Empire of Storms

by Sarah J. Maas

  Manon could hardly move fast enough to avoid the nails ripping into her face, her neck, her gut, yielding step after step after step.

  She only had to do this long enough to buy the Thirteen time to get to the skies.

  Her grandmother slashed for her cheek, and Manon blocked the blow with an elbow, slamming the joint down hard into her grandmother’s forearm. The witch barked in pain, and Manon spun out of reach, circling again.

  “It is not so easy to strike now is it, Manon Blackbeak?” her grandmother panted as they surveyed each other. No one around them dared move; the Thirteen had vanished—every last one of them. She almost sagged with relief. Now to keep her grandmother occupied long enough to avoid her giving the onlookers the order to pursue. “So much easier with a blade, the weapon of those cowardly humans,” her grandmother seethed. “With the teeth, the nails … You have to mean it.”

  They lunged for each other, some fundamental part of her cracking with every slash and swipe and block. They darted apart again.

  “As pathetic as your mother,” her grandmother spat. “Perhaps you’ll die like her, too—with my teeth at your throat.”

  Her mother, whom she’d killed coming out of, who had died birthing her—

  “For years, I tried to train her weakness out of you.” Her grandmother spat blue blood onto the stones. “For the good of the Ironteeth, I made you into a force of nature, a warrior equal to none. And this is how you repay me—”

  Manon didn’t let the words unnerve her. She went for the throat, only to feint and slash.

  Her grandmother barked in pain—genuine pain—as Manon’s claws shredded her shoulder.

  Blood showered her hand, flesh clinging to her nails—

  Manon staggered back, bile burning her throat.

  She saw the blow coming, but still didn’t have time to stop it as her grandmother’s right hand slashed across her belly.

  Leather, cloth, and skin ripped. Manon screamed.

  Blood, hot and blue, rushed out of her before her grandmother had darted back.

  Manon shoved a hand against her abdomen, pushing against the shredded skin. Blood dribbled through her fingers, splattering onto the stones.

  High above, a wyvern roared.

  Abraxos.

  The Blackbeak Matron laughed, flicking Manon’s blood off her nails. “I’m going to dice your wyvern into tiny pieces and feed him to the hounds.”

  Despite the agony in her belly, Manon’s vision honed. “Not if I kill you first.”

  Her grandmother chuckled, still circling, assessing. “You are stripped of your title as Wing Leader. You are stripped of your title as heir.” Step after step, closer and closer, an adder looping around its prey. “From this day, you are Manon Witch Killer, Manon Kin Slayer.”

  The words pelted her like stones. Manon backed toward the balcony rail, pushing against the wound in her stomach to keep the blood in. The crowd parted like water around them. Just a little longer—just another minute or two.

  Her grandmother paused, blinking toward the open doors, as if realizing the Thirteen had vanished. Manon attacked again before she could give the order to pursue.

  Swipe, lunge, slash, duck—they moved in a whirlwind of iron and blood and leather.

  But as Manon twisted away, the wounds in her stomach gave more, and she stumbled.

  Her grandmother didn’t miss a beat. She struck.

  Not with her nails or teeth, but with her foot.

  The kick to Manon’s stomach set her screaming, a roar again answered by Abraxos, locked high above. Soon to die, as she would. She prayed the Thirteen would spare him, let him join them wherever they would flee.

  Manon slammed into the stone rail of the balcony and crumpled to the black tiles. Blue blood leaked from her, staining the thighs of her pants.

  Her grandmother slowly approached, panting.

  Manon grabbed the balcony rail, hauling herself to her feet one last time.

  “Do you want to know a secret, Kin Slayer?” her grandmother breathed.

  Manon slumped against the balcony rail, the drop below endless and a relief. They’d take her to the dungeons—either use her for Erawan’s breeding, or torture her until she begged for death. Maybe both.

  Her grandmother spoke so softly that even Manon could barely hear over her own gasps for air. “As your mother labored to push you out, she confessed who your father was. She said you … you would be the one who broke the curse, who saved us. She said your father was a rare-born Crochan Prince. And she said that your mixed blood would be the key.” Her grandmother lifted her nails to her mouth and licked off Manon’s blue blood.

