Narene huffed, yanking on the reins. Not wanting to go near this place.
He didn’t blame her. The reek from the mountain set his knees wobbling.
But he’d spent years schooling his expression against the headache-inducing perfumes his mother’s courtiers wore. How far away that world seemed—that palace of perfume and lace and lilting music. Had they not resisted Erawan, would he have allowed it to still exist? Had they bowed to him, would Erawan have maintained his ruse as Perrington and ruled as a mortal king?
Dorian’s legs burned, the hours of walking taking their toll. Manon and Asterin lurked nearby, hidden in the snow and stone. They no doubt marked his every move while he inched closer to the gates.
His parting words with Manon had been brief. Terse.
He’d dropped the two Wyrdkeys into her awaiting palm, the Amulet of Orynth clinking faintly against her iron nails. Only a fool would bring them into one of Erawan’s strongholds. “They might not be your priority,” Dorian said, “but they remain vital to our success.”
Manon’s eyes had narrowed as she pocketed the keys, utterly unfazed at holding in her jacket a power great enough to level kingdoms. “You think I’d toss them away like rubbish?”
Asterin suddenly found the snow to be in need of her careful attention.
Dorian shrugged, and unbuckled Damaris, the sword too fine for a mere wyvern trainer. He passed it to Manon, too. An ordinary dagger would be his only weapon—and the magic in his veins. “If I don’t come back,” he said while she tied the ancient blade to her belt, “the keys must go to Terrasen.” It was the only place he could think of—even if Aelin wasn’t there to take them.
“You’ll come back,” Manon said. It sounded like more of a threat than anything.
Dorian smirked. “Would you miss me if I didn’t?”
Manon didn’t reply. He didn’t know why he expected her to.
He’d taken all of a step, when Asterin clasped his shoulder. “In and out, quick as you can,” she warned him. “Take care of Narene.” Worry indeed shone in the Second’s gold-flecked black eyes.
Dorian bowed his head. “With my life,” he promised as he approached her mount and grasped the dangling reins. He didn’t fail to miss the gratitude that softened Asterin’s features. Or that Manon had already turned away from him.
A fool to start down this path with her. He should have known better.
The guards’ faces became clear. Dorian embraced the portrait of a tired, bored handler.
He waited for the questioning, but it never came.
They simply waved him through, equally tired and bored. And cold.
Asterin had given him a layout of the Northern Fang and the Omega across from it, so he knew to turn left upon entering the towering hallway. Wyvern bellows and grunts sounded all around, and that rotting scent stuffed itself up his nose.
But he found the stables precisely where Asterin said they’d be, the blue mare patient while he loosely tied her chains to the anchor in the wall.
Dorian left Narene with a soothing pat to her neck, and went to see what the Ferian Gap might reveal.
The hours that passed were some of the longest of Manon’s existence.
From anticipation, she told herself. Of what she had to do.
Abraxos, unsurprisingly, found them within an hour, his reins sliced from the struggle he’d no doubt waged and won with Sorrel. He waited, however, beside Manon in silence, wholly focused upon the gate where Dorian and Narene had vanished.
Time dripped by. The king’s sword was a constant weight at her side.
She cursed herself for needing to prove—to him, to herself—that she refused to let him go into Morath for practical, ordinary reasons. Erawan wasn’t at the Ferian Gap. It’d be safer.
Somewhat. But if the Matrons were there …
That was why he’d gone. To learn if they were. To see if Petrah truly commanded the host there, and how many Ironteeth were present.
He had not been trained as a spy, but he’d grown up in a court where people wielded smiles and clothes like weapons. He knew how to blend in, how to listen. How to make people see what they wished to see.
She’d sent Elide into the dungeons of Morath, Darkness damn her. Sending the King of Adarlan into the Ferian Gap was no different.
It didn’t stop her breath from escaping when Abraxos stiffened, scanning the sky. As if he heard something they couldn’t.
And it was the joy that sparked in her mount’s eyes that told her.
Moments later, Narene sailed toward them, making a lazy path over the mountains, a dark-haired, pale-skinned rider atop her. He’d truly been able to change parts of himself. Had made his face nearly unrecognizable. And kept it that way.
Asterin rushed toward the mare, and even Manon blinked as her Second threw her arms around Narene’s neck. Holding her tight. The mare only leaned her head against Asterin’s back and huffed.
Dorian slid off the mare, leaving the reins dangling.
“Well?” Manon demanded.
His eyes—dark as a Valg’s—flashed. She didn’t try to explain that her knees had been shaking. Still buckled while she handed him his sword, then the two keys, her nails grazing his gloved hand.
Dorian’s eyes lightened to that crushing sapphire, his skin becoming golden once more. “The Matrons are not there. Only Petrah Blueblood, and about three hundred Ironteeth from all three clans.” His mouth curved in a cruel half smile, cold as the peaks around them. Damning. “The way is clear, Majesty.”
