He tugged at the sword. It shifted slightly, as though the spring were trying to ease it out of his grip. Hope fluttered in Eli’s chest, small but powerful enough to urge him on.
“The first time I thought you might love me was when you asked to hold my hand on the gallows,” Eli said. “Where are we supposed to go from that, Sabre? We never really knew each other. I wanted to. I wanted to know you. But I didn’t, and you didn’t know me, and now what are we?”
The sword jerked an inch, and Eli felt Sabre’s hand on his arm, just under Rey’s.
“I don’t know either,” Sabre said.
“I’m not evil.” Eli dug his nails into the leather around the pommel of the sword. “I’m not my mother. I thought it would be easier if I pretended I deserved it, but I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve to die.”
“That’s right,” Rey said, into his ear.
“I don’t want to sacrifice anything else,” Eli said, and the tears finally came, hot and stinging down his cheeks. They dripped into the spring, making the surface of the water tremble. “I want to be with you, Rey. I want to get to know Sabre, and Laurent, and Rose. I want all of it.”
His reflection shivered and warped until Eli could see past it and into the spring. The sword in his hands was bright steel with a skull carved into the hilt, and as Eli heaved, the skull wavered in the water. The shadows in its eyes seemed to move, and when Eli brushed it with his fingertips, the steel wriggled under his touch as though it were a living thing.
“I deserve to be happy,” Eli said, and pulled the sword out of the spring.
It wasn’t a glorious victory. Eli didn’t stand tall over the spring and raise the sword to the air, or laugh, or swing the blade expertly like Isiodore de Mortain. Instead, he stumbled onto his ass in the mud, and the flat of the sword thumped painfully on his knees as he tried not to behead anyone as he fell.
“You did it.” Rey grabbed Eli from behind, pulling him up and getting mud all over them both as he wrapped his arms around Eli’s shoulders. “Look at you!”
Eli stared at the sword. It was long and heavy, and the balance felt perfect for a sword that had spent centuries in a spring. The leather around the pommel was as pristine as it must have been when it was made, and when Eli turned it to catch the dim light filtering through the leaves, he saw that instead of a skull at the hilt, there was a carving of a stag’s head.
“It didn’t look like this before,” Eli said. “Did it?”
“I think it’s yours now.” Rey reached over to brush the carving of the stag. “Maybe it was always meant to be you, Eli, this whole time.”
Sabre was kneeling beside him, mud on his expensive trousers, his face wan and sad. Eli pulled out of Rey’s hold and reached for him, hesitant, and Sabre took his offered hand.
“I’m sorry I never knew you before,” Sabre said. “But we can start again.”
Eli squeezed Sabre’s hand tight, the way he hadn’t been able to that day on the gallows. “I think I can do that.”
Sabre helped Eli up, and Eli smiled briefly at Rey. Rey was beaming, mud all down his front and in his hair, a clump of it sticking up by his ear. Eli opened his mouth to tell him he was beautiful, and swayed as a cold wind whirled through the woods, twisting around the trees and stirring the water of the spring.
“Oh, my,” a voice said, and Eli straightened as two glowing eyes opened in the dark. A heavy paw thumped onto the grass, and Tristan appeared out of the shadows, fur bristling. “Two deValois men, bearing my sword? What a gift you have left at my feet, little fox.”
He chuckled, and more eyes shone around them as spectral wolves twined in the shadows, circling them. “Now that you have done your duty, de Valois, bring me the sword, and I will give you an ending.”
Chapter
Fourteen
Rey was shaking. The fear coursed through him like fire crackling over his skin, and he fumbled as he reached for the beads in his pocket. He moved stiffly after Eli as Eli approached King Tristan, and he shuddered when Tristan bared fangs long enough to spear a fox through the middle.
“You promised you’d let him live,” Rey said. He let the beads hang off his left hand, just out of Eli’s view, and Tristan flicked his gaze his way.
“If he fulfills his duty,” Tristan said. “But blood must be spilled to fix my horn. Hold out your arm, de Valois, that should be enough.” Eli took another careful step. Behind him, Sabre had a hand on his own sword, eyeing the wolves that were closing in around them. Then Tristan made a low, rumbling sound. “What’s that on my sword, de Valois? The insignia on the hilt.”
Rey swallowed thickly, thinking fast. He tried to draw his power around him, but it felt like such a small thing in King Tristan’s shadow. “I can explain.” Tristan turned his enormous head to look at Rey, and the beads clacked as they swung from Rey’s fingers. “Once—Once there was a sword that belonged to the dead. But it was stolen, and it—” Rey looked at Eli, who was edging closer despite Tristan’s massive claws and jagged teeth.He thought of Emeric lying dead in a trampled field. “It yearned to be held by someone brave, and true?—”
“What is this?” Tristan narrowed his eyes. “I’m not here for a children’s story, fox.”
“And when the right man found it,” Rey said, as his face elongated and his ears grew more foxlike, “it became his. It changed to suit him.” Fur sprouted on his hands in patches, and his nails sharpened. “It became a ghost-killer, a blade that can even strike the heart of the King of the Hunt.”
Eli hefted the sword in both hands, and Tristan whirled on him. Fear consumed Rey, panic rising to a fever pitch, heart pounding, lightning buzzing through his limbs. He moved on instinct—the same instinct that had made him flee so long ago, that kept him away from angry farmers and greedy nobles tricked out of their savings. He lunged for Tristan in his fox form and scrambled up his side, the necklace hanging in his mouth. Tristan tried to buck him off, but Rey hung on, slinging the necklace over Tristan’s ear.
“And when the King of the Hunt saw the sword that would be his death coming, hedropped to his knees,” Rey shouted. Tristan’s body shook as the compulsion took hold, strengthened by Rey’s magic. When he dropped, he cast off the wolf form as well, becoming the handsome young man he’d been when he’d taken his role as a tormentor of the dead. His knees hit the earth, and he looked up at Eli with hatred burning in his yellow eyes.
