Chapter 55
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Eurydice
A strange, liminal space. Almost darkness, but not quite—the world barely existed.
I had thoughts, but not in real words; they drifted without shape, almost without my control.
A fat strand of light sat right in the center of me, tendrils of it reaching outward.
Every tendril eventually dissolved into the great nothingness of me.
Inside me, the dark expanse ate away at the light, devouring at its edges. But the light was too much, too great to consume completely. Once, I’d had a word for that light; once, I’d had a word for the darkness, too. As it was, I only watched the two coexist.
Then, a third color. Green. It appeared in the darkness first as a droplet, then a spill, then a bloom. And every moment it grew, I felt a greater longing. It was succulent. I latched onto it, suckled at it, greedy, until the green grew and merged into the darkness and the light, and suddenly—
Life.
My eyes flew open as I pulled in air, a great punch of it into my lungs, a violent, bruising gulp. The world snapped into startling color, so much red and green and the expanse of blue sky. Clouds and grass and trees and blood. Blood everywhere.
And a voice in my head, laughing and laughing and laughing.
“Rise now, daughter of scorn.” Like gravel in a drum.
Details came to me in pieces. Hard stone against my back. An arrow through my lung. Three shapes approaching. Women—queens.
And in my lap, an ice-cold blade.
Beside me, a dark-haired form slumped against the stone. Limp, eyes shut with his face turned toward me. I knew that face, those soft lips. Dorian Crowmere. His palm lay open to the sky, blood dripping from the fate line.
I understood.
I’d died—actually died. Gone beyond. And somehow he’d brought me back. He had emptied himself into me. He’d delivered the dagger back to me. Caustrix’s tooth. Caustrix—the voice in my head.
I was Eurydice. Eurydice Waters. A daughter of scorn.
And I’d been murdered.
My murderers stood before me, three queens of three courts in a land of brutality and vengeance. But they were the least compelling thing in my sight.
A feeling flowed through me unlike anything I’d known. Not rage. Not even anger. Not power like I’d known it before my death, but possibility.
Around me, the air danced with it. All four magics—dark green feralis; golden solaire; ebony noxveil; pink viridine—twisted and twined through the world at the center of the Killing Fields.
They were as visible to me as the sky and trees. My chest glowed with solaire. It moved through my body—warm, insistent, threading through my veins like liquid sunlight. I’d never been able to feel light magic inside me, and I understood why the moment it collided with what already lived inside me.
Caustrix’s acid met the solaire and fought it.
Not gently—not two rivers merging. Like two animals in a cage.
The light surged through my chest and the acid rose to meet it, and for a terrible second my body became the battlefield.
Heat and cold. Growth and decay. My ribs ached with the pressure of it, my fingers curled and locked, and I thought I would come apart—that whatever Liora’s sword had opened in me, my body couldn’t contain.
Until something shifted. Not in thought, not in will, but in marrow, in the blood itself.
The two forces stopped fighting and began to move together.
Not merging—never merging—but circling, the way two fighters find a rhythm without either yielding.
Solaire spiraled alongside Caustrix’s acid, and where they touched neither destroyed the each other. They held. Tension without collapse.
Air reached my lungs again. My heartbeat thudded, and it was steady.
Caustrix was Unseelie. His blood ran through me—acid-lined blood. Any connection I’d ever had to light had been eaten away by the dragon’s acid. But Liora’s light-slicked sword had infused solaire straight into my body… too much light to eat away.
The dragon’s blood still laced my veins. I felt it. But I felt the light there now, too—enough to fight the acid. Enough to swirl through my arteries, Unseelie and Seelie alike. Death and growth careening through one body.
Carys had tried to hold feralis and noxveil—two Unseelie magics. That was why she’d died.
She never could have been the Courtbreaker. Balance was the key.
A shadow fell over me, blotting out the sun. A sword’s tip held at my neck. “Ssa ssen nokh.”
Foreign Faerish, familiar tone. Liora the Dawnmaker, her sword still dripping with my blood, still glowing with light beneath. A feral creature poised for movement, honed for the kill.
My reflexes had never felt so whiplike. My body hummed with life.
Her fingers twitched before her sword did.
She swung to slice the top half of my skull from my body, and I jerked my head aside.
