Darkness embrace her, it sparkled. She tugged it. Flexible, but strong as steel. Impossibly light. But—
“There’s an imperfection here . . . Can I expect the rest of it to be similarly marred?” The spider hissed and the ground thudded as she neared. Abraxos stopped her with a warning growl that set the other three coming up behind her—guards, then. But Manon held up the swatch to the light. “Look,” Manon said, pointing to a vein of color running through it.
“That’s no imperfection,” the spider snapped. Abraxos’s tail curled around Manon, a shield between her and the spiders, bringing her closer to the wall of his body.
Manon held it higher, angling it toward the sun. “Look in the better light. You think I’m going to give away my beauty for second-rate weaving?”
“Second rate!” the spider seethed. Abraxos’s tail curled tighter.
“No—it appears I’m mistaken.” Manon lowered her arms, smiling. “It seems I’m not in the bargaining mood today.”
The spiders, now standing along the cliff ’s edge, didn’t even have time to move as Abraxos’s tail unwound like a whip and slammed into them.
They went flying into the ravine, shrieking. Manon didn’t waste a second as she stuffed the remaining yards of silk into the empty saddlebags. She mounted Abraxos and they leapt into the air, the cliff the perfect takeoff spot, just as she’d planned.
The perfect trap for those foolish, ancient monsters.
38
Manon gave a foot of spidersilk to the overseer after he carefully grafted it onto Abraxos’s wings. She’d gotten extra—lots of it, in case it ever wore down—and it was now locked in the false bottom of a trunk. She told no one where she had been, or why Abraxos’s wings now shimmered in a certain light. Asterin would have murdered her for the risk, and her grandmother would have butchered Asterin for not being there. Manon was in no mood to replace her Second and find a new member for the Thirteen.
Once Abraxos had healed, Manon brought him to the mouth of the Northern Fang to try the Crossing. Before, his wings had been too weak to attempt the plunge—but with the silk reinforcements, he’d stand a far greater chance.
But the risk remained, which was why Asterin and Sorrel waited behind her, already on their mounts. If things went wrong, if Abraxos couldn’t pull up or the silk failed, she was to jump—jump away from him. Let him die, while one of them caught her in the claws of their wyverns.
Manon wasn’t too keen on that plan, but it was the only way Asterin and Sorrel would agree to let her do it. Though Manon was the Blackbeak heir, they would have locked her in a wyvern pen rather than let her make the Crossing without the proper precautions. She might have called them softhearted and given them the beatings they deserved, but it was smart. Tensions were worse than ever, and she wouldn’t put it past the Yellowlegs heir to spook Abraxos during the Crossing.
Manon nodded her readiness to her Second and Third before approaching her beast. Not many had gathered, but Iskra was on the viewing platform, smiling faintly. Manon checked the stirrups, the saddle, and the reins one more time, Abraxos tense and snarling.
“Let’s go,” she said to him, pulling the reins to lead him a bit farther ahead so she could mount him. He still had plenty of space to get a running start—and with his new wings, she knew he would be fine. They’d done steep plunges and hard upswings before. But Abraxos wouldn’t move.
“Now,” she snapped at him, tugging hard.
Abraxos turned an eye to her and growled. She lightly smacked his leathery cheek. “Now.”
Those hind legs dug in, and he tucked his wings in tight. “Abraxos.”
He was looking at the Crossing, then back at her. Wide-eyed. Petrified—utterly petrified. Useless, stupid, cowardly beast.
“Stop it,” she said, moving to climb into the saddle instead. “Your wings are fine now.” She reached for his haunch but he reared away, the ground shaking as he slammed down. Behind her, Asterin and Sorrel murmured to their mounts, who had skittered back and snapped at Abraxos, and at each other.
There was a soft laugh from the viewing platform, and Manon’s teeth popped down.
“Abraxos. Now.” She reached for the saddle again.
He bucked away, slamming into the wall and shrinking back.