The patrols at the Ferian Gap spotted them miles away.
The Thirteen were still allowed to land in the Omega.
Manon had left Dorian in the small pass where they’d gathered the Thirteen. If they did not return within a day, he was to do what he wished. Go to Morath and Erawan’s awaiting embrace, if he was that reckless.
There had been no good-byes between them.
Manon kept her heartbeat steady as she sat atop Abraxos just inside the cavernous mouth leading into the Omega, aware of every enemy eye on them, both at their front and back. “I wish to speak to Petrah Blueblood,” she declared to the hall.
A young voice answered “I assumed so.”
The Blueblood Heir appeared through the nearest archway, an iron band on her brow, blue robes flowing.
Manon inclined her head. “Gather your host in this hall.”
Manon hadn’t dwelled long on what she’d say.
And as the three hundred Ironteeth witches filed into the hall, some coming off their patrols, Manon half wondered if she should have. They watched her, watched the Thirteen, with a wary disdain.
Their disgraced Wing Leader; their fallen Heir.
When all were gathered, Petrah, still standing in the doorway where she’d appeared, merely said, “My life debt for an audience, Blackbeak.”
Manon swallowed, her tongue as dry as paper. Seated atop Abraxos, she could see every shifting movement in the crowd, the wide eyes or hands gripping swords.
“I will not tell you the particulars of who I am,” Manon said at last. “For I think you have already heard them.”
“Crochan bitch,” someone spat.
Manon set her eyes on the Blackbeaks, stone-faced where the others bristled with hatred. It was for them she spoke, for them she had come here.
“All my life,” Manon said, her voice wavering only slightly, “I have been fed a lie.”
“We don’t have to listen to this trash,” another sentinel spat.
Asterin snarled at Manon’s side, and the others fell silent. Even disgraced, the Thirteen were deadly.
Manon went on, “A lie, about who we are, what we are. That we are monsters, and proud to be.” She ran a finger over the scrap of red fabric binding her braid. “But we were made into them. Made,” she repeated. “When we might be so much more.”
Silence fell.
Manon took that as encouragement enough. “My grandmother does not plan to only reclaim the Wastes when this war is done. She plans to rule the Wastes as High Queen. Your only queen.”
A murmur at that. At the words, at the betrayal Manon made in revealing her Matron’s private plans.
“There will be no Bluebloods, or Yellowlegs, not as you are now. She plans to take the weapons you have built here, plans to use our Blackbeak riders, and make you into our subjects. And if you do not bend to her, you will not exist at all.”
Manon took a breath. Another.
“We have known only bloodshed and violence for five hundred years. We will know it for another five hundred yet.”
“Liar,” someone shouted. “We fly to glory.”
But Asterin moved, unbuttoning her leather jacket, then hoisting up her white shirt. Rising in the stirrups to bare her scarred, brutalized abdomen. “She does not lie.”
UNCLEAN
There, the word remained stamped. Would always be stamped.
“How many of you,” Asterin called out, “have been similarly branded? By your Matron, by your coven leader? How many of you have had your stillborn witchlings burned before you might hold them?”
The silence that fell now was different from before. Shaking—shuddering.
Manon glanced at the Thirteen to find tears in Ghislaine’s eyes as she took in the brand on Asterin’s womb. Tears in the eyes of all of them, who had not known.
And it was for those tears, which Manon had never seen, that she faced the host again. “You will be killed in this war, or after it. And you will never see our homeland again.”
“What is it that you want, Blackbeak?” Petrah asked from the archway.
“Ride with us,” Manon breathed. “Fly with us. Against Morath. Against the people who would keep you from your homeland, your future.” Murmuring broke out again. Manon pushed ahead, “An Ironteeth-Crochan alliance. Perhaps one to break our curse at last.”
Again, that shuddering silence. Like a storm about to break.
Asterin sat back in the saddle, but kept her shirt open.
“The choice of how our people’s future shall be shaped is yours,” Manon told each of the witches assembled, all the Blackbeaks who might fly to war and never return. “But I will tell you this.” Her hands shook, and she fisted them on her thighs. “There is a better world out there. And I have seen it.”
Even the Thirteen looked toward her now.
“I have seen witch and human and Fae dwell together in peace. And it is not a weakness to do so, but a strength. I have met kings and queens whose love for their kingdoms, their peoples, is so great that the self is secondary. Whose love for their people is so strong that even in the face of unthinkable odds, they do the impossible.”
Manon lifted her chin. “You are my people. Whether my grandmother decrees it so or not, you are my people, and always will be. But I will fly against you, if need be, to ensure that there is a future for those who cannot fight for it themselves. Too long have we preyed on the weak, relished doing so. It is time that we became better than our foremothers.” The words she had given the Thirteen months ago. “There is a better world out there,” she said again. “And I will fight for it.” She turned Abraxos away, toward the plunge behind them. “Will you?”
