Chapter 50
CHAPTER FIFTY
Dorian
The tip of my knife met metal in the shadows. A clang, and my knife was rebuffed. I knew that sound, that feel; Gawain wielded a broadsword, as he always had.
Now, at least, I knew which direction he fought from.
I turned toward him, ignored the surge of pain in my leg, and swung sideways. My knife cut through smoky shadow, but I had gotten close; he grunted as he dodged. I swung again, caught only air. His boots scraped backward.
He didn’t want to kill me. He never had.
“Listen to me, Dorian.”
I stepped into a third swipe. Maeronyx’s shadows couldn’t last forever; there was a reason she was called the queen of mist.
“Fight me out of the shadows,” I growled.
“Eurydice will be dead in moments, Dorian. But I’ve made a provision for you.”
Lies. More lies. I didn’t stop moving. Not my arm, not my feet.
I was so close I could smell his spoiled-milk breath.
I leapt, slashing. He raised his sword, deflected.
My hand was knocked aside, and the blow numbed my fingers to the wrist; the knife nearly slipped free.
I landed in a stumble, and he shoved me aside with the butt of his blade. The force of it threw me to the ground.
“Fool,” he spat. “You’re at your limit. Without magic, I’ve always outmatched you.”
It was true.
I hit the ground on my shoulder and rolled. He advanced, boots scraping. I came up to my feet in a crouch.
“Come with me,” he said. “Maeronyx will spare you.”
“Like you spared my family?” Rage flared in my chest. “My mothers?”
All at once, the shadows dissolved. Sunlight streamed into my face, sudden and blinding. Not Liora’s magic, but real sunlight.
Maeronyx’s power had reached its limit.
There he stood, armored in ebony from toes to crown, not six paces away. He held his broadsword low in both hands. The angles of his helmet framed his cheekbones, his hard eyes. The edge of the scar on his jaw shone white in the sunlight.
Every time, it was me and him. In waking, in dreams. That face, those gray eyes and hard lips.
My gaze was pulled toward the Killing Fields. I couldn’t see her out there; the spire glowed golden, obliterating everything else. But I could feel her alive, as I’d felt her from the moment we’d been connected by the spiritstag.
She lived. Eury lived, and that was enough.
Now, to get through this fucker. I couldn’t use more magic; I was at my limit. But he couldn’t, either. Not here on my land.
A sliver of his neck was visible between breastplate and helmet.
So many veins and arteries awaited my knife.
I knew all his moves, just like he knew mine.
Every feint. Every step. But he’d always been the better fighter.
He had to be, with only a candle’s flame of magic.
He was the reason I had so much—him, him, him.
And he was why I trained every night with a blade.
Even when I wasn’t fighting him, I was. Always.
I had to be careful, tactical—
My heart seized with pain. An avalanche of it, like I’d been stabbed right through the center. The veyre mark burned hot and hard, and I dropped the knife. My knees buckled.
I knelt, clutching my chest with both hands. Air—I couldn’t breathe. Was I dying?
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. The tip of the broadsword came into view. “You can’t see her, so I’ll narrate.” Gawain’s voice, certain and steady. “Just now, your queen’s been impaled by Liora’s solaire-slathered sword. Right through the heart, from what I can see. Up against the gods’ spire.”
Impaled.
I squinted through the veil of my hair. There, at the center of the Fields, they came into focus: four forms clustered near the spire.
“Lies,” I rasped.
“And yet here you kneel.” Gawain stopped in front of me. The tip of his sword touched the grass. “That veyre bond doesn’t lie.”
Moment by moment, the pain in my heart shrank, and it beat once more under my hand. The brand dimmed until I couldn’t feel its burn.
For the first time since the stag had joined us, I couldn’t feel her. Her presence had been so constant, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be alone.
But I was alone. Fully alone.
Eurydice was dead.
Impossible, but true. She’d survived so much. Fuck’s sake, she’d stood in dragon’s fire. And yet…
In my periphery, a streak of red. There on the Killing Fields, an object tore through the air like an arrow. It arced toward us, blood flying from it, and drove itself into the ground just inside Sylvanwild land.
It stuck there halfway into the ground, upright, dripping with blood and gleaming in the sun. The grass under it sizzled and died.
Carys’s dagger. Caustrix’s tooth.
For a flash I was back inside that cavern, staring down a dragon. Eury had lain unconscious, still trapped in the blue flames, her body limp, her face slack, her lips moving around words I couldn’t hear. The dragon had watched me watch her, and then it had made its offer.
