“Your letter, Majesty,” Murtaugh said, extending a wax-sealed tube.
Aelin took it, bowing her head in thanks.
Aedion said to Ren, “Unless you want to swap one tyrant for another, I suggest you get the Bane and any others ready to push from the North.”
Murtaugh answered for his grandson, “Darrow means well—”
“Darrow,” Aedion interrupted, “is now a man of limited days.”
They all looked to her. But Aelin watched the inn flickering through the trees—and the old man once again storming for them, a force of nature in his own right. She said, “We don’t touch Darrow.”
“What?” Aedion snapped.
Aelin said, “I’d bet all my money that he’s already taken the steps to ensure that if he meets an untimely death, we never set foot in Orynth again.” Murtaugh gave her a grim, confirming nod. Aelin shrugged. “So we don’t touch him. We play his game—play by rules and laws and oaths.”
Several feet away, Lysandra and Evangeline still spoke softly, the girl now crying in her mistress’s arms, Fleetfoot anxiously nuzzling her hip.
Aelin met Murtaugh’s stare. “I do not know you, Lord, but you were loyal to my uncle—to my family these long years.” She slid a dagger free of a hidden sheath along her thigh. They flinched as she sliced into her palm. Even Aedion started. Aelin clenched her bloodied palm into a fist, holding it in the air between them. “Because of that loyalty, you will understand what blood promises mean to me when I say if that girl comes to harm, physical or otherwise, I do not care what laws exist, what rules I will break.” Lysandra had now turned to them, her shifter senses detecting blood. “If Evangeline is hurt, you will burn. All of you.”
“Threatening your loyal court?” sneered a cold voice as Darrow halted a few feet away. Aelin ignored him. Murtaugh was wide-eyed—so was Ren.
Her blood seeped into the sacred earth. “Let this be your test.”
Aedion swore. He understood. If the Lords of Terrasen could not keep one child safe in their kingdom, could not find it in themselves to save Evangeline, to look after someone who could do them no good, gain them no wealth or rank … they would deserve to perish.
Murtaugh bowed again. “Your will is mine, Majesty.” He added quietly, “I lost my granddaughters. I will not lose another.” With that, the old man walked toward where Darrow waited, pulling the lord aside.
Her heart strained, but Aelin said to Ren, that scar hidden by the shadows of his rain-drenched hood, “I wish we had time to speak. Time for me to explain.”
“You’re good at walking away from this kingdom. I don’t see why now would be different.”
Aedion let out a snarl, but Aelin cut him off. “Judge me all you like, Ren Allsbrook. But do not fail this kingdom.”
She saw the unspoken retort flash in Ren’s eyes. Like you did for ten years.
The blow struck low and deep, but she turned away. As she did, she noted how Ren’s eyes fell on the little girl—on the brutal scars across Evangeline’s face. Near-twins to the ones on his own. Something in his gaze softened, just a bit.
But Darrow was now thundering toward Aelin, pushing past Murtaugh, his face white with anger. “You—” he started.
Aelin held up a hand, flame leaping at her fingertips, rain turning to steam above it. Blood snaked down her wrist from the deep cut, sibling to the other on her right hand, bright as Goldryn’s ruby, peeking over her shoulder. “I’ll make one more promise,” she said, folding her bloodied hand into a fist as she lowered it before them. Darrow tensed.
Her blood dripped onto the sacred soil of Terrasen, and her smile turned lethal. Even Aedion held his breath beside her.
Aelin said, “I promise you that no matter how far I go, no matter the cost, when you call for my aid, I will come. I promise you on my blood, on my family’s name, that I will not turn my back on Terrasen as you have turned your back on me. I promise you, Darrow, that when the day comes and you crawl for my help, I will put my kingdom before my pride and not kill you for this. I think the true punishment will be seeing me on the throne for the rest of your miserable life.”
His face had gone from white to purple.
She just turned away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Darrow demanded. So Murtaugh had not filled him in on her plan to go to the Dead Islands. Interesting.
She looked over her shoulder. “To call in old debts and promises. To raise an army of assassins and thieves and exiles and commoners. To finish what was started long, long ago.”
Silence was his answer.
So Aelin and Aedion strode to where Lysandra now monitored them, solemn-faced in the rain, Evangeline hugging herself as Fleetfoot leaned against the silently weeping girl.
Aelin said to the shape-shifter and the general, locking out the sorrow from her heart, locking out the pain and worry from her mind, “We travel now.”
And when they dispersed to gather the horses, Aedion brushing a kiss to Evangeline’s soaked head before Murtaugh and Ren led her back to the inn with considerable gentleness, Darrow striding ahead with no farewell whatsoever, when Aelin was alone, she finally approached that shadowed, gnarled tree.
The Little Folk had known about the wyvern attack this morning.
So she’d supposed that this little effigy, already falling apart under the torrent of rain, was another message of sorts. One just for her.
Brannon’s temple on the coast had been rendered carefully—a clever little contraption of twigs and rocks to form the pillars and altar … And on the sacred rock in its center, they’d created a white stag from raw sheep’s wool, his mighty antlers no more than curling thorns.
An order—where to go, what she needed to obtain. She was willing to listen, play along. Even if it had meant telling the others only half the truth.
Aelin broke apart the temple reconstruction but left the stag in her palm, the wool deflating in the rain.
Horses nickered as Aedion and Lysandra hauled them closer, but Aelin felt him a heartbeat before he emerged between the distant, night-veiled trees. Too far in the wood to be anything but a ghost, a figment of an ancient god’s dream.
Barely breathing, she watched him for as long as she dared, and when Aelin mounted her horse, she wondered if her companions could tell that it was not rain gleaming on her face as she tugged on her black hood.
Wondered if they, too, had spied the Lord of the North standing watch deep in the forest, the white stag’s immortal glow muted in the rain, come to bid Aelin Galathynius farewell.
6
Dorian Havilliard, King of Adarlan, hated the silence.
It
had become his companion, walking beside him through the near-empty halls of his stone castle, crouching in the corner of his cluttered tower room at night, sitting across the table at each meal.
He had always known he would one day be king.
He had not expected to inherit a shattered throne and vacant stronghold.
His mother and younger brother were still ensconced in their mountain residence in Ararat. He had not sent for them. He’d given the order to remain, actually.
If only because it would mean the return of his mother’s preening court, and he’d gladly take the silence over their tittering. If only because it would mean looking into his mother’s face, his brother’s face, and lying about who had destroyed the glass castle, who had slaughtered most of their courtiers, and who had ended his father. Lying about what his father had been—the demon that had dwelled inside him.
A demon that had reproduced with his mother—not once, but twice.
Standing on the small stone balcony atop his private tower, Dorian gazed at the glittering sprawl of Rifthold beneath the setting sun, at the sparkling ribbon of the Avery as it wended inland from the sea, curving around the city like the coils of a snake, and then flowing straight through the continent’s heart.
He lifted his hands before the view, his palms callused from the exercises and swordplay he’d made himself start learning once more. His favorite guards—Chaol’s men—were all dead.
Tortured and killed.
His memories of his time beneath the Wyrdstone collar were dim and blurred. But in his nightmares, he sometimes stood in a dungeon far beneath this castle, blood that was not his own coating his hands, screams that were not his own ringing in his ears, begging him for mercy.
Not him, he told himself. The Valg prince had done it. His father had done it.
He’d still had difficulty meeting the stare of the new Captain of the Guard, a friend of Nesryn Faliq, as he’d asked the man to show him how to fight, help him become stronger, faster.
Never again. Never again would he be weak and useless and frightened.