Kingdom of Ash

Yrene hated the Ferian Gap. Hated the tight air between the two gargantuan peaks, hated the bones and wyvern refuse littering the rocky floor, hated the reek that slithered from whatever openings had been carved into the mountains.

At least it was empty. Though they had not yet decided if that was a blessing.

The two armies now filled the Gap, Hasar’s soldiers already preparing to make the crossing back over the Avery into the tangle of Oakwald. That trek would take an age, even with the rukhin carrying the wagons and heavier supplies. And then the push northward through the forest, taking the ancient road that lay along the Avery’s northern branch.

“Pass me that knife there,” Yrene said to Lady Elide, pointing with her chin to her supply kit. Spread on a blanket on the bottom of the covered wagon, a Darghan soldier lay unconscious, cold sweat beading his brow. He hadn’t seen a healer after getting a slice to the thigh at the battle for Anielle, and when he’d fallen clean off his horse this morning, he’d been hauled in here.

Elide’s hands remained steady as she plucked up the thin knife and passed it to Yrene.

“Will it wake him?” she asked while Yrene bent over the unconscious warrior and examined the infected wound that was gruesome enough to turn most stomachs.

“My magic has him in a deep sleep.” Yrene angled the knife. “He’ll stay out until I wake him.”

Elide, to her credit, didn’t retch as Yrene began to clean out the wound, scraping away the dead, infected bits.

“No sign of blood poisoning, thank the gods,” Yrene announced as the cloth beside the man became covered in the discarded rot. “But we’ll need to put him on a special brew to make sure.”

“Your magic can’t just do a sweep through him?” Elide tossed the soiled cloth into the nearby waste bucket, and laid down another.

“It can, and I will,” Yrene said, fighting her gag as the reek from the wound stuffed itself up her nostrils, “but that might not be enough, if the infection truly wishes to make an appearance.”

“You talk about illnesses as if they were living creatures.”

“They are, to some degree,” Yrene said. “With their own secrets and temperaments. You sometimes have to outsmart them, just as you would any foe.”

Yrene took the mirrored lantern from beside the bed and adjusted the plates within to shine a beam of light on the infected slice. When the brightness revealed no further signs of rotting skin, she set down both lantern and knife. “That wasn’t as bad as I’d feared,” she admitted, and held out her hands over the bloody wound.

Warmth and light rose within her, like a memory of the summer in this frigid mountain pass, and as her hands glowed, Yrene’s magic guided her within the man’s body. It flowed along blood and sinew and bone, knitting and mending, listening to the aches and fever now running rampant. Soothing them, calming them. Wiping them away.

She was panting when she finished, but the man’s breathing had eased. The sweat on his brow had dried.

“Remarkable,” Elide whispered, gaping at the now-smooth leg of the warrior.

Yrene just turned her head to the side and vomited into the waste bucket.

Elide leapt to her feet.

But Yrene held up a hand, wiping her mouth with the other. “As joyful as it is to know I shall soon be a mother, the realities of the first few months are … not so joyous.”

Elide limped to the ewer of drinking water and poured a cup. “Here. Is there anything I can get you? Can—can you heal your own sickness, or do you need someone else to?”

Yrene sipped at the water, letting it wash away the bitter bile. “The vomiting is a sign that things are progressing with the babe.” A hand drifted to her middle. “It’s not something that can really be cured, not unless I had a healer at my side day and night, easing the nausea.”

“It’s become that bad?” Elide frowned.

“Terrible timing, I know.” Yrene sighed. “The best options are ginger—anything ginger. Which I would rather save for the upset stomachs of our soldiers. Peppermint can help, too.” She gestured toward her satchel. “I have some dried leaves in there. Just put some in a cup with the hot water and I’ll be fine.” Behind them, a small brazier held a steaming kettle, used for disinfecting supplies rather than making tea.

Elide was instantly moving, and Yrene watched in silence while the lady prepared the tea.

“I could heal your leg, you know.”

Elide stilled, a hand reaching for the kettle. “Really?”

Yrene waited until the lady had pressed a cup of the peppermint tea into her hands before she nodded to the lady’s boots. “Can I see the injury?”

Elide hesitated, but took her seat on the stool beside Yrene and tugged off her boot, then the sock beneath.

