“The bridge spirit didn’t accept my button and sent me back to the castle, and you were there but—” I swallow a sob as the image crashes back to me. “You said I’d been missing for seventy years, that I was too late.”
Emmett plucks a dried leaf from where it’s stuck in my hair and flicks it to the ground. “And then what?” he asks softly.
“And then I blinked and you were here, covered in blood.” His hazel eyes are nearly green in contrast to the crimson rivulets that have dried down his face. It’s a shocking sight, but I’m just so relieved to see him looking like himself again.
“It was a trick,” Rhion says from behind Emmett. “A cruel trick, but nothing more than a nasty dream.”
My heart slows but the tears don’t stop coming. Emmett pulls me tightly to his chest. “Shh, it’s all right.”
“They’re happy tears.” How do I begin to explain the depth of my relief? The new clarity?
I glance at their empty hands. “I take it you didn’t get the knife?”
Emmett helps me to my feet, and we walk through the icy gardens back to the castle. They tell me of their bloody encounter with the Redcaps.
The six of us cut through the revel up to Rhion’s private quarters, which strongly resemble his house in Bath. I have to duck to avoid the fishing net adorned with forks strung up over his doorway.
“It looks just like your house in England,” I remark, thinking of his strange group of fawning humans. “Sans all your... friends.”
Rhion pauses and glances to Lydia, then back to me. “I hope they think of me as a friend. I was trying to save them from Bram and the rest of the court. I attempted to get that poor girl in the deer mask to come inside, too, but she refused me.”
I regret my petty comment and am reminded of all we have to lose if we don’t succeed. “That was kind of you, Rhion.”
We move papers and books and silk shoes to find surfaces on which to sit. Emmett and I end up folded together on an armchair near the fire, with Marion, Faith, and Rhion all perched on the edge of his bed. Lydia chooses to stay standing and spends more of her time looking through the titles on his bookcase than at us.
“So they threw Ferrinus in these caves?” I clarify, still playing catch-up. My eyes keep lingering on Emmett, young and whole, beside me. My heartbeat has yet to return to its normal speed.
“That’s what he said.” Rhion sighs and lies back onto a beaded pillow, his dark hair a fan around him.
“So why not go get it? I’ll bring a better button next time, I promise.”
Emmett cuts me off. “The caves are forbidden for obvious reasons. Cursed a millennium ago. No one goes near them.”
“Cursed?” I ask. “Cursed how?”
This time, it’s Lydia who answers. “No one quite knows. The only thing the legends say is that what exists in the caves is pain, pure pain.”
“But the Redcaps went?”
Emmett shakes his head. “No, they likely just stood at the mouth and tossed the knife into its depths to be rid of it. I’m sure it made them squeamish.”
Marion snorts. “They seemed plenty comfortable with sharp objects to me.”
“They say the blade is cursed. Its existence makes everyone uncomfortable. Regicide isn’t exactly a dinner table conversation. Not even for Redcaps,” Rhion replies. “No one wants to think about what it takes to kill the unkillable.”
“But we’re not going to kill him,” Lydia adds sharply from over at the bookcase. She’s thumbing through a volume bound in sky-blue leather, but I can tell she’s not reading a single word.
“Someone will have to rule after him,” Faith says. “Are we putting Mor back on the throne?”
Rhion chews on the inside of his cheek. “Perhaps, if we could guarantee she wouldn’t use her power to come back to England. If not her, there are other candidates, a few lords I don’t completely despise. Lady Thalia. Emmett.”
Emmett stiffens. “Or you.”
“I don’t have a taste for it,” Rhion replies. “What about you?”
Emmett sinks his teeth into his bottom lip. “I’m unsuited to rule.”
“What if the land won’t accept anyone but Mor?” Lydia says.
