This fight was real.
I tried a third swing, but she caught me. With a snarl, she thrust my blade aside and went in.
Her movements blurred. Quick, light, her sword a gleam of light under the moon. I had to pull my attention from her eyes—I had no choice. I raised my sword and blocked, staggered back, blocked again, left, right, backstep, block. Again, again. My arm shook keeping pace with the blur.
Some part of me knew she was too fast for any human or fae. That was when I noticed it: every time she swung, a gust of wind carried her sword. She manipulated it like a musician with her instrument, at just the right angle and pressure to quicken her hand.
This wasn’t even what I’d seen in the throne room. This was Rhiannon’s child’s play.
I couldn’t fight against this.All I could do was block blow after blow, react to her swings. The only thing keeping me alive was my right arm, which already burned. Before long, this foreplay would be my end.
Think. Improvise.
Magic. I needed magic. Needed it like I’d crossed a barren, joyless plain for days and found nothing but thirst.
What had Dorian said to me? Golden spiderwebs… something about death. Remembering death.
I couldn’t think. Could only react. Raising my blade again and again.
Rhiannon’s sword came down on me from above, and I barely blocked. The force of it made my right arm cry out. She spun, leapt, and crashed down on me again.
I stumbled this time, my sword arm bowing under her weight.
Memento mori.
Remember death.
I could only think of people. My mother. Theo. Isa. Elisabet. I’d loved them all. And they were all of them dead.
Hadloved. The love was still true, but they were gone.
Far off, past Rhiannon, a glint of light caught my eye. The torchlight on the far side of the meadow, where Haskel and Dorian stood watching.
Dorian.
My kidnapper. My partner. My lover. My killer.
My life is yours.
He had nearly died to get us out of the Eldermaze, had fallen in the dirt with his veins blackened by magic. He had given hislife over under that waterfall, subjugated himself to the Wild Hunt. He would have been torn apart for me. Only for me.
But I couldn’t allow it. I couldn’t see him die. I’d let out an unholy noise. My body had vibrated with something like anger, grief, fear, every limb filled with it.
The thought of him made my heart press hard against my ribs in a strange alchemy. Even now, I wanted to throw myself at him the way I had done that first morning when I’d thrust a dagger at his throat. And Ihadkilled a man that way, under the acid rain. A king. I’d leapt onto him and slit his throat until his neck had opened up wide and drank in the rain.
I’d killed for Dorian that day.
Death had made me a blade.
Death made me a blade.
Death made me a blade.
Remember death.
Mementofuckingmori.
The thought suffused me. Flowed into my chest like the heat off a bellows. There it was—the feeling. The power. Carys’s power, running through her fate lines. The power of a changeling queen who’d been subjugated, who’d gripped at freedom with clawed hands.
