“Not just you.”
His fingers rubbed at his palms. “You know nothing of savagery.”
My eyebrows rose. “Please explain it to me, ser.”
His upper lip curled toward a sneer, but he seemed to stay himself. A breath escaped him instead. “From the moment she touched your head, our lives are bound. Do you understand what that means?”
So my guess was right. Dorian hadn’t been saving me back in Rhiannon’s chambers, he had been saving his own hide. “You die, I die?”
“Immediately and irrevocably,” he said, his eyes two pits. “Like a candle’s flame snuffed.”
Sounded like magic to me, and I didn’t believe in magic. And yet I had been healed as soon as I’d stepped through the gate into this land. Not slowly, but all at once.
Ice wrapped around my chest like a vise. A certain reality had settled.
He died, I died.
“How does that work?”
His eyes flashed. “Did you not feel it back there?”
I did. I had, though I hadn’t known what it meant at the time. Even now, the spot on my scalp tingled. “So if I were to stab myself in the neck…”
“Yes,” he said. “If you stab deep enough.”
I swallowed past the stopper in my throat. I knew the answer to my next question, knew I shouldn’t acknowledge the feeling crawling inside my chest. But the words forced themselves out: “And how do we end this binding?”
“By winning all three trials,” he said. “Or dying.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I sat againon the bench, staring at the green grass and the clear water. Dorian turned to leave, but I raised a hand. “Wait.” I was surprised when he paused. “Can you just wait?”
After a moment he approached, dropped onto the bench a foot away, and stared out over the water with me. He didn’t speak, and for that I was grateful.
Our lives were entwined until we won or died. That feltwrong. I had been brought here against my will, taken in front of their queen, and then the spiritstag…
At no point had I chosen any of this.
But that isn’t true, a small voice said inside.You wanted what it offered back in the grove. You were fucking desperate for it.
And what would have happened if I had turned down the spiritstag’s offer? Did I ever really have a choice?
Maybe not. And not just because of the spiritstag.
Maybe I’d had no choice because ofme.Because of who I was.
In one way, I had always felt apart from the people I loved most. I had always wanted strength—brute, martial, unignorable.
I thought of Theo, ridiculous Theo, dead now, and what he would say and do. He would probably just offer a riddle andlaugh at the face I made. Even when he joined the guard, he wasn’t a serious person. The world had never been a real place to him, just an increasingly vast playground.
I thought of Elisabet. Wanting, wanting always. For her parents to return. To be holed away in her room with quill and ink. To join the archivists’ college. To be healed of her illness.
I thought of my mother and what she might tell me if she were seated on this bench next to me. Her hand would come over mine, squeezing my fingers with maternal firmness, and the index finger of her other hand would slip under my chin and lift my eyes to hers.
You know what I would say.A tiny smile touched her lips.I’d say you’re sitting, Eury.
Yes, I was. Somehow I’d found myself sitting, pitying.
