“Is anything real, Eurydice, but what we perceive?” She stepped out of the cradle of my arms, turned sidelong to reveal a throne twenty paces off. Bone and gnarled root, unchanged. “What do you perceive, my love?”
The throne stood tall and unnerving, a monstrosity. But on its seat lay a blade, changed from the first time I’d been here.
Caustrix’s tooth. Thedagger of ice and spite.
Then, it had been asleep. Now, it glowed. Hummed. Vibrated with awareness.
Light bled from it, expanding, deepening, and soon I sensed all might change. That this silent peace would disappear—and my mother with it—as the dagger flared brighter.
“You don’t belong to this place of ash,” she said behind me. “Not yet.”
I twisted around to keep her in my sight. “I need to know something. The truth.”
She inclined her head. “Always.”
I turned fully toward her, away from the throne. Death stripped away fear; it left nothing to lose.
“Mama, am I a monster?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Dorian
Forget the queens.Forget destruction.
I wanted life. Life, life,life.
The limp was gone. All pain had left me the moment I’d touched the dagger, and now that I held it, even my fear had gone. Queens, gods—boots on necks and diadems, and all of it paled next to the power in my hand and what it could do.
Everything that mattered had been reduced to a pinpoint: one girl slumped against a stone spire.
I ran, barely aware of the magic swirling around me, some feral instinct listening for one thought, one command, one word. Speed—I needed speed. Feralis struck my back, a gust of it like a giant’s palm, pressing me forward, through the Killing Fields. I crossed the veil, crossed onto the bloody grass, and the magic swept over me like a spider’s thick webbing. Yetwhat lay within me felt ten times greater than any magic around me.
The dagger sang in my hand. Not a sound anyone else could hear—a vibration, a frequency, something that lived in my marrow and the deep place where Caustrix’s power had nested inside me. The tooth knew me. My blood, my spite, the shape of the dark room it had opened in my chest that night in the cavern. And it wasglad. Glad to be held by someone who wasn’t fighting it, wasn’t afraid of it, wasn’t trying to use it with clean hands and a pure heart.
I had neither. The dagger didn’t care; the dagger wanted what I wanted.
The queens slowed. Maeronyx’s, Liora’s, and Iseris’s faces came into abrupt crystalline view. One with wide eyes, another squinting, the third frozen. All three unable to comprehend how a man held the dagger without withering into a husk.
A man who should have been nothing. A changeling from the inner district with dirt under his nails and murder on his ledger. The least likely vessel in the world for a weapon that had broken queens.
But Caustrix hadn’t chosen me because I was worthy. He’d chosen me because love made mewilling.
All the while I ran closer, closer?—
Just before collision, they leapt aside for me. They had no choice; it was scatter or be obliterated.
I crossed into the Convergence, where the magics became a soup. The air hung around me, thick and confused, but it didn’t slow me. Nothing could do that. My hand sipped feralis from the dagger, and the dagger drank it from the air.
I slid to my knees beside Eurydice. Maeronyx’s arrow protruded from her chest, the obsidian head lacquered red with her blood. A second hole gaped over her heart. The wound had spilt down to her lap, and her blue eyes stared at the ground without seeing.
Dead, truly. She had defied death so many times it had begun to believe it impossible for her. It had taken three queens conspiring, an ambush, to bring her down.
But powerful souls lingered.
I lifted the dagger and my opposite palm. Before I’d known her, I would have burned the world down to have this blade. I would have killed and clawed my way toward it. An ocean’s power rested in my hand—to make and unmake. The boy I’d been had fantasized a thousand thousand times about this kind of power.
Yet none of it meant anything without her.