“Yes, anything,” Yrene said, fluffing out her wrinkled clothes. “It’s likely because of anything that you’re limping worse than before.”
Chaol let her fall into step beside him, and balanced on his cane long enough to press a kiss to her temple. He didn’t care who saw. Who reported on it. They could all go to hell. But behind them, he could have sworn Shen and the other guards were grinning from ear to ear.
Chaol winked at her. “Then you’d better heal me, Yrene Towers, because I plan to do a great deal of anything with you tonight.”
She flushed even deeper, but angled her chin upward, prim and proper. “Let’s focus on these scrolls first, you rogue.”
Chaol grinned, broad and unrestrained, and felt it in every inch of his aching body as they strode back inside the palace.
Any joy was short-lived.
Chaol picked up on the humming threads of something amiss the moment they entered their quiet wing. The moment he saw the guards murmuring, the servants scurrying about. Yrene only shared a glance with him, and they hurried along as fast as he could manage. Strands of fire shot along his back, down his thighs, but if something had happened—
The doors to his suite were ajar, with two guards posted outside, who gave him looks full of pity and dread. His stomach turned.
Nesryn. If she had come back, if something had happened with that Valg hunting them—
He stormed into the suite, his protesting body going distant, his head full of roaring silence.
Nesryn’s door was open.
But no body lay sprawled on the bed. No blood stained the carpet, or splattered the walls.
His room was the same. But both bedrooms … Trashed.
Shredded, as if some great wind had shattered the windows and torn through the space.
The sitting room was worse. Their usual gold couch—gutted. The pictures, the art overturned or cracked or slashed.
The desk had been looted, the carpets flipped over—
Kadja was kneeling in the corner, gathering pieces of a broken vase.
“Be careful,” Yrene hissed, striding to the girl as she plucked up pieces with her bare hands. “Get a broom and dustpan rather than use your own hands.”
“Who did this,” Chaol asked quietly.
Fear glimmered in Kadja’s eyes as she rose. “It was like this when I came in this morning.”
Yrene demanded, “You didn’t hear anything at all?”
The sharp doubt in those words made him tense. Yrene hadn’t trusted the servant girl for an instant, making up tasks that would keep her away, but for Kadja to do this—
“With you gone, my lord, I … I took the night to visit my parents.”
He tried not to cringe. A family. She had family here, and he’d never bothered to ask—
“And can your parents swear to the fact that you were with them all night?”
Chaol whirled. “Yrene.”
Yrene didn’t so much as glance at him as she studied Kadja. The servant girl withered under that fierce stare. “But I suppose leaving the door unlocked for someone would have been smarter.”
Kadja cringed, shoulders curving inward.
“Yrene—this could have been from anything. Anyone.”
“Yes, anyone. Especially someone who was looking for something.”
The words clicked at the same moment the disarray of the room did.
Chaol faced the servant girl. “Don’t clean any more of the mess. Everything in here might offer some proof of who did this.” He frowned. “How much did you manage to clean already?”
From the state of the room, not much.
“I only just started. I thought you wouldn’t return until tonight, so I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.” At her cringe, he added, “Go to your parents. Take the day off, Kadja. I’m glad you weren’t here when this happened.”
Yrene gave him a frown that said the girl might very well have been the cause of this, but kept her mouth shut. Within a minute, Kadja had left, closing the hall doors with a quiet click.
Yrene ran her hands over her face. “They took everything. Everything.”
“Did they?” He limped to the desk, peering into the drawers as he braced a hand on the surface. His back ached and writhed—
Yrene stormed to the gold couch, lifting the ruined cushions. “All those books, the scrolls …”
“It was common knowledge that we’d be gone.” He leaned fully against the desk, nearly sighing at the weight it took off his back.
Yrene carved a path through the room, inspecting all the places she’d ferreted away those books and scrolls. “They took it all. Even The Song of Beginning.”
