I stared up at him, a strange feeling rising in me.
The king’s helmet inclined as his face lowered, those two horns shifting toward me under the sunlight. “You have no idea what you’ve led your people into, little queen.”
He raised his fingers to his lips, set theminto his mouth, and whistled.
I knew that whistle. I knew it in my bones.
The sound was returned somewhere to my left. My head jerked, seeking it out. A third whistle sounded on my right, and I swung my horse toward it. That was the call of the night guard. It was the whistle I, Eury, had failed to produce on my first night atop the wall.
It meant something to Carys, too. Though I didn’t know why.
Fear gripped my heart and held tight. My gaze shifted blurrily over the fae around me. I had to tell the archers to fire on the wall. I had to mass the soldiers.
Even as strategy floated through my head, cold reality loomed. The outer district civilians had crowded in around us. Children peered from alleys, and men and women stood shoulder to shoulder on paths. They held short swords and long swords and the shields and all the other weapons of the fallen guard.
Sunlit iron. All of it.
The whistle continued on, a chain passing deep into the kingdom. A sound of solidarity, a warning. There, at the corner of an alley, an old woman’s eyes stared back from between two veils of white hair. Dark eyes, severe, just like my mother’s. Notmine, but Carys’s. It was Carys who saw her, that old woman at the corner.
Except the last time she’d seen those eyes, they were softer, younger.
Thirty years had passed. Thirty years was much of a human life.
Mother, Mother, Mother.
The word struck through us, me and Carys, like a rock dropped into a well, rippling outward. It was her, the dark-eyed mother who’d raised Carys with a harsh grip and a keen, watchful eye. She had loved her daughter in a cautious way, perhaps always sensing Carys wasn’t who she thought, wasn’t her real daughter. And Carys had felt that cautious love, felt it and longed for it to be uncautious.
Even now, she longed for it. Desperately. From an old woman who barely resembled the mother she’d once had.
And I understood, suddenly, far too much. I understood her fear,her feeling, why she had fought so hard to be here and why now she struggled to give a command or lift her weapon.
This was her home. The Kingdom of the Plains was where she had grown up.
Carys’s mother lived here, and some part of her would forever live with those dark, severe eyes watching her.
I blinked. The old woman was gone from the corner. Perhaps she had never been there at all.
Now I grasped the danger of allowing Carys to fill me. She was haunted by a life I hadn’t lived, stopped by ghosts I didn’t know. Her stakes were not mine—not entirely.
I was not her. I was inside a trial.
This was a fight for my life and Dorian’s.
Carys fell away from me like a skein, and I was only Eurydice. I was no queen, no warrior, no fae. I was just the girl from the Dip, the daughter of the bread-baker, the night guard who’d spent one night on the wall.
This was it. Here, now—when Carys was confused, uncertain—thiswas my trial. It was I who had to choose correctly, but I didn’t know the history of this battle. Perhaps this was a trial of knowledge, then. Or of fortitude, or of bravery. None of that mattered, really.
Only one truth stood: If I didn’t make the right choice, we would both be captured.
My eyes lifted and found Dorian’s. Hazel eyes, round as coins. Did he see me, or Carys? Did he still want to kill me even here, even inside this terrible memory of the past?
Had he always wanted to kill me?
“My queen?” Cirevan said. His voice was low, uncertain.
My gaze lowered, and Carys seeped back into me. Eurydice and Carys were muddled inside me, swirling, creating friction.
We had enough fae archers and soldiers to fight our way out. The archers could fire as they had done on the wall. The soldiers could slice the humans down. I could separate their limbs from their bodies.
