Chapter 56
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Dorian
The world had become as small and faraway as a distant star. So small, I had almost forgotten its shape. I floated farther and farther and cared less and less.
Then that star grew—large, bright.
Rain. All around me, it rained.
I opened my eyes to a strange, half-lit vista of rising steam and golden droplets. Before me lay my legs, boots pointed at the sky. I couldn’t move them. Couldn’t move my hands, either. The constant thrum of magic I’d felt all my life was gone, like a missing organ.
I was emptied out.
No—one drop remained.
Above me stood a figure wreathed in golden light, a dagger in one hand. She might have been ten feet tall. Behind her lay a severed head and two armored women kneeling in the grass.
She dropped to both knees in front of me, so close her perfect bare head came level with mine. A splatter of fresh blood painted her face, and she wore a hardness in her eyes and mouth. Impenetrable, sharp as diamond—like Rhiannon but actually terrifying.
Yet that only served to make her eyes bluer, to outline her lips. The rabbit, the pettifey, the queen.
I couldn’t speak. But I could stare at her face forever.
The hardness melted away, and Eurydice emerged through it. Eyes softer, lips parting. Her hand came out to my chest. I saw it more than felt it, a vibration more than touch. Her eyes shut, and warmth ebbed from her fingers through my leathers. Magic, but not like I’d ever felt inside my body.
This wasn’t Seelie or Unseelie. It wasn’t death or life. It was… both. Both at the same time.
Impossible. Yet I felt it.
What had been hollow became vital, and feeling returned to my chest, arms, legs, my face.
My heart struck once, then again. In the vision I’d seen of Carys in the Killing Fields, she had suffered to wield two magics.
It had nearly destroyed her before her veyre took her life. But Eury seemed more alive, luminous.
And with a strange delight and horror, I understood. Maeronyx would not kneel for anything less than—
“Courtbreaker.” My voice came out a rasp.
Her eyes didn’t open. Her lips twitched in concentration. She kept her back to those queens like she had no fear of them.
Was this what Caustrix had planned for? Eury, Courtbreaker? Or had the dragon wagered on both outcomes—
She died, and I alone could hold the dagger.
I died, and Eury alone could hold it.
Either way, the dragon’s blood ran through both of us. The dragon had won. Its spite rained over us, over all our heads.
When Eury’s eyes did finally open and her hand fell from my chest, I caught it in both of mine. Her small, warm hand. I never wanted to let it go.
“That’s three,” she whispered.
“Three what?”
She didn’t pull away. Her face was so close to mine I could smell her sweet breath. “Dorian.” Even her voice sounded different. Eurydice, but more than that. She wasn’t the girl I’d met. Not only her, anymore.
“Eury.”
“You nearly died for me.”
“You did die.”
She studied my face. “And you brought me back.” Her other hand lifted, pulling aside the neck of her jerkin in the gentle golden rain. “Look at me.” The wound over her heart had closed. In its place, only a starburst scar.
“How…?” I asked.
She pressed the spot with her fingers. “Liora’s light-limned sword.”
Back in that cave, Caustrix had said a thing that now caught my breath.
"My acid drinks every drop of magic her little body tries to hold. Feralis survives because it’s mine.
The rest? She’d need a straight injection of it through the center of her to make any difference, and I suspect such a thing would kill her. She does have a heart, yes?”
A straight injection through the heart.
The Dawnmaker had given Eury exactly what she needed to become the Courtbreaker, and she hadn’t even known it. Now her head lay staring up at the sun.
Eury’s hand dropped from her chest. Her gaze darted left, toward Liora’s body. “Do you regret it?”
Regret? In a blink, I saw it clearly: the queens had fought her; Liora wouldn’t give in; Eury had done what she’d needed to do. “I can’t let her live,” she’d said before she’d even stepped onto the Fields. She had known Liora wouldn’t be the one who would yield.
Now the others knelt until Eury gave them permission to stand.
But I knew her fear. I was her veyre; she was the Courtbreaker. By rights, I ought to kill her. I had been marked to bring her down if she became too powerful, corrupted. She had beheaded a queen, for gods’ sake.
And yet the old rhyme came to mind:
Four courts keep the world in line—
One for blood, and one for shine,
One for thorn, and one for sky…
But if the Courtbreaker wakes—
one must kneel, and one must die.
Carys had left no one kneeling; she’d taken the heads of all three queens. Eury had only taken one. My queen wasn’t corrupted—she was clear-eyed. And even if she was, I didn’t care. Darkness take us both.
I let out a scoff and set my hand to her soft, bloody cheek. “Regret it? Fuck Liora. Fuck the courts. We make our own lives.”
Her eyes went wide—then narrowed. Understanding passed between us. We would never be parted again. Not in this life.
She jerked her chin toward the Sylvanwild forest. “Our god wanted this.”
There, past the Fields and amongst the trees, the spiritstag had watched the whole thing. The ambush, the betrayal, the beheading. It hadn’t stepped in after the dawn hawk’s betrayal, nor the black maw’s.
The spiritstag had wanted Eury to break the wheel, and she had done that. But at great cost.
“Faun,” I breathed. “She lost her arm in the fight.”
She jerked back. “She’s alive?”
“Barely, if so.”
She rose and struck off through the Killing Fields. She ran full tilt in the rain, past the body of the Dawnmaker, past kneeling queens. She still gripped the dagger, and the rain still fell in specks from the moody sky.
I laid my head back against the spire. If I knew nothing else, I knew three truths:
First, I loved her. Human, changeling, queen, Courtbreaker—I loved everything she had been and was and would be. Now, tomorrow, every tomorrow after.
Second, we stood on uncharted land. Carys had wielded two magics for a handful of seconds and destroyed three queens. She’d died for it. Now the wheel was truly broken, but to what end?
Third, Maeronyx would never, never stop. In the glistening rain, after Eurydice had passed, she raised her head and glared at me like she would like to bite into my body and tear me piece by piece with her teeth.