Each of the scars, the chipped teeth and broken claws, the mutilated tail—they weren’t the markings of a victim. Oh, no. They were the trophies of a survivor. Abraxos was a warrior who’d had all the odds stacked against him and survived. Learned from it. Triumphed.
Manon didn’t bother to look at the men behind her as she said, “Get out.” She kept staring into those dark eyes. “Leave the saddle and get out. If you bring a whip in here again, I’ll use it on you myself.”
“But—”
“Now.”
Muttering and clicking their tongues, the handlers shuffled out and shut the gate. When they were alone, Manon stroked the massive snout.
However the king had bred these beasts, Abraxos had somehow been born different. Smaller, but smarter. Or perhaps the others didn’t ever need to think. Cared for and trained, they did what they were told. But Abraxos had learned to survive, and perhaps that had opened his mind. He could understand her words—her expressions.
And if he could comprehend those things . . . he could possibly teach the other mounts of the Thirteen. It was a small edge, but an edge that could make them Wing Leader—and make them invincible against the king’s enemies.
“I am going to put this saddle on you,” she said, still cupping that snout. He shifted, but Manon grabbed on tight, forcing him to look at her. “You want out of this shithole? Then you’ll let me put this saddle on you to check the fit. And when we’re done, you’re going to let me look at your tail. Those human bastards cut off your spikes, so I’m going to build some for you. Iron ones. Like mine,” she said, and flashed her iron nails for him to see. “And fangs, too,” she added, baring her iron teeth. “It’s going to hurt, and you’re going to want to kill the men who put them in, but you’re going to let them do it, because if you don’t, then you will rot down here for the rest of your life. Understand?”
A long, hot huff of air into her hands.
“Once all that is done,” she said, smiling faintly at her wyvern, “you and I are going to learn how to fly. And then we’ll stain this kingdom red.”
•
Abraxos did everything she asked, though he growled at the handlers who inspected and poked and prodded, and nearly bit off the arm of the physician who had to dig out his rotted teeth to make way for the iron fangs. It took five days to do it all.
He almost took out a wall when they welded the iron spikes onto his tail, but Manon stood with him the entire time, talking to him about what it was like to ride with the Thirteen on their ironwood brooms and hunt down the Crochan witches. She told the stories as much to distract him as she did to remind the men that if they made a mistake, if they hurt him, her retribution would be a long, bloody process. Not one of them made an error.
During the five days they worked on him, she missed her riding lessons with the Thirteen. And with each passing day, the window for getting Abraxos airborne became smaller and smaller.
Manon stood with Asterin and Sorrel in the training hall, watching the tail end of the day’s sparring session. Sorrel had been working with the youngest coven of Blackbeaks—all of them under seventy, and few of them experienced.
“How bad?” Manon asked, crossing her arms.
Sorrel, small and dark-haired, crossed her arms as well. “Not as bad as we feared. But they’re still sorting out coven dynamics—and their leader is . . .” Sorrel frowned at a mousy-looking witch who had just been thrown to the ground by an inferior. “I’d suggest either having her coven decide what to do with her or picking a new leader. One weak coven in the wing and we could lose the War Games.”
The coven leader was panting on the hard stone floor, nose dripping blue blood. Manon ground her teeth. “Give her two days—let’s see if she sorts herself out.” No need to have word of unstable covens get around. “But have Vesta take her out tonight,” Manon added, glancing to the red-haired beauty leading another coven in archery drills. “To wherever she’s been going to torment the men in the Northern Fang.”
Sorrel raised her thick brows innocently, and Manon rolled her eyes. “You’re a worse liar than Vesta. You think I haven’t noticed those men grinning at her at all hours of the day? Or the bite marks on them? Just keep the death toll down. We have enough to worry about as it is—we don’t need a mutiny from the mortals.”
Asterin snorted, but when Manon gave her a sidelong look, the witch kept her gaze ahead, face all too innocent. Of course, if Vesta had been bedding and bleeding the men, then Asterin had been right there with her. Neither of them had reported anything about the men tasting strange.
“As you will it, Lady,” Sorrel said, a faint hint of color on her tan cheeks. If Manon was ice and Asterin was fire, then Sorrel was rock. Her grandmother had told her on occasion to make Sorrel her Second, as ice and stone were sometimes too similar. But without Asterin’s flame, without her Second being able to rile up a host or rip out the throat of any challenger to Manon’s dominance, Manon would not have led the Thirteen so successfully. Sorrel was grounded enough to even them both out. The perfect Third.
“The only ones having fun right now,” Asterin said, “are the green-eyed demon-twins.”
Indeed, the midnight-haired Faline and Fallon were grinning with maniacal glee as they led three covens in knife-throwing exercises, using their inferiors as target practice. Manon just shook her head. Whatever worked; whatever shook the dust off these Blackbeak warriors.
“And my Shadows?” Manon asked Asterin. “How are they doing?”
Edda and Briar, two cousins that were as close as sisters, had been trained since infancy to blend into any sliver of darkness and listen—and they were nowhere to be seen in this hall. Just as Manon had ordered.
