Queen of Shadows

  No collar. No ring on either hand.

  Aelin bit back her cry of relief and flicked her fingers to tell the courtesan to hurry—

  On near-silent feet, Lysandra hurtled past her, right into the speckled brown-and-green cloak Rowan was holding out. Two heartbeats later she was down the steps and into the brush. Another beat, and the dead guards were inside the wagon with the door locked. Aelin and Rowan slipped back into the forest amid the roars of the wyverns.

  Lysandra was shivering where she knelt in the thicket, Chaol before her, inspecting her wounds. He mouthed to Aelin that she was fine and helped the courtesan rise to her feet before hauling her deeper into the woods.

  It had taken less than two minutes—and thank the gods, because a moment later the painted wagon’s door was flung open and the Matron and king stormed out to see what the noise was about.

  A few paces from Aelin, Rowan monitored every step, every breath their enemy took. There was a flash of movement beside her, and then Aedion and Nesryn were there, dirty and panting, but alive. The grin on Aedion’s face faltered as he peered back at the clearing behind them.

  The king stalked to the heart of the clearing, demanding answers.

  Butchering bastard.

  And for a moment, they were again in Terrasen, at that dinner table in her family’s castle, where the king had eaten her family’s food, drunk their finest wine, and then he’d tried to shatter her mind.

  Aedion’s eyes met hers, his body trembling with restraint—waiting for her order.

  She knew she might live to regret it, but Aelin shook her head. Not here—not now. There were too many variables, and too many players on the board. They had Lysandra. It was time to go.

  The king told his son to get onto his horse and barked orders to the others as the Wing Leader backed away from the prince with a casual, lethal grace. The Matron waited across the clearing, her voluminous black robes billowing despite her stillness.

  Aelin prayed that she and her companions would never run into the Matron—at least not without an army behind them.

  Whatever the king had seen inside the painted wagon had been important enough that they hadn’t risked letters about its specific details.

  Dorian mounted his horse, his face cold and empty.

  I’ll come back for you, she’d promised him. She had not thought it would be in this way.

  The king’s party departed with eerie silence and efficiency, seemingly unaware that they were now missing three of their own. The stench of the Valg faded as they vanished, cleared away by a brisk wind as if Oakwald itself wanted to wipe away any trace.

  Headed in the opposite direction, the witches prowled into the trees, lugging the wagon behind them with inhuman strength, until only the Wing Leader and her horrifying grandmother remained in the clearing.

  The blow happened so fast that Aelin couldn’t detect it. Even Aedion flinched.

  The smack reverberated through the forest, and the Wing Leader’s face snapped to the side to reveal four lines of blue blood now running down her cheek.

  “Insolent fool,” the Matron hissed. Lingering near the trees, the beautiful, golden-haired lieutenant observed every movement the Matron made—so intensely that Aelin wondered if she would go for the Matron’s throat. “Do you wish to cost me everything?”

  “Grandmother, I sent you letters—”

  “I received your whining, sniveling letters. And I burned them. You are under orders to obey. Did you think my silence was not intentional? Do as the duke says.”

  “How can you allow these—”

  Another strike—four more lines bleeding down the witch’s face. “You dare question me? Do you think yourself as good as a High Witch, now that you’re Wing Leader?”

  “No, Matron.” There was no sign of that cocky, taunting tone of minutes before; only cool, lethal rage. A killer by birth and training. But the golden eyes turned toward the painted wagon—a silent question.

  The Matron leaned in, her rusted iron teeth within shredding distance of her granddaughter’s throat. “Ask it, Manon. Ask what’s inside that wagon.”

  The golden-haired witch by the trees was ramrod straight.

  But the Wing Leader—Manon—bowed her head. “You’ll tell me when it’s necessary.”

  “Go look. Let’s see if it meets my granddaughter’s standards.”

  With that, the Matron strode into the trees, the second coven of witches now waiting for her.

  Manon Blackbeak didn’t wipe away the blue blood sliding down her face as she walked up the steps of the wagon, pausing on the landing for only a heartbeat before entering the gloom beyond.