Yrene surveyed the scarring, the twisted bone. Elide had told her days ago why she had the injury.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection yourself.” Yrene sipped from her tea, deemed it still too hot, and set it aside before patting her lap. Elide obeyed, putting her foot on Yrene’s thigh. Carefully, Yrene touched the scars and mangled bones, her magic doing the same.

The brutality of the injury was enough to take Yrene’s breath away. And to make her grind her teeth, knowing how young Elide had been, how unbearably painful it was—knowing that her very uncle had done this to her.

“What’s wrong?” Elide breathed.

“Nothing—I mean, beyond what you already know.”

Such cruelty. Such terrible, unforgivable cruelty.

Yrene coiled her magic back into herself, but kept her hands on Elide’s ankle. “This injury would require weeks of work to repair, and with our current circumstances, I don’t think either of us can undergo it.” Elide nodded. “But if we survive this war, I can help you, if you wish.”

“What would it entail?”

“There are two roads,” Yrene said, letting some of her magic seep into Elide’s leg, soothing the aching muscles, the spots where bone ground against bone with no buffer. The lady sighed. “The first is the hardest. It would require me to completely restructure your foot and ankle. Meaning, I would have to break apart the bone, take out the parts that healed or fused incorrectly, and then regrow them. You could not walk while I did it, and even with the help I could give you for the pain, the recovery would be agonizing.” There was no way around that truth. “I’d need three weeks to take apart your bones and put them back together, but you’d need at least a month of resting and learning to walk on it again.”

Elide’s face had gone pale. “And the other option?”

“The other option would be to not do the healing, but to give you salve—like the one you said Lorcan gave you—to help with the aches. But I will warn you: the pain will never entirely leave you. With the way your bones grind together here”—she gently touched the spot on Elide’s upper foot, then a spot down by her toes—“arthritis is already setting in. As the bones continue to grind together, the arthritis, that pain you feel when you walk, will only worsen. There may come a point in a few years—maybe five, maybe ten, it’s hard to tell—when you find the pain to be so bad that no salve can help you.”

“So I would need the healing then, regardless.”

“It’s up to you whether you want the healing at all. I only want you to have a better idea of the road ahead.” She smiled at the lady. “It’s up to you to decide how you wish to face it.”

Yrene tapped Elide’s foot, and the lady lowered it back to the floor before putting her sock back on, then her boot. Efficient, easy motions.

Yrene sipped from her tea, cool enough now to drink. The fresh verve of the peppermint zapped through her, clearing her mind and calming her stomach.

Elide said, “I don’t know if I can face that pain again.”

Yrene nodded. “With that sort of injury, it would require facing a great many things inside yourself.” She smiled toward the wagon entrance. “My husband and I just went through one such journey together.”

“Was it hard?”

“Incredibly. But he did it. We did it.”

Elide considered, then shrugged. “We’d have to survive this war first, I suppose. If we live … then we can talk about it.”

“Fair enough.”

Elide frowned at the wagon’s ceiling. “I wonder what they’ve learned up there.”

Up in the Omega and Northern Fang, where Chaol and the others were now meeting with the breeders and wranglers who had been left behind.

Yrene didn’t want to know more than that, and Chaol had not offered any other insight into how they’d be extracting information from the men.

“Hopefully something worth our visit to this awful place,” Yrene muttered, then drained the rest of her tea. The sooner they left, the better.

It was as if the gods were laughing at her—at them both. A knock on the wagon doors had Elide limping toward them, just before Borte appeared. Her face uncharacteristically solemn.

Yrene braced herself, but it was Elide whom the ruk rider addressed.

“You’re to come with me,” Borte said breathlessly. Behind the girl, Arcas waited, a sparrow perched on the saddle. Falkan Ennar. Not a companion, Yrene realized, but an additional guard.

Elide asked, “What’s wrong?”

Borte shifted, with impatience or nerves, Yrene couldn’t tell. “They found someone in the mountain. They want you up there—to decide what to do with him.”

Elide had gone still. Utterly still.

Yrene asked, “Who?”

Borte’s mouth tightened. “Her uncle.”

Elide wondered if the rukhin would shun her forever if she vomited all over Arcas. Indeed, during the swift, steep flight up to the bridge spanning the Omega and Northern Fang, it was all she could do not to hurl the contents of her stomach all over the bird’s feathers.