“They’ll have a report for you tonight,” Asterin said. Distant cousins to Manon, the Shadows bore the same moon-white hair. Or they had, until they’d discovered eighty years ago that the silver hair was as good as a beacon and dyed it solid black. They rarely spoke, never laughed, and sometimes even Asterin herself couldn’t detect them until they were at her throat. It was their sole source of amusement: sneaking up on people, though they’d never dared do it to Manon. It was no surprise they’d taken two onyx wyverns.
Manon eyed her Second and Third. “I want you both in my room for their report, too.”
“I’ll have Lin and Vesta stand watch,” Asterin said. They were Manon’s fallback sentries—Vesta for the disarming smiles, and Lin because if anyone ever called her by her full name, Linnea—the name her softhearted mother had given her before Lin’s grandmother tore out her heart—that person wound up with missing teeth at best. A missing face at worst.
Manon was about to turn away when she caught her Second and Third watching her. She knew the question they didn’t dare ask, and said, “I’ll be airborne with Abraxos in a week, and then we’ll be flying as one.”
It was a lie, but they believed her anyway.
28
Days passed, and not all of them were awful. Out of nowhere, Rowan decided to take Celaena to the commune of healers fifteen miles away, where the finest healers in the world learned, taught, and worked. Situated on the border between the Fae and mortal world, they were accessible to anyone who could reach them. It was one of the few good things Maeve had done.
As a child, Celaena had begged her mother to bring her. But the answer had always been no, accompanied by a vague promise that they would someday take a trip to the Torre Cesme in the southern continent, where many of the teachers had been taught by the Fae. Her mother had done everything she could to keep her from Maeve’s clutches. The irony of it wasn’t wasted on her.
So Rowan took her. She could have spent all day—all month—wandering the grounds under the clever, kind eyes of the Head Healer. But her time there was halved thanks to the distance and her inability to shift,
and Rowan wanted to be home before nightfall. Honestly, while she’d actually enjoyed herself at the peaceful riverside compound, she wondered whether Rowan had just brought her there to make her feel bad about the life she’d fallen into. It had made her quiet on the long hike back.
And he didn’t give her a moment’s rest: they were to set out the following dawn on an overnight trip, but he wouldn’t say where. Fantastic.
Already making the day’s bread, Emrys only looked faintly amused as Celaena hurried in, stuffed her face with food and guzzled down tea, and hurried back out.
Rowan was waiting by her rooms, a small pack dangling from his hands. He held it open for her. “Clothes,” he said, and she stuffed the extra shirt and underclothes she’d laid out into the bag. He shouldered it—which she supposed meant he was in a good mood, as she’d fully expected to play pack mule on their way to wherever they were going. He didn’t say anything until they were in the mist-shrouded trees, again heading west. When the fortress walls had vanished behind them, the ward-stones zinging against her skin as they passed through, he stopped at last, throwing back the heavy hood of his jacket. She did the same, the cool air biting her warm cheeks.
“Shift, and let’s go,” he said. His second words to her this morning.
“And here I was, thinking we’d become friends.”
He raised his brows and gestured with a hand for her to shift. “It’s twenty miles,” he said by way of encouragement, and gave her a wicked grin. “We’re running. Each way.”
Her knees trembled at the thought of it. Of course he’d make this into some sort of torture session. Of course. “And where are we going?”
He clenched his jaw, the tattoo stretching. “There was another body—a demi-Fae from a neighboring fortress. Dumped in the same area, same patterns. I want to go to the nearby town to question the citizens, but . . .” His mouth twisted to the side, then he shook his head at some silent conversation with himself. “But I need your help. It’ll be easier for the mortals to talk to you.”
“Is that a compliment?” He rolled his eyes.
Perhaps yesterday’s outing to the healers’ compound hadn’t been out of spite. Maybe he’d . . . been trying to do something nice for her. “Shift, or it’ll take us twice as long.”
“I can’t. You know it doesn’t work like that.”
“Don’t you want to see how fast you can run?”
“I can’t use my other form in Adarlan anyway, so what’s the point?” Which was the start of a whole massive issue she hadn’t yet let herself contemplate.
“The point is that you’re here now, and you haven’t properly tested your limits.” It was true. She hadn’t really seen what she was capable of. “The point is, another husk of a body was found, and I consider that to be unacceptable.”
Another body—from that creature. A horrible, wretched death. It was unacceptable.
He gave her braid a sharp, painful tug. “Unless you’re still frightened.”
Her nostrils flared. “The only thing that frightens me is how very much I want to throttle you.” More than that, she wanted to find the creature and destroy it, for those it had murdered and for what it had made her walk through. She would kill it—slowly. A miserable sort of pressure and heat began building under her skin.
Rowan murmured, “Hone it—the anger.”
Was that why he’d told her about the body? Bastard—bastard for manipulating her, for making her pull double duty in the kitchen. But his face was unreadable as he said, “Let it be a blade, Aelin. If you cannot find the peace, then at least hone the anger that guides you to the shift. Embrace and control it—it is not your enemy.”
Arobynn had done everything he could to make her hate her heritage, to fear it. What he’d done to her, what she’d allowed herself to become . . . “This will not end well,” she breathed.
