“Perhaps,” Haskel said. “Perhaps it was the dagger, or perhaps it was in her all along.”
The answer was clear now. I raised my fingers to my scalp, touched one of the spots where a thorn had pierced. My fingers came away red.
“Dorian will kill me,” I said, “if I become like her. Like Carys.”
Silence like a drape. Silence like mourning.
“He must,” Haskel said. “He’ll have no choice.”
Dorian,veyre.Dorian, queenslayer.
My death.
Why him? Why him of all fae?
I stepped to the edge of my bed and reached behind me. “Get me out of this corset.” I felt like a fly in a jar. “Please.”
“That’s my cue.” Haskel pressed himself out of the chair. “Just know this. Dorian’s not your inferior, but he’s not your superior, either. Don’t let him shove you around.”
When Haskel had left and the door shut behind him, Faun turned to me. “Breathe.”
I placed one hand over my sternum. “I can’t have him as myveyre.He hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you, even if he hates your kind.” Faun came around the bed and gestured for me to turn. “He’s as lost on you as you are on him.”
I turned away from her. “Why would you think that?”
“I have eyes. It was obvious—isobvious.” Faun tugged at the first tie. “He’d rather gnaw his own hand off than kill you. Just push your cleavage up when he’s around.”
“Easy to jibe when I’m the one with a sword over my head.” I set my hands against the poster of the bed and leaned my forehead on them as she worked. “He’s not driven by his cock.”
“If you think he cares more for his morals than his tip, then you’re not the queen I thought you were.”
I jerked my head around with a weak glare.
She paused with the sash between her fingers. “What? Tell me you haven’t fucked him.”
“It’s not aboutthat.He’s branded by a god, Faun.”
“So you have fucked him.” Her next tug on my corset was sharper. “Explains why he stood outside your door like a starving mongrel for three days.”
“You’re merciless.”
“I’m fae, and so are you.” She pulled the last sash, and the corset dropped away. She sat on the bed beside me. “You’ve faced death a dozen times since you’ve been here. What are you truly afraid of?”
For the first time since I’d been shoved into that chest-cage, I could breathe. I pressed it down over my hips, stepped out, kicked it away. The impulse rose in me to chase after it, tear it to shreds with my fingers and teeth. I’d always been strange and too much and full of heat like that.
Maybe the spiritstag saw in me what I’d always suspected in myself. A god thought I was a threat. A monster. Just like Dorian had. Just like…
My old guard’s knife lay where I’d left it. I crossed to my bedside and picked it up. “In the third trial, when we were placed inside Queen Carys?—”
“Yes?”
I thumbed the knife, flicked it open. “What was it like for you, Faun?”
“Likebeing inside Carys’s body.”
“Not her mind?”