Dorianand I had to report the death of the fae who’d been torn open. Queen Rhiannon had been visiting the winter court, but upon her return she granted us an audience five days after our escape.
We stood before her as she lounged in her chambers, in her bramble chair overgrown with flowering vines. One fae brushed her hair; another knelt at her feet, tending to her toes. Her heel rested on a velvet pillow, her body draped like something half-feral, half-idle. Calculated boredom.
But I couldn’t stop staring at her cheek.
A smattering of blood ran from her hairline to the apple of her cheekbone. Bright-red, arterial, like she’d slit the throat of an animal a moment before we’d stepped in. Like she might touch it and lick it away.
“A shame,” she said of the slain fae in the Eldermaze. “But it was the spiritstag’s will. The trials are designed to cull the unworthy.”
Does she believe that?
It sounded like the pronouncements I’d heard growing up, whenever a man on the wall team slipped and cracked his skull open.Arxius’s will, they’d say—words I’d hated since I was old enough to understand what a lie felt like. What if it wasn’t the will of a god, but just a bad harness or an overworked crew? We never got to ask, because once Arxius’s fucking will got involved, everyone stopped caring.
But this scene before me? It felt the same. Like a show.
It felt like Rhiannon trying to tell us something about who she was, or who she wanted to be.
Rhiannon reclined on her throne like a god herself, fingers curled against her blood-smattered cheek as she looked between Dorian and me. A god, because?—
She has no advisors. Only servants.
She doesn’t trust. She only trusts in herself.
Sister-killer. A queen alone.
These truths came to me as my eyes flicked down to the handmaid at her feet. At some point, this queen had relegated everyone around her to servitude. To toe-washing and hair-brushing and nipple-sucking.
That was her mistake. Everyone needed people they could trust.
“No doubt you’ve received much attention during your time back,” Rhiannon said. “I need not remind you that discussing the trials with anyone else is forbidden.”
Beside me, Dorian inclined his head. The blackness in his veins had faded, though not fully. “Of course, my queen.”
Her gaze slid to me and waited.
She wants obedience.
I kept my jaw still. “Yes. I understand.”
She clocked my resistance. Her expression didn’t change, but something hardened in the green of her eyes, gemstone turning to weapon.
She dipped her fingers into a shallow bowl of water beside her and said, almost idly, “I do find it a wonder that the two of you escaped in such a short time. Obviously, magic was involved.” Her gaze drifted up Dorian’s arms to his throat, to his face. “A great deal of it.”
“We did what we had to,” Dorian said.
“And what,” Rhiannon said, her voice silk, “was the human’s participation?”
She was asking how heavy I’d been to carry. How onerous it had been to pull me through the maze to safety. And she wasn’t even asking me directly. We’d survived, which no one had expected. And now Dorian would either fling dung on me or give me that uncomfortable acknowledgment he’d offered while bedbound.
“She was fine,” Dorian said.
That was the only answer I hadn’t expected.
Rhiannon’s eyebrows rose. “Fine?”
“She followed my lead when necessary. She ran well when she had to.”
I eyed Dorian in profile.He’s close-lipped.There was none of the acknowledgment, the awe I’d heard in his voice that day when I came to his bedside. Why, I didn’t know. But in the short time I’d known him, I had observed one thing for certain: he never spoke freely in front of Rhiannon. He treated her like a sculpture one should never touch.
