Chapter 4
Four
Fieran
The labyrinth was a bad place to have the complicated conversation I had promised Cara. It was the kind of close-quarters terrain that punished divided attention.
And the conversation we were having itself would punish divided attention.
Cara moved well. She was still learning, her pulse visible in her throat and her sword clumsy, but she made clever, quick choices.
I was proud to see her fight in the narrow dark of the labyrinth, her blade catching the faint bioluminescence of the stone.
She was built for this in ways she didn’t fully understand yet.
“She is faster than she was just a week ago,” Shadowbane observed. “Remarkably clever thing, isn’t she?”
I had spent the last several years trying to train Shadowbane to offer compliments; he usually thought lower-grade criticisms were enough of an improvement from his insults to count as one. But he seemed to manage with Cara.
A wave came from the left passage. Six Lightless, low and fast. They moved in packs, cave-bred things with elongated jaws and claws that clicked against the stone.
I stepped into the lead one, drove my blade through the junction of neck and shoulder, and used the falling weight of it to redirect toward the second. Two clean kills within seconds. The rest scattered. For now.
“We need to talk about Tay.” Cara pressed her back against the wall and scanned the passage, her breathing fast.
“Now?” Gods, the Lightless had regrouped with inconvenient speed. They didn’t usually trouble me, but today they were a hassle. “You have three Lightless coming from your right.”
I spun to her side to handle one before I turned to the immense cave spider that had tried to creep up behind us. It was the size of a medium dog and considerably more venomous. I drove my sword toward it, missed, almost buried the hilt in sand.
“Embarassing,” Shadowbane chided.
The cave spider skittered forward, trying to escape my sword and toward Cara.
She made an aggrieved noise and pinned it to the dirt.
Then she hesitated to pull her sword loose, even though it was well and truly dead, and I stepped in to cleave the spider in two.
She did not miss a beat, though she did wrinkle her nose at the spider at the same time as she protested, “He’s been in her hands for days. Every day matters.”
If she hadn’t been single-minded when she had a worry, she would’ve mocked me about the miss. I had no doubt she would return to the subject at a more convenient time.
I pulled her back a half-step before she registered the movement from the far passage; something larger this time was taking its time, in no hurry to cover us in blood and ichor and venom. She let me move her, which she would not have done weeks ago.
“Every day is the same. He is already enchanted and he is not suffering. We cannot go to Tay tonight.”
“Why not?” Her voice was strong, not petulant.
“Gentle with her,” Shadowbane warned. “She’s more tender than she looks. Just as you are.”
I wished I could shut him out.
“Tay is bound by enchantment. We would have to drag him out, and if we dragged him out, he would fight to return to her. He could harm himself. He could harm you.” I knew her well enough by now to know she would protest, so I cut her off. “He would not want to, but he would not be able to stop it.”
She didn’t want it to be true. Then came the sound of her exhale, slow and deliberate. “You’re certain. How long have you known we couldn’t rescue my brother?”
“Long enough to have made a plan.”
The thing in the passage resolved itself into a palewalker. Had my mother left any of the cave monsters for the next Hunt? I moved toward it before Cara could and ended it quickly. Messy work. I stepped back and let the body settle to the earth.
I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in one of the mirrors that hung on the wall, of my ichor-touched armor and my blood-slicked blade.
I hated the thought that Cara was being reflected in the enormous mirrors in the arena too, that Fae were watching her with their bloodthirst, and I was tempted to move her into the blind spot. At least they could not hear us.
But mortals were watching too, and they gathered strength from her strength.
“The first step in the plan being to send me back to Amber.” Her voice had an edge in it now, careful as a blade being drawn slowly. “You want me in Clan Amber and away from Bismyth, and I’m supposed to trust that this helps Tay.”
Two from the right. I called out direction; she took it, which always amazed me a little. We worked the narrow space without colliding.
“Yes, you are. You worked out my plan.”
I was still overwhelmed by the memory of how she had looked up from conversation with Kiegan and announced Lightbringer’s name.
If the queen had been able to enchant her in time to honesty, she’d have laid the entirety of my plan before the queen like a map.
“The dragon who will claim you is Lightbringer.”
“Shadowbane’s mate.”
Shadowbane’s stir of satisfaction coiled at the back of my mind. “My mate.”
I nodded. “But the timing is off. I need you to still be in Clan Amber, because Lightbringer is an Amber dragon.”
“And what can she do? Break the queen’s enchantments?”
She was thinking of the queen’s enchantment on Tay. She always had that keen sense of concern for her family and too little concern for herself. It grated on me. Self-sacrifice for a worthy cause was meant to be one and done, not a perpetual spooning out of one’s self to feed others.
“Lightbringer will be capable of much. The specific shape her powers take will change depending on the mortal she bonds with.”
“The mortal?” Cara asked sharply.
I kept my eyes on the passages. “Half mortal. There is only one person alive who meets that description that I’ve found so far.”
The pause was short. Cara was quick. “How long have you known you needed me for Lightbringer?”
Another wave of Lightless—larger than the ones before, seven or eight, trying to flank us from the right and the left and, inconveniently, the ceiling. Cara stepped up beside me without hesitation. We broke the first line together, and for a while there was no conversation, only the work of it.
When it was done, she was breathing harder. “From the moment you knew who I was, you planned to use me to bring Lightbringer back.”
“I did.”
Some of it had been set in motion long before her and me. Eventually, Cara would have to discover that too.
She turned to look at me, with the look of someone deciding how much to believe. “Did you flirt with me in Stonehaven because you suspected who I was?”
“Yes. And because I found you brave and charming.”