One of the men brought out a whip, but she held out a hand. “Don’t take another step,” she snapped, iron nails out. Whips only made Abraxos more uncontrollable. She turned to her mount. “You rutting coward,” she hissed at the beast, pointing to the Crossing. “Get back in line.” Abraxos met her stare, refusing to back down. “Get in line, Abraxos!”
“He can’t understand you,” Asterin said quietly.
“Yes, he—” Manon shut her mouth. She hadn’t told them that theory, not yet. She turned back to the wyvern. “If you don’t let me into that saddle and make that jump, I’m going to have you confined to the darkest, smallest pit in this bloody mountain.”
He bared his teeth. She bared hers.
The staring contest lasted for a full minute. One humiliating, enraging minute.
“Fine,” she spat, turning from the beast. He was a waste of her time. “Have him locked up wherever he’ll be the most miserable,” she said to the overseer. “He’s not coming out until he’s willing to make the Crossing.”
The overseer gaped, and Manon snapped her fingers at Asterin and Sorrel to signal them to dismount. She’d never hear the end of this—not from her grandmother, or from the Yellowlegs witches, or from Iskra, who was already making her way across the floor of the pit.
“Why don’t you stay, Manon?” Iskra called. “I could show your wyvern how it’s done.”
“Keep walking,” Sorrel murmured to Manon, but she didn’t need a reminder.
“They say it’s not the beasts who are the problem, but the riders,” Iskra went on, loud enough for everyone to hear. Manon didn’t turn. She didn’t want to see them take Abraxos back to the gate, to whatever hole they’d lock him in. Stupid, useless beast.
“Though,” Iskra said thoughtfully, “perhaps your mount needs a bit of discipline.”
“Let’s go,” Sorrel coaxed, pressing in tight to Manon’s side. Asterin walked a step behind, guarding Manon’s back.
“Give that to me,” Iskra barked at someone. “He just needs the right encouragement.”
A whip snapped behind them, and there was a roar—of pain and fear.
Manon stopped dead.
Abraxos was huddling against the wall.
Iskra stood before him, whip bloody from the line she’d sliced down his face, narrowly missing his eye. Her iron teeth shining bright, Iskra smiled at Manon as she raised the whip again and struck. Abraxos yelped.
Asterin and Sorrel weren’t fast enough to stop Manon as she hurtled past and tackled Iskra.
Teeth and nails out, they rolled across the dirt floor, flipping and shredding and biting. Manon thought she might be roaring, roaring so loud the hall shook. Feet slammed into her stomach, and the air shot out of her as Iskra kicked her off.
Manon hit the earth, spat out a mouthful of blue blood, and was up in a heartbeat. The Yellowlegs heir slashed with an iron-tipped hand, a blow that could have severed through bone and flesh. Manon ducked past her guard and threw Iskra onto the unforgiving stone.
Iskra groaned above the shouts of the swarming witches, and Manon brought her fist down onto her face.
Her knuckles howled in pain, but all she could see was that whip, the pain in Abraxos’s eyes, the fear. Struggling against Manon’s weight, Iskra swiped at her face. Manon reeled back, the blow cutting down her neck. She didn’t quite feel the stinging, or the warm trickle of blood. She just drew back her fist, knee digging harder into Iskra’s chest, and struck. Again. And again.
She lifted her aching fist once more, but there were hands at her
wrist, under her arms, hauling her off. Manon thrashed against them, still screaming, the sound wordless and endless.
“Manon!” Sorrel roared in her ear, and nails cut into her shoulder—not hard enough to damage but to make her pause, to realize there were witches everywhere, in the pit and in the viewing platform, gaping. Sword raised, Asterin was standing between her and—
And Iskra, on the ground, face bloodied and swollen, her own Second’s sword out and poised to meet Asterin’s.
“He is fine,” Sorrel said, squeezing her tighter. “Abraxos is fine, Manon. Look at him. Look at him and see that he’s fine.” Breathing through her mouth thanks to her blood-clogged nose, Manon obeyed, and found him crouching, eyes wide and on her. His wound had already clotted.
