Chapter Twenty-Eight
She dreamed in fragments.
Not in scenes she could follow, nor in any order that resembled thought.
The cavern came first, though perhaps first was the wrong word for anything in that sleep.
Stone. Then water. Then the black shimmer of scales moving over one another in a pit that ought to have horrified her.
The giant head rising from the flooded dark.
Diamonds scattered like teeth. A bridge broken across a gulf.
Eyes, blue and yellow and with pupils narrow like a cat’s.
None of it held still long enough to mean anything, yet none of it frightened her either.
The dreams had no shape, but they had a rhythm.
Snake hissing. Water rising. A voice older than mountains asking questions she had already answered and might answer again.
A diamond larger than any she had seen, pulsing with something almost alive, and her own heartbeat answering it.
Then warmth. The dry, pleased warmth of scales stretched over sun-warmed stone.
Changing, melding again into something else.
The warmth of a sun beneath stone. Hidden. Waiting.
Somewhere inside the dream, beneath the confusion of images, the cavern pulled at her.
Not with menace.
With insistence.
Come back, it seemed to say. Come deeper. Come see.
Or perhaps it was not the cavern at all, but something inside it, waiting at the edge of her mind until she was quiet enough to hear.
---
It took a day for her to wake. A full day, Derran later said. Though later, and time, and full, all seemed like ideas belonging to a world further off than the bed she lay in now.
When Ina’s eyes finally opened, it was to the dim light of her room in the burrow court and two pale faces bent over her.
Derran sat on one side of the bed, Karai on the other.
They both looked worn down past grace. Not disordered, of course.
They were too much themselves for that, too much fairy princes.
But their skin had gone a shade paler than health.
Their eyes were shadowed. They had the look of people who had not slept because sleep would have meant surrendering the watch.
When they saw her looking back at them, the relief in their faces was so plain it hurt her more than the knife had.
“Ina,” they chorused, softly and almost together.
She drew in a breath and found it easy. No tearing in her side.
No burning in her chest. Her princes had done their work well.
Yet when she tried to sit up, it was not her body that slowed her so much as the deep soreness left somewhere more inward.
The ache that follows terror and fury after the wounds themselves have been cleaned away.
She pushed herself upright a little anyway.
The covers slid down.
She looked down and discovered, with delayed dismay, that she was naked.
She snatched the blankets back up to her chest and said, in a rough half-murmur, “Did I forget my clothes that time?”
Derran chuckled.
Even Karai’s eyes held the faintest trace of a smile.
“No,” he said quietly. Then, by way of explanation, he added, “There was a great deal of blood.”
He did not say more. He did not need to. Ina understood well enough that whatever had once been on her body had not remained fit to keep there. She was suddenly very glad she had been unconscious for the more practical parts of being saved and healed.
Karai reached for her hand.
She let him take it, and smiled at him as he bent to kiss her fingers. Then she looked at Derran.
There was the smallest flicker of jealousy in his face, there and gone so quickly another person might have missed it. He blinked it away, but she had seen it.
So she reached for his hand too.
He gave it to her without hesitation.
That seemed to settle something in the room, if only by a little.
“Lugo?” she asked then. “Eogan? Shayna? Are they all right?”
Karai looked away.
It was a small motion, but telling. He did not want to be the one to answer. Whether because the answer was too tangled, or because he had spent the last day and night holding himself together by the edges, Ina could not tell.
Derran answered instead, and briefly, as if brevity might make any of it easier to bear.
“Shayna is fine. Unharmed. Sensible enough to stay out of that room while the rest of us made a wreck of it. Eogan is fine too. Easily healed, and very pleased to see the...” he glanced once at Karai before he chose the word, “issue dealt with as he preferred. He’s returned to the canopy court.”
Ina absorbed that. Then, quieter, “And Lugomir?”
Derran’s face changed into respectful sorrow.
“Despondent,” he replied quietly. “For several reasons, as you can imagine. Jassie’s betrayal and sudden death have left him in despair. He’s… not really fit to rule just now.”
Ina closed her eyes briefly.
She had not loved Jasenka, not in the deep way one loved old friends or chosen kin, but betrayal leaves a wound wider than a death sometimes, because it must first kill everything a person thought was true. Some small part of Ina felt the pain of that.
