“Like you spared my family?” Rage flared in my chest. “My mothers?”
All at once, the shadows dissolved. Sunlight streamed into my face, sudden and blinding. Not Liora’s magic, but real sunlight.
Maeronyx’s power had reached its limit.
There he stood, armored in ebony from toes to crown, not six paces away. He held his broadsword low in both hands. The angles of his helmet framed his cheekbones, his hard eyes. The edge of the scar on his jaw shone white in the sunlight.
Every time, it was me and him. In waking, in dreams. That face, those gray eyes and hard lips.
My gaze was pulled toward the Killing Fields. I couldn’t see her out there; the spire glowed golden, obliterating everything else. But I couldfeelher alive, as I’d felt her from the moment we’d been connected by the spiritstag.
She lived. Eury lived, and that was enough.
Now, to get through this fucker. I couldn’t use more magic; I was at my limit. But he couldn’t, either. Not here on my land.
A sliver of his neck was visible between breastplate and helmet. So many veins and arteries awaited my knife. I knew all his moves,just like he knew mine. Every feint. Every step. But he’d always been the better fighter. He had to be, with only a candle’s flame of magic. He was the reason I had so much—him, him, him. And he was why I trained every night with a blade.
Even when I wasn’t fighting him, Iwas.Always.
I had to be careful, tactical?—
My heart seized with pain. An avalanche of it, like I’d been stabbed right through the center. Theveyremark burned hot and hard, and I dropped the knife. My knees buckled.
I knelt, clutching my chest with both hands. Air—I couldn’t breathe. Was I dying?
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.The tip of the broadsword came into view. “You can’t see her, so I’ll narrate.” Gawain’s voice, certain and steady. “Just now, your queen’s been impaled by Liora’s solaire-slathered sword. Right through the heart, from what I can see. Up against the gods’ spire.”
Impaled.
I squinted through the veil of my hair. There, at the center of the Fields, they came into focus: four forms clustered near the spire.
“Lies,” I rasped.
“And yet here you kneel.” Gawain stopped in front of me. The tip of his sword touched the grass. “Thatveyrebond doesn’t lie.”
Moment by moment, the pain in my heart shrank, and it beat once more under my hand. The brand dimmed until I couldn’t feel its burn.
For the first time since the stag had joined us, I couldn’t feel her. Her presence had been so constant, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be alone.
But I was alone. Fully alone.
Eurydice was dead.
Impossible, but true. She’d survived so much. Fuck’s sake, she’d stood in dragon’s fire. And yet…
In my periphery, a streak of red. There on the Killing Fields, an object tore through the air like an arrow. It arced toward us, bloodflying from it, and drove itself into the ground just inside Sylvanwild land.
It stuck there halfway into the ground, upright, dripping with blood and gleaming in the sun. The grass under it sizzled and died.
Carys’s dagger. Caustrix’s tooth.
For a flash I was back inside that cavern, staring down a dragon. Eury had lain unconscious, still trapped in the blue flames, her body limp, her face slack, her lips moving around words I couldn’t hear. The dragon had watched me watch her, and then it had made its offer.
I should have refused. I should have picked Eury up and carried her out of that tomb and never looked back. But Caustrix had seen what I was, and what I wasn’t. He’d smelled the spite on me the way a predator smells blood—old anger, the kind that doesn’t heal, that calcifies inside your chest and becomes the architecture of who you are. He’d known I wouldn’t say no. He’d known it before I had.
I had extended my hand, palm up.
He’d lifted a foreleg, brought one great claw down atop me until it hovered over my palm. Just the delicate tip. I’d looked at it and I’d thought of Eury’s face when she’d learned what I was. Changeling-killer. The thing she hated most. And I’d thought:What’s one more sin on a ledger this long?