Iskra hadn’t moved an inch from where Manon had thrown her onto the floor. But Asterin and the other Second were growling, ready to launch into another fight that might very well rip this mountain apart.
Enough.
Manon shook off Sorrel’s firm grip. Everyone went dead silent as Manon wiped her bloody nose and mouth on the back of her wrist. Iskra snarled at her from the floor, blood from her broken nose leaking onto her cut lip.
“You touch him again,” Manon said, “and I’ll drink the marrow from your bones.”
•
The Yellowlegs heir got a second beating that night from her mother in the mess hall—plus two lashes of the whip for the blows she’d given Abraxos. She’d offered them to Manon, but Manon refused under the guise of indifference.
Her arm was actually too stiff and aching to use the whip with any efficiency.
Manon had just entered Abraxos’s cage the next day, Asterin on her heels, when the Blueblood heir appeared at the stairway entrance, her red-haired Second close behind. Manon, her face still swollen and eye beautifully black, gave the witch a tight nod. There were other pens down here, though she rarely ran into anyone else, especially not the two heirs.
But Petrah paused at the bars, and it was then that Manon noticed the goat’s leg in her Second’s arms. “I heard the fight was something to behold,” Petrah said, keeping a respectful distance from Manon and the open door to the pen. Petrah smiled faintly. “Iskra looks worse.”
Manon flicked her brows up, though the motion made her face throb.
Petrah held out a hand to her Second, and the witch passed her the leg of meat. “I also heard that your Thirteen and your mounts only eat the meat they catch. My Keelie caught this on our morning flight. She wanted to share with Abraxos.”
“I don’t accept meat from rival clans.”
“Are we rivals?” Petrah asked. “I thought the King of Adarlan had convinced us to fly under one banner again.”
Manon took a long breath. “What do you want? I have training in ten minutes.”
Petrah’s Second bristled, but the heir smiled. “I told you—my Keelie wanted to give this to him.”
“Oh? She told you?” Manon sneered.
Petrah cocked her head. “Doesn’t your wyvern talk to you?”
Abraxos was watching with as much awareness as the other witches. “They don’t talk.”
Petrah shrugged, tapping a hand casually over her heart. “Don’t they?”
She left the goat leg before walking off into the raucous gloom of the pens.
Manon threw the meat away.
39
“Tell me about how you learned to tattoo.”
“No.”
Hunched over the wooden table in Rowan’s room a night after their encounter with the creature in the lake, Celaena looked up from where she held the bone-handled needle over his wrist. “If you don’t answer my questions, I might very well make a mistake, and . . .” She lowered the tattooing needle to his tan, muscled arm for emphasis. Rowan, to her surprise, let out a huff that might have been a laugh. She figured it was a good sign that he’d asked her to help shade in the parts of his arm he couldn’t reach himself; the tattoo around his wrist needed to be re-inked now that the wounds from her burning him had faded. “Did you learn from someone? Master and apprentice and all that?”
He gave her a rather incredulous look. “Yes, master and apprentice and all that. In the war camps, we had a commander who used to tattoo the number of enemies he’d killed on his flesh—sometimes he’d write the whole story of a battle. All the young soldiers were enamored of it, and I convinced him to teach me.”
“With that legendary charm of yours, I suppose.”
That earned her a half smile at least. “Just fill in the spots where I—” A hiss as she took the needle and little mallet and made another dark, bloody mark in him. “Good. That’s the right depth.” With his immortal, fast-healing body, Rowan’s ink was mixed with salt and powdered iron to keep the magic in his blood from wiping away any trace of the tattoo.
She’d awoken that morning feeling . . . clear. The grief and pain were still there, writhing inside her, but for the first time in a long while, she felt as though she could see. As though she could breathe.
Focusing on keeping her hand steady, she made another little mark, then another. “Tell me about your family.”
