He hefted a tome from the table between us. “Ah, but we know what trials have come before.”
The tome looked a hand’s span wide. “Is that a history of them?”
“As much as has been recorded.” He passed the book over to me. “See for yourself.”
I took hold of it with both hands, and even then its weight sank my arms halfway to the desk. “I can’t read Faerish.” Nor much of English, but that wasn’t a fact I thought it helpful to offer up.
His mouth turned wry. “It’s a children’s book.”
My eyebrows went up, and I opened it to a random page. The colorful illustration of two fae—a man and woman—inside a deep wood greeted me. They stood back-to-back, their eyes toward the canopy. There were words on the page, but they were large and few.
“Study it in the evenings,” Dorian said. “You’ll be surprised how much you can glean.”
I turned a page to find an arrow piercing the woman’s chest. Blood sprayed out her back. “Do the trials ever repeat themselves?”
“All things repeat.” He nodded to my book. “History is repetition with some variations. Fae are all the same in nature. That’s why we study it and them.”
“But,” I said, “what about uniqueness?”
Across from me, I sensed amusement creasing his eyes. “So you bristle and think, ‘But Eurydice Waters is unique.’ Right?”
He was right. I turned another page without answering.
This time, an arrow protruded from the man’s chest as well. Both of them lay on the forest floor, dead.
“Eurydice Waters is completely unique,” Dorian said. “But her thoughts and feelings have been thought and felt by many before her and will be by many after her. It’s the synthesis of all your experiences that makes you unique.”
That was the kind of philosophy Elisabet would talk about. Itwas the first time Dorian had discussed such a thing with me. Here was a creature who had read perhaps all the books surrounding me, who could write with that quill and ink, who had studied history and politics and strategy. And I could touch none of it except with my fingers.
Yet he didn’t deride me about this picture book. He derided me about a great many things, but not this.
“I’ll read it.” I closed the book in my lap. “As much of it as I can.”
He nodded. “Consider strategy as you do. How you might fight.”
That night in bed,I opened the book of trials. Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to draw thousands of pages of history.
This historian fae must have fucking loved death.
Yes, I found stories of valor, of triumph. But they were few next to the accounting of how fae had died. Arrows, swords, halberds, rocks, drowning, creatures with tusks and horns and claws and sharp teeth.
Apparently many trials were known, even if all their participants had died. How, I didn’t know. But Dorian was right: I could understand these stories, mostly.
The trials were wide-ranging and unexpected. Some were trials of fortitude, the competitors forced to survive harsh circumstances—terrible rains or cold or heat. Some were trials of power, featuring battles or great beasts to be slain. One trial showed a creature emerging from a lake, three heads towering ten times taller than the two fae who fought it… and they died, of course. Some were trials of intellect—solving puzzles, finding hidden treasure.
And some were incomprehensible.
I turned a page and came across a trial unlike any before it. The drawing depicted a night so dark, the pages were in grayscale. A lonefae stood with a sword raised on a barren sweep of land, a vast spot of darkness looming before her.
I leaned closer. Where was the fae’s partner, and what was that darkness?
The longer I looked, the more vulnerable I felt. A chill prickled my skin, and I snapped the book shut. That was enough for one night.
Still, one thing was clear:
The trials made anything possible. They were magic. I couldn’t understand how they worked, but I had seen enough strange lands, enough monsters, enough of what I couldn’t explain in those pages to know the trials could transport me anywhere.
The next day in Dorian’s study, I set the book on the table between our two armchairs. “I have a strategy.”
