Faun kicked aside a shard of glass. “I’m testing the rest of the food myself. Until tomorrow morning, the queen’s eating olives.”
Eury turned toward the table of food and set her knuckles against the surface, shoulders hunched, head down.
“She won’t poison you,” I said. “That isn’t Liora’s way.”
She lifted her head, studied me with narrowed eyes. “And what is her way?”
"Patience," Haskel said from the doorway. "She’ll wait until the perfect moment. When it benefits her most and costs her least."
“And a breakfast poisoning would cost her image a great deal,” I said. “She’s not poisoned anyone in six hundred years. Maeronyx, on the other hand…”
“What’s your opinion of the breakfast, then?” Faun asked me. “Testing the waters?”
I hadn’t taken my gaze off Eurydice. “She wants to see how much of a fae our queen really is. If it’s possible she did kill Rhiannon. If she’ll be any threat.”
And then there was the stag’s prophecy.She will give her the key.
Eury hadn’t taken her gaze off me, either. A certain light had come into her eyes, one I recognized by now.
A queen’s light.
I’d seen that light in her a dozen times before today. In the Eldermaze. Under Virellan Falls. When she’d walked the throne room to Mirek’s commands.
A challenge had been laid before her, and she could not help but rise to it. The keenness was as much a part of her as her blue eyes.
Would it be enough? Gawain was here, and he was already making moves.
“Is there any other threat in these chambers tonight?” she asked.
“The hidden doors,” Haskel said.
“Dorian will watch those,” Eury said. “Right?”
I nodded.
“And otherwise?”
“None that I can sense,” I said.
She drew in a breath, let it out. She flicked her knife back into its fold and turned toward her bedchamber. “Then we should sleep. The night’s waning, and Liora expects to break her fast with a queen.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eurydice
I woketo a narrow shaft of morning light pouring onto me through the slit window. A stray feather floated through the brightness—a remnant from last night. Dorian had driven his sword through the mattress.
Left of me, in the smaller bedchamber, Faun’s bed was empty but made. And the main door to my bedchamber had at some point been shut, though the sounds of voices penetrated the wood.
Faun, Mirek, Haskel, Finch. All of them were up.
Someone had thought to give me privacy. Or wanted to keep me from overhearing.
I unclenched my fingers from around the knife I’d held in my sleep and set it on the bedside table. It was probably as useless now as it had been last night, but I’d found a certain bravery in holding it since the day I’d entered Feyreign.
I wasn’t someone who would go easy toward death. The old guard’s knife reminded me of that, even when my thinking brain forgot it.
The spot where the mirror had been stood empty. If not for the hole in the bed near my feet and the floating feathers, I could almost have put it off as a dream.