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Yes, she’d loved Sam—more than she’d ever loved anyone. Even Chaol.
a raging wound in the core of her. Sam’s clothes were still in the two bottom drawers of her dresser, where Arobynn had indeed unpacked them. She’d worn one of his shirts to bed these past two nights.
“I’m sorry,” Aelin said. “For the years I spent being a monster toward you, for whatever part I played in your suffering. I wish I’d been able to see myself better. I wish I’d seen everything better. I’m sorry.”
“If you’re in, I’m in.”
That fast—that easily—the offer of friendship was tossed her way. Rowan might have been her dearest friend, her carranam, but … she missed female companionship. Deeply.
“I’m in.”
“Oh, thank the gods. Now I can talk to someone about clothes without being asked how so-and-so would approve of it, or gobble down a box of chocolates without someone telling me I’d better watch my figure—tell me you like chocolates. You do, right? I remember stealing a box from your room once when you were out killing someone. They were delicious.”
“Some night soon, I’ll sneak back in here and we can eat chocolates until we vomit.” “We’re such refined, genteel ladies.”
“you and I are nothing but wild beasts wearing human skins. Don’t even try to deny it.”
The courtesan had no idea how close she wa...
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Lysandra’s shrug was the definition of nonchalance. “I happen to know a thing or two about playing different roles. How to turn eyes away when you don’t want to be seen.”
“What if we killed two birds with one stone?”
“When you shatter the chains of this world and forge the next, remember that art is as vital as food to a kingdom. Without it, a kingdom is nothing, and will be forgotten by time. I have amassed enough money in my miserable life to not need any more—so you will understand me clearly when I say that wherever you set your throne, no matter how long it takes, I will come to you, and I will bring music and dancing.”
She was fire, and light, and ash, and embers. She was Aelin Fireheart, and she bowed for no one and nothing, save the crown that was hers by blood and survival and triumph.
Even disguised as an aristo man, there was wicked, vicious triumph in her turquoise-and-gold eyes. Behind them, across the hall, the dancers shattered their roses on the floor, and Aedion grinned at his queen as the entire world went to hell.
Lysandra glanced behind her, to the bedroom where Aedion now lay unconscious, and loosed a long breath. “The resemblance is uncanny. Gods, the fact that you went undiscovered for so many years boggles the mind.” She studied Aedion again. “Even though he’s a handsome bastard, it’d be like kissing you.” Her eyes were still hard, but—a flicker of amusement gleamed there.
“I don’t know why I was ever nervous you would start bowing and scraping.” Light and understanding danced in Lysandra’s eyes. “Where would the fun be in that?”
Easy to flatter, easy to trick. Making people see and hear what they wanted to: one of the many weapons in her arsenal.
A gift from Anneith, the Lady of Wise Things, Finnula had claimed—the
Not like Silba, who offered peaceful ends, or Hellas, who offered violent, burning ones. No, deaths at Anneith’s hands—at the hands of Hellas’s consort—were brutal, bloody, and slow.
Bastard. Most men, she’d decided, were bastards of varying degrees. Most of them were monsters. None worse than Vernon.
she’d been eight when her father passed her up onto Vernon’s horse and kissed her good-bye, promising to see her soon.
Her title. Lady of Perranth—that’s what she should have been.
Perhaps they assumed she was dead—like Aelin, that wild queen-who-might-have-been.
There were so many scars all over him—so many brutal lines. She did not think Manon had made them, not with the way she spoke to him. Abraxos was smaller than the others, she realized. Far smaller. And yet the Wing Leader had picked him. Elide tucked that information away, too. If Manon had a soft spot for broken things, perhaps she would spare her as well.
Abraxos lowered himself to the ground, stretching out his neck until his head rested on the hay not ten feet from Elide. Those giant black eyes stared up at her, almost doglike.
The King of Adarlan made them, like whatever was being made inside those mountains. The man who had shattered her life, murdered her parents, doomed her to this … Don’t be angry, Finnula had said, be smart.
