She paced and paced, knowing Chaol wouldn’t be back in his rooms yet, and wound up going down to the tomb, if only to give herself something to do.
She expected Mort to lecture her about the portal—which he did, thoroughly—but she didn’t expect to find Elena waiting for her inside the tomb. “You have enough power to appear to me now, but you couldn’t help close the portal last night?”
She took one look at the queen’s frown and began pacing again.
“I could not,” Elena said. “Even now, this visit is draining me faster than it should.”
Celaena scowled at her. “I can’t go to Wendlyn. I—I can’t go. Chaol knows what I’m doing for you—so why would he make me go there?”
“Take a breath,” Elena said softly.
Celaena glared at her. “This ruins your plans, too. If I’m in Wendlyn, then I can’t deal with the Wyrdkeys and the king. And even if I pretended to go and instead went questing across this continent, it wouldn’t take long for the king to realize I’m not where I’m supposed to be.”
Elena crossed her arms. “If you are in Wendlyn, then you will be near Doranelle. I think that’s why the captain wants you to go.”
Celaena barked a laugh. Oh, what a tangled mess he’d gotten her into! “He wants me to go hide with the Fae and never come back to Adarlan? That’s not going to happen. Not only will he be killed, but the Wyrdkeys—”
“You will sail to Wendlyn tomorrow.” Elena’s eyes glowed bright. “Leave the Wyrdkeys and the king for now. Go to Wendlyn, and do what needs to be done.”
“Did you plant this idea in his head somehow?”
“No. The captain is trying to save you the only way he knows how.”
Celaena shook her head, looking at the sunlight pouring into the tomb from the shaft above. “Will you ever stop giving me commands?”
Elena let out a soft laugh. “When you stop running from your past, I will.”
Celaena rolled her eyes, then let her shoulders droop. A shard of memory sliced through her. “When I spoke to Nehemia, she mentioned … mentioned that she knew her own fate. That she had embraced it. That it would set things in motion. Do you think she somehow manipulated Archer into …” But she couldn’t finish saying it, couldn’t let herself voice what the horrible truth might be: that Nehemia had engineered her own death, knowing that she might change the world—change Celaena—more through dying than living.
A cold, slender hand grasped hers. “Cast that thought into the far reaches of your mind. Knowing the truth, whatever it may be, will not change what you must do tomorrow—where you must go.”
And even though Celaena knew the truth in that moment, knew it just from Elena’s refusal to answer at all, she did as the queen commanded. There would be other moments, other times to take out that truth to examine every dark and unforgiving facet. But right now—right now …
Celaena studied the light pouring into the tomb. Such a little light, holding the darkness at bay. “Wendlyn, then.”
Elena smiled grimly and squeezed her hand. “Wendlyn, then.”
Chapter 54
When the council meeting was over, Chaol did his best not to look at his father, who had been watching him so carefully while he’d announced his plans to the king, or at Dorian, whose sense of betrayal rippled off of him as the meeting went on. He tried to hurry back to the barracks, but he wasn’t all that surprised when a hand clapped on his shoulder and turned him around.
“Wendlyn?” Dorian snarled.
Chaol kept his face blank. “If she’s capable of opening a portal like she did last night, then I think she needs to get out of the castle for a while. For all of our sakes.” Dorian couldn’t know the truth.
“She’ll never forgive you for having her shipped off like that, to take down a whole country. And in such a public way—making a spectacle out of it. Are you mad?”
“I don’t need her forgiveness. And I don’t want to worry about her letting in a horde of otherwordly creatures just because she’s missing her friend.”
He hated each lie that came out of his mouth, but Dorian drank them up, his eyes seeming to glow with rage. This was the other sacrifice he’d have to make; because if Dorian didn’t hate him, if he didn’t want Chaol gone, then leaving for Anielle would be that much more difficult.
“If anything happens to her in Wendlyn,” Dorian growled, refusing to back down, “I’ll make you regret the day you were born.”
If anything happened to her, Chaol was fairly certain he’d forever regret that day, too.
But he just said, “One of us has to start leading, Dorian,” and stalked off.
Dorian didn’t follow him.
Dawn was just breaking as Celaena arrived at Nehemia’s grave. The last of the winter snows had melted, leaving the world barren and brown, waiting for spring.
In a few hours, she’d set sail across the ocean.
Celaena dropped to her knees on the damp ground and bowed her head before the grave.
Then she said the words she’d wanted to say to Nehemia last night. The words that she should have said from the beginning. Words that wouldn’t change, no matter what she learned about Nehemia’s death.
“I want you to know,” she whispered to the wind, to the earth, to the body far beneath her, “that you were right. You were right. I am a coward. And I have been running for so long that I’ve forgotten what it is to stand and fight.”