“What about the bedroom?”
She vanished instantly. Chaol rubbed at his back, hissing softly. More rustling, then, “Ha!”
She emerged again, waving one of his boots in the air. “At least they didn’t find this.”
That first scroll. He rallied a smile to his mouth. “At least there’s that.”
Yrene held his boot to her chest as if it were a babe. “They’re getting desperate. That makes people dangerous. We shouldn’t stay here.”
He surveyed the damage. “You’re right.”
“Then we’ll go directly to the Torre.”
He glanced through the open doors to the foyer. To Nesryn’s bedroom.
She was due back soon. And when she did return, to find him gone, with Yrene … He’d treated her abominably. He’d let himself forget what he’d promised, what he’d implied, in Rifthold. On the ship here. And Nesryn might not hold him to any promises, but he’d broken too many of them.
“What is it?” Yrene’s question was barely more than a whisper.
Chaol closed his eyes. He was a bastard. He’d dragged Nesryn here, and this was how he’d treated her. While she was off hunting for answers, risking her life, while she sought some shred of hope for raising an army … He’d send that message—immediately. To return as fast as she could.
“It’s nothing,” Chaol said at last. “Perhaps you should stay at the Torre tonight. There are enough guards there to make anyone think twice.” He added when hurt flickered in her eyes, “I can’t appear to be running away. Especially with the royals now starting to think I might be someone of interest. That Aelin continues to be such a source of worry and intrigue … perhaps I should use that to my advantage.” He fiddled with the cane, tossing it from one hand to another. “But I should stay here. And you, Yrene, you should go.”
She opened her mouth to object, but paused, straightening. A steely glint entered her eyes. “I’ll take Hafiza the scroll myself, then.”
He hated the edge to her voice as he nodded, the dimming of those eyes. He’d done wrong by her, too. In not first ending things with Nesryn, to make it clear. He’d made a mess of it.
A fool. He’d been a fool to think he could rise above this. Move beyond the person he’d been, the mistakes he’d made.
A fool.
CHAPTER
53
Yrene stormed up the Torre steps, careful not to crush the scroll in her fist.
The trashing of his room had rattled him. Rattled her, too, but …
It wasn’t fear of harm or death. Something else had shaken him.
In her other hand, she clutched the locket, the metal warm against her skin.
Someone knew they were close to discovering whatever it was they wanted to keep secret. Or at the very least suspected they might learn something and had destroyed any possible sources. And after what they’d started to piece together in the ruins amid Aksara …
Yrene checked her temper as she reached the top landing of the Torre, the heat smothering.
Hafiza was in her private workshop, tutting to herself over a tonic that rippled with thick smoke. “Ah, Yrene,” she said without looking up while she measured in a drop of some liquid. Vials and basins and bowls covered the desk, scattered between the open books and a set of bronze hourglasses of various time measurement
s. “How was your party?”
Revelatory. “Lovely.”
“I assume the young lord finally handed over his heart.”
Yrene coughed.
Hafiza smiled as she lifted her head at last. “Oh, I knew.”
“We are not—that is to say, there is nothing official—”
“That locket suggests otherwise.”
Yrene clapped a hand over it, cheeks heating. “He is not—he is a lord.”
At Hafiza’s raised brows, Yrene’s temper whetted itself. Who else knew? Who else had seen and commented and betted?
“He is a Lord of Adarlan,” she clarified.
“So?”
“Adarlan.”
“I thought you had moved past that.”
Perhaps she had. Perhaps she hadn’t. “It is nothing to be concerned about.”
A knowing smile. “Good.”
Yrene took a long breath through her nose.
“But, unfortunately, you are not here to give me all the juicy details.”
“Och.” Yrene grimaced. “No.”
Hafiza measured another few drops into her tonic, the substance within roiling. She plucked up her ten-minute hourglass and turned it over, bone-white sand trickling into the ancient base. A proclamation of a meeting begun even before Hafiza said, “I assume it has something to do with that scroll in your hand?”
