Remember all that you promised to do. To be.
Her hand slid into her pocket, curling around the note there.
The world needs more healers.
“It’s not what you think,” Chaol said behind her.
Yrene closed her eyes for a heartbeat.
Fight—fight for your miserable, useless, wasted life.
She turned, forcing a polite smile to her face. “It is a natural thing. A healthy thing. I’m glad you’re feeling … up to the task.”
From the ire that rippled in his eyes, the tightness of his jaw, Chaol perhaps was not.
The world needs more healers. The world needs more healers. The world needs more healers.
Finish with him, heal him, and she could leave Hafiza, leave the Torre, with her head held high. She could return home, to war and bloodshed, and make good on her promise. Make good on that stranger’s gift of freedom that night in Innish.
“Shall we begin?”
It would be in here today. Because the prospect of sitting on that rumpled bed that likely still smelled of them—
There was a tightness to her throat, her voice, that she could not shake, no matter how many breaths she took.
Chaol studied her. Weighing her tone. Her words. Her expression.
He saw it—heard it. That tightness, that brittleness.
I expected nothing, she wanted to say. I—I am nothing.
Please don’t ask. Please don’t push. Please.
Chaol seemed to read that, too. He said quietly, “I didn’t take her to bed.”
She refrained from mentioning that the evidence seemed stacked against him.
Chaol went on, “We spoke long into the night and fell asleep. Nothing happened.”
Yrene ignored the way her chest both hollowed out and filled at the words. Didn’t trust herself to speak as the information settled.
As if sensing her need for a breath, Chaol began to turn toward the couch, but his attention snagged on the books she’d stacked on the table. On the scrolls.
The color drained from his face.
“What is that,” he growled.
Yrene strode to the desk, picking up the parchment and unrolling it carefully to display the strange symbols. “Nousha, the Head Librarian, found it for me that night when I asked her for information on … the things that hurt you. In all the—upheaval, I forgot it. It was shelved near the Eyllwe books, so she threw it in, just in case. I think it’s old. Eight hundred years at least.” She was babbling, but couldn’t stop, grateful for any subject but the one he’d been so near to breaching. “I think they’re runes, but I’ve seen none like it. Neither had Nousha.”
“They are not runes,” Chaol said hoarsely. “They’re Wyrdmarks.”
And from what he had told her, Yrene knew there was much more. So much more he had not divulged. She stroked a hand over the dark cover of The Song of Beginning. “This book … It mentioned a gate. And keys. And three kings to wield them.”
She wasn’t certain he was breathing. Then Chaol said, voice low, “You read that. In that book.”
Yrene opened the pages, flipping to the illustration of the three figures before that otherworldly gate. Approaching, she held the book open for him to see. “I couldn’t read much of it—it’s in an ancient form of Eyllwe—but …” She flipped to the other illustration, of the young man being infested by that dark power on the altar. “Is that … is that what they truly do?”
His hands slackened at the sides of his chair as he stared and stared at the panel featuring the young man’s cold, dark eyes. “Yes.”
The word held more pain and fear than she’d expected.
She opened her mouth, but he sliced a warning glare at her, mastering himself. “Hide it, Yrene. Hide all of it. Now.”
Her heart thundered in her chest, her limbs, but she snatched up the books. The scrolls. He watched the doors, the windows, while she set about placing them under cushions and inside some of the larger vases. But the scroll … it was too precious. Too ancient to treat so callously. Even flattening it out might harm the integrity of the paper, the ink.
He noticed her looking around helplessly, the scroll in her hands. “My boots, if you will, Yrene,” he said casually. “I have a second pair that I’d rather wear today.”
Right. Right.
Yrene hurried from the sitting room into his bedroom, wincing at the askew bed linens, at what she’d so stupidly assumed and seemed like such an enormous fool about—
She strode into the small dressing room, spotted his boots, and slid the parchment down the neck of one. Then took the pair and shoved it in a drawer, covering it with a stack of linen towels.
She reentered the sitting room a moment later. “I couldn’t find them. Perhaps Kadja sent them out for cleaning.”
“Too bad,” he said casually, his own boots now removed. Along with his shirt.
Her heart still raged as he eased onto the gold sofa but did not lie down.
“Do you know how to read?” she asked, kneeling before him and taking his bare foot in her hands. The Wyrdmarks?
“No.” His toes shifted as she began careful rotations of his ankle. “But I know someone who does it for me when it’s important.” Careful, veiled words for anyone listening.
Yrene went about exercising his legs, stretching and bending, the motions repeated over and over while he moved his toes as much as he could. “I should show you the library sometime,” she offered. “You might find something that strikes your fancy—for your reader to narrate to you.”
“Do you have many similarly interesting texts?”
She lowered his left leg and started on the other. “I could ask—Nousha knows everything.”
“When we’re done. After you rest. It’s been a while since I had a book to … intrigue me.”
“It’d be my honor to escort you, my lord.” He grimaced at the formal title, but Yrene worked his right leg, going through the same motions, before she bade him to lie down on the couch. They worked in silence while she rotated his hips, urging him to try to move them on his own, while bending and stretching as much of his leg as she could.