She bowed deeper, putting her forehead against the dirt.
“But I promise,” she breathed into the soil, “I promise that I will stop him. I promise that I will never forgive, never forget what they did to you. I promise that I will free Eyllwe. I promise that I will see your father’s crown restored to his head.”
She raised herself, drawing a dagger from her pocket, and sliced a line across her left palm. Blood welled, ruby-bright against the golden dawn, sliding down the side of her hand before she pressed her palm to the earth.
“I promise,” she whispered again. “On my name, on my life, even if it takes until my last breath, I promise I will see Eyllwe freed.”
She let her blood soak into the ground, willing it to carry the words of her oath to the Otherworld where Nehemia was safe at last. From now on, there would be no other oaths but this, no other contracts, no other obligations. Never forgive, never forget.
And she didn’t know how she would do it, or how long it would take, but she would see it through. Because Nehemia couldn’t.
Because it was time.
Chapter 55
The shattered lock on Celaena’s bedroom door still wasn’t fixed by the time Dorian appeared after breakfast, a stack of books in his arms. She stood before her bed, stuffing clothing into a large leather satchel. Fleetfoot was the first to acknowledge him, though he had no doubt Celaena heard him coming from the hallway.
The dog limped to him, tail wagging, and Dorian set the books on the desk before kneeling on the plush rug. He ran his hands over Fleetfoot’s head, letting her lick him a few times.
“The healer said her leg is going to be fine,” Celaena said, still focused on her satchel. Her left hand was bandaged—a wound he hadn’t noticed last night. “She just left a few minutes ago.”
“Good,” Dorian said, rising to his feet. She was wearing a heavy tunic and pants and a thick cloak. Her brown boots were sturdy and sensible, far more subdued than her usual attire. Traveling clothes. “Were you going to leave without saying good-bye?”
“I thought it would be easier this way,” she said. In two hours, she would sail to Wendlyn, that land of myths and monsters, a kingdom of dreams and nightmares made flesh.
Dorian approached her. “This plan is madness. You don’t have to go. We can convince my father to do something else. If they catch you in Wendlyn—”
“They won’t catch me.”
“There will be no help for you,” Dorian said, putting a hand on the satchel. “If you are captured, if you are hurt, you are beyond our reach. You will be entirely on your own.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“But I won’t be. Every day that you’re there, I will wonder what has become of you. I won’t … I won’t forget you. Not for one hour.”
Her throat bobbed, the only sign of emotion she allowed to show, and she looked toward her dog, watching them from the rug. “Will you …” He watched her swallow again before meeting his gaze. The gold in her eyes glowed in the morning sun. “Will you look after her while I’m gone?”
He took her hand, squeezing. “As if she’s one of my own. I’ll even let her sleep in the bed.”
She gave him a small smile, and he had a feeling that any greater sign of emotion would shatter her self-control. He waved a hand to the books he’d brought. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need a place to store these, and your rooms might be … safer than mine.”
She glanced at the desk but, to his relief, didn’t go to it. The books he’d brought would only lead to more questions. Geneaologies, royal chronicles, anything on how and why he might have magic. “Of course,” was all she said. “I think The Walking Dead is still floating around in here, anyway. Maybe it’ll be glad to have company.”
He might have smiled had it not been eerily true. “I’ll leave you to your packing. I have a council meeting at the same time your ship departs,” he said, fighting the ache in his chest. It was a lie—and a bad one. But he didn’t want to be at the docks, not when he knew someone else would be there to see her off. “So … I suppose this is good-bye.” He didn’t know whether he was allowed to embrace her anymore, so he stuffed his hands into his pockets and gave her a smile. “Take care of yourself.”
A faint nod.
They were friends now, and he knew that the physical boundaries between them had been altered, but … He turned away rather than let her see the disappointment he knew was all too clear on his face.
He took all of two steps toward the door before she spoke, the words soft and strained. “Thank you for all that you have done for me, Dorian. Thank you for being my friend. For not being like the others.”
He paused, turning to face her. She kept her chin high, but her eyes were gleaming.
“I’ll come back,” she said quietly. “I’ll come back for you.” And he knew that there was more that she wasn’t saying, some bigger meaning behind those words.
But Dorian still believed her.
The docks were crowded with sailors and slaves and workers loading and unloading cargo. The day was warm and breezy, the first hint of spring in the air, and the sky was cloudless. A good day for sailing.
Celaena stood before the ship that would carry her through the first leg of the journey. It would sail to a prearranged location where a ship from Wendlyn would meet it to take aboard refugees fleeing the shadow of Adarlan’s empire. Most of the women traveling on her ship were already belowdecks. She shifted the fingers of her bandaged left hand, wincing at the dull pain radiating outward from her palm.