CHAPTER
12
Burning, razor-sharp pain sliced down his back in brutal claws.
Chaol arched, bellowing in agony.
Yrene’s hand was instantly gone, and a crashing sounded.
Chaol panted, gasping, as he pushed up onto his elbows to find Yrene sitting on the low-lying table, her vial of oil overturned and leaking across the wood. She gaped at his back, at where her hand had been.
He had no words—none beyond the echoing pain.
Yrene lifted her hands before her face as if she had never seen them before.
She turned them this way and that.
“It doesn’t just dislike my magic,” she breathed.
His arms buckled, so he lay down again on the cushions, holding her stare as Yrene declared, “It hates my magic.”
“You said it was an echo—not connected to the injury.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
“Rowan healed me with none of those problems.”
Her brows knotted at the name, and he silently cursed himself for revealing that piece of his history in this palace of ears and mouths. “Were you conscious?”
He considered. “No. I was—nearly dead.”
She noticed the spilled oil then and cursed softly—mildly, compared to some other filthy mouths he’d had the distinct pleasure of being around.
Yrene lunged for her satchel, but he moved faster, grabbing his sweat-damp shirt from where he’d laid it on the sofa arm and chucking it over the spreading puddle before it could drip onto the surely priceless rug.
Yrene studied the shirt, then his outstretched arm, now nearly across her lap. “Either your lack of consciousness during that initial healing kept you from feeling this sort of pain, or perhaps whatever this is had not … settled.”
His throat clogged. “You think I’m possessed?” By that thing that had dwelled inside the king, that had done such unspeakable things—
“No. But pain can feel alive. Maybe this is no different. And maybe it does not want to let go.”
“Is my spine even injured?” He barely managed to ask the question.
“It is,” she said, and some part of his chest caved in. “I sensed the broken bits—the tangled and severed nerves. But to heal those things, to get them communicating with your brain again … I need to get past that echo. Or beat it into submission enough to have space to work on you.” Her lips pressed into a grim line. “This shadow, this thing that haunts you—your body. It will fight me every step of the way, fight to convince you to tell me to stop. Through pain.” Her eyes were clear—stark. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”
His voice was low, rough. “That if you are to succeed, I will have to endure that sort of pain. Repeatedly.”
“I have herbs that can make you sleep, but with an injury like this … I think I won’t be the only one who has to fight back against it. And if you are unconscious … I fear what it might try to do to you if you’re trapped there. In your dreamscape—your psyche.” Her face seemed to pale further.
Chaol slid his hand from where it still rested atop his shirt-turned-mop and squeezed her hand. “Do what you have to.”
“It will hurt. Like that. Constantly. Worse, likely. I will have to work my way down, vertebra by vertebra, before I even reach the base of your spine. Fighting it and healing you at the same time.”
His hand tightened on hers, so small compared to his. “Do what you have to,” he repeated.
“And you,” she said quietly. “You will have to fight it as well.”
He stilled at that.
Yrene went on, “If these things feed upon us by nature … If they feed, and yet you are healthy …” She gestured to his body. “Then it must be feeding upon something else. Something within you.”
“I sense nothing.”
She studied their joined hands—then slid her fingers away. Not as violent as dropping his hand, but the withdrawal was pointed enough. “Perhaps we should discuss it.”
“Discuss what.”
She brushed her hair over a shoulder. “What happened—whatever it is that you feed this thing.”
Sweat coated his palms. “There is nothing to discuss.”
Yrene stared at him for a long moment. It was all he could do not to shrink from that frank gaze. “From what I’ve gleaned, there is quite a bit to discuss regarding the past few months. It seems as if it’s been a … tumultuous time for you recently. You yourself said yesterday that there is no one who loathes you more than yourself.”
To say the least. “And you’re suddenly so eager to hear about it?”
She didn’t so much as flinch. “If that is what is required for you to heal and be gone.”
His brows rose. “Well, then. It finally comes out.”
Yrene’s face was an unreadable mask that could have given Dorian a run for his money. “I assume you do not wish to be here forever, what with war breaking loose in our homeland, as you called it.”
“Is it not our homeland?”
Silently, Yrene rose to grab her satchel. “I have no interest in sharing anything with Adarlan.”
He understood. He really did. Perhaps it was why he still had not told her who, exactly, that lingering darkness belonged to.
“And you,” Yrene went on, “are avoiding the topic at hand.” She rooted through her satchel. “You’ll have to talk about what happened sooner or later.”
“With all due respect, it’s none of your business.”
Her eyes flicked to him at that. “You would be surprised by how closely the healing of physical wounds is tied to the healing of emotional ones.”
“I’ve faced what happened.”
“Then what is that thing in your spine feeding on?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t care.
She fished something out of the satchel at last, and when she strode back toward him, his stomach tightened at what she held.
A bit. Crafted from dark, fresh leather. Unused.
She offered it to him without hesitation. How many times had she handed one over to patients, to heal injuries far worse than his?
“Now would be the time to tell me to stop,” Yrene said, face grim. “In case you’d rather discuss what happened these past few months.”