Yrene looked to the open hall, then rushed to shut the door. Then the open windows.
By the time she’d finished, Hafiza had set down the tonic, her face unusually grave.
Yrene explained the ransacking of their room. The books and scrolls taken. The ruins at the oasis and their wild theory that perhaps the healers had not just arisen here, but had been planted here, in secret. Against the Valg and their kings.
And for the first time since Yrene had known her, the ancient woman’s brown face seemed to go a bit colorless. Her clear dark eyes turned wide.
“You are certain—that these are the forces amassing on your continent?” Hafiza settled herself into the small chair behind the worktable.
“Yes. Lord Westfall has seen them himself. Battled them. It is why he came. Not to raise an army against mere men loyal to Adarlan’s empire, but an army to fight demons who wear the bodies of men, demons who breed monsters. So vast and terrible that even the full might of Aelin Galathynius and Dorian Havilliard is not enough.”
Hafiza shook her head, her nimbus of white hair flowing. “And now you two believe that the healers have some role to play?”
Yrene paced. “Perhaps. We were relentlessly hunted down on our own continent, and I know it doesn’t sound like anything to go on, but if a settlement of healing-inclined Fae did start a civilization here long ago … Why? Why leave Doranelle, why come so far, and leave so few traces, yet ensure that the healing legacy survived?”
“That is why you have come—and brought this scroll.”
Yrene placed the scroll before the Healer on High. “Since Nousha only knew vague legends and didn’t know how to read the language written here, I thought you might actually have the truth. Or tell me what this scroll might be about.”
Hafiza carefully unfurled the scroll, weighing its corners with various vials. Dark, strange letters had been inked there. The Healer on High traced a wrinkled finger over a few of them. “I do not know how to read such a language.” She ran her hand over the parchment again.
Yrene’s shoulders sagged.
“But it reminds me …” Hafiza scanned the bookshelves in her workshop, some of them sealed behind glass. She rose, hobbling to a locked case in the shadowy corner of the room. The doors there were not glass at all—but metal. Iron.
She withdrew a key from around her neck and opened it. Beckoned Yrene over.
Half stumbling through the room in her haste, Yrene reached Hafiza’s side. On a few of the spines of the tomes, near-rotting with age …“Wyrdmarks,” Yrene murmured.
“I was told these were not books for human eyes—that it was knowledge best kept locked away and forgotten, lest it find its way into the world.”
“Why?”
Hafiza shrugged, studying but not touching the ancient texts shelved before them. “That was all my predecessor told me: They are not meant for human eyes. Oh, once or twice, I’ve been drunk enough to debate opening up the books, but every time I take out this key …” She toyed with the long necklace, the key of blackest iron hanging from it. A match to the cabinet. “I reconsider.”
Hafiza weighed the key in her palm. “I do not know how to read these books, nor what this language is, but if those scrolls and books were in the library itself, then the fact that these have been locked up here … Perhaps this is the sort of information worth killing for.”
Ice skittered down her spine. “Chaol—Lord Westfall knows someone who can read these markings.” Aelin Galathynius, he’d told her. “Perhaps we should bring them to her. The scroll, and these few books.”
Hafiza’s mouth tightened as she closed the iron doors to the cabinet and locked it with a heavy click. “I shall have to think on it, Yrene. The risks. Whether these books should leave.”
Yrene nodded. “Yes, of course. But I fear we may not have much time.”
Hafiza slid the iron key back under her robes and returned to the worktable, Yrene trailing her. “I do know a little of the history,” Hafiza admitted. “I thought it myth, but … my predecessor told me, when I first came. During the Winter Moon festival. She was drunk, because I’d plied her with alcohol to get her to reveal her secrets. But instead, she gave me a rambling history lesson.” Hafiza snorted, shaking her head. “I never forgot it, mostly because I was so disappointed that three bottles of expensive wine—purchased with all the money I had—got me so little.”
