Queen of Shadows

  Shifting into her Fae form hadn’t helped—it had only made the Valg smell worse.

  Dorian was on his knees, clawing at his hand, where the ring kept glowing, branding his flesh.

  He sent darkness snapping for her again and again—and each time, she slammed it away with a wall of flame.

  But her blood was heating.

  “Try, Dorian,” she begged, her tongue like paper in her parched mouth.

  “I will kill you, you Fae bitch.”

  A low laugh sounded behind her.

  Aelin half turned—not daring to put her back to either of them, even if it meant exposing herself to the open fall.

  The King of Adarlan stood in the open doorway at the other end of the bridge.

  Chaol—

  “Such a noble effort from the captain. To try to buy you time so you might save my son.”

  She’d tried—tried, but—

  “Punish her,” the demon hissed from the other end of the bridge.

  “Patience.” But the king stiffened as he took in the gold ring burning on Dorian’s hand. That harsh, brutal face tightened. “What have you done?”

  Dorian thrashed, shuddering, and let out a scream that set her Fae ears ringing.

  Aelin drew her father’s sword. “You killed Chaol,” she said, the words hollow.

  “The boy didn’t even land a single blow.” He smirked at the Sword of Orynth. “I doubt you will, either.”

  Dorian went silent.

  Aelin snarled, “You killed him.”

  The king approached, his footfalls thudding on the glass bridge.

  “My one regret,” the king said to her, “is that I did not get to take my time.”

  She backed up a step—just one.

  The king drew Nothung. “I’ll take my time with you, though.”

  Aelin lifted her sword in both hands.

  Then—

  “What did you say?”

  Dorian.

  The voice was hoarse, broken.

  The king and Aelin both turned toward the prince.

  But Dorian’s eyes were on his father, and they were burning like stars. “What did you say. About Chaol.”

  The king snapped. “Silence.”

  “Did you kill him.” Not a question.

  Aelin’s lips began trembling, and she tunneled down, down, down inside herself.

  “And if I did?” the king said, brows high.

  “Did you kill Chaol?”

  The light at Dorian’s hand burned and burned—

  But the collar remained around his neck.

  “You,” the king snapped—and Aelin realized he meant her just as a spear of darkness shot for her so fast, too fast—

  The darkness shattered against a wall of ice.

  Dorian.

  His name was Dorian.

  Dorian Havilliard, and he was the Crown Prince of Adarlan.

  And Celaena Sardothien—Aelin Galathynius, his friend … she had come back for him.

  She faced him, an ancient sword in her hands.

  “Dorian?” she breathed.

  The demon inside him was screaming and pleading, ripping at him, trying to bargain.

  A wave of black slammed into the shield of ice he’d thrown up between the princess and his father. Soon—soon the king would break through it.

  Dorian lifted his hands to the Wyrdstone collar—cold, smooth, thrumming.

  Don’t, the demon shrieked. Don’t!

  There were tears running down Aelin’s face as Dorian gripped the black stone encircling his throat.

  And, bellowing his grief, his rage, his pain, he snapped the collar from his neck.

  CHAPTER

  77

  The Wyrdstone collar broke in two—severing along a hairline fracture where the ring’s power had sliced through.

  Dorian was panting, and blood was running from his nose, but—

  “Aelin,” he gasped out, and the voice was his. It was him.

  She ran, sheathing the Sword of Orynth, reaching his side as the wall of ice exploded beneath a hammer of darkness.

  The king’s power surged for them, and Aelin flung out a single hand. A shield of fire blasted into existence, and the darkness was shoved back.

  “Neither of you are leaving here alive,” the king said, his rough voice slithering through the fire.

  Dorian sagged against her, and Aelin slipped a hand around his waist to hold him up.

  Pain flickered in her gut, and a throbbing began in her blood. She couldn’t hold out, not so unprepared, even as the sun held at its peak, as if Mala herself willed it to linger just a little longer to amplify the gifts she’d already showered on a Princess of Terrasen.