Chaol only lay on his stomach and slid the bit into his mouth.
Nesryn had watched the sunrise from the skies.
She’d found Prince Sartaq waiting in his aerie in the hour before dawn. The minaret was open to the elements at its uppermost level, and behind the leather-clad prince … Nesryn had braced a hand on the archway to the stairwell, still breathless from the climb.
Kadara was beautiful.
Each of the ruk’s golden feathers shone like burnished metal, the white of her breast bright as fresh snow. And her gold eyes had sized Nesryn up immediately. Before Sartaq even turned from where he’d been buckling on the saddle across her broad back.
“Captain Faliq,” the prince had said by way of greeting. “You’re up early.”
Casual words for any listening ears.
“The storm last night kept me from sleep. I hope I am not disturbing you.”
“On the contrary.” In the dim light, his mouth quirked in a smile. “I was about to go for a ride—to let this fat hog hunt for her breakfast for once.”
Kadara puffed her feathers in indignation, clicking her enormous beak—fully capable of taking a man’s head off in one snip. No wonder Princess Hasar remained wary of the bird.
Sartaq chuckled, patting her feathers. “Care to join?”
With the words, Nesryn suddenly had a sense of how very, very high the minaret was. And how Kadara would likely fly above it. With nothing to keep her from death but the rider and saddle now set in place.
But to ride a ruk …
Even better, to ride a ruk with a prince who might have information for them …
“I am not particularly skilled with heights, but it would be my honor, Prince.”
r /> It had been a matter of a few minutes. Sartaq had ordered her to switch from her midnight-blue jacket to the spare leather one folded in a chest of drawers shoved against the far wall. He’d politely turned his back when she changed pants as well. Since her hair fell only to her shoulders, she had difficulty braiding it back, but the prince had fished into his own pockets and supplied her with a leather thong to pull it back into a knot.
Always carry a spare, he told her. Or else she’d be combing her hair for weeks.
He’d mounted the keen-eyed ruk first, Kadara lowering herself like some oversized hen to the floor. He climbed her side in two fluid movements, then reached down a hand for Nesryn. She gingerly laid her palm against Kadara’s ribs, marveling at the cool feathers smooth as finest silk.
Nesryn waited for the ruk to shift about and glare while Sartaq hauled her into the saddle in front of him, but the prince’s mount remained docile. Patient.
Sartaq had buckled and harnessed them both into the saddle, triple-checking the leather straps. Then he clicked his tongue once, and—
Nesryn knew it wasn’t polite to squeeze a prince’s arms so hard the bone was likely to break. But she did so anyway as Kadara spread her shining golden wings and leaped out.
Leaped down.
Her stomach shot straight up her throat. Her eyes watered and blurred.
Wind tore at her, trying to rip her from that saddle, and she clenched with her thighs so tightly they ached, while she gripped Sartaq’s arms, holding the reins, so hard he chuckled in her ear.
But the pale buildings of Antica loomed up, near-blue in the early dawn, rushing to meet them as Kadara dove and dove, a star falling from the heavens—
Then flared those wings wide and shot upward.
Nesryn was glad she had forgone breakfast. For surely it would have come spewing out of her mouth at what the motion did to her stomach.
Within the span of a few beats, Kadara banked right—toward the horizon just turning pink.
The sprawl of Antica spread before them, smaller and smaller as they rose into the skies. Until it was no more than a cobblestoned road beneath them, spreading into every direction. Until she could spy the olive groves and wheat fields just outside the city. The country estates and small towns speckled about. The rippling dunes of the northern desert to her left. The sparkling, snaking band of rivers turning golden in the rising sun that crested over the mountains to her right.
Sartaq did not speak. Did not point out landmarks. Not even the pale line of the Sister-Road that ran toward the southern horizon.
No, in the rising light, he let Kadara have her head. The ruk took them floating higher still, the air turning crisp—the awakening blue sky brightening with each mighty flap of her wings.
Open. So open.
Not at all like the endless sea, the tedious waves and cramped ship.
This was … this was breath. This was …
She could not look fast enough, drink it all in. How small everything was, how lovely and pristine. A land claimed by a conquering nation, yet loved and nurtured.
Her land. Her home.
The sun and the scrub and the undulating grasslands that beckoned in the distance. The lush jungles and rice fields to the west; the pale sand dunes of the desert to the northeast. More than she could see in a lifetime—farther than Kadara could fly in a single day. An entire world, this land. The entire world contained here.
She could not understand why her father had left.
Why he had stayed, when such darkness had crept into Adarlan. Why he had kept them in that festering city where she so rarely looked up at the sky, or felt a breeze that did not reek of the briny Avery or the rubbish rotting in the streets.
“You are quiet,” the prince said, and it was more question than statement.
Nesryn admitted in Halha, “I don’t have words to describe it.”
She felt Sartaq smile near her shoulder. “That was what I felt—that first ride. And every ride since.”
“I understand why you stayed at the camp those years ago. Why you are eager to return.”
A beat of quiet. “Am I so easy to read?”
“How could you not wish to return?”
