Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Eurydice
Around me, chaos. Hooves thumping, metal clanging, screams and shouts. Searing light like the sun still sat before my eyes—solaire, cast by the dawn hawk, more intense for the black maw's shadow that had fallen after.
In Highmark, Liora had known what was coming and held it back from me. She’d shown me her own power in careful measures, never the full hand. Of course she hadn’t. She was old and experienced enough to know that you never showed all your cards.
And she and Maeronyx had waited until I had seen the ambush—had seen Faun and Mirek fall—before the black maw’s shadow fell. They wanted me to see my court dying to the other three.
A coordinated attack. Summer, spring, winter. And my court was gone.
The best enemy, my dear, is a demoralized one. Casual, ruthless, pragmatic. Her words felt like they floated in from a different life.
Liora had smiled at me. She had poured me wine.
She had told me her real name. She had already decided I would die here.
I should have seen her for what she was from the beginning, but I was na?ve, fresh as a child.
I might have been a distant relative, but birds threw their own babies from their nests every day.
She had never been an ally, not for a moment.
She had always been my enemy.
Shock filled my mouth like iron, then something deeper rose beneath it. Anger. And beneath the anger, another thing fueling it. Deeper, more potent.
Shame.
Shame for ever trusting. Shame for believing. Shame for Mirek and Finch and Faun’s deaths.
But beneath that shame, a swift, even more potent current thrilled through me.
Deep inside my fragmented mind I found myself in the raining meadow while acid dripped onto Dorian’s face, wanting to kiss him or kill him.
He wasn’t gone; I felt the tug of him. Our veyre bond was still there, still pulling at my ribs.
So I’ll need to fight blind, I’d said.
You’ll need to fight through anything.
I wasn’t dead yet. I wouldn’t die until they put me down.
Feralis crackled at my fingertips. Fierce, ready, waiting. I gripped the dagger at my back, and a surge of numbing power lit up my arm. I pulled magic toward me, the wind kicked up—
A force punched into my back. I slammed into the wet grass, chest first, and the air left me in one violent expulsion. Pain exploded through me, tectonic. All thought obliterated.
No words, no thought, just pain. Pain and fear tendriling through me in the darkness. Then, panic—no air, no air—for a second, two, three, before my chest convulsed open.
Air tore in, ragged and piercing. Fuck, did it hurt, but mostly on my left side.
I wasn’t dead. Dying a little, maybe a lot, but not dead.
Whatever had struck me, I felt it in my lung, lodged there. A sword or dagger—no, the other queens couldn't get to me that fast. A bow shot, then. But no one could make that distance except—
Maeronyx.
The terrible numbing cold confirmed it when I sipped in a little air. An arrow through my left lung, not my heart. She'd been aiming for my heart; the wind I'd just called had set it off course.
Why hadn’t the stag intervened? My entire court had been ambushed. Why would the gods watch, if not to stop a slaughter?
There was only one good reason: it didn’t want to.
It didn’t care if I died, only that I lived. It hadn’t cared if I died in the Sylvanwild trials. Hadn’t cared if I died to Rhiannon’s hand. But because I’d lived, I’d grown more powerful.
To the Sylvanwild god, death was boring; survival was intriguing.
Finally, finally, I understood Caustrix.
A dragon locked beneath a kingdom for a thousand years, chained in the dark by the same fae who called themselves civilized, the same humans who prayed to gods that wouldn’t answer.
He had been buried alive—not because he was evil, but because he was powerful enough to be hidden.
Because one king had looked at what he was and decided it was easier to cage him than to share the world with him.
A thousand years in the dark, with nothing but his own spite for company.
I’d spent twenty years in the Dip thinking I understood what it meant to be forgotten.
Caustrix had been forgotten by entire civilizations.
Whole ages of the world had come and gone while he rotted beneath the earth, and not one fae, not one human, not one god had come to free him.
They’d built a kingdom on top of his prison and everyone had gone on living.
No wonder spite was the only language he had left. It was the only thing they hadn’t been able to take from him.
I felt him stir behind my eyes. Not in words—just a low, resonant hum, like a tuning fork finding its pitch. He knew. And for one moment, shared recognition between fae and dragon. The quiet, terrible solidarity of two creatures who’d spent a lifetime feeling unseen.
