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The Eridun aerie was madness when they returned.
“Though there were some interesting details.” Then the princess rattled off the facts. The numbers. A third of Maeve’s armada, bearing Whitethorn flags, had turned on their own and joined Terrasen’s fleet. Dorian had fought—held the front lines with Rowan. Then a pack of wyverns had soared in from nowhere—to fight for Aelin. Manon Blackbeak.
“What other armada,” Chaol forced himself to ask. Hasar shrugged, walking from the room. “Turns out, Aelin called in a debt. To the Silent Assassins of the Red Desert.” Chaol’s eyes burned. “And to Wendlyn.” His hands began shaking. “How many ships,” he breathed. “All of them,” Hasar said, hand on the door. “All of Wendlyn’s armada came, commanded by Crown Prince Galan himself.”
“there are quite a few people who think highly of her. And who believe in what she’s selling.” “Which is what?” Yrene whispered. Hasar shrugged. “I assume it’s what she tried to sell to me, when she wrote me a message weeks ago, asking for my aid. From one princess to another.” Chaol took a shuddering breath. “What did Aelin promise you?” Hasar smiled to herself. “A better world.”
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff
the time they’d returned, he’d needed it—his legs still capable of some motion, but not standing. But it did not frustrate him, did not embarrass him. If this was to be his body’s natural state for the rest of his life … it was not a punishment, not at all.
“You mean to tell me the ruks shitting up the roofs are just here to make you look important?” Sartaq huffed a quiet laugh.
Chaol glanced to Yrene, smiling serenely at the sea, then to the note. To the handwriting he knew as well as his own. Yrene went still at the tears he could not stop from sliding down his face.
She would have been sixteen, nearly seventeen then. And if she had been in Innish … It would have been on her way to the Red Desert, to train with the Silent Assassins. The bruises Yrene had described … The beating Arobynn Hamel had given her as punishment for freeing Rolfe’s slaves and wrecking Skull’s Bay.
A gift from a queen who had seen another woman in hell and thought to reach back a hand. With no thought of it ever being returned. A moment of kindness, a tug on a thread …
Even Aelin could not have known or dreamed or guessed how that moment of kindness would be answered.
So the khagan had answered. With one thousand ships from Hasar’s armada, and his own. Filled with Kashin’s foot soldiers and Darghan cavalry. And above them, spanning the horizon far behind the flagship on which Chaol and Yrene now sailed … Above them flew one thousand rukhin led by Sartaq and Nesryn, from every aerie and hearth.
Every step, all of it, had led here. From that keep in the snow-blasted mountains where a man with a face as hard as the rock around them had thrown him into the cold; to that salt mine in Endovier, where an assassin with eyes like wildfire had smirked at him, unbroken despite a year in hell. An assassin who had found his wife, or they had found each other, two gods-blessed women wandering the shadowed ruins of the world.And who now held the fate of it between them.
A moment of kindness. From a young woman who ended lives to a young woman who saved them.
“This story of yours had better be worth it,” she said with a wry grin. Chaol smiled back at his wife, at the light he’d unknowingly walked toward his entire life, even when he had not been able to see it. “It is,” he said quietly to Yrene. “It is.”
