I drew the blade’s edge along my fate line until blood welled and spilt warm over my fingers, dripped onto the grass. Then I set my palm against Eurydice’s broken breast.
To reignite a sun that has gone dark,you must become the conduit that empties itself.
This girl, the sun. This changeling, the brightest light.
“Take it.” Not a shout, not a scream, not even a yell. Just a whisper. “Take it all.”
No rage. No spectacle.
Only surrender.
And I meant it, more than anything I’d meant in my life.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Eurydice
My mother pressedone soft hand over my chest. “Oh, Eury?—”
I pushed her hand away. “All my life you spoke of the monsters outside the wall.” The words pressed out, sharp and desperate. “All that time, you knew I was one. And half the time you treated me like one.”
There it was. The jagged truth, undeniable from any angle. Dredged up and out of me with my hands pressed over my chest, though it held nothing anymore.
Vaelen’s bleeding sky, it took death to say it aloud. I’d always hoped after we died, we didn’t have to think or feel or remember. Because then, then?—
Then I wouldn’t have to know. I could have lived in the false light of her love and died happy.
Her hands opened, palms out, empty. She said nothing. I wantedto rage; I wanted to cry. It was just like her to go silent when I needed her most. On her last day alive she’d been sweet and loving, but that couldn’t undo the whole of my life.
My gaze flicked toward the throne, toward the dagger resting there. I wanted to grab it. Instead, my voice came out thick and childlike. “Say something.”
“You read the journal.” She was soft, careful. “You know my feelings about you, Eurydice.”
Oh, fuck the journal.
“Yes, in the journal you once wrote that you loved me.” I stepped toward her. “In life, you spent a third of my childhood in bed. Days, sunrise to sunset.”
“My girl?—”
“Some days you loved me, and some days you couldn’t even look at me. You let me go twenty years without understanding why.”
“Ididn’t understand it. Not for years.” Her hand came out toward me, reaching. “You can’t imagine. You can’t imagine knowing what was outside the wall, seeing athingwheeled in, and then your child gone one night. And you don’t realize it for years.”
I longed to take her hand; instead, I scoffed. “I didn’t choose to be put in the bassinet. I only knewyou. And now…”
Now it was all pointless. I was just a whelp of the Dip, and then a guard for a few months, and so briefly a queen I could barely remember the sharp points of the bramble diadem pressing into my scalp.
She came toward me. I hadn’t realized how far my gaze had fallen until her hands touched my shoulders. “Look at me.”
I didn’t.
She lifted my chin until our eyes met. “You aren’t meant for this place. Not yet. Already you’re on your way back.”
“I’vedied, Mama.”
“Listen to me, Eury. Listen. It’s impossible not to love you.”
Just words. My eyes burned, and I slumped, but herfingers only tightened.