As soon as the idea entered my head, it refused to leave. It wouldn’t allow me any other course but this one. My mother would have allowed it—she would have done it herself—and thatmattered. Her opinion mattered more than anyone’s, even if she only lived in my memory now.
In the morning, Dorian’s knock came early. When I opened the door, he looked so much improved I just stood there staring up at him. The veins in his hands and neck were nearly normal, the whites of his eyes almost unbroken again.
“What happened?” I said finally.
“What? Oh.” One finger touched his cheekbone. “When the queen is in court, the grove’s power grows.”
So he visits the grove. And the grove is tied to her power.I didn’t understand the tangle of it, but I knew now that Sylvanwild’s magic was entwined with the spiritstag, with the grove, with the queen. Just like I knew that under the earth, trees didn’t exist alone; they formed a network of roots and fungi.
I stepped into the hallway. “The change is marked.”
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Does it please you?”
My mouth twisted to one side. Even if he was teasing me, I found I’d missed it. “As long as you’re not one of those fucking things. Then I’d have to kill you.”
“I am me,” he said, “for better or worse.”
We began walking to the stables in silence. When we’d reached the empty gardens, Dorian sucked in a breath and said, “What I told you the other day?—”
I stopped on a narrow path flanked by carmine blooms. Last night’s plan had eclipsed everything Dorian and I had talked about in the days before; I could hardly think of anything else. “Yes?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. His jaw feathered. “When you came to me after the trial?—”
I stood waiting. For all his strength and size, right now he seemed uncertain, unpracticed. “Please just say it. The dew’s evaporating.”
“How very human of you.” His eyes opened. He exhaled in a sort of defeat. “The wraiths. I apologize for keeping that truth from you.”
The wraiths. An apology.
Something in me stuttered, unprepared. I had not yet seen a fae apologize—not to one another, and certainly not to me. And for a moment, I wasn’t standing in the gardens with an enemy or even a partner. He was just a man taking accountability.
The apology shouldn’t have mattered. But it did.
“All right,” I said, my voice quiet. I’d never been good with apologies, either. Not giving them, not accepting them. Where I came from, apologies were given in the form of food, in soft looks, in clinked steins at the pub.
But it was more than that.Iwas keeping something fromhimright now. What I had planned would buck their trials and their wraiths and all their corseted rules.
I just had to wait for nightfall.
I stepped forward. “Shall we get on with riding?”
His eyebrows lifted, as though he’d expected more.Not from me. Not right now.After a beat, he gestured for me to walk ahead of him.
The day moved in a steady,relentless current. I cantered on Pettifey, practiced mounting her at a run; I sharpened my pull and aim with Haskel; Dorian and I studied the history of the trials in his quarters. We came to no great conclusions, but one thing had changed between us: he waited for me to finish my sentences, and he listened when I spoke. And I did the same for him.
Respect hung between us like a gossamer thread. Fragile, but real.
Our sparring took place in the same spot I’d found him that one night high up in the citadel, battling a wraith. Except in the daylight, the tree only rustled with leaves and the clang of our swords. We began with swords as my most familiar weapon; he wanted to get to know my technique.
He quickly saw I was better on defense than offense. Of course I was—defense was how I survived, the only way I’d been able to fend off the other guards-in-training back in the southern district. I would bide my time until an opening appeared for one uncounterable strike.
But Dorian was no trainee. He never opened himself up to death.
He started by training me in ambidexterity. Apparently this was most important, though I knew it would take forever.
All the while, I wondered what he would say to me after tonight. I wondered if I would even be alive to find out.
Our sparring concluded in the late afternoon, and then we cleaned up for dinner. We were to eat with Rhiannon and her maidens-in-court as a celebration of our success in the first trial. The meal was lavish, the table sagged with food, and I was quiet, though I was asked many questions by the young fae girls I’d seen brushing Rhiannon’s hair and tending to her toes.
