Now I stared at the wretched creature. “I didn’t know that.”
“Six hundred years passed before Carys came. By then, I had begun to think the world had ended. Or maybeIhad. What’s the difference, really? Death doesn’t mean what you think it does, little fae. Try six hundred years of solitude and you’ll break in a dozen different ways.” Now a plume of smoke appeared from his nostrils. “A spiteful heart, you say. That’s pretty. The privilege of sanity allows for prettiness.”
Six hundred years. How had this creature held on to any semblance of truth, of self?
“Carys found me.” His head rose high on his elegant neck. “A curious little lowborn girl from the southern district, she crept her way into the sewers. Even then she possessed the ears to hear and the determination to delve deep. Back then, humans came and went from the catacombs, stacking bones on bones on bones.”
Oh, no.
“We became friends,” he said. “I gave the girl my tooth willingly. And I did not make her choose between the flames and her soul.”
Despite the heat before me, my hands had gone cold. I pressed my eyes shut. “She also gave willingly,” I whispered.
A hum issued inside his great chest. “You are smarter than theotherveyre.Yet you have a terribly expressive face. You can hide nothing.”
“The choices are the same,” I said, my voice a rasp. “They’re the same fucking thing.”
Carys had been a child when she’d given herself over.Thatwas how she’d gained power in the trials, as a queen. She was the reason Feyreign had regained its might—had pushed back the humans.
The dragon had given her the tooth. It had given her a thread to its power.
But the cost had been great. Too great.
“You spoke of promises,” Caustrix said, low and lethal. “Carys swore to destroy this kingdom of worms. To bring down the sky. Yet what promises do any human or fae truly mean—truly keep? She brought down the sky. Acid rain. But she couldn’t destroy it.”
I opened my eyes. Before me, Eury stood motionless in the flames. She had been forged by Caustrix’s acid. Twenty years of it. A daughter of his legacy—of the scorn that had been given over to Carys. Which she in turn had carved into the fate line of that one archer.
A fate carried down. Spite given over, and power with it.
Above me, the edge of Caustrix’s shorn-off tooth gleamed from the corner of his maw. “So you see now,veyre, the truth of the world. You see why theveyrebefore you brought the dagger back to this place and begged me never to give it up. And do you know what I said to him?”
My eyes stung. They blurred. “You promised.”
“Yes. I promised.” The dragon gave a short, soft chuckle. “And then I ate him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Eurydice
Faint sunlight castbands on the clean kitchen floor. My mother stood with her face to the window, her fingers dug deep into dough. She hummed that song she’d taught me when I was four, the one about the deep forest.
“Eury.” Her face turned, and a softness came over it. A heart-shaped face, hair pulled tight. “You’re just in time for the rain. Take your boots off.”
I shut the door, kicked my shoes off left and right into the corner. “What’s to eat?”
“You know.”
The faintest tapping began at the windowpanes, the first droplets of afternoon rain. Each droplet hissed with acid where it touched the glass, and a green hue overtook the sunlight on the floor.
“Is it pig?” I said.
“Of course.” Her smile didn’t leave her as she turned back to her work; her fingers kneaded deeper into the dough. “The biggest in the Dip.”
The dough didn’t quite roll as it should. Didn’t have the right elasticity.
“Mama,” I said. “Is that fresh dough?”
“What else would it be?” She pounded a fist into it, and I paused with my hand on the back of the chair.