That would mean… “You’d be buried, too. Alone in this cave, forgotten.”
“Perhaps”—the lips parted, the teeth gleaming—“but at least I would have the satisfaction of hearing their death cries ring through the tunnels before they collapsed.”
I had called him a bitter bastard. He was more than that—far more. This dragon must be the most miserable creature alive. He lived only for his own resentment.
But what he offered was beyond anything I had ever imagined. My imagination had always been tempered by the knowledge that I could not possess the power to do as I pleased. To punish those who deserved it, to save those I loved.
Now, here it was. Power, offered.
In the flames, Eurydice didn’t move. If she were here, with me, she might beg me not to accept. She might take my face between her hands and kiss me and make me forget about those old longings and the sting of jealousy.
But she wasn’t here.
I stood, an insect before a predator. The frosty eyes watched, watched.
Deep under the earth, away from the reach of Feyreign and her queens and the world I had always known, I extended my hand, palm up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Eurydice
I stoodbefore the old door with the sun painted on its face. Already I smelled the flour; already I felt her fingers in my hair. I set my hand to the knob, turned it, and pushed in.
“Mama.”
Faint sunlight cast bands on the gleaming 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. Brown eyes, hair pulled back tight. “You’re just in time for the rain. Come in quick.”
A good day. A very good day.
I began kicking my boots off into the corner, but her footstepssounded behind me.
“Let me do that, my girl.”
My girl. She almost never called me that. The sound of it was like sunlight between clouds, warming.
She took hold of my arm, ushered me over to the table. She pressed me down into the chair and knelt before me. She took off my boots one by one. Averygood mood.
“You don’t have to do that, Mama.”
Her heart-shaped face lifted, eyes soft. “Of course I do. My daughter deserves no less.”
My brows lowered. Outside, the rain had begun to fall—hard, sharp raps against the windowpanes. On days like this, when the rain came fast and heavy, she took to bed.
“You’re happy?” I asked.
She took hold of both boots and rose with them in her arms. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
She crossed to the corner, set the boots down with careful precision side by side. Her humming had started up again; the words flowed through my mind:
“Deep in the forest, the green paths wind,
Twisting and turning, you lose what you find.
Step where it’s darkest, hush, don’t cry?—
The trees remember, though years drift by.