  “Dorian,” Aelin said, pain lancing down her spine as burnout neared.

  He turned his head, an eye still on the wall of flickering flames. Such pain, and grief, and rage in those eyes. Yet, somehow, beneath it all—a spark of spirit. Of hope.

  Aelin extended her hand—a question and an offer and a promise.

  “To a better future,” she said.

  “You came back,” he said, as if that were an answer.

  They joined hands.

  So the world ended.

  And the next one began.

  They were infinite.

  They were the beginning and the ending; they were eternity.

  The king standing before them gaped as the shield of flame died out to reveal Aelin and Dorian, hand in hand, glowing like newborn gods as their magic entwined.

  “You’re mine,” the man raged. He became darkness; folded himself into the power he carried, as if he were nothing but malice on a dark wind.

  He struck them, swallowed them.

  But they held tighter to each other, past and present and future; flickering between an ancient hall in a mountain castle perched above Orynth, a bridge suspended between glass towers, and another place, perfect and strange, where they had been crafted from stardust and light.

  A wall of night knocked them back. But they could not be contained.

  The darkness paused for breath.

  They erupted.

  Rowan blinked against the sunlight as it poured from beyond Aedion.

  Soldiers had infiltrated the sewers again, even after Lysandra had saved their sorry asses. Lorcan had rushed back, bloodied, and told them the way out was barred, and whatever way Lysandra had gotten in was now overrun.

  With battlefield efficiency, Rowan had healed his leg as best he could with his remaining power. While he’d patched himself up, bone and skin knitting together hastily enough to make him bark in pain, Aedion and Lorcan clawed a path through the cave-in, just as the sewer had filled with the sounds of the soldiers rushing in. They’d hauled ass back to the castle grounds, where they hit another cave-in. Aedion had started ripping at the top of it, shouting and roaring at the earth as if his will alone could move it.

  But now there was a hole. It was all Rowan needed.

  Rowan shifted, his leg flashing in agony as he exchanged his limbs for wings and talons. He loosed a cry, shrill and raging. A white-tailed hawk soared out of the small opening, past Aedion.

  Rowan did not linger as he took in his surroundings. They were somewhere in the castle gardens, the glass castle looming beyond. The reek of the smoke from the ruin of the clock tower clogged his senses.

  Light exploded from the uppermost castle spires, so bright that he was blinded for a moment.

  Aelin.

  Alive. Alive. He flapped, bending the wind to his will with the dregs of his magic, soaring faster and faster. He sent another wind toward the clock tower, rerouting the smoke toward the river, away from them.

  Rowan rounded the corner of the castle.

  He had no words for what he saw.

  The King of Adarlan bellowed as Aelin and Dorian fractured his power. Together they broke down every spell, every ounce of evil that he’d bent and shackled to his command.

  Infinite—Dorian’s power was infinite.

&nbs
p; They were full of light, of fire and starlight and sunshine. They overflowed with it as they snapped the final tether on the king’s power and cleaved his darkness away, burning it up until it was nothing.

  The king fell to his knees, the glass bridge thudding with the impact.

  Aelin released Dorian’s hand. Cold emptiness flooded her so violently that she, too, fell to the glass floor, gulping down air, reeling herself back in, remembering who she was.

  Dorian was staring at his father: the man who had broken him, enslaved him.

  In a voice she had never heard, the king whispered, “My boy.”

  Dorian didn’t react.

  The king gazed up at his son, his eyes wide—bright—and said again, “My boy.”

  Then the king looked to where she was on her knees, gaping at him. “Have you come to save me at last, Aelin Galathynius?”

  CHAPTER

  78

  Aelin Galathynius stared at the butcher of her family, her people, her continent.

  “Don’t listen to his lies,” Dorian said, flat and hollow.

