I held her until she fell asleep. When her breathing slowed—when I knew she had lapsed into unconsciousness—I unwound my arm from around her. I got up from the bed with a creak. Crossed around to the nightstand and stared down at the journal’s open pages.
Fresh ink. Those symbols she’d taught me as a little girl.
I never had an interest in reading. Always preferred to be outside, covered in dirt. So I’d never touched her journal. Never wanted to. But I saw the symbol for my name, staring back up at me from the page. And I picked it up and set my finger under the line and began reading.
My love. You were born today, under a storm.
My finger went still. I wanted to snap the journal shut. Wanted to throw it across the room. Wanted to tear out the page and crumple it.
But my eyes kept reading. Kept deciphering the symbols. Step where it’s darkest. Step into the deep forest.
I stepped in. I read and read until a line rose from the page and smacked me once, twice, three times in the face.
Not the same child. Not the same child. Not the same child.
My mother loved me, but she blamed me. She loved me but she resented me. She loved me… but she feared me.
Because I was a changeling. Because somewhere deep inside, she knew it.
I had sensed that. Saw it in her eyes on that day when I’d come into the bedroom and she couldn’t hide that feeling.
Run. Run. Run. Lock it away.
Now I remembered; I had all the pieces of her secret. I understood her feeling. Any mother would feel the same, but it still fucking lanced me becauseIhad to be the child and she the mother. And she was my sun, because forget the real sun—shemade the day begin and end. I didn’t know I was a changeling, only that her feelings were inexplicable and inconsistent. The real sun at least had consistency.
I closed the journal. Not to run this time, not to lock it away. But because I wasn’t that girl anymore, so I knew now…
It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t my fault.
I was Eurydice Waters. Eurydice of the Dip. A daughter of scorn. A human, but also a changeling. More importantly?—
I’d walked through the door, and I hadn’t died.
CHAPTER FORTY
Eurydice
I openedmy eyes to blue flame—to a dragon staring at me with slitted pupils and one shorn-off incisor visible between its lips.
Caustrix.
His eyes widened. “Little queen. You are a surprise.”
I stepped toward him, out of the flames. The world cooled. Dizziness hit in a wave; I stumbled, dropped to a knee, palm striking cold stone. My clothes were gone. My braid didn’t fall over my shoulder.
I was naked, hairless.
But I was out. I was back.
I stared at the ground until my body stopped feeling like it wanted to tilt sidelong.
“Eury,” Dorian’s voice warbled through the flames.
He stood on the other side of the fire. Howlong had he waited? My stomach felt wrenched empty, my arms shaking like they’d been immobile for… days. It must have been days.