay moaning on the ground with an arrow lodged in her breast. Mirek stared dead-eyed at the Killing Fields with an arrow straight through one ear and out the other.
And Haskel. Haskel with an arrow in the thigh, halberd raised. He faced down half a dozen charging horses, all of them bedecked in summer court regalia.
“West, Crowmere.” His voice carried the harsh bark of battles past; he didn’t even glance my way. “Your fight’s west.”
West of us, six ebony chargers bore down on our camp. Maeronyx’s cavalry, their black armor gleaming white where the light touched it.
Betrayal. Betrayal on every side.
The dawn hawk had violated the trial. Flown into the Killing Fields, wielded its own magic against a queen—that was forbidden. The gods observed, the gods did not act.
Truth hit me hard, fast, cruel:
Eury had broken the oldest rule. No weapon that isn’t of the land.
The dragon’s tooth wasn’t of the land. Dragons were creatures of sky and fire; they’d never belonged to the earth.
And Liora had known. She’d handed Eury the sol key, helped her find the dagger, watched her carry it onto the Fields.
She’d kept that knowledge tight to her pushed-up bosom and smiled the whole fucking time.
And now all rules were off, and the hawk had been the first to exploit that. Sunlight already lay over the Fields—it didn’t need to cross a border. The hawk had just angled the light that was already shining and blinded her.
At the tree line, the stag remained motionless, watching on.
Its great antlered head tilted slightly, the way it had when it pressed its brand into my skin.
When it had chosen me as the instrument of Eurydice’s death should the worst come to pass.
It had looked at me the way you look at a blade you’re sharpening—not with affection or cruelty, but with patience.
It wore that same patience now.
The stag wouldn’t stop the hawk, wouldn’t challenge its transgression.
It hadn’t intervened when Carys became the Courtbreaker.
It hadn’t intervened when her veyre killed her with her own dagger.
It had watched a queen it chose descend into corruption and done nothing, because the experiment was more interesting than the subject.
Now it was doing it again. If Eury died, no matter—the dagger would pass to another hand, another test, another four centuries of waiting. If she lived, well… that was intriguing to a god.
The hawk wanted the dagger for Highmark. The stag wanted to see if Eurydice deserved to keep it. Both of them were willing to let her die to find out.
Fuck the gods. Fuck the trials. Fuck the courts.
Feyreign was, and always had been, diadems and boots on necks and gods. And I was sick of being a pawn.
I hobbled to the weapons rack, slid the strap of a round shield onto my forearm and unsheathed my bastard sword. It came free gleaming under the sun, no doubt sharpened by Haskel himself. One clean slice severed the arrow lodged into my calf. I turned toward the fighting.
Half my magic had been sapped during the ride. Half would have to be enough.
The first Highmark knight had nearly ridden Haskel down, sword ready.
The old fae roared, pulled a torrent of feralis toward him, and pounded his booted foot on the ground.
The earth kicked upward before him—broke like a buried giant punching its way toward the sky—and the horse’s eyes went wide as it was thrown off course.
Haskel’s halberd swung down and sheared through the horse’s foreleg above the knee.
No one in this kingdom was better with a halberd than Haskel. No one in Sylvanwild was better at manipulating the earth. But he was one man on foot versus six mounted knights.
In the Killing Fields, a worse sight: Eury stood with one arm thrown up, her face shrouded. A darkness clung to her eyes like a living thing, too black and too deliberate to be cast by anything natural. The hawk had blinded her with light; the maw had finished the job with shadow.
I’d felt the first attack, and the second.
The brand on my chest had pulsed hot and sick the moment the hawk’s light hit her—not pain exactly, but an echo of hers, the veyre bond carrying her distress to me in waves I couldn’t shut out.
Whiteout. Panic. The disorientation of a body that had been robbed of its primary sense and hadn’t learned yet how to survive without it.
Now, the panther’s darkness. She might have been screaming. She might have been calling for help. In the roar of the Fields, I couldn’t hear her, and she couldn’t see me, and the distance between us might as well have been an ocean.
The blindness wouldn’t fade before the other three queens hacked her down.
She needed the dagger. She needed to use it now. But if she could act at all after two gods had reached into her skull and turned out the lights, then she was a greater creature than any queen in the history books.
The vibrations under my feet intensified. Maeronyx’s chargers.
I pivoted toward the west. Their gallop carried them toward me hard, fast, their lances readying. Six soldiers of the winter court—the best in Feyreign. The horses thundered but the riders remained eerily still; a bad rider fought the gallop, but a good one had nothing to fight.
No time to say a single word to Eury; they’d be on me in seconds.
Ever since Gawain had taken me, he had wondered at the strength of my magic. How I was able to call on it so easily, with so much force. Our circumstances were the same: both of us changelings, both of us made orphans.
What he didn’t—perhaps couldn’t—understand was that death lived with me. It lived in my mind like a coiled snake, those slitted eyes always open, watching. I’d watched both my mothers bleed out—human and fae. My father. My sister. Everyone I’d loved.
For some, perhaps, death was an event. For me, death became my whole life. It consumed me. It became my beginning and my end, my everyday, my dreams and my waking.
And it meant I could call on magic like breathing. In, out—like air.
Now, death had never been more with me. My family’s deaths had tortured me; even the thought of Eury dying was unbearable. It couldn’t happen. Not while I lived.
A shadow passed over the sun. Not a cloud—not natural. The air chilled, and goosebumps rose on my body.
Maeronyx had made her move on the Killing Fields.
Out there, I could barely make out the shape of the great white pillar. Couldn’t even see Eury. Winter shadow was as potent as summer light. Even fae eyes couldn’t penetrate it.
Which meant Eury was in terrible, terrible danger.
“Veyre.” Haskel’s voice boomed like I’d never heard it. Desperate, full of gravel. “Protect your queen.”
His sword clanged in the shadows. A horse screamed.
Haskel fought on. He would fight until he couldn’t.
Everything pulled me toward Eury’s side—but necessity kept me in place. If I didn’t take down the chargers, they’d lance me in the back as I ran. I needed to be quick, efficient, merciless.
I dropped the shield and sword on the ground beside me. For this, I needed feralis.