“What if it was a woman who killed him?” I asked. “They have a greater connection to magic.”
Dorian glanced back at the corpse. “They wouldn’t use the kind of magic it’d take to kill him. Not here.”
“Why not?”
“It’d take too much out of them.” He rose before I could press further, then pointed to the wound at the fae’s throat, viscera glinting in the sun. “Anyway, magic didn’t do this.”
It had happened so close to us. I realized with a hollow twist that I’d heard this man’s death cry in the night.
“Then what did?” I asked.
Dorian’s gaze slid down the path. “Something else.”
The path stretched on, empty in either direction. Even so, I stepped closer to him.
“Should I be ready?”
“I don’t sense anything nearby. But we don’t want to be moving after sundown.”
He started walking. I followed.
“There must be a trick to this place,” I said. The hedge flanked us in unbroken uniformity. “It can’t all be the same.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Dorian walked three paces ahead. “The question is whether we’ll figure it out before we die.”
That was the question. Whether it would be thirst, hunger, another competitor, or whatever had killed the fae, we were surrounded by death. Which meant our minds weren’t at their best for figuring out puzzles.
Maybe that was the point. Anyone who could solve it amidst all this wasn’t just clever—they were survivalists.
“What happens if only one pair finds the way out?” I asked. “Are they the only ones who pass the trial?”
“I’d assume so.” Dorian reached into his cloak and passed me the sack of rabbit meat. “Though I doubt there’s a time limit. And I suspect one pair escaping doesn’t stop the trial for everyone else.”
That made sense. Which meant even if we escaped tomorrow, we’d keep walking this hedge-bound hell until the others either passed… or died.
I chewed a piece of dried rabbit and mulled that over as we continued, always turning right. The sun climbed higher and beat down on our heads from the cloudless sky. Eventually, I flipped my cloak upside down and held it over my head like a crude parasol.
By late afternoon, Dorian’s steady walk had become something close to a jog. An edge ran through his every movement, shoulders tight, gaze flicking corners too fast. Anxiety radiated off him, and it stirred my own.
We hadn’t passed a single alcove. No new intersections. Nothing to mark one stretch of the maze from another. Just the same thorns, same dirt, same sun—and a growing sense of being hunted by time itself.
Dorian had started mumbling to himself in Faerish, too low for me to understand. From the tone, he was strategizing, likely trying to figure out what we’d do when the sun dipped and we had no shelter.
Which was probably why he missed the odd whorl in the hedge as we passed it.
But I didn’t.
We stoodbefore the whorl in the hedge, just as we had for the past twenty minutes. I crouched, squinting at it while Dorian paced behind me like a caged animal.
“There’s nothing there, Eury,” he said—for the fourth time. “We’re wasting daylight.”
The sun had slipped from afternoon into early evening. Its light slanted long across the maze, gilding the thorns in gold. I used to love this hour, when everything turned soft and golden and alive.
Now it just meant time was running out.
“When the sun’s gone,” I said, “we won’t see what’s coming.”
“I don’t seeanything now.”