I should have refused. I should have picked Eury up and carried her out of that tomb and never looked back.
But Caustrix had seen what I was, and what I wasn’t.
He’d smelled the spite on me the way a predator smells blood—old anger, the kind that doesn’t heal, that calcifies inside your chest and becomes the architecture of who you are.
He’d known I wouldn’t say no. He’d known it before I had.
I had extended my hand, palm up.
He’d lifted a foreleg, brought one great claw down atop me until it hovered over my palm. Just the delicate tip. I’d looked at it and I’d thought of Eury’s face when she’d learned what I was. Changeling-killer. The thing she hated most. And I’d thought: What’s one more sin on a ledger this long?
The claw pierced my palm. A single point of pain, small and bright, almost nothing.
Then the power. Not almost nothing. Not small.
It poured into me like molten ore—hot, heavy, ancient.
It hadn’t felt like feralis, hadn’t felt like any magic I’d ever touched.
It had felt like hunger, like a door opening inside me onto a room I’d never known was there, vast and dark and full of something breathing.
It had raced up my arm and into my chest and I’d felt my heart stutter, skip, restart with a beat that wasn’t entirely mine anymore.
Caustrix withdrew his claw. The wound sealed instantly, without even a mark.
“Tell me,” I’d said. “Tell me how to save her in the Killing Fields.”
“You can’t, veyre.” A snort of smoke into the air. “The gods won’t let you. You must wait.”
“Wait for what?”
He hummed as if considering whether to answer at all. “To reignite a sun that has gone dark, you must become the conduit that empties itself.”
A riddle. I’d never been good with riddles.
I hadn’t told Eury. I’d walked out of that cavern with acid threaded through my veins and I’d said nothing, because saying it out loud would have made it real, and if it was real then I’d have to face what I’d done—not just the deal, but the reason I’d taken it. The selfish, gutting reason.
I would do anything to keep her alive. Anything.
Now the dagger stood in the earth before me, dripping with the blood of dead fae, and my palm burned.
Power. Dragon’s power.
Gawain and I met eyes. We’d both seen the dagger fly.
The gleam in his gaze had changed. He’d only ever wanted me as a trophy, but now a greater prize awaited him. And I—without a weapon, at my limit—was the only creature in the way of it.
His fingers shifted on the grip of his sword. The other hand began to move. I knew those micro-movements like I knew my own body: he was about to hew me down from a few paces away. I’d seen him do it a hundred times.
I pulled on the last tendril of feralis I had and leapt upward with a roar. I crashed into him, and the two of us went to the ground. He landed on his back, armor clanking, helmet striking the grass.
He’d always been stronger than me. He’d never been faster.
I straddled him, pinning his arms with my knees, and reached for his left boot. He never went anywhere without Mercy, didn’t even sleep without those six inches of death nearby. I found the ebony tip at the lip of his boot. Gripped it, unsheathed, and stared down at him.
“Dorian—”
How often had I fantasized of this moment? How many times had I dreamed it? Daydreams, nightmares, while knifing a rasher of pork at breakfast. I’d always imagined the last words I would speak to him, the venom I would whisper as a sendoff into the underworld. The last voice he’d hear in this life.
Gawain had always been my endgame. The changeling I sought in every death.
Yet now he was just an armored obstacle.
I gripped Mercy tight and shoved its point up through his jaw. All six inches, until his gray eyes went wide, shocked. Then those eyes turned away from me toward the sky and saw no more.
I stood and limped toward the Killing Fields.
Red death lay all around me. Horses screamed; broken men groaned.
At the Sylvanwild camp, the tent had collapsed.
Haskel lay atop a Highmark knight, still gripping his sword, his body covered in blood.
Carnage and body parts littered the ground around him. All six Highmark knights were dead.
So was Haskel.
“Save your queen.” Last words, said without hesitation. A fucking titan of a man.
A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the human detritus. Barely a whisper, unintelligible, but I knew who it belonged to.
I hobbled faster, lifted a handmaiden’s body—Eleyrie—and found Faun lying beneath her.
A Highmark arrow stuck straight out from her chest, and one arm had been sheared off at the shoulder.
Crimson, arterial blood pooled in the grass.
She still held her rapier in her remaining hand.
Her lips were blue, her eyes wide on me.