Manon nodded to Petrah. Eyes bright, the Heir only nodded back. They would be permitted to leave as they had arrived: unharmed.
So Manon nudged Abraxos, and he leaped into the sky, the Thirteen following suit.
Not a child of war.
But of peace.
CHAPTER 44
“How shall I carve you up today, Aelin?”
Cairn’s words were a push of hot breath at her ear as his knife scraped down her bare thigh.
No. No, it couldn’t have been a dream.
The escape, Rowan, the ship to Terrasen—
Cairn dug the tip of his dagger into the flesh above her knee, and she gritted her teeth as blood swelled and spilled. As he began twisting the blade, a little deeper with each rotation.
He had done it so many times now. All over her body.
He would only stop when he hit bone. When she was screaming and screaming.
A dream. An illusion. Her escape from him, from Maeve, had been another illusion.
Had she said it? Had she said where the keys were hidden?
She couldn’t stop the sob that ripped from her.
Then a cool, cultured voice purred, “All that training, and this is what becomes of you?”
Not real. Arobynn, standing on the other side of the altar, was not real. Even if he looked it, his red hair shining, his clothes impeccable.
Her former master gave her a half smile. “Even Sam held out better than this.”
Cairn twisted the knife again, slicing through muscle. She arched, her scream ringing in her ears. From far away, Fenrys snarled.
“You could get out of these chains, if you really wanted,” Arobynn said, frowning with distaste. “If you really tried.”
No, she couldn’t, and everything had been a dream, a lie—
“You let yourself remain captive. Because the moment you are free …” Arobynn chuckled. “Then you must offer yourself up, a lamb to slaughter.”
She clawed and thrashed against the shredding in her leg, not hearing Cairn as he sneered. Only hearing the King of the Assassins, unseen and unnoted beside her.
“Deep down, you’re hoping you’ll be here long enough that the young King of Adarlan will pay the price. Deep down, you know you’re hiding here, waiting for him to clear the path.” Arobynn leaned against the side of the altar, cleaning his nails with a dagger. “Deep down, you know it’s not really fair, that those gods picked you. That Elena picked you instead of him. She bought you time to live, yes, but you were still chosen to pay the price. Her price. And the gods’.”
Arobynn ran a long-fingered hand down the side of her face. “Do you see what I tried to spare you from all these years? What you might have avoided had you remained Celaena, remained with me?” He smiled. “Do you see, Aelin?”
She could not answer. Had no voice.
Cairn hit bone, and—
Aelin lunged upward, hands grasping for her thigh.
No chains weighed her. No mask smothered her.
No dagger had been twisted into her body.
Breathing hard, the scent of musty sheets clinging to her nose, the sounds of her screaming replaced by the drowsy chirping of birds, Aelin scrubbed at her face.
The prince who’d fallen asleep beside her was already running a hand down her back in silent, soothing strokes.
Beyond the small window of the ramshackle inn somewhere near Fenharrow and Adarlan’s border, thick veils of mist drifted.
A dream. Just a dream.
She twisted, setting her feet to the threadbare carpet on the uneven wood floor.
“Dawn isn’t for another hour,” Rowan said.
Yet Aelin reached for her shirt. “I’ll get warmed up, then.” Maybe run, as she had not been able to do in weeks and weeks.
Rowan sat up, missing nothing. “Training can wait, Aelin.” They’d been doing it for weeks now, as thorough and grueling as it had been at Mistward.
She shoved her legs into her pants, then buckled on her sword belt. “No, it can’t.”
Aelin dodged to the side, Rowan’s blade sailing past her head, snipping a few strands from the end of her braid.
She blinked, breathing hard, and barely brought Goldryn up in time to parry his next attack. Metal reverberated through the stinging blisters coating her hands.
New blisters—for a new body. Three weeks at sea, and her calluses had barely formed again. Every day, hours spent training at swordplay and archery and combat, and her hands were still soft.
Grunting, Aelin crouched low, thighs burning as she prepared to spring.
But Rowan halted in the dusty courtyard of the inn, his hatchet and sword dropping to his sides. In the first light of dawn, the inn could have passed for pleasant, the sea breeze from the nearby coast drifting through the lingering leaves on the hunched apple tree in the center of the space.
A gathering storm to the north had forced their ship to find harbor last night—and after weeks at sea, none of them had hesitated to spend a few hours on land. To learn what in hell had happened while they’d been gone.
The answer: war.
Everywhere, war raged. But where the fighting occurred, the aging innkeeper didn’t know. Boats didn’t stop at the port anymore—and the great warships just sailed past. Whether they were enemy or friendly, he also didn’t know. Knew absolutely nothing, it seemed. Including how to cook. And clean his inn.
