Page 150 of Promise of Darkness
I find myself standing on the dais, slowly lifting the tip of the sword as the weight of it lightens.
Blaedwyn gapes up at me from where she’s lying flat on her back at my feet. The entire crowd is down, and the walls crumble from the shock of detonation.
Then Eris is there, shoving Thalia ahead of her.
“Move!” she yells, shoving me toward the arch behind the throne.
Through the castle wall and into the labyrinth.
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“We’re lost,” I say, hacking at a thorny tangle of vines with my old sword. It shears away from the wall of the labyrinth, but other vines hiss at me and take its place, knotting the wall into an even tighter array of greenery.
Behind us, the howls of rampaging Unseelie echo through the labyrinth. Blaedwyn unleashed her host upon us, and I can hear them growing ever closer. There’s no way we can survive an entire war host, though with the walls of the maze so close, they can only come at us two abreast.
And while I have the Sword of Mourning sheathed at my hip, I don’t dare use it.
“Eris.” Thalia turns to her with a pleading look in her eyes.
“No.” The word is hard, final.
“What other options do we have?” Thalia snaps. “If the Unseelie face you in your other form, they’ll scatter like scavengers.”
“It’s not the Unseelie who have to worry,” Eris bites out.
There’s a whole lot of undercurrent going on in this conversation. Maybe it has something to do with that Devourer comment. “What are you both talking about?”
Eris looks at me coldly. “I have something inside me, something that can terrorize the entire Unseelie host and send them fleeing. But it comes at a cost. The last time I let myself channel myotherhalf, I slaughtered an entire battlefield.”
I don’t see the problem with that. “A few hundred less Unseelie in the world isn’t going to be a major problem.”
“Anentirebattlefield,” she repeats. “Enemy and ally alike. Friend and foe.” For a moment, horror darkens her eyes, as if she’s seeing it all over again. “I destroyed everyone who followed me onto that battlefield and when I walked out, I was the only thing living. I barely manage to cage it after all the glut of blood. I don’t know if I can come back to myself again. It’s been over a hundred years. Every day it pushes at the cage, I can feel it growing hungrier. There’s no point asking me to unleash my dark side, because if I do, then I’m going to be the only thing left alive in this entire kingdom. And even then,Imight not be me.”
“They called her the Eater of Souls,” Thalia whispers.
The Devourer.
My mind suddenly trips over a long-forgotten memory. One of our tutors was obsessed with history, and I vaguely recall hearing of a battlefield where only one survivor walked away. Nevernight, they call it now, and even the ground lies fallow, as if the glut of blood drowned every blade of grass that stood there.
Thalia hesitates. “Thiago—”
“Is at half strength,” Eris replies calmly, “and we both know it. He’s no match for me, not right now. He’s also still trapped in the dungeon.”
“And I’m useless,” Thalia says bitterly, “after that bitch stole my voice.”
I make a small circular gesture in the air. “Let’s pretend you haven’t told me all of these stories before. Blaedwyn said a witch stole your voice. What does that even mean?”
“Long story,” Thalia replies, “and not enough time to tell it. If we get out of this, you and I shall raid Thiago’s wine cellars and dwell on the bad old times.”
“Use the sword,” Eris says. “They won’t hunt us if you stand against them with that”—she nods uneasily toward my hip—“in your hand.”
I can’t explain the shiver of fear I felt when that mysterious woman put the sword in my hand in that vision. “It drove Blaedwyn mad. I think it best if Idon’ttouch it.”
A troll suddenly bellows behind us, and then it’s lumbering around the corner of the maze. It lifts its head and howls, as if to alert the host.
“Erlking’s hairy balls.”
We are dead.