He didn’t back down. “See what you want, Aelin, and seize it. Don’t ask for it; don’t wish for it. Take it.”
“I’m certain the average magic instructor would not recommend this to most people.”
“You are not most people, and I think you like it that way. If it’s a darker set of emotions that will help you shift on command, then that’s what we’ll use. There might come a day when you find that anger doesn’t work, or when it is a crutch, but for now . . .” A contemplative look. “It was the common denominator those times you shifted—anger of varying kinds. So own it.”
He was right—and she didn’t want to think on it any more than that, or let herself get that enraged, not when she had been so angry for so long. For now . . .
Celaena took a long breath. Then another. She let the anger anchor her, a knife slicing past the usual hesitation and doubt and emptiness.
She brushed up against that familiar inner wall—no, a veil, shimmering with a soft light. All this time, she thought she’d been reaching down for the power, but this was more of a reach in. Not a wish, but a command. She would shift—because there was a creature prowling these lands, and it deserved to pay. With a silent growl, she punched herself through the veil, pain shooting along every inch and pore as she shifted.
A fierce, challenging grin, and Rowan moved, so fast she could hardly follow as he appeared on her other side and yanked on her braid again. When she whirled, he was already gone, and— She yelped as he pinched her side. “Stop—”
He was standing in front of her now, a wild invitation in his eyes. She’d been studying the way he moved, his tricks and tells, the way he assumed she’d react. So when she crossed her arms, feigning the tantrum he expected, she waited. Waited, and then—
He shot left to pinch or poke or hit her, and she whirled, slamming down his arm with an elbow and whacking him upside the head with her other hand. He stopped dead and blinked a few times. She smirked at him.
He bared his teeth in a feral, petrifying grin. “Oh, you’d better run now.”
When he lunged, she shot through the trees.
•
She had a suspicion that Rowan was letting her get ahead for the first few minutes, because though she moved faster, she could barely adjust enough to her altered body to leap over rocks and fallen trees. He’d said they were going southwest, and that was where she went, dodging between the trees, the anger simmering away, shifting into something else entirely.
Rowan was a silver and white streak beside and behind her, and every time he got too close, she veered the other way, testing out the senses that told her where the trees were without seeing them—the smell of oak and moss and living things, the open coolness of the mist passing between them like a path that she followed.
They hit a plateau, the ground easy beneath her boots. Faster—she wanted to see if she could go faster, if she could outrun the wind itself.
Rowan appeared at her left, and she pumped her arms, her legs, savoring the breath in her lungs—smooth and calm, ready to see what she would do next. More—this body wanted more.
She wanted more.
And then she was going swifter than she ever had in her life, the trees a blur, her immortal body singing as she let its rhythms fall into place. Her powerful lungs gobbled down the misty air and filled with the smell and taste of the world, only instinct and reflex guiding her, telling her she could go faster still, feet eating up the loamy earth step by step by step.
Gods. Oh, gods.
She could have flown, could have soared for the sudden surge of ecstasy in her blood, the sheer freedom granted by the marvel of creation that was her body.
Rowan shot at her from the right, but she dodged a tree with such ease she let out a whoop, then threw herself between two long-hanging braches, mere hurdles that she landed with feline skill.
Rowan was at her side again, lunging with a snap of his teeth, but she whirled and leapt over a rock, letting t
he moves she’d honed as an assassin blend into the instincts of her Fae body.
She could die for love of this speed, this surety in her bones. How had she been afraid of this body for so long? Even her soul felt looser. As if it had been locked up and buried and was only now starting to shake free. Not joy, perhaps not ever, but a glimmer of what she had been before grief had decimated her so thoroughly.
Rowan raced beside her, but made no move to grab her. No, Rowan was . . . playing.
He threw a glance at her, breathing hard but evenly. And it might have been the sun through the canopy, but she could have sworn that she saw his eyes alight with a glimmer of that same, feral contentment. She could have sworn he was smiling.
•
It was the fastest twenty miles of her life. Granted, the last five were slower, and by the time Rowan brought them to a halt, they were both gulping down air. It was only then, as they stared at each other between the trees, that she realized the magic hadn’t once flared—hadn’t once tried to overpower or erupt. She could feel it waiting down in her gut, warm but calm. Slumbering.
She wiped the sweat from her brow, her neck, her face. Though she was panting, she still could have run for miles more. Gods, if she had been this fast the night Nehemia had—
It wouldn’t have made a difference. Nehemia had orchestrated every step in her own destruction, and would have found another way. And she had only done it because Celaena refused to help—refused to act. Having this glorious Fae body changed nothing.
She blinked, realizing she’d been staring at Rowan, and that whatever satisfaction she’d seen on his face had again turned to ice. He tossed something at her—the shirt he’d carried with him. “Change.” He turned and stripped off his own shirt. His back was just as tan and scarred as the rest of him. But seeing those markings didn’t make her want to show him what her own ruined back looked like, so she moved between the trees until she was sure he couldn’t see her, and swapped her shirt. When she returned to where he’d dumped the pack, he tossed her a skein of water, which she gulped down. It tasted . . . She could taste each layer of minerals in the water, and the musk of the skein itself.
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