“They found him hiding in the Northern Fang,” Borte had said before she’d hauled Elide into the saddle, Falkan already flying up the sheer face of the pass. “Trying to pretend to be a wyvern trainer. But one of the other trainers sold him out. Queen Aelin called for you as soon as they had him secure. Your uncle, not the trainer, I mean.”

Elide hadn’t been able to respond. Had only nodded.

Vernon was here. At the Gap. Not in Morath with his master, but here.

Gavriel and Fenrys were waiting when Arcas landed in the cavernous opening into the Northern Fang. The rough-hewn rock loomed like a gaping maw, the reek of what lay within making her stomach turn again. Like rotting meat and worse. Valg, undoubtedly, but also a smell of hate and cruelty and tight, airless corridors.

The two Fae males silently fell into step beside her as they entered. No sign of Lorcan, or Aelin. Or her uncle.

Men lay dead in some of the dim hallways that Fenrys and Gavriel led her through, killed by the rukhin when they’d swept in. None of them leaked black blood, but they still had that reek to them. Like this place had infected their very souls.

“They’re just up here,” Gavriel said quietly—gently.

Elide’s hands began shaking, and Fenrys placed one of his own on her shoulder. “He’s well restrained.”

She knew not with mere ropes or chains. Likely with fire and ice and perhaps even Lorcan’s own dark power.

But it did not stop her from shaking, from how small and brittle she became as they turned a corner and beheld Aelin, Rowan, and Lorcan standing before a shut door. Farther down the hall, Nesryn and Sartaq, Lord Chaol with them, waited. Letting them decide what to do.

Letting Elide decide.

Lorcan’s grave face was frozen with rage, his depthless eyes like frigid pools of night. He said quietly, “You don’t need to go in there.”

“We had you brought here,” Aelin said, her own face the portrait of restrained wrath, “so you could choose what to do with him. If you wish to speak to him before we do.”

One look at the knives at Rowan’s and Lorcan’s sides, at the way the queen’s fingers curled, and Elide knew what their sort of talking would include. “You mean to torture him for information?” She didn’t dare meet Aelin’s eyes.

“Before he receives what is due to him,” Lorcan growled.

Elide glanced between the male she loved and the queen she served. And her limp had never felt so pronounced, so obvious, as she took a step closer. “Why is he here?”

“He has yet to reveal that,” Rowan said. “And though we have not confirmed that you are here, he suspects.” A glance toward Lorcan. “The call is yours, Lady.”

“You will kill him regardless?”

Lorcan asked, “Do you wish us to?” Months ago, she had told him to. And Lorcan had agreed to do it. That had been before Vernon and the ilken had come to abduct her—before the night when she had been willing to embrace death rather than go with him to Morath.

Elide peered inward. They gave her the courtesy of silence. “I would like to speak to him before we decide his fate.”

A bow of Lorcan’s head was his only answer before he opened the door behind him.

Torches flickered, the chamber empty save for a worktable against one wall.

And her uncle, bound in thick irons, seated on a wooden chair.

His finery was worn, his dark hair unkempt, as if he’d struggled while they’d bound him. Indeed, blood crusted one of his nostrils, his nose swollen.

Shattered.

A glance to her right confirmed the blood on Lorcan’s knuckles.

Vernon straightened as Elide stopped several feet away, the door shutting, Lorcan and Aelin mere steps behind. The others remained in the hall.

“What mighty company you keep these days, Elide,” Vernon said.

That voice. Even with the broken nose, that silky, horrible voice raked talons along her skin.

But Elide kept her chin up. Kept her eyes upon her uncle. “Why are you here?”

“First you let the brute at me,” Vernon drawled, nodding to Lorcan, “then you send in the sweet-faced girl to coax answers?” A smile toward Aelin. “A technique of yours, Majesty?”

Aelin leaned against the stone wall, hands sliding into her pockets. Nothing human in her face. Though Elide marked the way her hands, even within their confines, shifted.

Bound in irons. Battered.

Only weeks ago, it had been the queen herself in Vernon’s place. And now it seemed she stood here through sheer will. Stood here, ready to pry the information from Vernon, for Elide’s sake.

It strengthened Elide enough that she said to her uncle, “Your breaths are limited. I would suggest you use them wisely.”

“Ruthless.” Vernon smirked. “The witch-blood in your veins ran true after all.”

