She eyed me but didn’t slow her scrubbing. I began to suspect she’d been waiting for me in this hallway for some time. “Did she die onher feet?”
I blinked. I had been prepared for a wide range of replies, but not that. A human would have apologized or at least feigned sadness; this was disarmingly matter-of-fact.
“Death on your feet is the only way to die,” she said. “We can’t kill a man standing.”
“Why not?”
She shook her head and doubled down on the scrubbing. “Are all humans this thick, or did they scrape the bottom of the barrel for you? You won’t last the first trial.”
“How do you know about the trials?”
She glanced up at me, blue eyes glittering. “Where there are branches to carry a bird’s call, nothing can be kept secret.” As she spoke, her canines flashed. “Best not to wander the citadel. Not a single door would open for a human, anyway.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That nightI slept with my knife under my pillow, my fingers wrapped around the grip. My sleep was light, and I woke at every noise beyond the door to my chamber. I had no idea what tomorrow would be, except that Dorian and I would train for trials we couldn’t predict.
In some small part of my heart that I could only acknowledge in the deepest, deadest hour of night, I wondered if I had been waiting all my life for this. When you grow up in a kingdom of acid and barrenness, when your last name isWaters, you become a strange child. You begin to fantasize, to wonder what would happen if the monsters ever did come. What if the wall did fall? What if this life did end?
Every day, you live with that kernel deep inside you. The quiet, relentless what if—what if?
That day had come. It hadn’t been a day after all; it had been nighttime. And in my imagination, it had never been so terrible, so irrevocable. But when do our imaginations ever match reality? That’s the whole point of fantasy.
I woke with the afteressence of that feeling in my mind, the knife still in my grip. The thing I had always been half-waiting for hadfinally come to pass, and here I was. In Feyreign. Perhaps for the rest of my short life.
I dressed in the predawn light. Now, on the second day, I understood the rhythm of this place, that the purple crystals, which hung by some strange magic, only flared to life when the sun appeared. And when I got up, my room was still dark.
When Dorian’s knock came, I was already standing at my door. I said, “Open.” It was the first time I’d ever told someone they were allowed into my space. I felt, briefly, like the regiment commander.
A pause, and then the door opened a hair. His face appeared, his gaze wary. Then, with a flick of his eyes down and up, “You’re dressed.”
I stood with crossed arms. “I said I’d be.”
“And you aren’t leaping on me.”
“Not this morning.” I stepped forward. “But you never know.”
He pushed the door open wider for me, allowing me to pass into the hallway. He had dressed himself differently, in a dark leather jerkin and pants and tall boots. “One upside to our pairing,” he said. “No more knives to my throat before breakfast.”
At least he wasn’t humorless. “I’ve heard a little bloodshed sharpens the appetite.”
His lips twitched, and he started down the hallway in the opposite direction of the throne room. “Then you must be ravenous. This way.”
I was, though I hadn’t expected to eat. I’d thought we would begin our training immediately. I followed him down the immaculately scrubbed hallway and up another flight of stairs.
We came through a tall curved doorway and into a large dining room with its own balcony at the far end. Morning light streamed past the trees, pooling over a table with eight chairs and no one at it. Every place had been set with wooden plates and utensils; there was a rustic formality to it all. The ceiling was tall and curved, with an enormous tiered light fixture hanging low. It had been set with small purple crystals and grew with vines, which gave the room a lavenderhue. The vines were fragrant and blossoming with the same yellow blooms I’d seen Dorian crush in the gardens.
On the two opposing walls, tapestries three times as wide and colorful covered the whole of the walls. I glimpsed a battle with bows and gleaming swords on one wall and had to force myself not to stare. It looked like the whole history of Feyreign in one room. Elisabet would have been rapt; she could probably have spent an entire day on just one panel.
Dorian crossed to a seat closest to the balcony. “Sit anywhere you want, except at the head.”
I hesitated at the threshold. Across the room, the chairs were all the same except for a high-backed one at the far end. A smaller version of the bramble throne, though it was still larger and grander than any of the others. “That’s Rhiannon’s seat,” I said.
A small, almost amused noise escaped him. “Yes.”
Of course it was. “It’s just us here?”
“Most don’t rise this early.” He pulled out a chair. “Rhiannon and her consort of the night will be in later.”
