Dorian let out a sharp, aggrieved-sounding breath. “In Feyreign, a queen doesn’t wait for a threat to grow teeth. She’ll cut your throat long before then.”
Not pliant, and a threat.
Ice crawled up my spine. I knew Dorian was right about Rhiannon; I had seen it in her eyes. Most of her power was in her cunning.
He squeezed my hand and led me out of the cave and into the moonlit night. His grip was firm, unignorable.He slipped something from a belt pocket, pressed it into my palm. “Pack your shoulder with this. Do it now, before you’ve bled more.”
I nodded, numb, hardly processing as my fingers closed over the thing in my hand. His words rattled in my head. Only the strongest could rule. Rhiannon was the Sylvanwild Court’s ruler because her power was unmatched. Somehow, Dorian thought I was a threat to that power.
“Eury,” he said, his voice sharp enough to bring me back.
I focused on him—on what I held. It felt mossy between my fingers. “What is this?”
“It’ll stop the pain and the bleeding.”
After a second’s breath, I lifted the moss and pressed it against the spot where my jerkin was torn at the shoulder. I grimaced wide, but Dorian said, “It has to be properly in there,” and soon his fingers were pressing the packing into the wound. I cried out, but he didn’t stop until it was done.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured when he stepped back.
Seconds after he said it, coolness spread through my shoulder and into my chest. As it did, the pain dampened. And within a minute, my mind sharpened. Whatever that herb was, it was magic itself.
I stared out over the forest before us. “It must be at least a day’s walk to get back to the gates,” I said. “We can’t possibly?—”
“We can,” he said. “And we will.”
We walked the path alongside the water, and once we had gotten clear of the waterfall Dorian set a cupped hand to his mouth and let out a noise that resounded somewhere between a whistle and a cry. It was a chilling, throaty sound; goosebumps rose on my arms.
A few seconds later, the same call returned from somewhere in the moonlit forest.
“What was that?” I said on a breath out.
“No matter where you are in our lands,” he said, “the wraiths will heed the call.”
I stared into the darkness. Ice ran through my arms. “The wraiths want to kill me, Dorian.”
“Not now,” he said, his breath labored. He was struggling with his wounds. “You’ve manifested power, Eurydice. The Wild Hunt deemed you worthy.”
That word again.Worthy.I still didn’t know the shape of it—not the way the Wild Hunt and Dorian seemed to mean it.
Moments later the wraiths emerged from the gray night, from amidst the silver-limned trees. They slid over the ground like the drape of a royal cape around its monarch, but these were made of formless shadow. Five of them. And each of them held scythes.
I wanted to shrivel away from them. Everything in me hated those things.
Dorian spoke to them in a whispered language I had not heard before. A language of the lips and the tip of the tongue and nothing else, so soft it could have been the wind stirring the trees.
They spoke back in that same language. But from them, it was the sound of cursed death.
He turned to me. His hands came to my face. “They’ll take you.”
My eyes went wide on him. “Takeus, you mean.”
He leaned forward, his lips touching mine with a tenderness that pained me. He set his forehead to mine. “I’d only slow them down.”
“No.” My chest pulled tight as a drum. “We’re bound by the trials. We have to go together.”
“I’ll follow.” His forehead remained pressed to mine. “I’ll follow in time, and I’ll find you on the other side of the gates. There’s a path through the trees—take it to the road. Wait for me there, where we left the wagon.”
That was a lie. Or if not a lie, then a promise he knew he couldn’t keep. But I understood the logic: he had to say that so I would go. I knew if he saw any other way for us to stay together, he would have taken it. Which meant there was no other way. This was it.