  No.

  No.

  “So you have been a Kin Slayer your whole life,” her grandmother purred. “Hunting down those Crochans—your relatives. When you were a witchling, your father searched the lands for you. He never stopped loving your mother. Loving her,” she spat. “And loving you. So I killed him.”

  Manon gazed at the drop below, the death that beckoned.

  “His despair was delicious when I told him what I’d done to her. What I would make you into. Not a child of peace—but war.”

  Made.

  Made.

  Made.

  Manon’s iron nails chipped on the dark stone of the balcony rail. And then her grandmother said the words that broke her.

  “Do you know why that Crochan was spying in the Ferian Gap this spring? She had been sent to find you. After a hundred and sixteen years of searching, they had finally learned the identity of their dead prince’s lost child.”

  Her grandmother’s smile was hideous in its absolute triumph. Manon willed strength to her arms, to her legs.

  “Her name was Rhiannon, after the last Crochan Queen. And she was your half sister. She confessed it to me upon our tables. She thought it’d save her life. And when she saw what you had become, she chose to let the knowledge die with her.”

  “I am a Blackbeak,” Manon rasped, blood choking her words.

  Her grandmother took a step, smiling as she crooned, “You are a Crochan. The last of their royal bloodline with the death of your sister at your own hand. You are a Crochan Queen.”

  Absolute silence from the witches gathered.

  Her grandmother reached for her. “And you’re going to die like one by the time I’m finished with you.”

  Manon didn’t let her grandmother’s nails touch her.

  A boom sounded nearby.

  Manon used the strength she’d gathered in her arms, her legs, to hurl herself onto the stone ledge of the balcony.

  And roll off it into the open air.

  Air and rock and wind and blood—

  Manon slammed into a warm, leathery hide, screaming as pain from her wounds blacked out her vision.

  Above, somewhere far away, her grandmother was shrieking orders—

  Manon dug her nails into the leathery hide, burying her claws deep. Beneath her, a bark of discomfort she recognized. Abraxos.

  But she held firm, and he embraced the pain as he banked to the side, swerving out of Morath’s shadow—

  She felt them around her.

  Manon managed to open her eyes, flicking the clear lid against the wind into place.

  Edda and Briar, her Shadows, were now flanking her. She knew they’d been there, waiting in the shadows with their wyverns, had heard every one of those damning last words. “The others have flown ahead. We were sent to retrieve you,” Edda, the eldest of the sisters, shouted over the roar of the wind. “Your wound—”

  “It’s shallow,” Manon snapped, forcing the pain aside to focus on the task at hand. She was on Abraxos’s neck, the saddle a few feet behind her. One by one, every breath an agony, she released her nails from his skin and slid toward the saddle. He evened out his flight, offering smooth air to buckle herself into the harness.

  Blood leaked from the gouges in her belly—soon the saddle was slick with it.

  Behind them, several roars set the mountains
trembling.

  “We can’t let them get to the others,” Manon managed to say.

  Briar, black hair streaming behind her, swept in closer. “Six Yellowlegs on our tail. From Iskra’s personal coven. Closing in fast.”

  With a score to settle, they’d no doubt been given free rein to slaughter them.

  Manon surveyed the peaks and ravines of the mountains around them.

  “Two apiece,” she ordered. The Shadows’ black wyverns were enormous—skilled at stealth, but devastating in a fight. “Edda, you drive two to the west; Briar, you slam the other two to the east. Leave the last two to me.”

  No sign of the rest of the Thirteen in the gray clouds or mountains.

  Good—they had gotten away. It was enough.

  “You kill them, then you find the others,” Manon ordered, an arm draped over her wound.

  “But, Wing Leader—”

  The title almost sapped her will. But Manon barked, “That’s an order.”

  The Shadows bowed their heads. Then, as if sharing one mind, one heart, they banked to either direction, peeling away from Manon like petals in the wind.

