My stomach hollowed. “That’s impossible. It’s nighttime, and I’ve never shot that far.”
“Not for her,” Dorian said, his voice clipped and tense. “She’s the best fae in two hundred years with a bow. And her eyes are trained to see at night.”
I turned my head to meet his eyes. No words needed to be spoken.
This wasn’t a duel. It was a slaughter.
Dorian stepped forward, by my side. “Your best chance is to survive. Evade her arrows, Eury.”
“Much as I hate to admit, he’s right,” Haskel said. “I’ve seen you shoot. You’re good, girl, but you’re no match for her. It would take you forty years to gain an ounce of her skill.”
My throat felt as though someone had pressed a cork down it. “That’s helpful, Haskel.”
“The truth does tend to be,” he said.
“How will evading her arrows make me worthy?” My words came out thin into the night. “She shoots, I run like a rabbit. That’s no queen.”
“The best rabbits survive,” Haskel said. “It’s how nature persists.”
I glanced over at him. “And the spiritstag respects that?”
“Naturerespects that,” he said. “The spiritstag is nothing if not nature’s sentience.”
My gaze returned to the far-off torchlight. Over there, I caught the shadows of movement. Someone was high-stepping through the grass. A cloud had obscured the moon, and now it moved away.
Rhiannon came into sharp relief, her light-wood bow low at her side. She came to a stop facing me, like she could see me.
She probably could.
Haskel pressed something into my side—a bundle of long arrows. “If you intend to shoot, you’ll need these arrows, not those tiny ones. Don’t worry, I’ve fletched them myself.”
I pulled the shorter arrows from my quill and replaced them with the longer ones, my hands trembling as I fumbled one.
I didn’t know whether I would shoot. I could barely remember how to draw.
“It’s almost time,” Dorian said, sounding breathless beside me. “Once you begin, you won’t be able to stop until it’s done. Your best hope is to close the distance. She’s most formidable with a bow.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Rhiannon’s form in the grass. “Dorian,” I whispered.
So many words pressed at my throat. Cruel things, angry and grieving things. I wanted to tell him I hated him, but that wasn’t right. I hated the way I felt next to him right now, the wrench of my chest.
Most of all, I hated that I had no time to say anything.
“If I die,” I said, “does that mean you die, too?”
A pause. The silence lengthened, long enough I thought hewouldn’t answer. Then, so quietly only I could hear, “My life is yours.”
I didn’t know what he meant, and I couldn’t ask. Not here, not now, not with my veins flowing hot and my mind stripped of everything but instinct.
I gripped the bow tight and stepped forward.
“Irin go with you, girl,” Haskel said.
It sounded like a benediction. It sounded like a eulogy.
My step faltered. Then I forced myself to take another, and another, until I’d counted twenty paces away from the torchlight and I stood opposite Rhiannon in the meadow.
We stood like that in silence, and a glint from the tree line captured my attention. A stag, head raised, stood at the far end of the meadow exactly between the two of us.
