“I’m sorry Nesryn left,” Yrene murmured into the dim light.
I hold you to no promises. And I will hold to none of my own.
“I promised her an adventure,” Chaol admitted. “She deserved to go on one.”
Yrene was quiet enough that he turned from the garden doors. She had snuggled deep into his bed, her attention fixed wholly on him. “What about you? What do you deserve?”
“Nothing. I deserve nothing.”
Yrene studied him. “I don’t agree at all,” she murmured, eyelids drooping.
He monitored the exits again. After a few minutes, he said, “I was given enough and squandered it.”
Chaol looked over at her, but Yrene’s face was softened with sleep, her breathing steady.
He watched her for a long while.
Yrene was still sleeping when dawn broke.
Chaol had dozed for a few minutes at a time, as much as he’d allow himself.
But as the sun crept across the bedroom floor, he found himself washing his face. Scrubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Yrene didn’t stir as he moved out of the suite and into the hall. The guards were precisely where Kashin had ordered them to remain. And they told him precisely where he needed to go when he met them each in the eye and asked for directions.
And then he informed them that if Yrene were harmed while he was gone, he’d shatter every bone in their bodies.
Minutes later, he found the training courtyard Yrene had mentioned yesterday.
It was already full of guards, some of whom eyed him and some of whom ignored him fully. Some of whom he recognized from Shen’s shift, and gave him a nod.
One of the guards he did not know approached him, older and grayer than the rest.
Like Brullo, his former instructor and Weapons Master.
Dead—hanging from those gates.
Chaol pushed away the image. Replaced it with the healer still asleep in his bed. How she had looked when she’d declared to the prince, the world, that she felt safer there. With him.
He replaced the pain that rippled through him at the sight of the exercising guards, the sight of this private training space, so similar to the one in which he’d spent so many hours of his life, with the image of Shen’s artificial arm, the unwavering, quiet strength he’d felt supporting him while he’d mounted his horse. No less a man without that arm—no less a guard.
“Lord Westfall,” said the gray-haired guard, using his language. “What can I do for you at this hour?” The man seemed astute enough to know if there had been something related to the attack, this would not be the place to discuss it. No, the man knew Chaol had come here for a different reason, and read the tension in his body as not a source of alarm, but intrigue.
“I trained for years with men from my continent,” Chaol said, lifting the sword and dagger he’d brought with him. “Learned as much as they know.”
The older guard’s brows flicked up.
Chaol held the man’s stare. “I would like to learn what you know.”
The aging guard—Hashim—worked him until Chaol could barely breathe. Even in the chair. And out of it.
Hashim, who was a rank below captain and oversaw the guards’ training, found ways for Chaol to do their exercises either with someone bracing his feet or modified versions from the chair.
He had indeed worked with Shen a year ago—many of the guards had. They’d banded together, assisting Shen in any way they could with the reorienting of his body, his way of fighting, during those long months of recovery.
So not one of them stared or laughed. Not one of them whispered.
They were all too busy, too tired, to bother anyway.
The sun rose over the courtyard, and still they worked. Still Hashim showed him new ways to strike with a blade. How to disarm an opponent.
A different way of thinking, of killing. Of defending. A different language of death.
They broke at breakfast, all of them near-trembling with exhaustion.
Even winded, Chaol could have kept going. Not for any reserve of strength, but because he wanted to.
Yrene was waiting when he returned to the suite and bathed.
Six hours, they then spent lost in that darkness. At the end of it, the pain had wrecked him, Yrene was shaking with exhaustion, but a precise sort of awareness had awoken within his feet. Crept up past his ankles. As if the numbness were a receding tide.
Yrene returned to the Torre that night under heavy guard, and he fell into the deepest sleep of his life.
Chaol was waiting for Hashim in the training ring before dawn.
And the next dawn.
And the next.
PART TWO
MOUNTAINS AND SEAS
29
Storms waylaid Nesryn and Sartaq on their way out of the northern Asimil Mountains.
Upon awakening, the prince had taken one look at the bruised clouds and ordered Nesryn to secure everything she could on their rocky outcropping. Kadara shifted from clawed foot to clawed foot, rustling her wings as her golden eyes monitored the storm galloping in.
That high up, the crack of thunder echoed off every rock and crevice, and as Nesryn and Sartaq sat pressed against the stone wall beneath the overhang, winds lashing them, she could have sworn even the mountain beneath shuddered. But Kadara held fast against the storm, settling herself in front of them, a veritable wall of white and golden feathers.
Still the icy rain managed to find them, freezing Nesryn down to her bones even with the thick ruk leathers and heavy wool blanket Sartaq insisted she wrap around herself. Her teeth chattered violently enough to make her jaw hurt, and her hands were so numb and raw that she kept them tucked beneath her armpits just to savor any scrap of warmth.
Even before magic had vanished, Nesryn had never longed for magical gifts. And after magic had disappeared, after the decrees banning it and the terrible hunts for those who had once wielded it, Nesryn hadn’t dared to even think about magic. She’d been content to practice her archery, to learn how to wield knives and swords, to master her body until it, too, was a weapon. Magic had failed, she’d told her father and sister whenever they asked. Good steel would not.
Yet sitting on that cliff, whipped by the wind and rain until she couldn’t remember what warmth felt like, Nesryn found herself wishing for a spark of flame in her veins. Or at least for a certain Fire-Bringer to come swaggering around the corner of the cliff to warm them.
But Aelin was far away—unaccounted for, if Hasar’s report was to be believed, which Nesryn did. The true question was whether Aelin and her court’s vanishing were due to some awful play by Morath, or some scheme of the queen herself.
Having seen what Aelin was capable of in Rifthold, the plans she’d laid out and enacted without any of them knowing … Nesryn’s money was on Aelin. The queen would show up when and where she wished—at precisely the moment she intended. Nesryn supposed that was why she liked the queen: there were plans so long in the making that for someone who let the world deem her unchecked and brash, Aelin showed a great deal of restraint in keeping it all hidden.
And as that storm raged around Nesryn and Sartaq, she wondered if Aelin Galathynius might yet have some card up her sleeve that even her court might not know about. She prayed Aelin did. For all their sakes.
But magic had failed before, Nesryn reminded herself as her teeth clacked against each other. And she’d do everything she could to find a way to fight Morath without it.
It was hours before the storm at last lumbered off to terrorize other parts of the world, Sartaq only easing to his feet when Kadara fanned her feathers, shaking off the rain. Spraying them in the process, but Nesryn was in no position to complain, when the ruk had taken the brunt of the storm’s wrath for them.
Of course, it also left the saddle damp, which in turn led to a fairly uncomfortable ride as they soared down the brisk, clean winds from the mountains and into the sprawling grasslands below.
With the delay, they were forced to camp for another night, this time in a copse of trees, again with not so much as an ember to warm them. Nesryn kept her mouth shut about it—the cold that lingered along her bones, the roots that dug into her back through the bedroll, the empty pit in her stomach that fruit and dried meat and day-old bread couldn’t fill.
Sartaq, to his credit, gave her his blankets and asked if she wanted a change of his clothes. But she barely knew him, she realized. This man she’d flown off with, this prince with his sulde and sharp-eyed ruk … He was little more than a stranger.