With a low growl, I pulled one leg over and half-dropped off the horse’s back. I hit the cave floor with a groan, back-first, and stayed there as pain ricocheted through my spine.
Eury came to stand over me, shrouded by the light. Child of dirt, daughter of scorn, autumn queen. Carys’s heir.
She could make it. She could force them all to kneel in the bloody grass.
“Go.” My voice threaded between immobile lips. “Ride to the iron gates.”
She crouched, her eyes almost as blue as the dragon’s. Her fingers touched my cheek, and she turned my face toward her. “Don’t talk nonsense.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Eurydice
The rain hissedagainst the cave’s entrance. Outside, the world had become a muddy green. Inside, the horse stood with its nose almost touching the ground, flanks trembling, swaying from exhaustion.
The scouts wouldn’t find us in this. Rain like this drove even the ruthless to shelter; they were likely crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in another cave. Or maybe they’d turned back toward the wall.
But they were our least concern.
I sat against the cave wall, the dagger in my cross-legged lap, while the Unseelie magic did its work on Dorian. He’d passed the point of return. Only the spiritstag and the grove could save him now.
I’d known it when he fell off the horse. Known it when he told me to go; his eyes had been black at the edges.
Now he writhed, groaning, as the magicovertook him. And there was nothing I could do. I had stood in a dragon’s flames, and there was nothing I could do.
Dorian had told me to leave him. He’d told me to take the horse and go.
I’d considered it. Considered it as I considered all options, in a flash. I saw myself riding for Sylvanwild, through the iron gates, taking a horse from the citadel’s stables and galloping for the Killing Fields in time for the trial.
I had the dagger. If I lacked aveyre, then that was one less threat. The word meantqueenslayer, for Vaelen’s sake.Blood coated its letters; the syllables were no hollow threat.
But I’d recoiled from the thought—from its vividness, the tug of it. I’d always been a survivor, but I’d never so fully considered abandoning someone like this.
And Dorian wasn’t just someone…
He’ll betray you. He already has.
The words were a song I couldn’t force out. They already haunted me, and I’d only just emerged from the dragon’s lair.
Caustrix had changed me. I’d carried a piece of him with me out of those catacombs, and perhaps it was that piece pulling me toward the horse and Sylvanwild. Or, simply, what kept my fingers wrapped tightly around the dagger long after the choice had been made.
Dorian gritted his teeth, his back bowed, tendons standing out along his neck. At first I’d held his hand through the pain, murmured words, but he didn’t seem to see me or hear me. He’d recessed into a pit inside his body.
I’d stay until he passed. I’d do that.
But wasn’t that its own betrayal? I didn’tacceptthe inevitable. The Sylvanwild trials had meant inevitable death. Rhiannon’s sword through my heart had been inevitable. The dragon’s flames had promised inevitable burning.
Caustrix had whispered something else to me when his tail was wrapped around me. The words had sunk beneath the waves of everything else. Now they rose.
The tooth does not only cut, child. It drinks. Every magic it touches, it swallows. Every power it meets, it makes its own.
My gaze dropped to the dagger, its eerie glow. My thighs had gone numb where it lay. At the sound of Dorian’s groans, I placed my fingers around its grip.
How did a dagger drink? But this wasn’t a dagger, at least not originally.
It was a tooth.
I moved across the cave’s floor to Dorian’s side with a sudden frenzy in my chest. He didn’t have long; his eyes had already gone fully black.