Chapter 57
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Eurydice
Three days. Three days of sleep, of half-consciousness, of my body’s aches.
When I finally woke, Dorian lay behind me in my bed.
Every part of him touched every part of me, and for once the veyre bond didn’t yank me toward him like a leash.
Part of me wanted freedom from it; most of me loved the yearning—loved how it turned the simple fact of being near him into annihilating relief.
He murmured by my ear, “I’d begun to wonder if the sun would rise a fourth time before you came back to me.”
Barely a whisper, but even that made my head pound like I’d been struck. The Killing Fields had killed me, after all.
His arm lay over me, heavy. His breath tickled my ear, my bare scalp. And I didn’t know if I dreamed or if I was truly a queen. I rolled toward him and his dark-eyed, soft-lipped face made it all real.
“When did you get here?”
“I’ve been here all along.”
I ran my fingertips down the rough line of his jaw.
Stubble caught against my skin. For the first time since I’d known him, I felt no fear.
Not of him, but more unexpectedly, not of me.
I didn’t fear us, together. My chest expanded; I wanted to be this close to him always.
“It’s presumptuous to slip naked into the queen’s bed. ”
His lips curled. “Blame the handmaiden for allowing me in.”
The handmaiden. “Eleyrie?” Had she lived? My fingers stopped moving, the spell dissolving.
Dorian shook his head, the smile gone. “None survived.”
All dead, all thirteen. So many arrows, like rain. And then death, blood—so much of it. My last memory burst to mind.
“Faun?”
“She’s in her room. I imagine if you knock you’ll be served a side of her complaints.”
She’d lived. After what had happened at the Convergence, I had nearly been at my limit.
When I’d come upon her in the massacre that was the Sylvanwild camp, she was paler than death.
But her breath still moved under my finger.
I’d had Dorian’s help carrying her to the spire, and she’d stayed alive until I passed out with my hand still on her chest.
I stared at him without seeing. “Haskel?”
Dorian’s face hardened. “Took six Highmark knights out with his broadsword. A master-at-arms until the end.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Eight hundred years of life, ended in one morning. “Mirek?”
“No.”
“Finch?”
He flinched. That death hurt him in particular. “None survived except Faun.”
I hadn’t realized tears had escaped until Dorian’s thumb wiped them away. “The whole thing was a coward’s move.”
True, but the injustice didn’t change their deaths. I opened my eyes. “If I had known the extent, I would have—”
Dorian waited, face wide open. “You would have what?”
Murder had flashed before my eyes, swelled in my blood. A ferocious, prickling rage that swept through my body. It wasn’t the impotent rage of Eurydice Waters, child of the Dip. Now, Feyreign had forged a true daughter of scorn.
Trust was a gate so narrow, a person would have to contort to fit through it. Dorian had managed it, and Faun, but none else. The others were dead. Trust got you an arrow in the back. Trust got you a light-limned sword through the heart.
I longed to sunder the winter and spring citadels today, with their queens inside. But the wheel had already been broken, and they had already set their knees in the bloody grass to appease me.
Yet—
“The dagger.”
Dorian’s gaze shifted past me. “It’s a bit sharper than that dull pocketknife you kept at your bedside.”
I half-turned. There on the table lay Caustrix’s tooth. I sat up, ignoring my throbbing head, and took hold of it. For once, it didn’t numb my hand—but its power under my skin made me suck in a breath. You may use it three times, and then—well, you’ll see.
Yes, I saw. I felt. The piece of the dragon I’d taken out of that cavern with me would be with me always now, grown like a vine up the insides of my skull.
“On the Fields, you brought me back.” I didn’t meet his eyes. “How?”
I knew how. There was only one way.
Dorian pushed himself to a seat. He turned fully toward me. “I—”
I turned the dagger around in my hands until I held it by the flat of the blade… and extended the grip to Dorian. His gaze lowered, then lifted to me. “Take it,” I said.
He took hold. His skin didn’t flake, his body didn’t burn.
I breathed out, let it go. He’ll betray you. He already has. That gods-cursed dragon.
“Caustrix won.” Dorian lowered the dagger to the bedding between us. “He won, either way.”
Yes, he did. He’d escaped his cage, even if his body remained inside it. “I only have one question.”
“I have an answer.”
I outlined the dagger, tip to grip, with my finger. “How tempted were you to fuck me over?”