Yes, the hum seemed to say. Now you see.
The arrow in my lung shifted when I breathed. Blood filled my mouth, hot and copper-bright. My court was dying. I was dying.
But Caustrix hadn’t died in a thousand years of darkness. He had waited. He had held his spite like a coal in his jaws and he had refused to let it go out, and when I had walked into his fire, he had been ready.
I could be ready, too.
The dagger. My fingers had barely found the grip when something closed around my ankle and I was moving—dragged hard across the wet grass before I could close my hand around it.
I opened my seared eyes, still with haloes of Liora’s light in them, and at the edges of my vision could see my arms scraping across the ground.
Fast, faster, away from the sounds of battle. Away from the Sylvanwild ambush.
I was being pulled toward the pillar. Toward the center of the Killing Fields. The one place I wasn’t supposed to go.
The Convergence.
They would kill me there, all three of them. Rid themselves of the changeling queen, the upstart who’d forced them into the trials. No matter that I had feralis; it was still three against one, and I with an arrow through the lung.
I raised my head. There, wrapped three times around my ankle, a slick, vibrant green vine. Not one from the autumn court; this was Iseris’s spring magic. Verdant, potent, terribly alive.
The vine had sprouted from the earth in the Convergence. There stood the spring queen, bedecked in gleaming, iridescent armor, beckoning me in with the same slender fingers she’d set atop my hand. And behind her, the white pillar loomed so wide I couldn’t find the edges.
So this was their plan—all four of us meeting at the Convergence. But one of us wouldn’t be leaving.
The vine jerked hard. Grass tore beneath my fingers as I was dragged, faster, faster, until I was whipped out of the autumn court’s lands and sent skidding over the ground toward the spire.
I passed through the thick veil, viscous as jelly, and into the convergence. The four magics pooled over me at once—feralis and noxveil and viridine and solaire swimming together, cloying in my mouth and nose.
I slid hard, fast toward the pillar, fingers grasping. Close, closer, the white wall growing. I threw my shoulder forward just before impact. I slammed up against it, shoulder then hip.
Pain radiated through me; my vision went white.
Not with light, but with the hurt. Hurt everywhere, like my body was one great open wound.
There was nothing else, just the cold stone of the pillar against my back and the sound of my own breathing—shallow, wet, wrong.
Here, pressed against the heart of the Convergence, the magic seemed too dense for sound to carry. The world felt still, muted.
Footsteps on the grass. Several pairs.
When I opened my eyes, there they were. Three queens, each of them wreathed in magic.
Liora, Iseris, Maeronyx. Summer, spring, winter, and my coming death.
They didn’t speak, didn’t laugh or scream. Speaking was a waste of time when you were delivering death, and these three women weren’t wasteful.
They were efficient. They were fighters. They were queens.
They descended on me not one at a time, not politely, but all three at once. First, solaire—a blast so intense the world went white all over again. Everything disappeared, and I was thrown back into blindness.
I hadn’t realized how much sight was life, how much I’d relied on it until it was stolen from me again and again.
No wonder Liora had survived six hundred years.
No wonder she and Maeronyx had led the ambush.
Between light and shadow, they could strip away your best sense before the fight even began.
Yet all my other senses remained—the slide of metal from sheath, the movement of their boots over the grass, the astringent smell of magic in my nose, the metallic tang of blood in my mouth, pain beating like a second heart inside me—and the certainty of my own body still existing in the world.
I was alive, for now. But I wouldn’t be in ten seconds. Iseris’s vine tightened on my ankle, keeping me bound. No running away.
They'd gone to all this trouble, and still they fought like it was already done.
Anger flared in me, hot and startling. I had always been underestimated.
Frail, a weakling. A rabbit, a pettifey.
Forced into this kingdom. Forced into trials.
Forced to fight Rhiannon. And never on equal footing, always at a disadvantage.
Yet I had survived, found a way every time, and still it was fucking three on one.
Eight seconds until they were on me.
I couldn’t fight them, not even one at a time. Maeronyx had already gotten a kill-shot with her arrow; now it was only to finish their work.
