Dorian didn’t ask more questions—not right away. His entire focus shifted to stemming the bleeding, bandaging my hand. He was alert, aware, wholly himself. As he worked, I searched his arm, his throat. Not one discolored vein.
Finally, he sat back against the cave’s wall. His gaze flicked from the blood-slick dagger to me. The basics must have been obvious to him, if not the specifics. “Thank you.”
I shook my head. We didn’t thank each other; we did what we had to do.
“I don’t know what you did, Eury.”
I moved next to him, cradling my hand. Exhaustion dragging at my eyelids. Our shoulders didn’t quite touch. Without the dagger in my grip, I felt calmer, more myself. “I don’t, either.”
He let out a one-note chuff. “Then how did you know to do it?”
“My mother always said I had a mind like a trap. I thought she had to say that because she was my mother.” With the fingers of my good hand, I traced points in the air. “Something Carys did in the third trial. Something Caustrix said to me. When someone’s dying, you put things together more quickly.”
He leaned his head against the wall. “I think your mother saw you more clearly than you know.”
I kept my face turned away, toward the cave’s mouth. The horse, standing with lowered head, seemed the safest spot to study. “In the flames, I saw her. Over and over andover.”
“I was going to ask, but?—”
“I know. There wasn’t time.”
“And I didn’t want to make you relive it.”
I angled closer to him, so our shoulders touched. “I couldn’t escape until I went through a door. Her bedroom door.”
He didn’t speak. His shoulder remained solid, comforting, unmoving.
My head touched his arm. Soft, warm. My eyes slipped closed. “How did you know, Dorian? You told me to look for a door.”
“Long ago,” he whispered, “when Gawain took me to Noctere, he trapped me inside my own mind. He made me face my deepest fear.”
“Which was?”
“A door. The same one you walked through in the inner district.” He meant the door to his home in the Kingdom of Storms. The site of his family’s death. “I couldn’t walk through it. I had to.”
He’d gone easily through that door—the real one—when the time came.
I set my unbandaged hand on his arm. Sleep had nearly pulled me under its waves, but I needed to hear this. “Did you?”
“Of course. I couldn’t escape until I did.” He sighed. “For people like us it’s always a door, Eury.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Dorian
She sleptlike she’d died, with her head in my lap. Only the subtle movement of her breast under her uniform told me she lived, and the sometimes-twitch of her fingers on my thigh.
Outside, the rains continued. On the ground, the dagger watched me from where she’d dropped it. The blood had long ago evaporated, leaving only the clean blue blade.
Cursed thing. It had saved my life.
Well,Eurydicehad saved my life. The dagger was impossible to wield unless the right hand held it.
More and more, she was becoming inexplicable to me. I didn’t know how she’d done it, even after she’d told me. Her head lay on my leg, and still she seemed to me almost like the queens of old in children’s stories. They were said to have a mystical connection tomagic, something the average fae could never understand. Certainly not the averageman.
I’d always thought everything was explicable. Until I met her.
She wasn’t just brave—not just smart—not just powerful. She was unreal, as though touched by divinity. I’d been truthful when I said it was impossible not to love her, but there was another piece to it. A smaller, sharper piece. One I couldn’t yet name.