The claw pierced my palm. A single point of pain, small and bright, almost nothing.
Then the power. Not almost nothing. Not small.
It poured into me like molten ore—hot, heavy, ancient. It hadn’t felt like feralis, hadn’t felt like any magic I’d ever touched. It had felt like hunger, like a door opening inside me onto a room I’d never known was there, vast and dark and full of something breathing. It had raced up my arm and into my chest and I’d felt my heart stutter, skip, restart with a beat that wasn’t entirely mine anymore.
Caustrix withdrew his claw. The wound sealed instantly, without even a mark.
“Tell me,” I’d said. “Tell me how to save her in the Killing Fields.”
“You can’t,veyre.” A snort of smoke into the air. “The gods won’t let you. You must wait.”
“Wait for what?”
He hummed as if considering whether to answer at all. “To reignite a sun that has gone dark, you must become the conduit that empties itself.”
A riddle. I’d never been good with riddles.
I hadn’t told Eury. I’d walked out of that cavern with acid threaded through my veins and I’d said nothing, because saying it out loud would have made it real, and if it was real then I’d have to face what I’d done—not just the deal, but the reason I’d taken it. The selfish, gutting reason.
I would do anything to keep her alive. Anything.
Now the dagger stood in the earth before me, dripping with the blood of dead fae, and my palm burned.
Power.Dragon’spower.
Gawain and I met eyes. We’d both seen the dagger fly.
The gleam in his gaze had changed. He’d only ever wanted me as a trophy, but now a greater prize awaited him. And I—without a weapon, at my limit—was the only creature in the way of it.
His fingers shifted on the grip of his sword. The other hand began to move. I knew those micro-movements like I knew my own body: he was about to hew me down from a few paces away. I’d seen him do it a hundred times.
I pulled on the last tendril of feralis I had and leapt upward with a roar. I crashed into him, and the two of us went to the ground. He landed on his back, armor clanking, helmet striking the grass.
He’d always been stronger than me. He’d never been faster.
I straddled him, pinning his arms with my knees, and reached for his left boot. He never went anywhere without Mercy, didn’t even sleep without those six inches of death nearby. I found the ebony tip at the lip of his boot. Gripped it, unsheathed, and stared down at him.
“Dorian—”
How often had I fantasized of this moment? How many times had I dreamed it? Daydreams, nightmares, while knifing a rasher of pork at breakfast. I’d always imagined the last words I would speak to him, the venom I would whisper as a sendoff into the underworld. The last voice he’d hear in this life.
Gawain had always been my endgame. The changeling I sought in every death.
Yet now he was just an armored obstacle.
I gripped Mercy tight and shoved its point up through his jaw. All six inches, until his gray eyes went wide, shocked. Then those eyes turned away from me toward the sky and saw no more.
I stood and limped toward the Killing Fields. Red death lay all around me. Horses screamed; broken men groaned. At the Sylvanwild camp, the tent had collapsed. Haskel lay atop a Highmark knight, still gripping his sword, his body covered in blood. Carnage and body parts littered the ground around him. All six Highmark knights were dead.
So was Haskel.
“Save your queen.” Last words, said without hesitation. A fucking titan of a man.
A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the human detritus. Barely a whisper, unintelligible, but I knew who it belonged to.
I hobbled faster, lifted a handmaiden’s body—Eleyrie—and found Faun lying beneath her. A Highmark arrow stuck straight out from her chest, and one arm had been sheared off at the shoulder. Crimson, arterial blood pooled in the grass. She still held her rapier in her remaining hand. Her lips were blue, her eyes wide on me.
I dropped to my knees and yanked the belt from my waist. “Don’t talk.”