She couldn’t stand it. To be in this room with him. To breathe the same air as the man who had smiled while her father had been executed, smiled while he locked her in that tower for ten years. Smiled while he’d touched Kaltain, done far worse perhaps, then tried to sell Elide to Erawan for breeding. “Why?” she asked.

It was the only question she could really think of, that really mattered. “Why do any of it?”

“Since my breaths are limited,” Vernon said, “I suppose it makes no difference what I tell you.” A small smile curled his lips. “Because I could,” her uncle said. Lorcan growled. “Because my brother, your father, was an insufferable brute, whose only qualification to rule was the order of our birth. A warrior-brute,” Vernon spat, sneering toward Lorcan. Then at Elide. “Your mother’s preference seems to have passed to you, too.” A hateful shake of the head. “Such a pity. She was a rare beauty, you know. Such a pity that she was killed, defending Her Majesty.” Heat flared across the room, but Aelin’s face remained unmoved. “There might have been a place for her in Perranth had she not—”

“Enough,” Elide said softly, but not weakly. She took another step toward him. “So you were jealous. Of my father. Jealous of his strength, his talent. Of his wife.” Vernon opened his mouth, but Elide lifted a hand. “I am not done yet.”

Vernon blinked.

Elide kept her breathing steady, shoulders back. “I do not care why you are here. I do not care what they plan to do with you. But I want you to know that once I walk from this room, I will never think of you again. Your name will be erased from Perranth, from Terrasen, from Adarlan. There will never be a whisper of you, nor any reminder. You will be forgotten.”

Vernon paled—just slightly. Then he smiled. “Erased from Perranth? You say that as if you do not know, Lady Elide.” He leaned forward as much as his chains would allow. “Perranth now lies in the hands of Morath. Your city has been sacked.”

The words rippled through her like a blow, and even Lorcan sucked in a breath.

Vernon leaned back, smug as a cat. “Go ahead and erase me, then. With the rubble, it will not be hard to do.”

Perranth had been captured by Morath. Elide didn’t need to glance over a shoulder to know that Aelin’s eyes were near-glowing. Bad—this was far worse than they’d anticipated. They had to move quickly. Get to the North as fast as they could.

So Elide turned toward the door, Lorcan stalking ahead to open it for her.

“That’s it?” Vernon demanded.

Elide paused. Slowly turned. “What else could I have to say to you?”

“You did not ask me for details.” Another snake’s smile. “You still have not learned how to play the game, Elide.”

Elide returned his smile with one of her own. “There is nothing more that I care to hear from you.” She glanced toward Lorcan and Aelin, toward their companions gathered in the hall. “But they still have questions.”

Vernon’s face went the color of spoiled milk. “You mean to leave me in their hands, utterly defenseless?”

“I was defenseless when you let my leg remain unhealed,” she said, a steady sort of calm settling over her. “I was a child then, and I survived. You’re a grown man.” She let her lips curl in another smile. “We’ll see if you do, too.”

She didn’t try to hide her limp as she strode out. As she caught Lorcan’s eye and beheld the pride gleaming there.

Not a whisper—not one whisper from that voice who had guided her. Not from fear, but … Perhaps she did not need Anneith, Lady of Wise Things. Perhaps the goddess had known she herself was not needed.

Not anymore.

Aelin knew that one word from her, and Lorcan would rip out Vernon’s throat. Or perhaps begin with snapping bones.

Or skin him alive, as Rowan had done with Cairn.

As she followed Elide, the Lady of Perranth’s head still high, Aelin forced her own breathing to remain steady. To brace herself for what was to come. She could get through it. Push past the shaking in her hands, the cold sweat down her back. To learn what they needed, she could find some way to endure this next task.

Elide halted in the hall, Gavriel, Rowan, and Fenrys taking a step closer. No sign of Nesryn, Chaol, or Sartaq, though one shout would likely summon them in this festering warren.

Gods, the stench of this place. The feel of it.

She’d been debating for the past hour whether it was worth it to her sanity and stomach to shift back into her human form—to the blessed lesser sense of smell it offered.

Elide said to none of them in particular, “I don’t care what you do with him.”

“Do you care if he walks out alive?” Lorcan said with deadly calm.

Elide studied the male whose heart she held. “No.” Good, Aelin almost said. Elide added, “But make it quick.” Lorcan opened his mouth. Elide shook her head. “My father would wish it so.”

Punish them all, Kaltain had made Aelin once promise. And Vernon, from what Elide had told Aelin, seemed likely to have been at the top of Kaltain’s list.