She said after a moment, her voice barely audible, “You only talk of Erawan.” His eyes flashed in warning at the name. “But what of Orcus and Mantyx?”
“Who?”
Yrene began another set of the exercises on his legs and hips and lower back. “The other two kings. They are named in that book.”
Chaol stopped wriggling his toes; she flicked them in reminder. The air whooshed from him as he resumed. “They were defeated in the first war. Sent back to their realm or slain, I can’t recall.”
Yrene considered as she lowered his leg to the couch, nudging him to flip onto his stomach. “I’m sure you and your companions are adept at this whole saving-the-world thing,” she mused, earning a snort from him, “but I would make sure you know for certain. Which one it is.”
She took up a perch on the thin lip of golden sofa cushion that his body did not cover.
Chaol twisted his head toward her, the muscles in his back bunching. “Why?”
“Because if they were merely banished to their realm, who is to say they aren’t still waiting to be let back into our world?”
CHAPTER
23
Chaol’s eyes went vacant as Yrene’s question hung between them, the color again draining from his face. “Shit,” he murmured. “Shit.”
“You can’t remember what happened to the other two kings?”
“No—no, I’d assumed they were destroyed, but … why is there mention of them here, of all places?”
She shook her head. “We could see—look into it more.”
A muscle feathered in his jaw, and he blew out a long breath. “Then we will.”
He reached a hand toward her in silent demand. For the bit, she realized.
Yrene studied his jaw and cheek again, the brimming anger and fear. Not a good state to begin a healing session. So she tried, “Wh
o gave you that scar?”
Wrong question.
His back stiffened, his fingers digging into the throw pillow beneath his chin. “Someone who deserved to give it to me.”
Not an answer. “What happened?”
He just extended his hand again for the bit.
“I’m not giving it to you,” she said, her face an immovable mask as he turned baleful eyes on her. “And I’m not starting this session with you in a rage.”
“When I’m in a rage, Yrene, you’ll know.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“What’s wrong is that I’m barely able to move my toes and I might not have one Valg king to face, but three. If we fail, if we can’t—” He caught himself before he could voice the rest. The plan that Yrene had no doubt was so secret he barely dared think about it.
“They destroy everything—everyone—they encounter,” Chaol finished, staring at the arm of the couch.
“Did they give you that scar?” She clenched her fingers into a fist to keep from touching it.
“No.”
But she leaned forward, instead brushing a finger down a tiny scar just barely hidden by the hair at his temple. “And this? Who gave you that one?”
His face went hard and distant. But the rage, the impatient, frantic energy … it calmed. Went cold and aloof, but it centered him. Whatever that old anger was, it steadied him again.
“My father gave that scar to me,” Chaol said quietly. “When I was a boy.”
Horror sluiced through her, but it was an answer. It was an admission.
She didn’t press further. Didn’t demand more. No, Yrene just said, “When I go into the wound …” Her throat bobbed as she studied his back. “I will try to find you again. If it’s waiting for me, I might have to find some other way to reach you.” She considered. “And might have to find some other plan of attack than an ambush. But we shall see, I suppose.” And even though the corner of her mouth tugged up in what he knew was meant to be a reassuring, healer’s smile, she knew he noted the quickening of her breathing.
“Be careful,” was all he said.
Yrene just offered him that bit at last, bringing it to his lips.
His mouth brushed her fingers as she slid it between his teeth.
For a few heartbeats, he scanned her face.
“Are you ready?” she breathed as the prospect of facing that insidious darkness again loomed.
He lifted his hand to squeeze her fingers in silent answer.
But Yrene removed her fingers from his, leaving his own to drop back to the cushions.
He was still studying her, the way she took a bracing breath, as she laid her hand over the mark on his back.
It had snowed the day he told his father he was to leave Anielle. That he was abdicating his title as heir and joining the castle guard in Rifthold.
His father had thrown him out.
Thrown him right down the front stairs of the keep.
He’d cracked his temple on the gray stone, his teeth going through his lip. His mother’s pleading screams had echoed off the rock as he slid along the ice at the landing. He didn’t feel the pain in his head. Only the razor-sharp slice of the ice against his bare palms, cutting through his pants and ripping his knees raw.
There was only her pleading with his father, and the shriek of the wind that never stopped, even in summer, around the mountaintop keep that overlooked the Silver Lake.
That wind now tore at him, tugging at his hair—longer than he had kept it since. It hurled stray snowflakes into his face from the gray sky above. Hurled them to the grim city below that flowed to the banks of the sprawling lake and curved around its shores. To the west, to the mighty falls. Or the ghost of them. The dam had long since silenced them, along with the river flowing right from the White Fangs, which ended at their doorstep.
It was always cold in Anielle. Even in summer.
Always cold in this keep built into the curving mountainside.
“Pathetic,” his father had spat, none of the stone-faced guards daring to help him rise.
His head spun and spun, throbbing. Warm blood leaked and froze down his face.
