Around me,chaos. Hooves thumping, metal clanging, screams and shouts. Searing light like the sun still sat before my eyes—solaire, cast by the dawn hawk, more intense for the black maw's shadow that had fallen after.
In Highmark, Liora had known what was coming and held it back from me. She’d shown me her own power in careful measures, never the full hand. Of course she hadn’t. She was old and experienced enough to know that you never showed all your cards.
And she and Maeronyx had waited until I had seen the ambush—had seen Faun and Mirek fall—before the black maw’s shadow fell. Theywantedme to see my court dying to the other three.
A coordinated attack. Summer, spring, winter. And my court was gone.
The best enemy, my dear, is a demoralized one.Casual, ruthless, pragmatic. Her words felt like they floated in from a different life.
Liora had smiled at me. She had poured me wine. She had told me her real name. She had already decided I would die here. I should have seen her for what she was from the beginning, but I was naïve, fresh as a child. I might have been a distant relative, but birds threw their own babies from their nests every day. She had never been an ally, not for a moment.
She had always been my enemy.
Shock filled my mouth like iron, then something deeper rose beneath it. Anger. And beneath the anger, another thing fueling it. Deeper, more potent.
Shame.
Shame for ever trusting. Shame for believing. Shame for Mirek and Finch and Faun’s deaths.
But beneath that shame, a swift, even more potent current thrilled through me. Deep inside my fragmented mind I found myself in the raining meadow while acid dripped onto Dorian’s face, wanting to kiss him or kill him. He wasn’t gone; I felt the tug of him. Ourveyrebond was still there, still pulling at my ribs.
So I’ll need to fight blind, I’d said.
You’ll need to fight through anything.
I wasn’t dead yet. I wouldn’t die until they put me down.
Feralis crackled at my fingertips. Fierce, ready, waiting. I gripped the dagger at my back, and a surge of numbing power lit up my arm. I pulled magic toward me, the wind kicked up?—
A force punched into my back. I slammed into the wet grass, chest first, and the air left me in one violent expulsion. Pain exploded through me, tectonic. All thought obliterated.
No words, no thought, just pain. Pain and fear tendriling through me in the darkness. Then, panic—no air, no air—for a second, two, three, before my chest convulsed open.
Air tore in, ragged and piercing. Fuck, did it hurt, but mostly on my left side.
I wasn’t dead. Dying a little, maybe a lot, but not dead.
Whatever had struck me, I felt it in my lung, lodged there. A sword or dagger—no, the other queens couldn't get to me that fast. A bow shot, then. But no one could make that distance except?—
Maeronyx.
The terrible numbing cold confirmed it when I sipped in a little air. An arrow through my left lung, not my heart. She'd been aiming for my heart; the wind I'd just called had set it off course.
Why hadn’t the stag intervened? My entire court had been ambushed. Why would the gods watch, if not to stop a slaughter?
There was only one good reason: it didn’t want to.
It didn’t care if I died, only that I lived. It hadn’t cared if I died in the Sylvanwild trials. Hadn’t cared if I died to Rhiannon’s hand. But because I’d lived, I’d grown more powerful.
To the Sylvanwild god, death was boring; survival was intriguing.
Finally, finally, I understood Caustrix.
A dragon locked beneath a kingdom for a thousand years, chained in the dark by the same fae who called themselves civilized, the same humans who prayed to gods that wouldn’t answer. He had been buried alive—not because he was evil, but because he was powerful enough to be hidden. Because one king had looked at what he was and decided it was easier to cage him than to share the world with him.
A thousand years in the dark, with nothing but his own spite for company.
I’d spent twenty years in the Dip thinking I understood what it meant to be forgotten. Caustrix had been forgotten by entire civilizations. Whole ages of the world had come and gone while he rotted beneath the earth, and not one fae, not one human, not one god had come to free him. They’d built a kingdom on top of his prison and everyone had gone on living.