Yes—the sun followed its arc, the moon its tether, the waters their endless cycle. And yet no one besides us had escaped the maze.
The stag stared at me.“What is your decision?”
I unthreaded my fingers and opened my hands to the sky. I was just one human before a god. “The same.”
A breath passed. The night was impossibly still. Then the stag raised its head higher, those antlers tall enough to touch the trees, the sky, the moon.
“Very well, Eurydice Waters.”
Its nostrils widened and shrank.It turned and walked into the trees.
I stayed kneeling, the tears falling before I noticed them. My request was granted. What price it carried, I didn’t yet know.
I sat in silence, wondering how many of them would make it to the end. How many would hear what they needed to hear.
There was nothing more I could do.
The next morning,while Dorian and I were at breakfast, it began.
Voices echoed down the hallway—urgent, disbelieving. Figures blurred past the open door.
Dorian and I locked eyes from across the table. We stood at the same time.
From the balcony above the citadel’s central hall, we peered down. Two fae stood below, bloodied and bent-backed, the man supporting the woman. I couldn’t even recognize them from this height. Servants were already rushing to their side.
“Tethryn,” Dorian whispered beside me. “They made it.”
The truth struck like a slap. Some part of me had wondered, even as I left the grove, whether I’d dreamed the stag. The request, the assent. Some part of me had half-hoped, half-doubted.
“They escaped the Eldermaze,” I breathed, already knowing, needing to hear it anyway.
Dorian didn’t answer. He bounded down the stairs, calling out their names. Names I didn’t know. He cupped their faces one after the other, smiling so freely I barely recognized him. I had never seen him so alive.
These were fae he had grown up beside. Friends from before the trials, before me. If it had been guards from the southern district returning from the brink of death, I would have done the same—held their faces like kin, even if I didn’t know them.
Survival binds people into kinship. That was what Dorian felt now.
Warmth rose in my chest. Still, I folded my arms across my body. Maybe Rhiannon wouldn’t suspect. Maybe she would be too relieved by their return to question the timing, or the odds.
But in the days that followed, I knew that was a hope I couldn’t afford.
Two by two, they returned. One pair the first day, another the second, and two more the day after that. By week’s end, eighteen of us had made it out of the maze.
The last pair was the one I’d begun to believe wouldn’t return—the one I most needed to see.
I was sitting in the gardens, turning the pages of the book about the trials, when hooves clattered across the moat’s bridge.
Faun sat behind her partner on horseback, arms wrapped tight around his waist, her eyes flinty and fixed on me.
I froze, lips parted, the book open in my lap.
She’s here. She’s alive.
They didn’t slow. They rode past me, straight toward the citadel. Only when they dismounted did I see how badly they were hurt—blood streaked the horse’s sandy back, dripped to the flagstones. Faun landed on one foot and staggered.
I stood, snapping the book shut. “Faun.”
She turned her head. Her mouth was held so tight, her lips had gone white. She stared at me like she’d known me in another life. “I saw you, and I thought you must be a ghost,” she said. “Then you spoke.”
