“Please,” Elena breathed.
The three-faced one said, “Tell Brannon of the Wildfire what occurred here; tell him the price his bloodline shall one day pay. Tell him to ready for it.”
She let the words, the damnation, sink in. “I will,” she whispered.
But they were gone. There was only a lingering warmth, as if a beam of sunlight had brushed her cheek.
Gavin lifted his head. “What have you done?” he asked again. “What have you given them?”
“Did you not—not hear it?”
“Only you,” he rasped, his face so horribly pale. “No others.”
She stared at the sarcophagus before them, its black stone rooted to the earth of the pass. Immovable. They would have to build something around it, to hide it, protect it.
Elena said, “The price will be paid—later.”
“Tell me.” His swollen, split lips could barely form the words.
Since she had already damned herself, damned her bloodline, she figured there was nothing left to lose in lying. Not this one time, this last time. “Erawan will awaken again—one day. When the time comes, I will help those who must fight him.”
His eyes were wary.
“Can you walk?” she asked, extending a hand to help him rise. The rising sun cast the black mountains in gold and red. She had no doubt the valley behind was bathed in the latter.
Gavin released his grip, the fingers still broken, from where it had rested on Damaris’s hilt. But he did not take her offered hand.
And he did not tell her what he’d detected while he touched the Sword of Truth, what lies he’d sensed and unraveled.
They never spoke of them again.
Moonrise at the Temple of Sandrian, the Stone Marshes
The Princess of Eyllwe had been wandering the Stone Marshes for weeks, searching for answers to riddles posed a thousand years ago. Answers that might save her doomed kingdom.
Keys and gates and locks—portals and pits and prophecies. That was what the princess murmured to herself in the weeks she’d been stalking through the marshes alone, hunting to keep herself alive, fighting the beasts of teeth and venom when necessary, reading the stars for entertainment.
So when the princess at last reached the temple, when she stood before the stone altar and the chest that was the light twin to the dark one beneath Morath, she at last appeared.
“You are Nehemia,” she said.
The princess whirled, her hunting leathers stained and damp, the gold tips on her braided hair clinking.
An assessing look with eyes that were too old for barely eighteen; eyes that had stared long into the darkness between the stars and yearned to know its secrets. “And you are Elena.”
Elena nodded. “Why have you come?”
The Princess of Eyllwe jerked her elegant chin toward the stone chest. “Am I not called to open it? To learn how to save us, and to pay the price?”
“No,” Elena said quietly. “Not you. Not in this way.”
A tightening of her lips was the only sign of the princess’s displeasure. “Then in what way, Lady, am I required to bleed?”
She had been watching, and waiting, and paying for her choices for so long. Too long.
And now that darkness had fallen … now a new sun would rise. Must rise.
“It is Mala’s bloodline that will pay, not your own.”
Her back stiffened. “You have not answered my question.”
Elena wished she could hold back the words, keep them locked up. But this was the price, for her kingdom, her people. The price for these people, this kingdom. And others.
“In the North, two branches flow from Mala. One to the Havilliard House, where its prince with my mate’s eyes possesses my raw magic—and her brute power. The other branch flows through the Galathynius House, where it bred true: flame and embers and ashes.”
“Aelin Galathynius is dead,” Nehemia said.
“Not dead.” No, she’d ensured that, still paying for what she’d done that wintry night. “Just hiding, forgotten by a world grateful to see such a power extinguished before it matured.”
“Where is she? And how does this tie to me, Lady?”
“You are versed in the history, in the players and the stakes. You know the Wyrdmarks and how to wield them. You misread the riddles, thinking it was you who must come here, to this place. This mirror is not the Lock—it is a pool of memory. Forged by myself, my father, and Rhiannon Crochan. Forged so the heir of this burden might understand one day. Know everything before deciding. This encounter, too, shall be held in it. But you were called, so we might meet.”
That wise, young face waited.
“Go north, Princess,” Elena said. “Go into your enemy’s household. Make the contacts, get the invitation, do what you must, but get to your enemy’s house. The two bloodlines will converge there. Already, they are on their way.”
“Aelin Galathynius is headed to Adarlan?”
“Not Aelin. Not with that name, that crown. Know her by her eyes—turquoise with a core of gold. Know her by the mark on her brow—the bastard’s mark, the mark of Brannon. Guide her. Help her. She will need you.”
“And the price?”
Elena hated them, then.
Hated the gods who had demanded this. Hated herself. Hated that this was asked, all these bright lights …
“You will not see Eyllwe again.”
The princess stared at the stars as if they spoke to her, as if the answer were written there. “Will my people survive?” A small, quiet voice.
“I don’t know.”
“Then I will take the steps for that, too. Unite the rebels while I am in Rifthold, ready the continent for war.”
Nehemia lowered her eyes from the stars. Elena wanted to fall to her knees before the young princess, beg her forgiveness. “One of them must be ready—to do what needs to be done,” Elena said, if only because it was the sole way to explain, to apologize.
Nehemia swallowed. “Then I shall help in whatever way I can. For Erilea. And my people.”
66
Aedion Ashryver had been trained to kill men and hold a line in battle since he was old enough to lift a sword. Crown Prince Rhoe Galathynius had begun his training personally, holding Aedion to standards that some might have deemed unfair, too unyielding for a boy.
