I slid my legs between the sheets, the fabric gloriously cool against my skin, like passing through water. The pillows were just as inviting, though I doubted I’d be able to sleep. Not in this place, with these people all around. Not without knowing what would happen to me tomorrow.
One thing I could be certain of: their kind had killed my people. They had killed those I loved most. For that, someday I would slice each one of their throats. I doubted they had hearts to stab, anyway.
Once more, Dorian’s words floated through my brain:You know what we are.
For a moment I saw his cloak again, and the symbols on it. One seemed familiar: a tall, bountiful tree with branches reaching toward the sky. It reminded me of a child’s song my mother used to sing:
“Within the tree where lichen glows, the quiet folk in crystal rows…
They sip the wind and weave the light, and never sleep through silver night.”
She had a lovely voice. I didn’t know how or why an illiterate baker would come to have a voice like hers, but I adored it like I adored the feeling of her fingers on my hair, stroking my arms, the feel of her soft hollow of a shoulder as I lay side by side with her in her small bed…
A sharp rapping sounded at the door.
I jerked upright, scrabbling for my knife. I had fallen asleep—so deeply asleep I didn’t have any idea how much time had passed. Myfingers came over the grip of the knife and I jerked it up in front of my chest.
I stared at the door. The three raps came again, harder.
“Nothing? Not even a grunt?” A man’s voice came muffled through the door.
Dorian.
I climbed out of the bed in slow, fluid movements. I stalked toward the door, careful, foot over foot, flicking my knife from its fold. I came to stand at the hinge of the door, just past where it would open.
Outside, his voice: “I’m coming in, then. Be decent, at least.”
The door swung inward, and Dorian stepped into the room. His gaze scanned the empty, unmade bed. His brow furrowed, but his focus wasn’t on me.
Good. That was all I needed.
I leapt on him, my body slamming into his, my sunlit knife palmed underhand.
If this was how I died, so be it.
But I’d make damn sure he died first.
CHAPTER TEN
I landedon his back and plunged my knife toward his neck. My legs wrapped around his torso and my free hand clung to his leather jerkin.
It was, as the regiment commander called it in my kingdom, certain death.
It couldn’t be foreseen. Couldn’t be deflected. And I couldn’t be wrenched off him fast enough to stop me from delivering just one strike.
One strike was all I needed. If these creatures were anything like humans, I knew exactly where the knife’s tip needed to go—right into the artery on the side of the neck. My knife touched skin, the point piercing his flesh…
Sunlit iron. Monsters’ bane.
And yet, somehow, I found myself dislodged. The world spun, I was thrust in the wrong direction, and I hit the floor so hard my skull would’ve cracked if I hadn’t fallen onto the bearskin.
Motherfuck.
Air hitched in my throat, and my eyes danced as the world swam. I dropped the knife and clutched at my aching chest, panic threatening to overtake me.
This wasn’t it. This wasn’t it at all.
Dorian set his hand to his neck—and paused. His fingers came away red.They bleed. They bleed red.He stared at the blood, then at me, a flicker of genuine surprise passing across his face, brief but unmistakable. “You actually cut me.”