“Who’s ruling, then?” she asked. “Did they name a regent after all?”
This time both princes looked at each other before Derran answered. The hesitation alone told her much.
“No,” he said. “But... well. It became very clear that Achlys had nothing to do with any of this. And the other courtiers advocated for her.”
Ina nodded slowly. The shape of the answer was already there. “Achlys is regent.”
Derran nodded. “Yes.” He gave a small shrug that suggested he was not thrilled by the arrangement, only resigned to its necessity. “I’m not certain she will ever be pleasant. But that appears to be her manner with everyone, not only us. And the marsh court trusts her.”
Ina let out a breath. She was not sure how to feel about that.
Relief, perhaps, at having judged one woman too harshly rather than not harshly enough.
She was glad to have been wrong. But there was unease too.
Achlys had all the warmth of a knife left out in winter, and yet perhaps a court in grief needed something that cold and steady for a little while.
“Very well,” she said. She turned to Karai then. “What did Zuri mean by curse?”
Something startled passed through his eyes, then quickly disappeared. He murmured only, “My mole form, perhaps.”
She stared at him, certain he was leaving something out. But the answer had sounded enough like truth that she fought it only briefly.
It was all she had strength for.
She looked at both of them then. At their hands still holding hers. At the clear tiredness in their faces, the exhaustion they had not even tried to hide from her now that she was awake to see it. Her eyes had already begun to feel heavy again, treacherously so. She sank back into the pillows.
“Don’t sit here staring at me,” she murmured. “Go rest. We all need to talk again when I have more strength.”
Neither of them moved. Ina, already sliding back toward sleep, added, “I have a promise to fulfill. To the snakes in the cavern.”
That did move them. Derran and Karai traded another look, alarm plain in both faces. But Ina was already gone again, pulled back under before they could decide whether to argue, refuse, or simply sit there until one of them fell over from fatigue first.
Her breathing evened, matching the rhythm of trickling water in her dreams.
The room went quiet again, except for the very faint sound of two princes remaining exactly where she had told them not to be.
---
Ina woke again only a few hours later. This time the room was empty.
For a moment she simply lay there, pleased by the absence of worried princes at either side of her bed.
It was proof they had listened, which was not always something either of them could be trusted to do.
She stretched cautiously, testing herself.
The knife wound was well-healed. The cuts across her chest were long gone.
A soreness remained, but it had softened into something she could carry.
She pushed back the covers and stood. Her wardrobe held the dresses Emmie had made for her months ago, each one more beautiful than anything Ina would ever have thought possible.
The last days had given her little chance to wear them.
She had lived in armor and leather and boots, things fit for flight and fights and caves and blood and haste.
But this morning, or whatever hour it was now, she meant to look like a queen.
She stood before the wardrobe a moment, fingers brushing silk and velvet and fine embroidery.
Then she chose the lavender dress. The first one Emmie had made for her.
Something about that felt right. A beginning, perhaps, or a promise back to an older version of herself.
She drew it on and fastened it carefully.
The color set off her hair well, and the cut of it still pleased her even after all this time.
When she looked into the mirror, a memory stirred.
She crossed to one of the drawers, opened it, and found the amethyst circlet that matched the gown.
She set it in her hair and looked at herself again.
That would do.
With a small nod to her own reflection, she left the room.
A cluster of pages stood whispering in one of the outer corridors, all nervous excitement and half-finished rumor.
They jumped apart when they saw her coming, then straightened so quickly one nearly stepped on another’s foot.
Their eyes widened. It was not only the gown, she knew.
It was the whole of her. They had spent the last day hearing bits of the marsh court disaster and the fairy queen’s near death in scraps not meant for them.
“Your Majesty,” they chorused.
Ina did not waste time.
“You two,” she said, pointing to the nearest pair, “go wake Prince Derran and Prince Karai. Tell them I want them dressed well. Like actual princes.”
The two pages blinked, then bowed and ran.
The other two she kept. “You will gather the burrow court cooks and the senior household servants in the throne room.”
Both nodded, wide-eyed.
She let them go and made her own way there.
She had not spent much time there. Her life in the burrow court had centered itself elsewhere – in the library, in her room, in passages and gardens and borrowed corners.