  It was as good a sign as any to get the hell out. With Aedion and Nesryn guarding their backs, Aelin and Rowan hurried for the spot where Chaol and Lysandra would be waiting. Not without magic would she take on the king and Dorian. She didn’t have a death wish—either for herself or her friends.

  She found Lysandra standing with a hand braced against a tree, wide-eyed, breathing hard.

  Chaol was gone.

  CHAPTER

  59

  The demon seized control the moment the man who wielded the collar returned. It shoved him back into that pit of memory until he was the one screaming again, until he was small and broken and fragmented.

  But those golden eyes lingered.

  Come find me again, Prince.

  A promise—a promise of death, of release.

  Come find me again.

  The words soon faded, swallowed up by screaming and blood and the demon’s cold fingers running over his mind. But the eyes lingered—and that name.

  Manon.

  Manon.

  Chaol couldn’t let the king take Dorian back to the castle. He might never get this chance again.

  He had to do it now. Had to kill him.

  Chaol hurtled through the brush as quietly as he could, sword out, bracing himself.

  A dagger through the eye—a dagger, and then—

  Talking from ahead, along with the rustling of leaves and wood.

  Chaol neared the party, beginning to pray, beginning to beg for forgiveness—for what he was about to do and for how he had run. He’d kill the king later; let that kill be his last. But this would be the kill that broke him.

  He drew his dagger, cocking his arm. Dorian had been directly behind the king. One throw, to knock the prince off the horse, then a sweep of his sword, and it could be over. Aelin and the others could deal with the aftermath; he’d already be dead.

  Chaol broke through the trees into a field, the dagger a burning weight in his hand.

  It was not the king’s party that stood there in the tall grass and sunlight.

  Thirteen witches and their wyverns turned to him.

  And smiled.

  Aelin ran through the trees as Rowan tracked Chaol by scent alone.

  If he got them killed, if he got them hurt—

  They’d left Nesryn to guard Lysandra, ordering them to head for the forest across the nearby temple ravine and to wait under an outcropping of stones. Before herding Lysandra between the trees, Nesryn had tightly grabbed Aelin’s arm and said, “Bring him back.”

  Aelin had only nodded before bolting.

  Rowan was a streak of lightning through the trees, so much faster than her when she was stuck in this body. Aedion sprinted close behind him. She ran as quickly as she could, but—

  The path veered away, and Chaol had taken the wrong fork. Where the hell had Chaol even been going?

  She could scarcely draw breath fast enough. Then light flooded in through a break in the trees—the other side of the wide meadow.

  Rowan and Aedion stood a few feet into the swaying grass, their swords out—but downcast.

  She saw why a heartbeat later.

  Not thirty feet from them, Chaol’s lip bled down his chin as the white-haired witch held him against her, iron nails digging into his throat. The prison wagon was open beyond them to reveal the three dead soldiers insid
e.

  The twelve witches behind the Wing Leader were all grinning with anticipatory delight as they took in Rowan and Aedion, then her.

  “What’s this?” the Wing Leader said, a killing light in her golden eyes. “Spies? Rescuers? Where did you take our prisoner?”

  Chaol struggled, and she dug her nails in farther. He stiffened. A trickle of blood leaked down his neck and onto his tunic.

  Oh, gods. Think—think, think, think.

  The Wing Leader shifted those burnt-gold eyes to Rowan.

  “Your kind,” the Wing Leader mused, “I have not seen for a time.”

  “Let the man go,” Rowan said.

  Manon’s smile revealed a row of flesh-shredding iron teeth, far, far too close to Chaol’s neck. “I don’t take orders from Fae bastards.”

  “Let him go,” Rowan said too softly. “Or it will be the last mistake you make, Wing Leader.”

  In the field behind them, the wyverns were stirring, their tails lashing, wings shifting.

