But if the Courtbreaker wakes?—
one must kneel, and one must die.
Carys had left no one kneeling; she’d taken the heads of all three queens. Eury had only taken one. My queen wasn’t corrupted—she was clear-eyed. And even if shewas, I didn’t care. Darkness take us both.
I let out a scoff and set my hand to her soft, bloody cheek. “Regret it? Fuck Liora. Fuck the courts. We make our own lives.”
Her eyes went wide—then narrowed. Understanding passed between us. We would never be parted again. Not in this life.
She jerked her chin toward the Sylvanwild forest. “Our god wanted this.”
There, past the Fields and amongst the trees, the spiritstag had watched the whole thing. The ambush, the betrayal, the beheading. It hadn’t stepped in after the dawn hawk’s betrayal, nor the black maw’s.
The spiritstag had wanted Eury to break the wheel, and she had done that. But at great cost.
“Faun,” I breathed. “She lost her arm in the fight.”
She jerked back. “She’s alive?”
“Barely, if so.”
She rose and struck off through the Killing Fields. She ran full tilt in the rain, past the body of the Dawnmaker, past kneeling queens. She still gripped the dagger, and the rain still fell in specks from the moody sky.
I laid my head back against the spire. If I knew nothing else, I knew three truths:
First, I loved her. Human, changeling, queen, Courtbreaker—I loved everything she had been and was and would be. Now, tomorrow, every tomorrow after.
Second, we stood on uncharted land. Carys had wielded two magics for a handful of seconds and destroyed three queens. She’d died for it. Now the wheel was truly broken, but to what end?
Third, Maeronyx would never, never stop. In the glistening rain, after Eurydice had passed, she raised her head and glared at me like she would like to bite into my body and tear me piece by piece with her teeth.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Eurydice
Three days.Three days of sleep, of half-consciousness, of my body’s aches. When I finally woke, Dorian lay behind me in my bed. Every part of him touched every part of me, and for once theveyrebond didn’t yank me toward him like a leash. Part of me wanted freedom from it; most of me loved the yearning—loved how it turned the simple fact of being near him into annihilating relief.
He murmured by my ear, “I’d begun to wonder if the sun would rise a fourth time before you came back to me.”
Barely a whisper, but even that made my head pound like I’d been struck. The Killing Fields had killed me, after all.
His arm lay over me, heavy. His breath tickled my ear, my bare scalp. And I didn’t know if I dreamed or if I was truly a queen. I rolled toward him and his dark-eyed, soft-lipped face made it all real.
“When did you get here?”
“I’ve been here all along.”
I ran my fingertips down the rough line of his jaw. Stubble caught against my skin. For the first time since I’d known him, I felt no fear. Not of him, but more unexpectedly, not of me. I didn’t fearus, together. My chest expanded; I wanted to be this close to him always. “It’s presumptuous to slip naked into the queen’s bed.”
His lips curled. “Blame the handmaiden for allowing me in.”
The handmaiden. “Eleyrie?” Had she lived? My fingers stopped moving, the spell dissolving.
Dorian shook his head, the smile gone. “None survived.”
All dead, all thirteen. So many arrows, like rain. And then death, blood—so much of it. My last memory burst to mind.
“Faun?”