“We need to question him first,” Rowan said. “See what he knows.”

“Then do it,” Elide said. “But when it’s time, make it quick.”

“Quick,” Fenrys mused, “but not painless?”

Elide’s face was cold, unyielding. “You can decide.”

Lorcan’s brutal smile told Aelin enough. So did the hatchet, twin to Rowan’s, gleaming at his side.

Her palms turned sweaty. Had been sweating since they’d bound up Vernon, since she’d seen the iron chains.

Aelin reached for her magic. Not the raging flame, but the cooling droplet of water. She listened to its silent song, letting it wash through her. And in its wake, she knew what she wished to do.

Lorcan took a step toward the chamber door, but Aelin blocked his path. She said, “Torture won’t get anything out of him.”

Even Elide blinked at that.

Aelin said, “Vernon likes to play games. Then I’ll play.”

Rowan’s eyes guttered. As if he could scent the sweat on her hands, as if he knew that doing it the old-fashioned way … it’d send her puking her guts up over the edge of the Northern Fang.

“Never underestimate the power of breaking a few bones,” Lorcan countered.

“See what you can get out of him,” Rowan said to her instead. Lorcan whirled, mouth opening, but Rowan snarled, “We can decide, here and now, what we wish to be as a court. Do we act like our enemies? Or do we find alternative methods to break them?”

Her mate met her stare, understanding shining there.

Lorcan still seemed ready to argue.

Above the phantom sting of chains on her wrists, the weight of a mask on her face, Aelin said, “We do it my way first. You can still kill him, but we try my way first.” When Lorcan didn’t object, she said, “We need some ale.”

Aelin slid the tankard of chilled ale across the table to where Vernon now sat, chains loosened enough for him to use his hands.

One false move, and her fire would melt him.

Only the Lion and Fenrys stood in the chamber, stationed by the doors.

Rowan and Lorcan had snarled at her order to stay in the hall, but Aelin had declared that they would only hinder her efforts here.

Aelin sipped from her own tankard and hummed. “An odd day, when one has to compliment their enemy’s good taste in ale.”

Vernon frowned at the tankard.

“It’s not poisoned,” Aelin said. “It’d defeat the purpose if it was.”

Vernon took a small sip. “I suppose you think plying me with ale and talking like we’re steadfast friends will get you what you want to know.”

“Would you prefer the alternative?” She smiled slightly. “I certainly don’t.”

“The methods may differ, but the end result will be the same.”

“Tell me something interesting, Vernon, and maybe it will change.”

His eyes swept over her. “Had I known you’d grow into such a queen, perhaps I would not have bothered to kneel for Adarlan.” A sly smile. “So different from your parents. Did your father ever torture a man?”

Ignoring the taunt, Aelin drank, swishing the ale in her mouth, as if it could wash away the taint of this place. “You tried and failed to win power for yourself. First by stealing it from Elide, then by trying to sell her to Erawan. Morath has sacked Perranth, and no doubt marches on Orynth, and yet we find you here. Hiding.” She drank again. “One might think Erawan’s favor had shifted elsewhere.”

“Perhaps he stationed me here for a reason, Majesty.”

Her magic had already felt him out. To make sure no heart of iron or Wyrdstone beat in his chest.

“I think you were cast aside,” she said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “I think you outlived your usefulness, especially after you failed to recapture Elide, and Erawan didn’t feel like entirely ridding himself of a lackey, but also didn’t want you skulking about. So here you are.” She waved a hand to the chamber, the mountain above them. “The lovely Ferian Gap.”

“It’s beautiful in the spring,” Vernon said.

Aelin smiled. “Again, tell me something interesting, and perhaps you’ll live to see it.”

“Do you swear it? On your throne? That you shall not kill me?” A glance toward Fenrys and Gavriel, stone-faced behind her. “Nor any of your companions?”

Aelin snorted. “I was hoping you’d hold out longer before showing your hand.” She drained the rest of her ale. “But yes. I swear that neither me nor any of my companions will kill you if you tell us what you know.”

Fenrys started. All the confirmation Vernon needed that she meant it—that they had not planned it.

Vernon drank deeply from his ale. Then said, “Maeve has come to Morath.”

Aelin was glad she was sitting. She kept her face bored, bland. “To see Erawan?”

“To unite with him.”