“Tell me about yours and I’ll tell you about mine,” he said through gritted teeth as she kept going. He’d instructed her thoroughly before he had let her take the needles to his skin.
“Fine. Are your parents alive?” A stupid, dangerous question to ask, given what had happened with his mate, but there was no grief in his face as he shook his head.
“My parents were very old when they conceived me.” Not old in the human sense, she knew. “I was their only child in the millennia they’d been mated. They faded into the Afterworld before I reached my second decade.”
Before she could think more on that interesting, different way of describing death, Rowan said, “You had no siblings.”
She focused on her work as she let out the thinnest tendril of memory. “My mother, thanks to her Fae heritage, had a difficult time with the pregnancy. She stopped breathing during labor. They said it was my father’s will that kept her tethered to this world. I don’t know if she even could have conceived again after that. So, no siblings. But—” Gods, she should shut her mouth. “But I had a cousin. He was five years older than me, and we fought and loved each other like siblings.”
Aedion. She hadn’t spoken that name aloud in ten years. But she’d heard it, and seen it in papers. She had to set down the needle and mallet and flex her fingers. “I don’t know what happened, but they started saying his name—as a skilled general in the king’s army.”
She had failed Aedion so unforgivably that she couldn’t bring herself to blame or detest him for what he’d become. She’d avoided learning any details about what, exactly, he’d done in the north all these years. Aedion had been fiercely, wildly loyal to Terrasen as a child. She didn’t want to know what he’d been forced to do, what had happened to him, to change that. It was by luck or fate or something else entirely that he had never been in the castle when she was there. Because not only would he have recognized her, but if he knew what she had done with her life . . . his hatred would make Rowan’s look pleasant, probably.
Rowan’s features were set in a mask of contemplation as she said, “I think facing my cousin after everything would be the worst of it—worse than facing the king.” There was nothing she could say or do to atone for what she’d become while their kingdom fell into ruin and their people were slaughtered or enslaved.
“Keep working,” Rowan said, jerking his chin at the tools sitting in her lap. She obeyed, and he hissed again at the first prick. “Do you think,” he said after a moment, “your cousin would kill you or help you? An army like his could change the tide of any war.”
A chill went down her spine at that word—war. “I don’t know what he would think of me, or where his loyalti
es lie. And I’d rather not know. Ever.”
Though their eyes were identical, their bloodlines were distant enough that she’d heard servants and courtiers alike pondering the usefulness of a Galathynius-Ashryver union someday. The idea was as laughable now as it had been ten years ago.
“Do you have cousins?” she asked.
“Too many. Mora’s line was always the most widespread, and my meddlesome, gossiping cousins make my visits to Doranelle . . . irksome.” She smiled a little at the thought. “You’d probably get along with my cousins,” he said. “Especially with the snooping.”
She paused her inking and squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt anyone but an immortal. “You’re one to talk, Prince. I’ve never been asked so many questions in my life.”
Not quite true, but not quite an exaggeration, either. No one had ever asked her these questions. And she’d never told anyone the answers.
He bared his teeth, though she knew he didn’t mean it, and glanced meaningfully at his wrist. “Hurry up, Princess. I want to go to bed at some point before dawn.”
She used her free hand to make a particularly vulgar gesture, and he caught it with his own, teeth still out. “That is not very queenly.”
“Then it’s good I’m not a queen, isn’t it?”
But he wouldn’t let go of her hand. “You have sworn to free your friend’s kingdom and save the world—but will not even consider your own lands. What scares you about seizing your birthright? The king? Facing what remains of your court?” He kept his face so close to hers that she could see the flecks of brown in his green eyes. “Give me one good reason why you won’t take back your throne. One good reason, and I’ll keep my mouth shut about it.”
She weighed the earnestness in his gaze, his breathing, and then said, “Because if I free Eyllwe and destroy the king as Celaena, I can go anywhere after that. The crown . . . my crown is just another set of shackles.”