Dorian.Was that my captor’s name?
Beside me, he started forward, his pace even as he approached the throne. I squared myself and moved with him. Unwilling to be left behind.
I didn’t trust him, but I trusted them less.
“And he’s brought a pet,” another said.
“Pet?” a third said, eyeing me. “Barely a pettifey.”
Laughter burst forth from the men, swelling to fill the space. I didn’t know that word, but I knew I’d been targeted like a clip upside the head. I met eyes with a few of the men as we passed, butnone bore the red in their irises like the one who’d brought me here.
My captor came to stand eight feet from the throne. I stopped with him.
“Rhiannon,” he said to the lone woman.
This close, she looked more than noble. Mulberry-colored blooms peeked from the bramble crown, as did jagged edges. Her light-brown skin had an almost stunning, unbroken luster. Her eyes were cerulean, the dark pupils fixed on me.
Like my captor, she vibrated with latent violence. At any moment she could be out of the throne and have the tip of one of those torn-off brambles up under my chin.
I wanted to wither, to shrink away, but I didn’t—I couldn’t.
If I did, I would never look up again.
“Dorian,” Rhiannon said to him without shifting her gaze off me, “this had better be a good fucking story.”
Dorian—thatwas my killer’s name. A human name. A noble one. I had never stepped into a district where I could actually meet a Dorian, but I had heard the name.
Whatever these creatures were, they sounded and looked human. They had human names. But they were unequivocallynot human.
Beside me, Dorian straightened. “It’s true. That’s the part that matters.”
Rhiannon’s sharp eyebrows rose. “Do tell.”
“In the battle?—”
“Which ended three days ago,” one of the men called out from behind us.
Three days?Three days?I’d thought it was the next day. If threedays had passed, where were we now? I’d thought we were just outside my kingdom, but if we had been traveling for three days…
What had happened to my people? Had all the walls been breached? Had the whole kingdom fallen three days ago?
Rhiannon raised a staying hand to the other men, then lifted her chin for Dorian to continue.
“In the battle,” he said, “I came across this human.”
Her eyes flicked again to me, then back. She gave a small nod, and I wondered what amount of power this woman possessed over these men, and how she had come by it. It seemed tectonic, and a fresh pang of envy knotted in me again.
“And you did not end her,” Rhiannon said.
“I was about to, but”—at this, I could barely keep my face straight; heat flared in my cheeks and neck—“I was interrupted.”
“By the wraiths?”
The wraiths.Briefly, I heard a surge of screaming metal.
Dorian nodded once.
“And why did you not allow them to do their work?”
