“Yes, and all the other creatures you loved in your storybooks.”
I turned toward him, heart squeezing. “Unicorns?”
“Of course. The Aurelian throne is said to be made of a thousand thousand gleaming, spiraled horns.”
How cruel. How terrible. Yet?—
I should like to see that. And if I survived the Killing Fields, then I could; I was a queen. I could travel to all of Feyreign. And I could bring Dorian with me.
For once—the first time since the night the wall had fallen—the future felt like a spark in front of my eyes. Small, bright, real.
“Dorian.”
“Yes, Eurydice?”
My full name on his lips sent gooseflesh up my arms. “If there is a dragon guarding a tooth, I’ll speak to it first.”
Now he turned toward me, a surprised half-smile on his face. “And what will you say to it?”
I stood and extended my hand down to him. “Whatever I need to.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Dorian
We walkedand walked into the earth’s heart. Until I hardly felt real, and only the fae changeling behind me provided any proof I existed. The air cooled, the passage narrowed until we could only walk single file. The ceiling pressed in until I had to duck my head.
Though she wouldn’t say it, I felt Eurydice’s fear. Since the day I’d met her I could hear her heart—could hear its quickening, its rhythmic thud in sleep, its everyday cadence.
Her heart beat fast and faster the deeper we went. Yet she didn’t slow, didn’t speak up.
Still, I walked ahead. That spot on my chest, the spiritstag’s brand, had at first only ached. It was ignorable until it wasn’t. Now, with every fork we took and every mark we etched on a skull, it burned keener and hotter.
And my eyes had begun to sting. A familiar heat built behindthem, the rims pulsing with it. The deeper we went, the more I knew the truth. The more I knew the truth—could smell and hear and feel it—the easier it became to navigate the catacombs. Because it wasn’t just Eury’s pulse I sensed anymore.
Another creature—much larger, with far more blood to circulate and a heart bigger than the two of us put together—waited in the deep dark. Could she hear it?
If your body knows something your mind doesn’t, boy, Haskel used to say,shut your mouth and listen to your body.
We came to a fork, and Eury made to go right. Perhaps the smell was too strong now to discern between paths. I caught her arm, shook my head. “This time it’s a left.”
She didn’t move. Her crystal’s light caught her face—jaw set, eyes narrow. "How do you know that?"
“I can sense it. A heartbeat.”
“Aheartbeat?” A pause as she no doubt listened. Then, “You’re sure?”
Down here in the deep dark, surrounded by the dead, it seemed almost fitting to speak of it. I touched the skin beneath my eye. “I’m sure.”
She stepped closer, face rising as she studied the red rims of my eyes.
"Everyone asks eventually,” I said.
“I always assumed you drank too much.”
“Noctere has a method. Old, not spoken of outside the winter court. They take noxveil—concentrated shadow—and put it into the eyes. A hollow needle. Liquid dark." I kept my voice level. "They pin you still and push it through."
Her jaw tightened. She didn’t look away.