They’d need to be back on the seas within a day or two, if they were to make it to Terrasen quickly. There were too many storms in the North to have risked crossing directly there, their captain had said. This time of year, it was safer to make it to the continent’s coast, then sail up it. Even if that command and those very storms had landed them here: somewhere between Fenharrow and Adarlan’s border. With Rifthold a few days ahead.
When Rowan didn’t resume their sparring, Aelin scowled. “What.”
It wasn’t so much of a question as a demand.
His gaze was unfaltering. As it had been when she’d returned from her run through the misty fields beyond the inn and found him leaning against the apple tree. “That’s enough for today.”
“We’ve hardly started.” She lifted her blade.
Rowan kept his own lowered. “You barely slept last night.”
Aelin tensed. “Bad dreams.” An understatement. She lifted her chin and threw him a grin. “Perhaps I’m starting to wear you down a bit.”
Despite the blisters, she’d gained back weight, at least. Had watched her arms go from thin to cut with muscle, her thighs from reeds to sleek and powerful.
Rowan didn’t return her smile. “Let’s eat breakfast.”
“After that dinner last night, I’m in no hurry.” She didn’t give him a blink of warning before she launched herself at him, swiping high with Goldryn and stabbing low with her dagger.
Rowan met her attack, easily deflecting. They clashed, broke apart, and clashed again.
His canines gleamed. “You need to eat.”
“I need to train.”
She couldn’t stop it—that need to do something. To be in motion.
No matter how many times she swung her blade, she could feel them. The shackles. And whenever she paused to rest, she could feel it, too—her magic. Waiting.
Indeed, it seemed to open an eye and yawn.
She clenched her jaw, and attacked again.
Rowan met each blow, and she knew her maneuvers were descending into sloppiness. Knew he let her continue rather than seizing the many openings to end it.
She couldn’t stop. War raged around them. People were dying. And she had been locked in that damned box, had been taken apart again and again, unable to do anything—
Rowan struck, so fast she couldn’t track it. But it was the foot he slid before her own that doomed her, sending her careening into the dirt.
Her knees barked, skinning beneath her pants, and her dagger scattered from her hand.
“I win,” he panted. “Let’s eat.”
Aelin glared up at him. “Another round.”
Rowan just sheathed his sword. “After breakfast.”
She growled. He growled right back.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You’ll lose all that muscle if you don’t feed your body. So eat. And if you still want to train afterward, I’ll train with you.” He offered her a tattooed hand. “Though you’ll likely hurl your guts up.”
Either from the exertion or from the innkeeper’s suspect cooking.
But Aelin said, “People are dying. In Terrasen. In—everywhere. People are dying, Rowan.”
“Your eating breakfast isn’t going to change that.” Her lips curled in a snarl, but he cut her off. “I know people are dying. We are going to help them. But you need to have some strength left, or you won’t be able to.”
Truth. Her mate spoke truth. And yet she could see them, hear them. Those dying, frightened people.
Whose screams so often sounded like her own.
Rowan wriggled his fingers in silent reminder. Shall we?
Aelin scowled and took his hand, letting him haul her to her feet. So pushy.
Rowan slid an arm around her shoulders. That’s the most polite thing you’ve ever said about me.
Elide tried not to wince at the grayish gruel steaming in front of her. Especially with the innkeeper watching from the shadows behind his taproom bar. Seated at one of the small, round tables that filled the worn space, Elide caught Gavriel’s eye from where he pushed at his own bowl.
Gavriel raised the spoon to his mouth. Slowly.
Elide’s eyes widened. Widened further as he opened his mouth, and took a bite.
His swallow was audible. His cringe barely contained.
Elide reined in her smile at the pure misery that entered the Lion’s tawny stare. Aelin and Rowan had been finishing up a similar battle when she’d entered the taproom minutes ago, the queen wishing her luck before striding back into the courtyard.
Elide hadn’t seen her sit still for longer than it took to eat a meal. Or during the hours when she’d instructed them in Wyrdmarks, after Rowan had requested she teach them.
It had gotten her out of the chains, the prince had explained. And if the ilken were resistant to their magic, then learning the ancient marks would come in handy with all they faced ahead. The battles both physical and magic.
Such strange, difficult markings. Elide couldn’t read her own language, hadn’t tried to in ages. Didn’t suppose she’d be granted the opportunity anytime soon. But learning these marks, if it helped her companions in any way … she could try. Had tried, enough to know a few of them now.
Gavriel dared another mouthful of the porridge, offering the innkeeper a tight smile. The man looked so relieved that Elide picked up her own spoon and choked down a bite. Bland and a bit sour—had he put salt in it, rather than sugar?—but … it was hot.