But Rhoe had known, Aedion realized as he stood on the prow of the ship, Ansel of Briarcliff’s men armed and ready behind him. Rhoe had known even then that Aedion would serve Aelin, and when foreign armies challenged the might of the Fire-Bringer … it might not be mere mortals that he faced.
Rhoe—Evalin—had gambled that the immortal army now stretching away before him would one day come to these shores. And they had wanted to ensure that Aedion was ready when it did.
“Shields up,” Aedion ordered the men as the second volley of arrows rained from Maeve’s armada. The magical cloak around their ships was holding well enough thanks to Dorian Havilliard, and though he was glad for any bloodshed it spared them, after the bullshit the king had pulled with Aelin and Manon, Aedion gritted his teeth at each ripple of color upon impact.
“These are soldiers, the same as you,” Aedion went on. “Don’t let the pointy ears deceive you. They bleed like the rest of us. And can die from the same wounds, too.”
He didn’t let himself glance behind—to where his father commanded and shielded another line of ships. Gavriel had kept quiet while Fenrys divulged how to keep a quick-healing Fae warrior down: go for slicing through muscles rather than stabbing wounds. Snap a tendon and you’ll halt an immortal long enough to kill.
Easier said than done. The soldiers had gone pale-faced at the thought of it—open combat, blade-to-blade, against Fae warriors. Rightly so.
But Aedion’s duty wasn’t to remind them of the blunt facts. His duty was to make them willing to die, to make this fight seem utterly necessary. Fear could break a line faster than any enemy charge.
Rhoe—his real father—had taught him that. And Aedion had learned it during those years in the North. Learned it fighting knee-deep in mud and gore with the Bane.
He wished they flanked him, not unknown soldiers from the Wastes.
But he would not let his own fear erode his resolve.
Maeve’s second volley rose up, up, up, the arrows soaring faster and farther than those from mortal bows. With better aim.
The invisible shield above them rippled with flickers of blue and purple as arrows hissed and slid off it.
Buckling already, because those arrows came tipped with magic.
The soldiers on the deck stirred, shields shifting, their anticipation and rising terror coating Aedion’s senses. “Just a bit of rain, boys,” he said, grinning widely. “I thought you bastards were used to it out in the Wastes.”
Some grumbles—but those metal shields stopped shivering.
Aedion made himself chuckle. Made himself the Wolf of the North, eager to spill blood upon the southern seas. As Rhoe had taught him, as Rhoe had prepared him, long before Terrasen fell to the shadow of Adarlan.
Not again. Never again—and certainly not to Maeve. Certainly not here, with no one to witness it.
Ahead, at the front lines, Rowan’s magic flared white in silent signal.
“Arrows at the ready,” Aedion ordered.
Bows groaned, arrows pointing skyward.
Another flash.
“Volley!” Aedion bellowed.
The world darkened beneath their arrows as they sailed toward Maeve’s armada.
A storm of arrows—to distract from the real attack beneath the waves.
The water was dimmer here, the sunlight slim shafts that slid between the fat-bellied boats amassed above the waves.
Other creatures had gathered at the ruckus, flesh-shredders looking for the meals that would surely come when the two armadas at last met.
A flash of light had sent Lysandra diving deep, weaving between the circling scavengers, blending into their masses as best as she could while she launched into a sprint.
She had modified her sea dragon. Given it longer limbs—with prehensile thumbs.
Given her tail more strength, more control.
Her own little project, during the long days of travel. To take one original form and perfect it. To alter what the gods had made to her own liking.
Lysandra reached the first ship Rowan had marked. A careful, precise map of where and how to strike. A snap of her tail had the rudder in pieces.
Their shouts reached her even under the waves, but Lysandra was already flying, soaring for the next marked boat.
She used her claws this time, grabbing the rudder and ripping it clean off. Then bashing a hole in the keel with her clubbed tail. Clubbed, not spiked—no, the spikes had gotten stuck in Skull’s Bay. So she’d made her tail into a battering ram.
Arrows fired with better accuracy than the Valg foot soldiers, shooting like those rays of sunshine into the water. She’d prepared for that, too.
They bounced off scales of Spidersilk. Hours spent studying the material grafted onto Abraxos’s wings had taught her about it—how to change her own skin into the impenetrable fiber.
Lysandra tore into another rudder, then another. And another.
Fae soldiers were screaming in advance of her. But the harpoons they fired were too heavy, and she was too fast, dove too deep and too swift. Whips of water magic speared for her, trying to ensnare her. She outswam them, too.
The court that could change the world, she told herself over and over, as exhaustion weighed her down, as she kept disabling rudder after rudder, punching holes in those selected Fae ships.
She had made a promise to that court, that future. To Aedion. And to her queen. She would not fail her.
And if gods-damned Maeve wanted to go head-to-head with them, if Maeve thought to strike them when they were weakest … Lysandra was going to make the bitch regret it.
Dorian’s magic roiled as Maeve’s armada went from firing arrows to outright chaos. But he kept his shields intact, patching the spots where arrows had broken through. Already, his power wobbled, too swiftly drained.
Either through some trick of Maeve’s or whatever magic coated those arrows.