Gods, they didn’t deserve this. They didn’t deserve to win.
“So don’t let them.” Caustrix’s voice slithered into my head. I wasn’t alone, here at the end. “You still have the tooth. Use it.”
I scoffed. “Why? Haskel—Eleyrie—Finch—Mirek—they’re all fucking dead.”
“Not the one who matters most.”
The one who mattered most…
Dorian.
The bond, the thread still held. Caustrix was right: Dorian wasn’t dead; I felt him still, my veyre. Queenslayer, yes. But also my protector.
Long ago, before all this, almost the day we’d met, he had said something that never left my mind.
Fucking diadems and boots on necks.
He hated this. He’d hated all of it from the beginning. And whether or not he’d betrayed me, that changed nothing about the undying truth of those words.
My right shoulder was useless; my left arm still worked. I forced my hand around, found the dagger’s grip.
Carys’s dagger. The dagger of ice and spite. My own.
I was supposed to have broken the wheel, to have ended the trials, to have destroyed this machinery. The spiritstag had seen it in me—I had seen it in me. There in the grove, when I’d first touched magic. In the meadow, when I’d straddled Rhiannon and slit her throat.
I was meant for power.
I was meant to be the Courtbreaker.
It was an iron truth in my chest. I was supposed to have been her. Carys’s heir, but better. The hubris of a daughter of scorn.
But if it couldn’t be me, then let it be him.
Let him burn it all the way down.
I yanked the dagger from its sheath. Pain receded into cold numbness. Caustrix’s power slid into my fingers, up my arm, and with it, his hate of the world—every century of it, every year. I knew why he wanted to see it destroyed.
Maybe he had always seen the ambush coming.
Maybe he’d wanted to witness the chaos.
But maybe he had planned for this moment. For me, blind and bleeding at the base of the spire with his tooth in my hand and nowhere left to throw it but exactly where he wanted it to go.
A thousand years in the dark. A thousand years to plan. And all he’d needed was a child of dirt angry enough and desperate enough and spiteful enough to carry his dagger out of the darkness and deliver it to the one person who could wield it better than I ever would.
I’d thought I was using the dragon’s tooth.
The dragon’s tooth was using me.
They were closer now. I had five seconds.
I forced myself up to a seat against the spire, dagger in hand. I didn’t have physical strength, didn’t have eyesight, but I didn’t need either.
Blood contained water. I had command of feralis. I had the dagger in hand.
Water lay all around. So much of it.
The dagger replaced pain with cold strength.
Not healing—nothing so kind. It simply stopped mattering.
The arrow in my lung, the torn muscles, the vision that flickered like a guttering candle—all of it went distant, muffled, as if the dagger had drawn a curtain between me and my own dying body. I staggered to my feet, raised my arm.
Feralis gathered at my call. I envisioned the blood rising from the grass, the sacrifices of all those dead fae.
Rising, rising, congealing. The smell of it strengthened in my nose as the blood pooled around my hand, a godsawful crimson mass turning lazily, thickly.
The dagger drank from it and hummed a single, satisfied note.
Letting go of it was the last thing I wanted.
But I had no choice. This was my only choice.
I pulled my arm back and threw the dagger. Feralis go with it. Send it as far as it can fly.
The moment it left my hand, pain returned. Sudden, ferocious, all-encompassing. My punctured lung. My battered shoulder and hip. My seared eyes.
This was it. This was the end.
Let it be fast.
I didn’t know which queen arrived first; I only heard boots on the grass. A cold-fingered hand gripped my throat, shoved my head back into the spire. My scalp hit the stone so hard, stars appeared.
Cold metal slid through my sternum into my heart.
Pain, pain, nothing but pain.
Death opened before me. I couldn’t even see the sky past Liora’s blinding light.
Life faded. The world dimmed. My mother’s face appeared before me in flashes, beaming, then crying, then beaming again. I didn’t want to see her worst days, only her good ones. Only her brown eyes gleaming with love.
She’d loved me. She’d loved me. She’d loved me.
I had to believe it. I did.
The last thing I heard was Caustrix. Not words, just laughter. The piece of the dragon I’d brought with me out of that cavern laughed and laughed and laughed.