Day lapsed into night. I didn’t move, didn’t dare wake her. Morning would come soon enough, and then we would ride without stopping until we reached Sylvanwild. She needed energy, every bit of it.
Her final—most important—trial waited.
At some point sleep had claimed me as well, my head resting against the wall when her voice penetrated the darkness.
“Rain’s stopped.”
I opened my eyes. She sat cross-legged, facing the cave’s mouth. Not-quite-morning light slanted in. The dagger still lay where she’d dropped it yesterday. “Feeling better?” I asked.
“Better than better.” Her head turned until her face came into profile. “You?”
Stiff. Aching. Still tired. “Just great.” I pushed myself off the wall and to my feet. The horse had slept standing; it roused at my movement. “We’ll need to ride today without stopping.”
She stood and turned toward me. “Are you able?”
I nearly scoffed. “Haveyoueaten?”
Her lips curled. “I can eat on the way.”
We gathered what little we had and mounted. She rode in front while I held the reins; I didn’t trust her to stay on behind me with only one good hand. We cantered through the morning fog, toward Sylvanwild’s gates.
On the way, she drank from the canteen and ate dried meat while leaning against my chest. Every shift of her weight sent heat through the uniform and into my ribs, and I had to keep my breathing level so she wouldn’t feel what she was doing to me. To hold onto my head, Itold her the story of the four gods of Feyreign: the spiritstag, the black maw, the dawn hawk, and the brightcolt.
The four gods had been created by the land itself, and since their inception they’d always been frustrated by the bounds of their magic. Each of them wanted to reign, but the land’s covenant kept them locked. Inside their court, they had total power; outside it, they had none. They couldn’t even leave their own lands—though in rare moments, at the borders, a god’s power could reach beyond its edges like a hand through a cracked door. Brief, costly, and never without consequence.
With Carys’s rise, the spiritstag had hoped to make Sylvanwild the better court—maybe the only court. But she’d become corrupted by power and lost her life for it, and so the covenant went on as it had since the dawn of Feyreign.
That was where my story ended. What I didn’t say, but thought: the stag wanted Eurydice to become what Carys had not. It saw the potential in her, the same potential I’d seen from that first night.
Here she was, living it. Rising to it.
Eury listened without interrupting. When I’d finished, she asked, “But why four courts?”
“The land birthed four gods, not one—and it won’t allow any single one to consume the others. The covenant isn’t a contract—it’s a cage the world built around them.”
“So men and gods alike vie for power. Of course they do.”
“Why of course?”
She shrugged against me. “It’s the only thing that makes you free.”
She was right. The way of our world made her right.
She half-turned in her seat and set her good hand on my arm as though to speak to me confidentially. “Dorian, has any champion ever survived three on one in the Killing Fields?”
By which she meant,How can I possibly survive this?
I breathed out. I had to be careful. “It hasn’t happened except once.”
“Once?”
“When Carys wielded the blade.”
She considered this with her hand still on my arm. “And otherwise?”
“The victory always comes through an alliance. In past trials, the Noctere champions allied with Sylvanwild against the Seelie.”
Eury scoffed. “Yes, I’m sure Maeronyx longs for an alliance with me.”