He’d really gotten deep into my fucking head.
“Sit, sit, sit. Your mother’s last piece of wisdom, ignored. All because you’re afraid.”
Never sit. Never sit.
My feet had gone numb on the cave floor. I didn’t feel when I took one step, then the next. The blue shimmer became smoke. The light became an outline of a curved blade.
Only now did I understand why Carys called it a dagger of ice and spite.
Ice, for the deep-dark place where she’d acquired it.
Spite, for the dragon who lived now inside me. And because whoever wielded this god-cursed thing was consenting to an unholy union.
His spite had seeped a little bit into me. Or maybe it had always been there, raining down on my head every day of my life. Sinking like flour into my skin, forever there in the creases. Scentable by a strong enough nose.
I knelt before the dagger. A slender grip, a thorn-sharp curving blade. There on its surface sat my reflection, hued blue in the dragon’s fire.
All my hair was gone. My eyebrows. I was two blue eyes staring back from inside the globe of my skull.
My fingers curled into my palms.
Once I touched it, I sensed everything would change. A future would appear in the distance, and I would start down a path toward it. My hand longed tohold; my heart shrank away.
Beyond those flames, I knew Dorian watched. I knew he would never leave my side again. And that was its own weight to carry.
Am I making the right choice, Mama?
No answer. Maybe the answers in my head had only ever just been me.
I reached out. My fingers closed around the grip. Ice, ice, ice, so cold I wanted to jerk my hand away. But that was only instinct, only the shock.
Willpower wrapped my fingers tight around the grip. Tighter, until the numbness seeped into my palm and I lifted it from the cave floor.
The lightest weapon I’d ever held—and also the heaviest.
I rose, turned… and found Caustrix’s head a foot in front of me, the neck curving around and down. The dragon exhaled, and smoke blew over me.
“The tooth does not only cut, child. It drinks. Every magic it touches, it swallows. Every power it meets, it makes its own. You may use it three times, and then—” The dragon’s nostrils blew hot, astringent air. “Well. You’ll see.”
Three times.Then, before I could even process the rest, the maw came close enough to touch. His voice was so quiet, I wondered if I only heard it inside my head.
“Yourveyrewill betray you, just like Carys’s did.He already has.”
I stared. Didn’t breathe, didn’t speak.
“He wants what you have, and if you aren’t careful, little queen, he will take it from you.”
Then, slowly, the head moved backward. The blue eyes stared as the head rose, revealing Dorian standing on the other side of the cave. Even from here, his dark eyes were soft. Just like my mother’s when I’d stepped in through the old door with the sun on its face.
Dorian held my cloak, open and waiting. He was waiting for me.
“Go.” Caustrix thumped his tail on the floor; a vibration thrummed up through my numb feet. “I tire of looking at your pretty ephemeral faces.”
Dorian pushed the sewer grate up, and pure moonlight spilled over us in the frigid night. He climbed out and reached back, gripping my hand. He pulled me up onto the icy inner district street in nothing but my cloak, clasped at my neck. I swayed, and without asking he slid his arm under my legs and picked me up.
“You’re frozen.” His throat sounded so dry, I wondered how he had a voice. “It’s that fucking dagger.”
I’d clutched the dagger since the moment we’d left Caustrix’s tomb. Had carried it through the tunnels, up the catacombs, into the sewers. Even now I held it to my chest like an infant; where it touched my breast, the skin went slowly numb.