  The white-haired witch peered at Chaol, whose breathing had turned ragged. “The king is not too far down the road. Perhaps I should hand you over to him.” The cuts on her cheeks, scabbed in blue, were like brutal war paint. “He’ll be furious to learn you stole his prisoner from me. Maybe you’ll appease him, boy.”

  Aelin and Rowan shared all of one look before she stepped up to his side, drawing Goldryn. “If you want a prize to give to the king,” Aelin said, “then take me.”

  “Don’t,” Chaol gasped out.

  The witch and all twelve of her sentinels now fixed their immortal, deadly attention on Aelin.

  Aelin dropped Goldryn into the grass and lifted her hands. Aedion snarled in warning.

  “Why should I bother?” the Wing Leader said. “Perhaps we’ll take you all to the king.”

  Aedion’s sword lifted slightly. “You can try.”

  Aelin carefully approached the witch, her hands still up. “You enter into a fight with us, and you and your companions will die.”

  The Wing Leader looked her up and down. “Who are you.” An order—not a question.

  “Aelin Galathynius.”

  Surprise—and perhaps something else, something Aelin couldn’t identify—sparked in the Wing Leader’s golden eyes. “The Queen of Terrasen.”

  Aelin bowed, not daring to take her attention off the witch. “At your service.”

  Only three feet separated her from the Blackbeak heir.

  The witch sliced a glance at Chaol, and then at Aedion and Rowan. “Your court?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The Wing Leader studied Aedion again. “Your brother?”

  “My cousin, Aedion. Almost as pretty as me, wouldn’t you say?”

  The witch didn’t smile.

  But Aelin was now near enough, so close that the spatters of Chaol’s blood lay in the grass before the tip of her boots.

  The Queen of Terrasen.

  Elide’s hope had not been misplaced.

  Even if the young queen was now toeing the dirt and grass, unable to keep still while she bargained for the man’s life.

  Behind her, the Fae warrior observed every flicker of movement.

  He’d be the deadly one—the one to look out for.

  It had been fifty years since she’d fought a Fae warrior. Bedded him, then fought him. He’d left the bones of her arm in pieces.

  She’d just left him in pieces.

  But he had been young, and arrogant, and barely trained.

  This male … He might very well be capable of killing at least a few of her Thirteen if she so much as harmed a hair on the queen’s head. And then there was the golden-haired one—as large as the Fae male, but possessing his cousin’s bright arrogance and honed wildness. He might be problematic, if left alive too long.

  The queen kept fidgeting her foot in the grass. She couldn’t be more than twenty. And yet, she moved like a warrior, too—or she had, until the incessant shifting around. But she halted the movement, as if realizing that it gave away her nerves, her inexperience. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction for Manon to detect the queen’s true level of fear. “Well, Wing Leader?”

  Would the king put a collar around her fair neck, as he had the prince’s? Or would he kill her? It made no difference. She would be a prize the king would welcome.

  Manon shoved away the captain, sending him stumbling toward the queen. Aelin reached out with an arm, nudging him to the side—behind her. Manon and the queen stared at each other.

  No fear in her eyes—in her pretty, mortal face.

  None.

  It’d be more trouble than it was worth.

  Manon had bigger things to consider, anyway. Her grandmother approved. Approved of the breeding, the breaking of the witches.

  Manon needed to get into the sky, needed to lose herself in cloud and wind for a few hours. Days. Weeks.

  “I have no interest in prisoners or battling today,” Manon said.

  The Queen of Terrasen gave her a grin. “Good.”

  Manon turned away, barking at her Thirteen to get to their mounts.

  “I suppose,” the queen went on, “that makes you smarter than Baba Yellowlegs.”

  Manon stopped, staring straight ahead and seeing nothing of the grass or sky or trees.

  Asterin whirled. “What do you know of Baba Yellowlegs?”

  The queen gave a low chuckle, despite the warning growl from the Fae warrior.

  Slowly, Manon looked over her shoulder.

  The queen tugged apart the lapels of her tunic, revealing a necklace of thin scars as the wind shifted.

  The scent—iron and stone and pure hatred—hit Manon like a rock to the face. Every Ironteeth witch knew the scent that forever lingered on those scars: Witch Killer.

