Caustrix was Unseelie. His blood ran through me—acid-lined blood. Any connection I’d ever had to light had been eaten away by the dragon’s acid. But Liora’s light-slicked sword had infused solaire straight into my body… too much light to eat away.
The dragon’s blood still laced my veins. I felt it. But I felt the light there now, too—enough to fight the acid. Enough to swirl through my arteries, Unseelie and Seelie alike. Death and growth careening through one body.
Carys had tried to hold feralis and noxveil—two Unseelie magics. That was why she’d died.
She never could have been the Courtbreaker. Balance was the key.
A shadow fell over me, blotting out the sun. A sword’s tip held at my neck. “Ssa ssen nokh.”
Foreign Faerish, familiar tone. Liora the Dawnmaker, her sword still dripping with my blood, still glowing with light beneath. A feral creature poised for movement, honed for the kill.
My reflexes had never felt so whiplike. My body hummed with life.
Her fingers twitched before her sword did. She swung to slice the top half of my skull from my body, and I jerked my head aside. The blade shaved air. My hand closed around the dagger in my lap; I swiped out with it. The edge sliced through the plate of her boot with a hiss, as easy as a knife through cold butter. More than that, because she let out a scream.
Skin, too. And bone.
I rolled away and up to my feet, the dagger tight in my hand. The four magics swirled through the air, and two of them pulled toward me. Feralis, solaire. I hardly had to work for it; they almost felt captive to me. I breathed them in, green and gold, right to the bottom of my lungs. They ate through the wooden arrow inside me, dissolved it so completely that the two orphaned ends fell out of my body and onto the grass.
The wound healed the instant the last splinter left my flesh—life-giving solaire stitching me back together, tempered by the decay of feralis. All of it happened fast here in this strange place at the center of everything.
Liora hobbled backward. Maeronyx and Iseris stared, weapons ready, eyes wide as if they beheld a creature they’d never conceived of.
They were right to stare. I could feel it, all of it, everything, the full scope of what I’d become. Four magics visible in the air like colored smoke, two of them orbiting me as if I were their axis. The Convergence hummed beneath my feet, through my bones, up through the spire at my back, and I understood it now the way you understand your own heartbeat. This place wasn’t dangerous to me… this place wasmine.
I lifted my hand. Feralis coiled between my fingers, dark green and eager. I turned my palm and solaire pooled there, liquid gold, warm as sunlight on river water. Two magics that should haverepelled each other—Unseelie decay, Seelie growth—sat in the same hand, in the same body, as naturally as breathing.
Carys had never held this. No one had ever held this.
I could kill them. All of them, right now. The Eurydice I’d been would have wanted that; she had been cloaked in rage, in simmering want. But I wasn’t that Eurydice anymore, and I didn’t want them dead.
I wanted themstaring up at me.
I lowered my chin, gaze locking with each of theirs in turn. “Bend the knee.”
Liora moved first. Not to kneel—to straighten. She pulled herself upright despite the ruined boot, despite the blood, and met my gaze with six hundred years of queenship behind her eyes. But I saw what lived beneath it now. I saw the way her throat moved when she swallowed, the blanch of her fingers around the grip of her sword. She held herself the way you do when every instinct screams to run and you’ve decided that you won’t.
She was afraid. Probably more afraid than she had ever been in her life, and she would die before she showed it.
Liora scoffed, her blue eyes glinting. “You don’t know your fate, child. I watched Carys do what you’ve done, and I watched her body disintegrate like ash.”
Her defiance was almost beautiful. “So you won’t kneel.”
In my head, Caustrix’s gravelly laughter found a low, pleased note.
She flicked my blood from her sword. “I’d rather an eternity in the underworld than kneel before a half-dead lowborn of this kingdomandthe other.”
I respected that. Really, I did. She’d have earned herself a free drink in the Dip.
Liora’s words emboldened Maeronyx and Iseris. Their stances widened. They were at their magical limit, no doubt, but it was still three on one—and they thought I was short on time.
Above us, clouds had begun to roll in. Almost without my noticing,the sky had darkened until Maeronyx’s undereyes had become gray hollows beneath her onyx irises.
A storm. A promise of spite.
“Come, then.” I jerked my chin. “All of you. Show the gods your worth.”
They still had a little magic. Liora most of all.