Manon took a breath. Another.
“We have known only bloodshed and violence for five hundred years. We will know it for another five hundred yet.”
“Liar,” someone shouted. “We fly to glory.”
But Asterin moved, unbuttoning her leather jacket, then hoisting up her white shirt. Rising in the stirrups to bare her scarred, brutalized abdomen. “She does not lie.”
UNCLEAN
There, the word remained stamped. Would always be stamped.
“How many of you,” Asterin called out, “have been similarly branded? By your Matron, by your coven leader? How many of you have had your stillborn witchlings burned before you might hold them?”
The silence that fell now was different from before. Shaking—shuddering.
Manon glanced at the Thirteen to find tears in Ghislaine’s eyes as she took in the brand on Asterin’s womb. Tears in the eyes of all of them, who had not known.
And it was for those tears, which Manon had never seen, that she faced the host again. “You will be killed in this war, or after it. And you will never see our homeland again.”
“What is it that you want, Blackbeak?” Petrah asked from the archway.
“Ride with us,” Manon breathed. “Fly with us. Against Morath. Against the people who would keep you from your homeland, your future.” Murmuring broke out again. Manon pushed ahead, “An Ironteeth-Crochan alliance. Perhaps one to break our curse at last.”
Again, that shuddering silence. Like a storm about to break.
Asterin sat back in the saddle, but kept her shirt open.
“The choice of how our people’s future shall be shaped is yours,” Manon told each of the witches assembled, all the Blackbeaks who might fly to war and never return. “But I will tell you this.” Her hands shook, and she fisted them on her thighs. “There is a better world out there. And I have seen it.”
Even the Thirteen looked toward her now.
“I have seen witch and human and Fae dwell together in peace. And it is not a weakness to do so, but a strength. I have met kings and queens whose love for their kingdoms, their peoples, is so great that the self is secondary. Whose love for their people is so strong that even in the face of unthinkable odds, they do the impossible.”
Manon lifted her chin. “You are my people. Whether my grandmother decrees it so or not, you are my people, and always will be. But I will fly against you, if need be, to ensure that there is a future for those who cannot fight for it themselves. Too long have we preyed on the weak, relished doing so. It is time that we became better than our foremothers.” The words she had given the Thirteen months ago. “There is a better world out there,” she said again. “And I will fight for it.” She turned Abraxos away, toward the plunge behind them. “Will you?”
Manon nodded to Petrah. Eyes bright, the Heir only nodded back. They would be permitted to leave as they had arrived: unharmed.
So Manon nudged Abraxos, and he leaped into the sky, the Thirteen following suit.
Not a child of war.
But of peace.
CHAPTER 44
“How shall I carve you up today, Aelin?”
Cairn’s words were a push of hot breath at her ear as his knife scraped down her bare thigh.
No. No, it couldn’t have been a dream.
The escape, Rowan, the ship to Terrasen—
Cairn dug the tip of his dagger into the flesh above her knee, and she gritted her teeth as blood swelled and spilled. As he began twisting the blade, a little deeper with each rotation.
He had done it so many times now. All over her body.
He would only stop when he hit bone. When she was screaming and screaming.
A dream. An illusion. Her escape from him, from Maeve, had been another illusion.
Had she said it? Had she said where the keys were hidden?
She couldn’t stop the sob that ripped from her.
Then a cool, cultured voice purred, “All that training, and this is what becomes of you?”
Not real. Arobynn, standing on the other side of the altar, was not real. Even if he looked it, his red hair shining, his clothes impeccable.
Her former master gave her a half smile. “Even Sam held out better than this.”
Cairn twisted the knife again, slicing through muscle. She arched, her scream ringing in her ears. From far away, Fenrys snarled.
“You could get out of these chains, if you really wanted,” Arobynn said, frowning with distaste. “If you really tried.”
No, she couldn’t, and everything had been a dream, a lie—
“You let yourself remain captive. Because the moment you are free …” Arobynn chuckled. “Then you must offer yourself up, a lamb to slaughter.”
She clawed and thrashed against the shredding in her leg, not hearing Cairn as he sneered. Only hearing the King of the Assassins, unseen and unnoted beside her.
“Deep down, you’re hoping you’ll be here long enough that the young King of Adarlan will pay the price. Deep down, you know you’re hiding here, waiting for him to clear the path.” Arobynn leaned against the side of the altar, cleaning his nails with a dagger. “Deep down, you know it’s not really fair, that those gods picked you. That Elena picked you instead of him. She bought you time to live, yes, but you were still chosen to pay the price. Her price. And the gods’.”
Arobynn ran a long-fingered hand down the side of her face. “Do you see what I tried to spare you from all these years? What you might have avoided had you remained Celaena, remained with me?” He smiled. “Do you see, Aelin?”
She could not answer. Had no voice.
Cairn hit bone, and—
Aelin lunged upward, hands grasping for her thigh.
No chains weighed her. No mask smothered her.
No dagger had been twisted into her body.
Breathing hard, the scent of musty sheets clinging to her nose, the sounds of her screaming replaced by the drowsy chirping of birds, Aelin scrubbed at her face.
The prince who’d fallen asleep beside her was already running a hand down her back in silent, soothing strokes.
Beyond the small window of the ramshackle inn somewhere near Fenharrow and Adarlan’s border, thick veils of mist drifted.
A dream. Just a dream.
She twisted, setting her feet to the threadbare carpet on the uneven wood floor.
“Dawn isn’t for another hour,” Rowan said.
Yet Aelin reached for her shirt. “I’ll get warmed up, then.” Maybe run, as she had not been able to do in weeks and weeks.
Rowan sat up, missing nothing. “Training can wait, Aelin.” They’d been doing it for weeks now, as thorough and grueling as it had been at Mistward.
She shoved her legs into her pants, then buckled on her sword belt. “No, it can’t.”
Aelin dodged to the side, Rowan’s blade sailing past her head, snipping a few strands from the end of her braid.
She blinked, breathing hard, and barely brought Goldryn up in time to parry his next attack. Metal reverberated through the stinging blisters coating her hands.
New blisters—for a new body. Three weeks at sea, and her calluses had barely formed again. Every day, hours spent training at swordplay and archery and combat, and her hands were still soft.
Grunting, Aelin crouched low, thighs burning as she prepared to spring.
But Rowan halted in the dusty courtyard of the inn, his hatchet and sword dropping to his sides. In the first light of dawn, the inn could have passed for pleasant, the sea breeze from the nearby coast drifting through the lingering leaves on the hunched apple tree in the center of the space.
A gathering storm to the north had forced their ship to find harbor last night—and after weeks at sea, none of them had hesitated to spend a few hours on land. To learn what in hell had happened while they’d been gone.
The answer: war.
Everywhere, war raged. But where the fighting occurred, the aging innkeeper didn’t know. Boats didn’t stop at the port anymore—and the great warships just sailed past. Whether they were enemy or friendly, he also didn’t know. Knew absolutely nothing, it seemed. Including how to cook. And clean his inn.
They’d need to be back on the seas within a day or two, if they were to make it to Terrasen quickly. There were too many storms in the North to have risked crossing directly there, their captain had said. This time of year, it was safer to make it to the continent’s coast, then sail up it. Even if that command and those very storms had landed them here: somewhere between Fenharrow and Adarlan’s border. With Rifthold a few days ahead.