  Aelin studied the king’s hand, where the dark ring had been shattered away. Only a pale band of skin remained. “Who are you?” she said quietly.

  Human—more and more, the king looked … human. Softer.

  The king turned to Dorian, exposing his broad palms. “Everything I did—it was all to keep you safe. From him.”

  Aelin went still.

  “I found the key,” the king went on, the words tumbling out. “I found the key and brought it to Morath. And he … Perrington. We were young, and he took me under the Keep to show me the crypt, even though it was forbidden. But I opened it with the key …” Tears, real and clear, flowed down his ruddy face. “I opened it, and he came; he took Perrington’s body—and …” He gazed at his bare hand. Watched it shake. “He let his minion take me.”

  “That’s enough,” Dorian said.

  Aelin’s heart stumbled. “Erawan is free,” she breathed. And not only free—Erawan was Perrington. The Dark King himself had manhandled her, lived in this castle with her—and had never known, by luck or Fate or Elena’s own protection, that she was here. She had never known, either—never detected it on him. Gods above, Erawan had forced her to bow that day in Endovier and neither of them had scented or marked what the other was.

  The king nodded, setting his tears splattering on his tunic. “The Eye—you could have sealed him back in with the Eye …”

  The look on the king’s face when she’d revealed the necklace … He’d been seeing a tool not of destruction, but of salvation.

  Aelin said, “How is it possible he’s been inside Perrington all this time and no one noticed?”

  “He can hide inside a body like a snail in its shell. But cloaking his presence also stifles his own abilities to scent others—like you. And now you are back—all the players in the unfinished game. The Galathynius line—and the Havilliard, which he has hated so fiercely all this time. Why he targeted my family, and yours.”

  “You butchered my kingdom,” she managed to say. That night her parents died, there had been that smell in the room … The scent of the Valg. “You slaughtered millions.”

  “I tried to stop it.” The king braced a hand on the bridge, as if to keep from collapsing under the weight of the shame now coating his words. “They could find you based on your magic alone, and wanted the strongest of you for themselves. And when you were born …” His craggy features crumpled as he again addressed Dorian. “You were so strong—so precious. I couldn’t let them take you. I wrested control away for just long enough.”

  “To do what,” Dorian said hoarsely.

  Aelin glanced at the smoke wafting toward the river far beyond. “To order the towers built,” she said, “and use that spell to banish magic.” And now that they had freed magic … the magic-wielders would be sniffed out by every Valg demon in Erilea.

  The king gasped a shuddering breath. “But he didn’t know how I’d done it. He thought the magic vanished as punishment from our gods and knew nothing of why the towers were built. All this time I used my strength to keep the knowledge of it away from him—from them. All my strength—so I could not fight the demon, stop it when … when it did those things. I kept that knowledge safe.”

  “He’s a liar,” Dorian said, turning on his heel. There was no mercy in his voice. “I still wound up able to use my magic—it didn’t protect me at all. He’ll say anything.”

  The wicked will tell us anything to haunt our thoughts long after, Nehemia had warned her.

  “I didn’t know,” the king pleaded. “Using my blood in the spell must have made my line immune. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. My boy—Dorian—”

  “You don’t get to call him that,” Aelin snapped. “You came to my home and murdered my family.”

  “I came to find you. I came to have you burn it out of me!” the king sobbed. “Aelin of the Wildfire. I tried to get you to do it. But your mother knocked you unconscious before you could kill me, and the demon … The demon became devoted to wiping out your line after that, so no fire could ever cleanse him from me.”

  Aelin’s blood turned to ice. No—no, it couldn’t be true, couldn’t be right.

  “All of it was to find you,” the king said to her. “So you could save me—so you could end me at last. Please. Do it.” The king was weeping now, and his body seemed to waste away bit by bit, his cheeks hollowing out, his hands thinning.

  As if his life force and the demon prince inside him had indeed been bonded—and one could not exist without the other.

