“They’re hateful, cowardly wretches.” Yrene crossed her arms and scowled at the man tied to the cot. “Utterly pathetic,” she spat toward him—the demon inside him.
The man hissed. Yrene only smiled. The man—the demon—whimpered.
Aelin blinked, unsure whether to laugh or fall to her knees. “Show me. Do whatever it is you do, but show me.”
So the healer did. Hands shining, she laid them atop the man’s chest. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
Yrene panted, brows scrunching. For long minutes, the shrieking continued.
Borte said, “It’s not very exciting with them tied down, is it?”
Sartaq threw her an exasperated glare. As if this were a conversation they’d already had many times. “You can be on mucking duty, if you’d prefer.”
Borte rolled her eyes, but turned to Aelin, looking her over with a frankness that Aelin could only appreciate. “Any other missions for me?”
Aelin grinned. “Not yet. Soon, perhaps.”
Borte grinned right back. “Please. Please spare me from the tedium of this.”
Aelin glanced toward the healer radiant with light. “How many does this make today?”
“Ten,” Borte grumbled.
Aelin asked Chaol, “And how many can she do every day?”
“Fifteen, at most. Some require more energy than others to expel, so those days it’s less.”
Aelin tried to do the math on how many infested soldiers were left on the field. “And once they’re cured? What do you do with them then?”
“We interrogate them,” Chaol said, frowning. “See what their stories are, how they wound up captured. Where their allegiances lie.”
“And you believe them?” Fenrys asked.
Hasar patted the hilt of her fine sword. “Our interrogators are skilled at retrieving the truth.”
Aelin ignored the roiling in her stomach.
“So you free them,” Gavriel said, silent for minutes now, “and then torture them?”
“This is war,” Hasar said simply. “We leave them able to function. But we will not risk sparing their lives only to find a new army at our backs.”
“Some willingly joined Erawan,” Chaol said quietly. “Some willingly took the ring. Yrene can tell, when she’s in there, who wanted it or not. She doesn’t bother to save those who gladly knelt. So most of those she does save were either fools or taken forcibly.”
“Some want to fight for us,” Sartaq said. “Those who pass our vetting process are allowed to begin training with the foot soldiers. Not many of them, but a few.”
Fine. Fine, and fine.
Yrene gasped, her light flaring bright enough that Aelin squinted.
The man bound to the cot coughed, arching.
Black, noxious vomit sprayed.
Borte grimaced, waving away the smell. Then the black smoke that rippled from his mouth.
Yrene slumped back, Chaol shooting out an arm to brace her. The healer only took a perch on the arm of his chair, a hand on her heaving chest.
Aelin gave her a moment to catch her breath. To manage such a feat was remarkable. To do it while pregnant … Aelin shook her head in wonder.
Yrene said to no one in particular, “That demon didn’t want to go.”
“But it’s gone now?” Aelin asked.
Yrene pointed to the man on the cot, now opening his eyes. Brown, not black, gazed upward.
“Thank you,” was all the man said, his voice raw.
And human. Utterly human.
CHAPTER 67
Rowan followed Aelin as she meandered across the battlefield, to the edge of the Silver Lake. She stopped only now and then to pick up any worthwhile enemy weapons. There were few.
The others had dispersed, Gavriel lingering to learn how Yrene healed the Valg, Fenrys heading off with Chaol to meet with emissaries from the wild men, and the khaganate royals seeing to their troops.
They would leave in two days, if the weather held. Two days, and then they’d begin the push north.
Thank the gods. Even though they were the last beings Rowan wished to thank.
Aelin halted at the rocky shore, peering across the mirror-flat expanse now choked with debris. She rested a hand atop Goldryn’s hilt, flame dancing at her fingers, seemingly into the red stone itself.
“It would take years,” she observed, “to heal everyone infected by the Valg.”
“Each of those soldiers has a family, friends who would want us to try.”
“I know.” The chill wind whipped her hair across her face, blowing northward.
“Then why the walk out here?” She’d gone contemplative during their meeting in the tent, her brow furrowing.
“Could Yrene heal them? Erawan and Maeve? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
“Is Erawan’s body made by him, or stolen? Is Maeve’s?” Rowan shook his head. “They might be wholly different.”
“I don’t see how I can ask Yrene to do it. Ask it of Chaol.” Aelin swallowed. “To even put Yrene near Erawan or Maeve … I can’t do it.”
Rowan wouldn’t be able to, either. Not for a thousand different reasons.
“But is it a mistake to put Yrene’s safety above that of this entire world?” Aelin mused, examining one of the enemy daggers she’d pilfered. An unusually fine blade, likely stolen in the first place. “She’s the greatest weapon we have, if the keys are not in play. Are we fools not to push to use it?”
It wasn’t his choice, his call. But he could offer her a sounding board. “Will you be able to live with yourself if something happens to Yrene, to her unborn child?”
“No. But the rest of the world will live, at least. My guilt would be secondary to that.”
“And if you don’t push Yrene to try to destroy them, and Erawan or Maeve wins—what then?”
“There is still the Lock. There’s still me.”
Rowan swallowed. Saw the reason she’d needed to be away from the others, needed to walk. “Yrene is a ray of hope for you. For us. That you might not need to forge the Lock at all. You, or Dorian.”
“The gods demand it.”
“The gods can go to hell.”
Aelin chucked away the dagger. “I hate this. I really do.”
He slid an arm around her shoulders. It was all he could offer her.
Over—she’d said she wanted it to be over. He’d do all he could to make it so.
Aelin leaned her head against his chest, and they stared across the cold lake in silence. “Would you let me do it, if I were Yrene? If I were carrying our child?”
He failed to block out the image of that dream—of Aelin, heavily pregnant, their children around her. “I don’t let you do anything.”
She waved a hand. “You know what I mean.”
He took a moment to answer. “No. Even if the world ended because of it, I couldn’t bear it.”
And with that Lock, he might very well have to make that decision, too.
Rowan ran his fingers over the claiming marks on her neck. “I told you that love was a weakness. It would be far easier if we all hated each other.”
She snorted. “Give it a few weeks on the road with this army, in those mountains, and we might not be such pleasant allies anymore.”
Rowan kissed the top of her head. “Gods help us.”
But Aelin pulled away at the words, the phrase that dropped off his tongue. She frowned toward the camped army.
“What?” he asked.
“I want to see those Wyrdmark books Chaol and Yrene brought with them.”
“What does this say?” Aelin asked Borte, tapping a finger on a scribbled line of text in Halha, the tongue of the southern continent.
Seated beside her at the desk in Prince Sartaq’s war tent, the ruk rider craned her neck to study the handwritten note beside a long column of Wyrdmarks. “A good spell for encouraging your herb beds to grow.”
Across the desk, Rowan snorted. A book lay open before him, his progress through it far slower than Aelin’s.
Most of the tomes were wholly written in Wyrdmarks, but annotations scribbled in the margins had driven her to seek out the young rukhin. Borte, thoroughly bored with helping Yrene, had leaped at the chance to assist them, passing Valg duty onto her scowling betrothed.