Gods, they didn’t deserve this. They didn’t deserve to win.
“So don’t let them.” Caustrix’s voice slithered into my head. I wasn’t alone, here at the end. “You still have the tooth.Use it.”
I scoffed. “Why? Haskel—Eleyrie—Finch—Mirek—they’re all fucking dead.”
“Not the one who matters most.”
The one who mattered most…
Dorian.
The bond, the thread still held. Caustrix was right: Dorian wasn’tdead; I felt him still, myveyre.Queenslayer, yes. But also my protector.
Long ago, before all this, almost the day we’d met, he had said something that never left my mind.
Fucking diadems and boots on necks.
He hated this. He’d hated all of it from the beginning. And whether or not he’d betrayed me, that changed nothing about the undying truth of those words.
My right shoulder was useless; my left arm still worked. I forced my hand around, found the dagger’s grip.
Carys’s dagger. The dagger of ice and spite. My own.
Iwas supposed to have broken the wheel, to have ended the trials, to have destroyed this machinery. The spiritstag had seen it in me—Ihad seen it in me. There in the grove, when I’d first touched magic. In the meadow, when I’d straddled Rhiannon and slit her throat.
I was meant for power.
I was meant to be the Courtbreaker.
It was an iron truth in my chest. I was supposed to have been her. Carys’s heir, but better. The hubris of a daughter of scorn.
But if it couldn’t be me, then let it be him.
Let him burn it all the way down.
I yanked the dagger from its sheath. Pain receded into cold numbness. Caustrix’s power slid into my fingers, up my arm, and with it, his hate of the world—every century of it, every year. I knew why he wanted to see it destroyed.
Maybe he had always seen the ambush coming.
Maybe he’d wanted to witness the chaos.
But maybe he had planned for this moment. For me, blind and bleeding at the base of the spire with his tooth in my hand and nowhere left to throw it but exactly where he wanted it to go.
A thousand years in the dark. A thousand years to plan. And all he’d needed was a child of dirt angry enough and desperate enough and spiteful enough to carry his dagger out of the darkness anddeliver it to the one person who could wield it better than I ever would.
I’d thought I was using the dragon’s tooth.
The dragon’s tooth was using me.
They were closer now. I had five seconds.
I forced myself up to a seat against the spire, dagger in hand. I didn’t have physical strength, didn’t have eyesight, but I didn’t need either.
Blood contained water. I had command of feralis. I had the dagger in hand.
Water lay all around. So much of it.
The dagger replaced pain with cold strength. Not healing—nothing so kind. It simply stopped mattering. The arrow in my lung, the torn muscles, the vision that flickered like a guttering candle—all of it went distant, muffled, as if the dagger had drawn a curtain between me and my own dying body. I staggered to my feet, raised my arm.