“It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing.” He tilted his head to the side, lips curling. “I was very tempted.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because you’re alive.”
The words struck me like a fist in the gut. Love had always come to me like that: sudden, overwhelming, awash with heady confusion.
Dorian had betrayed me. He’d taken Caustrix’s power… and he’d saved my life with it. He’d saved my life when he could have let me die, could have overturned the whole matriarchy.
Old words drifted through my mind, from the grove:Power isn’t given. It’s taken—so take it.
He’d taken it. I couldn’t fault the man.
I picked up the dagger and climbed out of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
I began taking off clothes, pulling on others. “To speak to a god.”
The walk to the grove seemed brief. Such was memory: walk a path enough times, and your mind sieved out all the uninteresting parts.
When I arrived at the sparkling pond under midday light, I wasn’t alone. On the other side of the water stood the spiritstag. Perhaps it had sensed my approach; perhaps it had been waiting for days.
Cold awe struck through me, the same as ever. Except the feelingwas dulled, diminished by repetition. The first time I had fallen to my knees; now the wonder only sang through my veins and kept my gaze locked on those black eyes.
“You are much changed, Eurydice Waters.”
No pleasantries, no pussyfooting.
“You wanted this,” I said aloud. “What I’ve done, what I’ve become. Didn’t you?”
The stag’s great antlers shimmered under the shifting canopy. “Does it ease your mind to think of what you’ve done—what you will do—if you imagine the mandate came from a god?”
“What do you think Iwilldo?”
The stag didn’t speak. The eyes didn’t blink.
“You could kill me now, here.” I stepped closer to the water. “But you don’t. You assigned me Dorian because he and I were both changelings. You knew he would rather burn the world down than stick a dagger in my back.Thiswas the outcome you wanted.”
The stag’s head lifted a degree.“When the powerless takes power—when the daughter of scorn brings the world to its knees—what does she do then? The spite still burns in your chest, but the diadem already glitters atop your head and two queens kneel at your feet.”
My breathing had quickened. Anger surged, almost inexplicable to me. “You were at the Killing Fields. You saw the hatred on Maeronyx’s face.”
It had no answer. The stag hadseen.
“She was plotting,” I said, “before she’d even unbent her knee.”
Birdsong rang through the trees. The breeze carried over the water between us. Dappled sunlight made a pattern on the lush grass.
“Now that you have lost who you were, Eurydice Waters,” the stag said. “Do you see who you truly are?”
Who I was—the girl who’d climbed the wall nightly. The guard who’d bitten a man’s cheek. The changeling who’d wanted, wanted, and sometimes needed with a ferociousness that squeezed my chest even now.
But the stag was right. She was lost. She’d died against that spire with cold metal through her heart.
Who was I now?