The blade shaved air. My hand closed around the dagger in my lap; I swiped out with it.
The edge sliced through the plate of her boot with a hiss, as easy as a knife through cold butter.
More than that, because she let out a scream.
Skin, too. And bone.
I rolled away and up to my feet, the dagger tight in my hand.
The four magics swirled through the air, and two of them pulled toward me.
Feralis, solaire. I hardly had to work for it; they almost felt captive to me.
I breathed them in, green and gold, right to the bottom of my lungs.
They ate through the wooden arrow inside me, dissolved it so completely that the two orphaned ends fell out of my body and onto the grass.
The wound healed the instant the last splinter left my flesh—life-giving solaire stitching me back together, tempered by the decay of feralis. All of it happened fast here in this strange place at the center of everything.
Liora hobbled backward. Maeronyx and Iseris stared, weapons ready, eyes wide as if they beheld a creature they’d never conceived of.
They were right to stare. I could feel it, all of it, everything, the full scope of what I’d become.
Four magics visible in the air like colored smoke, two of them orbiting me as if I were their axis.
The Convergence hummed beneath my feet, through my bones, up through the spire at my back, and I understood it now the way you understand your own heartbeat.
This place wasn’t dangerous to me… this place was mine.
I lifted my hand. Feralis coiled between my fingers, dark green and eager.
I turned my palm and solaire pooled there, liquid gold, warm as sunlight on river water.
Two magics that should have repelled each other—Unseelie decay, Seelie growth—sat in the same hand, in the same body, as naturally as breathing.
Carys had never held this. No one had ever held this.
I could kill them. All of them, right now. The Eurydice I’d been would have wanted that; she had been cloaked in rage, in simmering want. But I wasn’t that Eurydice anymore, and I didn’t want them dead.
I wanted them staring up at me.
I lowered my chin, gaze locking with each of theirs in turn. “Bend the knee.”
Liora moved first. Not to kneel—to straighten.
She pulled herself upright despite the ruined boot, despite the blood, and met my gaze with six hundred years of queenship behind her eyes.
But I saw what lived beneath it now. I saw the way her throat moved when she swallowed, the blanch of her fingers around the grip of her sword.
She held herself the way you do when every instinct screams to run and you’ve decided that you won’t.
She was afraid. Probably more afraid than she had ever been in her life, and she would die before she showed it.
Liora scoffed, her blue eyes glinting. “You don’t know your fate, child. I watched Carys do what you’ve done, and I watched her body disintegrate like ash.”
Her defiance was almost beautiful. “So you won’t kneel.”
In my head, Caustrix’s gravelly laughter found a low, pleased note.
She flicked my blood from her sword. “I’d rather an eternity in the underworld than kneel before a half-dead lowborn of this kingdom and the other.”
I respected that. Really, I did. She’d have earned herself a free drink in the Dip.
Liora’s words emboldened Maeronyx and Iseris. Their stances widened. They were at their magical limit, no doubt, but it was still three on one—and they thought I was short on time.
Above us, clouds had begun to roll in. Almost without my noticing, the sky had darkened until Maeronyx’s undereyes had become gray hollows beneath her onyx irises.
A storm. A promise of spite.
“Come, then.” I jerked my chin. “All of you. Show the gods your worth.”
They still had a little magic. Liora most of all.
She leapt with the speed of sunlight. Her sword swung through the air, cleaving toward me. She couldn’t blind me any longer; her connection to the light was half mine. And she couldn’t play her light tricks with the weapon.
Behind her, Iseris dropped to one knee. Her palm slammed into the ground, and vines erupted through the earth toward me. They shot up, grasped at my hands and slithered up my arms.
Maeronyx dissolved. Three of her appeared instead, much closer to me, all identical. Ice speared from all three directions toward my body.
A last stand. A pretty display. Magic swirled in me, waiting to be released.
The vines hissed and withered as soon as they touched my skin. The feralis in me was so strong, growth couldn’t touch death.
I turned the dagger and solaire burst from the flat of the blade—not a flare, not a spark, but a beam so potent it obliterated Maeronyx’s shadow apparitions and melted their ice. On the other side of that stood only Maeronyx, squinting and stumbling in the brightness.
Twice now I’d called magic through the blade. Once the cave, now on the Fields. The rest would have to be my own hand.