“She’s in her room. I imagine if you knock you’ll be served a side of her complaints.”
She’d lived. After what had happened at the Convergence, I had nearly been at my limit. When I’d come upon her in the massacre that was the Sylvanwild camp, she was paler than death. But her breath still moved under my finger. I’d had Dorian’s help carrying her to the spire, and she’d stayed alive until I passed out with my hand still on her chest.
I stared at him without seeing. “Haskel?”
Dorian’s face hardened. “Took six Highmark knights out with his broadsword. A master-at-arms until the end.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Eight hundred years of life, ended in one morning. “Mirek?”
“No.”
“Finch?”
He flinched.Thatdeath hurt him in particular. “None survived except Faun.”
I hadn’t realized tears had escaped until Dorian’s thumb wiped them away. “The whole thing was a coward’s move.”
True, but the injustice didn’t change their deaths. I opened my eyes. “If I had known the extent, I would have?—”
Dorian waited, face wide open. “You would have what?”
Murder had flashed before my eyes, swelled in my blood. A ferocious, prickling rage that swept through my body. It wasn’t the impotent rage of Eurydice Waters, child of the Dip. Now, Feyreign had forged a true daughter of scorn.
Trust was a gate so narrow, a person would have to contort to fit through it. Dorian had managed it, and Faun, but none else. The others were dead. Trust got you an arrow in the back. Trust got you a light-limned sword through the heart.
I longed to sunder the winter and spring citadels today, with their queens inside. But the wheel had already been broken, and they had already set their knees in the bloody grass to appease me.
Yet—
“The dagger.”
Dorian’s gaze shifted past me. “It’s a bit sharper than that dull pocketknife you kept at your bedside.”
I half-turned. There on the table lay Caustrix’s tooth. I sat up, ignoring my throbbing head, and took hold of it. For once, it didn’t numb my hand—but its power under my skin made me suck in a breath.You may use it three times, and then—well, you’ll see.
Yes, I saw. I felt. The piece of the dragon I’d taken out of that cavern with me would be with me always now, grown like a vine up the insides of my skull.
“On the Fields, you brought me back.” I didn’t meet his eyes. “How?”
I knew how. There was only one way.
Dorian pushed himself to a seat. He turned fully toward me. “I?—”
I turned the dagger around in my hands until I held it by the flat of the blade… and extended the grip to Dorian. His gaze lowered, then lifted to me. “Take it,” I said.
He took hold. His skin didn’t flake, his body didn’t burn.
I breathed out, let it go.He’ll betray you. He already has.That gods-cursed dragon.
“Caustrix won.” Dorian lowered the dagger to the bedding between us. “He won, either way.”
Yes, he did. He’d escaped his cage, even if his body remained inside it. “I only have one question.”
“I have an answer.”
I outlined the dagger, tip to grip, with my finger. “How tempted were you to fuck me over?”
His eyes crinkled. “Very.”