I unclenched my fist, turned my palm over, briefly opened my eyes; my fate line ran strong and untarnished.The dagger. It had something to do with the dagger.
But it was more than that.
Yes, I remembered that power like I remembered the feeling of Dorian’s body against mine. The thrill had flowed through me like a current.
But in the end, it was Dorian. It was my desire to save him that had given me the power I’d needed.
I closed my eyes again, and I saw a flash of him as he had been in that square—kneeling, manacled, his face upturned toward the sun. That had been the king’s command, his torture. It was inhuman cruelty. It was its own sacrilege.
My eyes opened against the stag’s brightness.
I made the only choice, I thought.
The spiritstag seemed to absorb this. Then,“That was what she said, four hundred years past. And now your choice thrusts you into the same fate.”
The same fate as who? Yet the answer was already clear inside me—shewas the fae I had inhabited. The other changeling, Carys. So she had believed the acid rain was the only choice, too. Because of course it was.
Even as I felt a keening sympathy for the Kingdom of Storms, some part of me thrummed with the belief that the Kingdom of the Plains had deserved their curse.
What fate?I thought.
The spiritstag ignored my question. It stepped forward and the light shifted, gleaming past me. My face turned to where it shone upon Rhiannon’s bent head.“Two queens cannot rule one court. She knows it.”
Two queens?
“You have made a queen’s choice, Eurydice Waters—the choice none have made since Queen Carys. It was wrong, ruthless. And the Sylvanwild Court has been ruled by ruthlessness in the four hundred years since.”
I swallowed against the stopper in my throat. Yes, it had been ruthless. I had lived under Carys’s ruthless curse for twenty years. I had smelled the acid every day. Stepped in it, played in it. Poison dripping from the sky.
Perhaps that was why I had made the choice.
But then why, in four hundred years, if all of us changelings were raised in the Kingdom of Storms, had none besides me made Carys’s choice?
We knew. Every son and daughter of scorn knew the sacrifice of that life.
The stag’s head had already turned away, its brilliance retreating with it. At once the throne room dimmed, almost cold, as my eyes adjusted to the low light. I could not take my eyes off the shape of the stag’s body in profile. It stood motionless for three seconds, framed by the citadel’s peaked doors, and then it strode out of my view as though passing out of a picture frame.
With it went light. With it went answers.
Around the room, the others began to rise. All turned toward us—me and Rhiannon. Beside me, Dorian stood and met my eyes. His were wide on me, his jaw feathering with tension. He seemed to be debating something, and then he turned toward Rhiannon.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Not on the same day she survived a trial.”
She rose with her dagger still in hand. Her thumb rubbed over the obsidian, her eyes snapping up to him. “Fuck off, Dorian.” Her voice was low, a growl.
Dorian stood close enough to me that I could feel the heat off him. “There’s no law about the ritual.”
“What ritual?” I stepped out from behind him. “What did the stag say to you?”
Rhiannon’s face turned, her eyes piercing me so suddenly I nearly stepped back. Murder. She had murder etched there. “The ritual will happen tonight and no other night. A court cannot exist with two for queen.”
Did she mean the duel with Faun? No, she saidtwo for queen.Not champion—queen.
You have made a queen’s choice,the spiritstag said. A queen’s choice. A ruthless one. And Rhiannon was nothing if not ruthless.
Understanding rolled through me, spiked and painful. My hand lifted to my chest as though I could rub it away. “I am to duel you.”
A sneer lifted her lip, exposing teeth. Some part of me, beneath it all, felt breathless at her ferocity. “Are you ready to die, rabbit?”