She kicked a dead monster off the tip of her sword and paused, life-threatening though that might be, so she could aim a skeptical look my way. “No one finds me charming.”
There were so many real lies and tricks between us, and yet she thought that truth was a lie. “I do.”
“When you told Bismyth the queen didn’t know who I was, you were trying to keep from telling them about the dragon.
” She had to cut herself off as something came around the corner.
We were supposed to be making our way toward a prize, but Bismyth didn’t care about winning this Hunt. “You lied to your clan, didn’t you?”
She had gotten to that understanding faster than I expected.
“Bismyth loves you. Which shows their wisdom and renders me grateful. But our friends sometimes focus on the wrong things.”
“They want to protect me and you want to make me into a myth.”
That was uncomfortably insightful. “The mortals need a hero. They need you.”
She scoffed. She needed to be needed so badly that she kept sacrificing herself for her family, and yet she couldn’t hear she was needed without protesting. My wife was maddening.
“Ander will protect you in Amber. Whatever else he is, his instinct where you’re concerned has been thoroughly demonstrated.”
“You hate Ander.”
“Deeply. Creatively, even.”
“But.”
“But he kicked my ass in the arena for your sake.” That truth tasted exactly as sour as I expected.
“Is it especially hurtful that he only won because she helped him cheat? You would have cheated, if it had served your purposes,” Shadowbane asked.
“So I am supposed to go along with your lies because the alternative is that Bismyth would want to protect me.”
She had a way of stating things clearly that I found exasperating.
“You have the chance to save your people if you bring back Lightbringer, Cara. And mine.” My jaw tightened briefly. “I don’t want to risk your life any more than I want to risk mine.”
I didn’t want to make the confession that followed, but I wanted her to understand. “I respect you enough that protecting you, possessing you, only occupies my thoughts. That drive does not fully control my actions.”
“Not yet,” Shadowbane murmured, because gods knew what I needed was more complications in this conversation.
I set the way she destroyed my control aside because something very large had just entered the passage from the east. My mother’s hospitality was endless.
“Behind me.” My hand found her waist. I pulled her left and behind me in the same motion, covering the angle while I assessed the threat. It was large, larger than anything we’d faced so far, oozing through the passage.
“I can fight.”
“I know. But I do have those protective, possessive impulses that I’ve just claimed don’t control me, so let me butcher this thing, would you please?”
It was a kethryn, and a large one, larger than any kethryn had business being in a passage this narrow. Eight legs, jointed twice each, scraping the walls as it forced itself toward us.
What followed was a brutish, ugly fight.
And Cara, of course, defied my preferences. She moved to my left, where I had not asked her to be, her shorter blade finding the gap between foreleg and body where a kethryn’s plating thinned. It was an impressive bit of observation for someone who had not studied as I had.
The kethryn screamed, high and thin, as its leg gave out.
Focused on carving off its reaching mandibles, I only caught glimpses of her in my peripheral vision: the wet of her blade into something soft, a curse under her breath when her boot slipped on slick stone, the sound of her slipping on loose rock and catching herself a split-second before my free hand seized her arm.
It tried to take her head with a swing of its mandibles. She went under the swing without hesitation and came up on the other side. The kethryn slipped my blade, slammed into the wall, and rapidly climbed.
This was the angle I had hoped to deny it. This was the way I had once watched a friend die.
The kethryn hung down from above us, mandibles moving, and a chittering sound filled the air.
The Lightless, swarming toward us. It was easier to believe that the monsters were giant insects, that there was no intelligence there, but there was disquieting intelligence in how they cooperated to kill.
She must have read the change in me, because she rotated before I told her to, her back coming flush against mine, her shoulders pressing into my shoulder blades.
Both of us covering what the other couldn’t see.
Her body had made a decision her mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
I read its drop through her half-breath of warning.
I waited for my moment, and when its mandibles were dangerously near and its bell was exposed, I drove my blade up into the underside as the thing fell on us, into the thick band of softer flesh between the second and third pair of legs.
Into its heart. The blade went in to the hilt.
I twisted, moving out from beneath its body the split second before it fell to the ground.
Cara had moved forward, and there was a Lightless speared on her blade. The others were retreating.
The passage was quiet. The fighting elsewhere in the labyrinth felt muffled and distant. The immediate dark held nothing moving.
Cara drew her blade free and turned to me, and suddenly it felt as if we were very close. Her breathing was rough but beginning to even out. Mine was slightly ragged and might have had little to do with the kethryn. I would have to grow more accustomed to close proximity with my wife.
“Tay,” she persisted into the gap, and I almost smiled because I had expected her to name him as soon as it was silent again.
“Soon,” I promised.
“I chose to marry you to protect you. To protect your plans. As a ruse.” She paused on the word longer than she had meant to. “All I want for myself is to keep Tay and Lidi safe.”
“Is that true, Cara?”
Her gaze cut to mine.
“Just Tay and Lidi? Tell me I am wrong about you.”
She scoffed and didn’t answer, which was telling enough. She would refuse to admit to being a hero, despite all the mounting evidence. “You ask me to remake the world when I’ve only seen two corners of it?”
“I ask you to help me remake it. And we will save Tay in the process. I’m asking for your patience.”
“You are asking for a great deal more than my patience.” She turned to face the passage we’d come from, checked her blade, and moved up to my left without being asked.
Not because she believed everything. She knew better than that. I could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her gaze moved over me.
She had reasoned against trusting me. She had trusted me anyway. She was choosing me anyway. We both knew that to be a failure of judgment, but warmth bloomed in my chest.
“We should keep moving.”
We had nowhere to go, but we would not be freed from the labyrinth until all the monsters had been slain.
We went forward into the dark together.