His eyes crinkled. “Very.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing.” He tilted his head to the side, lips curling. “I was very tempted.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because you’re alive.”
The words struck me like a fist in the gut. Love had always come to me like that: sudden, overwhelming, awash with heady confusion.
Dorian had betrayed me. He’d taken Caustrix’s power… and he’d saved my life with it. He’d saved my life when he could have let me die, could have overturned the whole matriarchy.
Old words drifted through my mind, from the grove: Power isn’t given. It’s taken—so take it.
He’d taken it. I couldn’t fault the man.
I picked up the dagger and climbed out of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
I began taking off clothes, pulling on others. “To speak to a god.”
The walk to the grove seemed brief. Such was memory: walk a path enough times, and your mind sieved out all the uninteresting parts.
When I arrived at the sparkling pond under midday light, I wasn’t alone. On the other side of the water stood the spiritstag. Perhaps it had sensed my approach; perhaps it had been waiting for days.
Cold awe struck through me, the same as ever. Except the feeling was dulled, diminished by repetition. The first time I had fallen to my knees; now the wonder only sang through my veins and kept my gaze locked on those black eyes.
“You are much changed, Eurydice Waters.”
No pleasantries, no pussyfooting.
“You wanted this,” I said aloud. “What I’ve done, what I’ve become. Didn’t you?”
The stag’s great antlers shimmered under the shifting canopy. “Does it ease your mind to think of what you’ve done—what you will do—if you imagine the mandate came from a god?”
“What do you think I will do?”
The stag didn’t speak. The eyes didn’t blink.
“You could kill me now, here.” I stepped closer to the water. “But you don’t. You assigned me Dorian because he and I were both changelings. You knew he would rather burn the world down than stick a dagger in my back. This was the outcome you wanted.”
The stag’s head lifted a degree. “When the powerless takes power—when the daughter of scorn brings the world to its knees—what does she do then? The spite still burns in your chest, but the diadem already glitters atop your head and two queens kneel at your feet.”
My breathing had quickened. Anger surged, almost inexplicable to me. “You were at the Killing Fields. You saw the hatred on Maeronyx’s face.”
It had no answer. The stag had seen.
“She was plotting,” I said, “before she’d even unbent her knee.”
Birdsong rang through the trees. The breeze carried over the water between us. Dappled sunlight made a pattern on the lush grass.
“Now that you have lost who you were, Eurydice Waters,” the stag said. “Do you see who you truly are?”
Who I was—the girl who’d climbed the wall nightly. The guard who’d bitten a man’s cheek. The changeling who’d wanted, wanted, and sometimes needed with a ferociousness that squeezed my chest even now.
But the stag was right. She was lost. She’d died against that spire with cold metal through her heart.
Who was I now?
I had two pillars inside me. One was the hand that had slain the Dawnmaker; it hadn’t hesitated, had known what must be done.
The other pillar was Dorian. Just him, and everything about him. All my life I’d loved fearfully, hopefully, surrounded by almost-love or sometimes-love. But I felt no fear of Dorian.
“Yes,” I said. “I see her.”
Across the water, the stag’s head moved. Down, down, until the tip of its great antlers touched the earth. Even I, barely of this court, knew this deep gesture of respect.
I lowered my chin and closed my eyes. Around us, the forests of Sylvanwild breathed with the life of centuries past and centuries to come.
In her bed, Faun stared at me with the same hardness she’d offered the first time we’d met in the citadel. An outward gaze, one meant to create space.
I didn’t take it personally.
I fluffed one of the three pillows stacked behind her. “You haven’t touched your whipped butter.”
Her gaze broke to the tray at her bedside. There, a barely eaten breakfast and an untouched rosette of butter gleamed under light from her window. “It’s impossible to butter bread with one hand. Keeps sliding around.”
“You could always ask someone for help. Me, for instance.”
She scoffed, turned her face away. Silence fell, and I didn’t dare break it. I knew if I said a word into this thick silence, she was likely to send me away and not see me for days.
“Lately,” she said, still faced away, “I’ve fantasized about the hours I used to spend scrubbing floors. On my knees, bracing myself on one hand to squeeze the towel into the bucket with the other.”
I didn’t speak.
“It was Rhiannon’s punishment for my father’s choices. He was her spymaster, and he’d betrayed her. She took off his head, as you can imagine. But not before she told him I would spend the rest of eternity on my knees.”