  Bloodhounds on a scent, four Yellowlegs split from their group to deal with each Shadow.

  The two in the center flew faster, harder, spreading apart to close in on Manon. Her vision blurred.

  Not a good sign—not a good sign at all.

  She breathed to Abraxos, “Let’s make it a final stand worthy of song.”

  He bellowed in answer.

  The Yellowlegs swept near enough for Manon to count their weapons. A battle cry shattered from the one to her right.

  Manon dug her left heel into Abraxos’s side.

  Like a shooting star, he blasted down toward the peaks of the ashy mountains. The Yellowlegs dove with them.

  Manon aimed for a ravine running through the spine of the mountain range, her vision flashing black and white and foggy. A chill crept into her bones.

  The walls of the ravine closed around them like the maw of a mighty beast, and she pulled on the reins once.

  Abraxos flung out his wings and coasted along the side of the ravine before catching a current and leveling out, flapping like hell through the heart of the crevasse, pillars of stone jutting from the floor like lances.

  The Yellowlegs, too ensnared in their bloodlust, their wyverns too large and bulky, balked at the ravine—at the sharp turn—

  A boom and a screech, and the whole ravine shuddered.

  Manon swallowed her bark of agony to peer behind. One of the wyverns had panicked, too big for the space, and slammed into a stone column. Broken bone and blood rained down.

  But the other wyvern had managed to bank, and now sailed toward them, wings so wide they nearly grazed either side of the ravine.

  Manon panted through her bloody teeth, “Fly, Abraxos.”

  And her gentle, warrior-hearted mount flew.

  Manon focused on keeping to the saddle, on keeping the arm pressed against her wound to hold the blood in, keep that lethal cold away. She’d gotten enough injuries to know her grandmother had struck deep and true.

  The ravine swerved right, and Abraxos took the turn with expert skill. She prayed for the boom and roar of the pursuing wyvern to hit the walls, but none came.

  But Manon knew these deadly canyons. She’d flown this path countless times on the endless, inane patrols these months. The Yellowlegs, sequestered in the Ferian Gap, did not.

  “To the very end, Abraxos,” she said. His roar was his only confirmation.

  One shot. She’d have one shot. Then she could gladly die, knowing the Thirteen wouldn’t be pursued. Not today, at least.

  Turn after turn, Abraxos hurtled through the ravine, snapping his own tail against the rock to send debris flying into the Yellowlegs sentinel.

  The rider dodged the rocks, her wyvern bobbing on the wind. Closer—Manon needed her closer. She tugged on Abraxos’s reins, and he checked his speed.

  Turn after turn after turn, black rock flashing by, blurring like her own fading vision.

  The Yellowlegs was near enough to throw a dagger.

  Manon looked over a shoulder with her failing eyesight in time to see her do just that.

  Not one dagger—but two, metal gleaming in the dim canyon light.

  Manon braced herself for the impact of metal in flesh and bone.

  Abraxos took the final turn as the sentinel hurled her daggers at Manon. A towering, impenetrable wall of black stone arose, mere feet away.

  But Abraxos soared up, catching the updraft and sailing out of the heart of the ravine, so close Manon could touch the dead-end wall.

  The two daggers struck the rock where Manon had been moments before.

  And the Yellowlegs sentinel, on her bulky, heavy wyvern, did as well.

  Rock groaned as wyvern and rider splattered against it. And fell to the ravine floor.

  Panting, her breath a wet, bloody rasp, Manon patted Abraxos’s side. Even the motion was feeble. “Good,” she managed to say.

  Mountains became small again. Oakwald spread before her. Trees—the cover of trees might hide her … “Oak … ,” she rasped.

  Manon didn’t finish the command before the Darkness swept in to claim her.

  19

  Elide Lochan kept quiet during the two days she and Lorcan trekked through the eastern edges of Oakwald, heading for the plains beyond.

  She had not asked him the questions that seemed to matter the most, letting him think her a foolish girl, blinded by gratitude that he had saved her.