  Perhaps Manon would lose herself in blood and gore instead.

  “You’re carrion,” Manon said, and lunged.

  Only to slam face-first into an invisible wall.

  And then freeze entirely.

  “Run,” Aelin breathed, snatching up Goldryn and bolting for the trees. The Wing Leader was frozen in place, her sentinels wide-eyed as they rushed to her.

  Chaol’s human blood wouldn’t hold the spell for long.

  “The ravine,” Aedion said, not looking back from where he sprinted ahead with Chaol toward the temple.

  They hurtled through the trees, the witches still in the meadow, still trying to break the spell that had trapped their Wing Leader.

  “You,” Rowan said as he ran beside her, “are one very lucky woman.”

  “Tell me that again when we’re out of here,” she panted, leaping over a fallen tree.

  A roar of fury set the birds scattering from the trees, and Aelin ran faster. Oh, the Wing Leader was pissed. Really, really pissed.

  Aelin hadn’t believed for one moment that the witch would have let them walk away without a fight. She had needed to buy whatever time they could get.

  The trees cleared, revealing a barren stretch of land jutting toward the deep ravine and the temple perched on the spit of rock in the center. On the other side, Oakwald sprawled onward.

  Connected only by two chain-and-wood bridges, it was the sole way across the ravine for miles. And with the dense foliage of Oakwald blocking the wyverns, it was the only way to escape the witches, who would no doubt pursue on foot.

  “Hurry,” Rowan shouted as they made for the crumbling temple ruins.

  The temple was small enough that not even the priestesses had dwelled here. The only decorations on the stone island were five weather-stained pillars and a crumbling, domed roof. Not even an altar—or at least one that had survived the centuries.

  Apparently, people had given up on Temis long before the King of Adarlan came along.

  She just prayed that the bridges on either side—

  Aedion hurled himself to a stop before the first footbridge, Chaol thirty paces behind, Aelin and Rowan following. “Secure,” Aedion said. Before she could bark
a warning, he thundered across.

  The bridge bounced and swayed, but held—held even as her damn heart stopped. Then Aedion was at the temple island, the single, thin pillar of rock carved out by the rushing river flowing far, far below. He waved Chaol on. “One at a time,” he ordered. Beyond him the second bridge waited.

  Chaol hurried through the stone pillars that flanked the entrance to the first bridge, the thin iron chains on the sides writhing as the bridge bounced. He kept upright, flying toward the temple, faster than she’d ever seen him run during all those morning exercises through the castle grounds.

  Then Aelin and Rowan were at the columns, and— “Don’t even try to argue,” Rowan hissed, shoving her ahead of him.

  Gods above, that was a wicked drop beneath them. The roar of the river was barely a whisper.

  But she ran—ran because Rowan was waiting, and there were the witches breaking through the trees with Fae swiftness. The bridge bucked and swayed as she shot over the aging wooden planks. Ahead, Aedion had cleared the second bridge to the other side, and Chaol was now sprinting across it. Faster—she had to go faster. She leaped the final few feet onto the temple rock.

  Ahead, Chaol exited the second bridge and drew his blade as he joined Aedion on the grassy cliff beyond, an arrow nocked in her cousin’s bow—aimed at the trees behind her. Aelin lunged up the few stairs onto the bald temple platform. The entire circular space was barely more than thirty feet across, bordered on all sides by a sheer plunge—and death.

  Temis, apparently, was not the forgiving sort.

  She twisted to look behind. Rowan was running across the bridge, so fast that the bridge hardly moved, but—

  Aelin swore. The Wing Leader had reached the posts, flinging herself over and jumping through the air to land a third of the way down the bridge. Even Aedion’s warning shot went long, the arrow imbedding where any mortal should have landed. But not a witch. Holy burning hell.

  “Go,” Rowan roared at Aelin, but she palmed her fighting knives, bending her knees as—

  As an arrow fired by the golden-haired lieutenant shot for Aelin from the other side of the ravine.