She didn’t move at first. Her face remained passive. Then her legs uncrossed, and I saw it: a jagged, gleaming blade held by leather twine to her waist. It was as long as my thigh. Her fingers slid along the bramble arm toward her waist.
I wondered if she was twice as fast and three times as strong. Better to die at the hands of the queen and perhaps nick an artery than go down hunted or serving her. My hand moved toward my own knife.
“She desires it,” Dorian said, stepping forward. “She wants to be your champion, my queen.”
Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed, and her hand paused.
“The spiritstag has decided,” Dorian said, sounding out of breath. “The human accepted its decision back in the grove.”
Rhiannon’s gaze slid past Dorian and found mine. “Is that so?”
My attention shifted between Dorian, chest rising fast, and the predator of a queen still sitting almost-naked on her wood chair. He was trying to keep me alive—why? Why should he care?
The logic came immediately:
As his partner, my death would mean his death. It was all that made sense. He was saving his own hide.
Silence overtook the room. I didn’t answer.
Dorian turned toward me. His brow was drawn, eyes both intense and pleading.Say it, he mouthed.Tell her.
There was something in his expression—a thing I had not seen before. Need? Sincerity? Well, even a murderer and a thief could be sincere when it was their life in question.
Yet my gut twisted; a wrench of sympathy I didn’t expect or want to feel crept in. He was my captor. I hated him. This morning I had tried to stick a half-blunt knife in his neck. And yet…
What the spiritstag had shown me in the grove had felt unlike anything I’d ever known. Anything I’d ever thought. It had offered something to me—a thing I had longed for from the time I’d looked up at the sky and felt my own smallness.
And, it had shown me Dorian’s face.
Partners. It had wanted us together. I had felt its surety.
That surety had leaked away since, sifting out of me like sand, but it wasn’t fully gone. A grain of it still sat in my gut, and that was what wrenched it now.
“Yes,” I said, quietly. “I desire it.”
Dorian closed his eyes and breathed out. He stepped back, leaving unbroken space between me and the queen. She had a new gleam in her eyes, lethal and liquid. Her dagger stayed idle at her waist.
“Very well, child,” she said.
Rhiannon rose, thrusting the young kneeling woman away. Her hand lifted, fingers soft, and her gaze shifted to Dorian. I understood what came next. Every child in the Kingdom of Storms knew how a knight was made a ser.
Rhiannon stepped forward, and Dorian’s head lowered. His hands clasped behind his back. She set her fingertips to the crown of his head. “I accept your bid for the Sylvanwild trials, Dorian Crowmere.”
Dorian’s head remained inclined, though his jaw clenched.
When Rhiannon stepped to me, she paused, eyes cast down to meet mine. Whatever she possessed that these people valued, she did so in spades. Maybe she was right: I was only a human. A rabbit, a pettifey?—
Enough,a voice said in my head. My throat swelled; that was my mother.Enough of that, Eury. The world will not stand for a woman who won’t stand for herself.
She was right. She always had been right.
I clasped my hands behind my back in the guard’s stance, and I lowered my head. When my eyes closed, I saw the spiritstag again, saw the blossoming vision in the grove.
And, most of all, I heard its voice:
Power is not granted, it is taken. So take it.
A resolution lanced through me, bright and ferocious. Whatever would come in these trials, I would not sit down, would not give up. Not once, not ever. Not until death.