“Your mount doesn’t seem evil.” Abraxos’s tail thumped on the ground, the iron spikes in it glinting. A giant, lethal dog. With wings.
“No. However he was made, something went wrong with that part.” Elide didn’t think that constituted going wrong, but kept her mouth shut.
The beast perked up, and Elide jumped back a step, wincing as she landed hard on her ankle. The wyvern’s eyes shot to her, as if aware of the pain.
“You soft-hearted worm,” Manon hissed at Abraxos once the cunning, many-faced girl was gone.
“A crippled leg and a few chains, and you’re in love?”
Made, made, made.
It had been an exception—an unprecedented exception—when Ghislaine’s mother had convinced the High Witch to send her daughter to a mortal school in Terrasen a hundred years ago. She had learned magic and book-things and whatever else mortals were taught, and when Ghislaine had returned twelve years later, the witch had been … different. Still a Blackbeak, still bloodthirsty, but somehow more human. Even now, a century later, even after walking on and off killing fields, that sense of impatience, of life clung to her. Manon had never known what to make of it.
“Millennia ago, when the Valg broke into our world, witches did not exist. It was the Valg, and the Fae, and humans. But the Valg were … demons, I suppose. They wanted our world for their own, and they thought a good way to get it would be to ensure that their offspring could survive here. The humans weren’t compatible—too breakable. But the Fae … The Valg kidnapped and stole whatever Fae they could, and because your eyes are getting that glazed look, I’m just going to jump to the end and say the offspring became us. Witches. The Ironteeth took after our Valg ancestors more, while the Crochans
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“The Valg? Legend has it that they’re the origin of evil. They are blackness and despair incarnate.”
They have no laws, no codes. They would see the Thirteen as weak for our bonds and rules—as something to break for amusement.”
“Brannon and the Fae Queen Maeve found ways to defeat them—to send them back. I would hope that someone would find a way to do so again.”
“That’s the smell, isn’t it? The smell here, around some of the soldiers—like it’s wrong, from another world. The king found some way to bring them here and stuff them into human bodies.”
“To what end? Why do all of this—why ally with the Valg, why raise this army … Why?” She could not understand it. The continent already belonged to them. It made no sense. “Because we can,” the duke said simply. “And because this world has too long dwelled in ignorance and archaic tradition. It is time to see what might be improved.”
But she had not missed the words—this world. Not this land, not this continent. This world.
“Ansel of Briarcliff,”
fake location and have me bring stones to the wrong grave.” Not flowers—never flowers in Terrasen. Instead, they carried small stones to graves to mark their visits, to tell the dead that they still remembered. Stones were eternal—flowers were not.
the one named Asterin, golden-haired with eyes like a star-flecked night and a wildness in her very breath. Elide had long ago noted how quick she was to grin, and had marked the moments when Asterin thought no one was looking and gazed across the horizon, her face tight. Secrets—Asterin was a witch with secrets. And secrets made people deadly.
In the Wastes, they’ve made machines to break us apart. The fools never realized that all they needed to do to torture our kind, to make us beg”—she glanced down at Elide’s legs—“was to chain us. Keep us tied to the earth.”
“The witchlings who were your age at the time,” the sentinel went on, “never even had a chance to fly. The power doesn’t set in until their first bleeding. At least now they have the wyverns. But it’s not the same, is it?”
“You’ve never heard the wind calling your name, Elide Lochan? Never felt it tug at you? You’ve never listened to it and yearned to fly toward the horizon, to foreign lands?” She’d spent most of her life locked in a tower, but there had been nights, wild storms …
“You would hear that wind, girl,” she said with expert quiet, “because anyone with Ironteeth blood does. I’m surprised your mother never told you. It’s passed on through the maternal line.” Witch-blood. Ironteeth blood. In her veins—in her mother’s lineage.
Her blood flowed red; she had no iron teeth or nails. Her mother had been the same. If there was ancestry, it was so old that it had been forgotten, but …
She prayed to Anneith with every step upward, prayed to the Lady of Wise Things that she was wrong, that the Third was wrong.