I dropped to my knees and yanked the belt from my waist. “Don’t talk.”
Faun’s lips moved. I couldn’t understand. I didn’t need her words; I needed pressure. I wrapped the belt around her shoulder, pulled it tight around her stump. She screamed.
Clanking sounded from the Killing Fields. Out there, the three queens had seen Eurydice’s last act. They were moving—two of them in plate armor, fast and purposeful, the kind of movement that had nothing of surprise in it. They’d known what the dagger was. They’d always known.
I could reach it first. I had to.
I leaned over Faun, my face casting a shadow. She stared up at me like I’d appeared from the underworld. “You’re not dying. Don’t fucking die.”
Faun would live if no one else did. She was too stubborn to do anything else.
I rose and limped toward the dagger. The bloody grass cost them—the footing uncertain, their magic depleted or close to it on Sylvanwild land. They were quicker than me, but the terrain had leveled it, and I only needed to stay ahead by one step.
Still, it was close. Closer than I wanted. I limp-ran, pain surging up my leg, and skidded to my knees in the grass in front of the cursed blade.
There it sat, belonging to no one, the bloody grip offering itself to the sky.
As a boy in the winter court, I’d overheard a story of a servant who’d once brushed the dagger’s edge where it lay on the breakfast table while Carys dined.
She always had it with her, always. Never sheathed.
And at the mere touch, all the servant’s meager magic had been sapped away in seconds.
He became a wraith right there at Carys’s elbow.
The story had terrified me. Even now, my hands trembled.
But I had no choice. Grab it or die. No, not just that, more than that—
I wanted it. I wanted to hold it the way I’d craved Gawain’s death all my life. I knew my own power, my own potential. Gawain hadn’t hunted me for his trophy for no reason. And with the faces of those three witches coming into focus, my lip curled into a sneer. As if I’d let them touch it.
My hand shot out, my fingers wrapped around the grip. Cold seeped into my skin, my arm, right up to my racing heart.
Power. Beautiful, agonizing power.
Now it made sense—why Eury couldn’t let the dagger out of her hand, much less her sight. Clarity settled over me with brutal precision, why she and I were alike.
Not just changelings, the two of us. Not just raised human.
We’d both spent our lives feeling powerless.
The dagger didn’t overwhelm me, didn’t turn me into a wraith. Caustrix had known. Those glacial blue eyes had measured and seen the potential. I was Eury’s mirror, the man who wanted and wanted and wanted.
I could hold it. Now, tomorrow, forever. With this dragon’s tooth, I held greater power than any ruler since Carys. I could become the king of the autumn court, of all the courts.
But first, three queens to lay to waste. Even now, they ran toward me as if their power still exceeded mine.
Burn them, his voice curled through my head. Avenge her.
The vision appeared before me. One draw of the dagger across my palm. Let the blood come. Kneel. Slam my palm into the earth, and wipe the Killing Fields clean in one blast of feralis.
Magic like no one had seen since Carys, greater even than Eurydice’s storm. A disintegrating blast that would scour the Fields clean. Would send every one of us straight to the underworld.
Eury had wanted to break the wheel. This would do it. This was why she had thrown the dagger.
I lifted the tooth, turned my palm upward… and stopped.
A cloud had drifted in front of the sun. The sky darkened. For the first time, she became visible. There in the distance, beyond the churned grass, slumped against the spire with her head on her shoulder.
Eurydice, dead.
Gone.
The word rose in me, thick and impossible. Since my human family’s death, I’d never spoken it to anyone. I’d thought it impossible to even think it.
Love. I love her.
I loved her.
Probably had since the first night, before she’d even turned toward my sword. But when she had, I’d been her captive. Mind, body, soul, every part of me tethered to those fierce blue eyes. Her blond braid gleaming under green light, her face like the sun itself.
The sun.
I should move; I couldn’t. Caustrix’s words had entered my head, finally clear beneath the roar of blood in my ears. I hadn’t understood when he’d spoken them, but now with his tooth in hand…
To reignite a sun that has gone dark, you must become the conduit that empties itself.
A dragon’s riddle. Impossible to decipher until the moment demanded it.
That moment was now.
Memory crashed in: Eury’s desperate, terrified face, exactly as she’d looked in that cave outside the Kingdom of Storms. Her bloody palm had pressed to my body, dagger in the opposite hand.
Understanding slammed through me.
I fucking understood.
Power wasn’t just for taking.