Yrene leaned against the ancient worktable as Hafiza sat and interlaced her fingers in her lap. “She told me that long ago, before man stumbled here, before the horse-lords and the ruks above the steppes, this land indeed belonged to Fae. A small, pretty little kingdom, its capital here. Antica was built atop its ruins. But they erected temples to their gods beyond the city walls—out in the mountains, in the river-lands, in the dunes.”
“Like the necropolis at Aksara.”
“Yes. And she told me that they did not burn their bodies, but entombed them within sarcophagi so thick no hammer or device could open them. Sealed with spells and clever locks. Never to be opened.”
“Why?”
“The drunk goat told me that it was because they lived in fear of someone getting in. To take their bodies.”
Yrene was glad she was leaning on the table. “The way the Valg now use humans for possession.”
A nod. “She rambled about how they had left their knowledge of healing for us to find. That they had stolen it from elsewhere, and that their teachings formed the basis of the Torre. That Kamala herself had been trained in their arts, their records discovered in tombs and catacombs long since lost to us. She founded the Torre based off what she and her small order learned. Worshipped Silba because she was their healing god, too.” Hafiza gestured to the owls carved throughout her workroom, the Torre itself, and rubbed at her temple. “So your theory could hold water. I never learned how the Fae came here, where they went and why they faded away. But they were here, and according to my predecessor, they left some sort of knowledge or power behind.” A frown toward that locked bookcase.
“That someone is now trying to erase.” Yrene swallowed. “Nousha will kill me when she hears those books and scrolls were taken.”
“Oh, she might very well. But she’ll likely go on the hunt for whoever did it first.”
“What does any of it mean, though? Why go to so much trouble?”
Hafiza strode back to her tonic, the hourglass nearly empty. “Perhaps that is for you to learn.” She added a few more drops of liquid to her tonic, grabbed the one-minute glass, and flipped it over. “I shall consider the books, Yrene.”
Yrene returned to her room, flung open the wind
ow to let in the breeze to the stifling chamber, and sat on her bed for all of a minute before she was walking again.
She’d left the scroll with Hafiza, figuring the locked bookcase was safer than anywhere else, but it was not scrolls or ancient books that filled her head as she turned left and headed downstairs.
Progress. They had made progress on Chaol’s injury, significantly so, and returned to find their room trashed.
His room—not theirs. He’d made that clear enough earlier.
Yrene’s steps were unfaltering, even as her legs ached from nearly two days’ worth of riding. There had to be some connection—his progress, these attacks.
She’d never get any thinking done up in her quiet, stuffy room. Or in the library, not when she’d be jumping at every footstep or meow from a curious Baast Cat.
But there was one place, quiet and safe. One place where she might work through the tangled threads that had brought them here.
The Womb was empty.
After Yrene had washed and changed into the pale, thin lavender robe, she’d padded into the steam-filled chamber, unable to help looking toward that tub by the far wall. Toward where that healer had cried mere hours before her death.
Yrene scrubbed her hands over her face, taking a steadying breath.
The tubs on either side beckoned, the bubbling waters inviting, promising to soothe her aching limbs. But Yrene remained in the center of the chamber, amid all those faintly ringing bells, and stared up into the darkness high above.
From a stalactite too far in the gloom to see, a droplet of water fell—landing on her brow. Yrene closed her eyes at the cool, hard splash, but made no move to wipe away the water.
The bells sang and murmured, the voices of their long-dead sisters. She wondered if that healer who had died … If her voice was now singing here.
Yrene peered up at the nearest string of bells hung across the chamber, various sizes and makes. Her own bell …
On bare, silent feet, Yrene padded to the little stalagmite jutting from the floor near the wall, to the chain sagging between it and another pillar a few feet away. Seven other bells hung from it, but Yrene needed no reminder of which was hers.
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