“Find your own way to Rifthold, then.”
“Please,” his mother whispered. “Please.”
The last Chaol saw of her was his father’s arm gripping her above the elbow and dragging her into the keep of painted wood and stone. Her face pale and anguished, her eyes—his eyes—lined with silver as bright as the lake far below.
His parents passed a small shadow lurking in the open doorway to the keep itself.
Terrin.
His younger brother braved a step toward him. To risk those dangerously icy stairs and help him.
A sharp, barked word from his father within the darkness of the hall halted Terrin.
Chaol wiped the blood from his mouth and silently shook his head at his brother.
And it was terror—undiluted terror—on Terrin’s face as Chaol eased to his feet. Whether he knew that the title had just passed to him …
He couldn’t bear it. That fear on Terrin’s round, young face.
So Chaol turned, clenching his jaw against the pain in his knee, already swollen and stiff. Blood and ice merged, leaking from his palms.
He managed to limp across the landing. Down the stairs.
One of the guards at the bottom gave him his gray wool cloak. A sword and knife.
Another gave him a horse and a bearing.
A third gave him a supply pack that included food and a tent, bandages and salves.
They did not say a word. Did not halt him more than necessary.
He did not know their names. And he learned, years and years later, that his father had watched from one of the keep’s three towers. Had seen them.
His father himself told Chaol all those years later what happened to those three men who had aided him.
They were let go. In the dead of winter. Banished into the Fangs with their families.
Three families sent into the wilds. Only two were still heard from in the summer.
Proof. It had been proof, he’d realized after he’d convinced himself not to murder his father. Proof that his kingdom was rife with corruption, with bad men punishing good people for common decency. Proof that he had been right to leave Anielle. To stick with Dorian—to keep Dorian safe.
To protect that promise of a better future.
He’d still sent out a messenger, his most discreet, to find those remaining families. He didn’t care how many years had passed. He sent the man with gold.
The messenger never found them, and had returned to Rifthold, gold intact, months later.
He had chosen, and it had cost him. He had picked and he had endured the consequences.
A body on a bed. A dagger poised above his heart. A head rolling on stone. A collar around a neck. A sword sinking to the bottom of the Avery.
The pain in his body was secondary.
Worthless. Useless. Anyone he had tried to help … it had made it worse.
The body on the bed … Nehemia.
She had lost her life. And perhaps she had orchestrated it, but … He had not told Celaena—Aelin—to be alert. Had not warned Nehemia’s guards of the king’s attention. He had as good as killed her. Aelin might have forgiven him, accepted that he was not to blame, but he knew. He could have done more. Been better. Seen better.
And when Nehemia had died, those slaves had risen up in defiance. A rallying cry as the Light of Eyllwe was extinguished.
The king had extinguished them as well.
Calaculla. Endovier. Women and men and children.
And when he had acted, when he had chosen his side …
Blood and black stone and screaming magic.
You knew you knew you knew
You will never be my friend my friend my friend
The darkness shoved itself down his throat, choking him, strangling him.
He let it.
F
elt himself open his jaws wide to let it in farther.
Take it, he told the darkness.
Yes, it purred to him. Yes.
It showed him Morath in its unparalleled horrors; showed him that dungeon beneath the glass castle, where faces he knew pleaded for mercy that would never come; showed him the young golden hands that had bestowed those agonies, as if they had stood side by side to do it—
He knew. Had guessed who had been forced to torture his men, to kill them. They both knew.
He felt the darkness swell, readying to pounce. To make him truly scream.
But then it was gone.
Rippling golden fields stretched away under a cloudless blue sky. Little sparkling streams wended through it, curling around the occasional oak tree. Strays from the tangled, looming green of Oakwald Forest to his right.
Behind him, a thatched roof cottage, its gray stones crusted in green and orange lichen. An ancient well sat a few feet away, its bucket balanced precariously on the stone lip.
Beyond it, attached to the house itself, a small pen with wandering chickens, fat and focused on the dirt before them.
And past them …
A garden.
Not a formal, beautiful thing. But a garden behind a low stone wall, its wooden gate open.
Two figures were stooped amongst the carefully plotted rows of green. He drifted toward them.
He knew her by the golden-brown hair, so much lighter in the summer sun. Her skin had turned a lovely deep brown, and her eyes …
It was a child’s face, lit with joy, that looked upon the woman kneeling in the dirt, pointing toward a pale green plant with slender purple cones of blossoms swaying in the warm breeze. The woman asked, “And that one?”
“Salvia,” the child—no more than nine—answered.
“And what does it do?”
The girl beamed, chin rising as she recited, “Good for improving memory, alertness, mood. Also assists with fertility, digestion, and, in a salve, can help numb the skin.”
“Excellent.”
The girl’s broad smile revealed three missing teeth.
The woman—her mother—took the girl’s round face in her hands. Her skin was darker than her daughter’s, her hair a thicker, bouncier curl. But their builds … It was the woman’s build that the girl would grow into one day. The freckles that she’d inherit. The nose and mouth.
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