“Some consider my father’s palace to be the finest in the world.”
“It is.”
His silence was question enough.
“Rifthold’s palace was nothing so fine—so lovely and a part of the land.”
Sartaq hummed, the sound reverberating into her back. Then he said quietly, “The death of my sister has been hard upon my mother. It is for her that I remain.”
Nesryn winced a bit. “I’m so very sorry.”
Only the rushing wind spoke for a time.
Then Sartaq said, “You said was. Regarding Rifthold’s royal palace. Why?”
“You heard what befell it—the glass portions.”
“Ah.” Another beat of quiet. “Shattered by the Queen of Terrasen. Your … ally.”
“My friend.”
He craned his body around hers to peer at her face. “Is she truly?”
“She is a good woman,” Nesryn said, and meant it. “Difficult, yes, but … some might say the same of any royalty.”
“Apparently, she found the former King of Adarlan so difficult that she killed him.”
Careful words.
“The man was a monster—and a threat to all. His Second, Perrington, remains that way. She did Erilea a favor.”
Sartaq angled the reins as Kadara began a slow, steady descent toward a sparkling river valley. “She is truly that powerful?”
Nesryn debated the merits of the truth or downplaying Aelin’s might. “She and Dorian both possess considerable magic. But I would say it is their intelligence that is the stronger weapon. Brute power is useless without it.”
“It’s dangerous without it.”
“Yes,” Nesryn agreed, swallowing. “Are …” She had not been trained in the mazelike way of speaking at court. “Is there such a threat within your court that warranted us needing to speak in the skies?”
He could very well be the threat posed, she reminded herself.
“You have dined with my siblings. You see how they are. If I were to arrange a meeting with you, it would send a message to them. That I am willing to hear your suit—perhaps press it to our father. They would consider the risks and benefits of undermining me. Or whether it would make them look better to try to join … my side.”
“And are you? Willing to hear us out?”
Sartaq didn’t answer for a long moment, only the screaming wind filling the quiet.
“I would listen. To you and Lord Westfall. I would hear what you know, what has happened to you both. I do not hold as much sway with my father as others, but he knows the ruk riders are loyal to me.”
“I thought—”
“That I was his favorite?” A low, bitter laugh. “I perhaps stand a chance at being named Heir, but the khagan does not select his Heir based on whom he loves best. Even so, that particular honor goes to Duva and Kashin.”
Sweet-faced Duva, she could understand, but—“Kashin?”
“He is loyal to my father to a fault. He has never schemed, never backstabbed. I’ve done it—plotted and maneuvered against them all to get what I want. But Kashin … He may command the land armies and the horse-lords, he may be brutal when required, but with my father, he is guileless. There has never been a more loving or loyal son. When our father dies … I worry. What the others will do to Kashin if he does not submit, or worse: what his death will do to Kashin himself.”
She dared ask, “What would you do to him?” Destroy him, if he will not swear fealty?
“It remains to be seen what sort of threat or alliance he could pose. Only Duva and Arghun are married, and Arghun has yet to sire offspring. Though Kashin, if he has his way, would likely sweep that young healer off her feet.”
Yrene. “Strange that she has no interest in him.”
“A mark in her favor.
It is not easy to love a khagan’s offspring.”
The green grasses, still dewy beneath the fresh sun, rippled as Kadara swept toward a swift-moving river. With those enormous talons of hers, she could easily snatch up fistfuls of fish.
But it was not the prey Kadara sought as she flew over the river, seeking something—
“Someone broke into the Torre’s library last night,” Sartaq said as he monitored the ruk’s hunt over the dark blue waters. Mist off the surface kissed Nesryn’s face, but the chill at his words went far deeper. “They killed a healer—through some vile power that rendered her into a husk. We have never seen its like in Antica.”
Nesryn’s stomach turned over. With that description—“Who? Why?”
“Yrene Towers sounded the alarm. We searched for hours and found no trace, beyond missing books from where she had been studying, and where it stalked her. Yrene was rattled, but fine.”
Researching—Chaol had informed her last night that Yrene had planned to do some research regarding wounds from magic, from demons.
Sartaq asked casually, “Do you know what Yrene might have been looking into that posed such dark interest and theft of her books?”
Nesryn considered. It could be a trick—his revealing something personal from his family, his life, to lull her into telling him secrets. Nesryn and Chaol had not yielded any information of the keys, the Valg, or Erawan to the khagan or his children. They had been waiting to do so—to assess whom to trust. For if their enemies heard that they were hunting for the keys to seal the Wyrdgate …
“No,” she lied. “But perhaps they are unannounced enemies of ours who wish to scare her and the other healers out of helping the captain. I mean—Lord Westfall.”
Silence. She thought he’d push her on it, waited for it as Kadara skimmed closer to the river’s surface, as if closing in on some prey. “It must be strange, to bear a new title, with the former owner right beside you.”
“I was only captain for a few weeks before we left. I suppose I shall have to learn when I return.”
“If Yrene is successful. Among other possible victories.”
Like bringing that army with them.
“Yes,” was all she managed to say.