  “Chaol is alive,” the king murmured through his emaciated hands, lowering them to reveal red-rimmed eyes, already milky with age. “Broken, but I didn’t make the kill. There was—a light around him. I left him alive.”

  A sob ripped from her throat. She had hoped, had tried to give him a shot at survival—

  “You are a liar,” Dorian said again, his voice cold. So cold. “And you deserve this.” Light sparked at Dorian’s fingertips.

  Aelin mouthed his name, trying to reel herself back in, gather her wits. The demon inside the king had hunted her not because of the threat Terrasen posed—but for the fire in her veins. The fire that could end them both.

  She lifted a hand as Dorian stepped toward his father. They had to ask more, learn more—

  The Crown Prince tipped his head back to the sky and roared, and it was the battle cry of a god.

  Then the glass castle shattered.

  CHAPTER

  79

  The bridge exploded from beneath her, and the world turned into shards of flying glass.

  Aelin plummeted into open air, towers crashing down around her.

  She flung out her magic in a cocoon, burning through the glass as she fell and fell and fell.

  People were screaming—screaming as Dorian brought the castle down for Chaol, for Sorscha, and sent a tidal wave of glass rushing toward the city lying below.

  Down and down Aelin went, the ground surging up, the buildings around her rupturing, the light so bright on all the fragments—

  Aelin pulled out every last drop of her magic as the castle collapsed, the lethal wave of glass cascading toward Rifthold.

  Wildfire raced for the gates, raced against the wind, against death.

  And as the wave of glass crested the iron gates, shredding through the corpses tied there as if they were paper, a wall of fire erupted before it, shooting sky-high, spreading wide. Halting it.

  A wind shoved against her, brutal and unforgiving, her bones groaning as it pushed her up, not down. She didn’t care—not when she yielded the entirety of her magic, the entirety of her being, to holding the barrier of flame now shielding Rifthold. A few more seconds, then she could die.

  The wind tore at her, and it sounded like it was roaring her name.

  Wave after wave of glass and debris slammed into her wildfire.

  But she kept that wall of flame burning—for the Royal
Theater. And the flower girls at the market. For the slaves and the courtesans and the Faliq family. For the city that had offered her joy and pain, death and rebirth, for the city that had given her music, Aelin kept that wall of fire burning bright.

  There was blood raining down among the glass—blood that sizzled on her little cocoon of flame, reeking of darkness and pain.

  The wind kept blowing until it swept that dark blood away.

  Still Aelin held the shield around the city, held on to the final promise she’d made to Chaol.

  I’ll make it count.

  She held on until the ground rose up to meet her—

  And she landed softly in the grass.

  Then darkness slammed into the back of her head.

  The world was so bright.

  Aelin Galathynius groaned as she pushed herself onto her elbows, the small hill of grass beneath her untouched and vibrant. Only a moment—she’d been out for only a moment.

  She raised her head, her skull throbbing as she shoved her unbound hair from her eyes and looked at what she had done.

  What Dorian had done.

  The glass castle was gone.

  Only the stone castle remained, its gray stones warming under the midday sun.

  And where a cascade of glass and debris should have destroyed a city, a massive, opaque wall glittered.

  A wall of glass, its upper lip curved as if it indeed had been a cresting wave.

  The glass castle was gone. The king was dead. And Dorian—

  Aelin scrambled up, her arms buckling under her. There, not three feet away, was Dorian, sprawled on the grass, eyes closed.

  But his chest was rising and falling.

  Beside him, as if some benevolent god had indeed been looking after them, lay Chaol.

  His face was bloody, but he breathed. No other wounds that she could detect.

  She began shaking. She wondered if he had noticed when she’d slipped the real Eye of Elena into his pocket as she’d fled the throne room.

  The scent of pine and snow hit her, and she realized how they had survived the fall.

  Aelin got to her feet, swaying.

  The sloping hill down to the city had been demolished, its trees and lampposts and greenery shredded by the glass.