  He’d quickly forgotten that though he’d carried her out, she’d saved herself. And he’d accepted her name—her mother’s name—without question. If Vernon was on her trail … It had been a fool’s mistake, but there was no undoing it, not without raising Lorcan’s suspicions.

  So she kept her mouth shut, swallowed her questions. Like why he’d been hunting her. Or who his mistress was to command such a powerful warrior—why he wanted to get into Morath, why he kept touching some object beneath his dark jacket. And why he had looked so surprised—though he’d tried to hide it—when she’d mentioned Celaena Sardothien and Aelin Galathynius.

  Elide had no doubt the warrior was keeping secrets of his own, and that despite his promise to protect her, the moment he got every answer he needed, that protection would end.

  But she still slept soundly these last two nights—thanks to the belly full of meat courtesy of Lorcan’s hunting. He’d scrounged up two rabbits, and when she’d devoured all of hers in minutes, he’d given her half of what was left of his. She hadn’t bothered being polite by refusing.

  It was midmorning by the time the light in the forest turned brighter, the air fresher. And then the roaring of mighty waters—the Acanthus.

  Lorcan stalked ahead, and Elide could have sworn even the trees leaned away from him as he held up a hand in a silent motion to wait.

  She obeyed, lingering in the gloom of the trees, praying he wouldn’t make them return to the tangle of Oakwald, that she wouldn’t be denied this step into the bright, wide-open world…

  Lorcan motioned again—to come forward. All was clear.

  Elide was silent as she stepped, blinking at the flood of sunshine, from the last line of trees to stand beside Lorcan on a high, rocky riverbank.

  The river was enormous, shades of rushing gray and brown—the last of the ice melt from the mountains. So wide and wild that she knew she could not swim it, and that the crossing had to be somewhere else. But past the river, as if the water were a boundary between two worlds…

  Hills and meadows of high emerald grasses swayed on the other side of the Acanthus, like a hissing sea under a cloudless blue sky, stretching away forever to the horizon.

  “I can’t remember,” she murmured, the words barely audible over the roaring song of the river, “the last time I saw…” In Perranth, locked in that tower, she’d only had a view of the city, perhaps the lake if the day was clear enough. Then she’d been in that
prison wagon, then in Morath, where it was only mountains and ash and armies. And during the flight with Manon and Abraxos, she had been too lost in terror and grief to notice anything at all. But now … She could not remember the last time she’d seen sunlight dancing on a meadow, or little brown birds bobbing and swooping on the warm breeze over it.

  “The road is about a mile upriver,” Lorcan said, his dark eyes unmoved by the Acanthus or the rippling grasses beyond. “If you want your plan to work, now would be the time to prepare.”

  She cut him a glance. “You need the most work.” A flick of black brows. Elide clarified, “If this ruse is to succeed, you at least need to … pretend to be human.”

  Nothing about the man suggested his human heritage held sway.

  “Hide more of your weapons,” she went on. “Leave only the sword.”

  Even the mighty blade would be a dead giveaway that Lorcan was no ordinary traveler.

  She fished an extra strap of leather out of her jacket pocket. “Tie back your hair. You’ll look less…” She trailed off at the faint amusement tinged with warning in his eyes. “Savage,” she made herself say, dangling the leather strap between them. Lorcan’s broad fingers closed around it, a frown on his lips as he obeyed. “And unbutton your jacket,” she said, rummaging through her mental catalog of traits she had noted seemed less threatening, less intimidating. Lorcan obeyed that order, too, and soon the dark gray shirt beneath his tight-fitting black jacket was showing, revealing the broad, muscled chest. It looked more inclined for solid labor than killing fields, at least.

  “And you?” he said, brows still high.

  Elide surveyed herself, and set down her pack. First, she removed the leather jacket, even though it left her feeling like a layer of skin had peeled off, then she rolled up the sleeves of her white shirt. But without the tight leather, the full size of her breasts could be seen—marking her as a woman and not a slip of a girl that people assumed she was. She then took to her hair, ruffling it out of its braid and restyling it into a knot atop her head. A married woman’s hairstyle, not the free-flowing locks or plait of youth.