Kingdom of Ash

by Sarah J. Maas

  But she walked toward that wall, the birch branches artfully displayed across it. More of the Little Folk within, Rowan realized. Perched on the branches, clinging to them.

  Aelin’s steps were silent on the stone. Fenrys halted nearby, as if to give her privacy.

  Rowan had the vague sense of Lorcan, Elide, and Gavriel heading for the alcove across the cave to inspect the goods that had been laid out.

  But he lingered in the center of the space as his mate paused before the shining, living wall. There was no expression on her face, no tension in her body.

  Yet she inclined her head to the Little Folk half-hidden in the branches and boughs before her. Her jaw moved—speaking. Brief, short words.

  He’d never so much as heard of the Little Folk talking. But there was his queen, his wife, his mate, murmuring with them.

  At last, she turned away, her face still blank, her wildfire eyes as flat and cold as the lake. Fenrys fell into step beside her, and Rowan remained in place as Aelin aimed for the small fire.

  Safe. The Little Folk must have told her this cave was safe, if she now moved for the fire, her own sphere of it still burning bright.

  The others halted their assessment of the supplies.

  But Aelin paid them no heed, paid the world no heed, as she took up a spot between the fire and the cave wall, lay upon the bare stone, and closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER 32

  Dorian had brown eyes for three days before he figured out how to change them back to blue. Asterin and Vesta teased him about it mercilessly as they’d traveled down through the spine of the Fangs, dramatically bemoaning the absence of his pretty bluebell eyes, and had sighed to the heavens when the sapphire hue had returned.

  His magic could leap between one element and another, yet the ability to shift lay within something else entirely. Lay within a part of him that had always yearned for one thing above all others: to let go. To be free. As Temis, Goddess of Wild Things, was free—uncaged. As he had once wished to be, when he had been little more than a reckless, idealistic prince.

  It was the magic’s sole command: let go. Let go of who and what he’d become since that collar and emerge into something new, something different.

  It was easier realized than enacted. Since his eyes had returned to blue, like the unraveling of some thread within him, he’d been unable to do anything else. Even change them to brown again.

  The Crochans and the Thirteen had halted for their midday break under the heavy cover of Oakwald, the trees barren, yet not a hint of snow on the earth. Another day, and they’d reach the rendezvous point. A week after they’d promised the Eyllwe war leaders, but they would arrive.

  He sat on a fallen, moss-covered log, gnawing on the strip of dried rabbit. His dinner.

  “My head pounds on your behalf, just watching you try so hard,” Glennis said from across the clearing. Around them, the Thirteen ate in silence, Manon monitoring all. The Crochans sat amongst them, at least. Quietly, but they sat there.

  Which meant they all looked at him now. Dorian lowered the strip of tough meat and inclined his head to the crone. “My head is pounding enough for both of us, I think.”

  “What are you trying to turn into, exactly? Or who?”

  The opposite of what he was. The opposite of the man who’d overlooked Sorscha’s presence for years. And offered her only death in the end. He’d be glad to let go of it, if only the magic would allow him.

  “Nothing,” he said. Many of the Thirteen and Crochans went back to their meager meals at his dull response. “I just want to see if it’s possible, for someone with my manner of magic. To even change small features.” Not a lie, not entirely.

  Manon frowned, as if trying to work out some puzzle she couldn’t quite grasp.

  “But were you to succeed,” Glennis pressed, “who would you wish to be?”

  He didn’t know. Couldn’t conjure an image beyond empty darkness. Damaris, at his side, would have no answer, either.

  Dorian peered inward, feeling the sea of magic that roiled inside him.

  He traced its shape with careful, invisible hands. Followed a thread within himself not to his gut, but to his still-cracked heart.

  Who do you wish to be?

  There, like the seed of power that Cyrene had stolen, it lay—the little snarl in his magic. Not a snarl, but a knot—a knot in a tapestry. One that he might weave.

  One he might fashion into something if he dared.

  Who do you wish to be? he asked the barely woven tapestry within himself. Let the threads and knots take form, crafting the picture within his mind. Starting small.

  Glennis chuckled. “Your eyes are green now, king.”

  Dorian started, heart thundering. The others again halted their lunches, gaping, some leaning in to peer at him more closely. But he fed his magic into the loom within himself, adding to the emerging picture.

  “Och, golden hair does not suit you at all.” Asterin grimaced. “You look sickly.”

  Who did he wish to be? Anyone but himself. But what he’d become.

  His silent answer sent that magical loom tumbling from his invisible grip, and he knew if he looked, his dark hair and sapphire eyes would have returned. Asterin sighed in relief.

  But Manon smiled grimly, as if she’d heard his unspoken answer. And understood.

  Night was full overhead, the Crochans’ fires crackling away beneath the lattice of leafless trees, when Glennis asked, “Have any of you seen the Wastes?”

  The Thirteen blinked toward the crone. She didn’t usually address them all at once, or ask such personal questions.

  But at least Glennis spoke to them. Three days of travel, and Manon was no closer to winning the Crochans over than she’d been upon their departure from the Fangs. Though they spoke to her, and occasionally joined Glennis’s hearth for meals, it was with as few words as necessary.

  Asterin answered for the coven. “No. Not one of us, though I spent some time in a forest on the other side of the mountains. But never that far.” Sorrow flickered in the witch’s gold-flecked black eyes, as if there was more to the tale than that. Indeed, Sorrel and Vesta, even Manon, looked with a bit of that sorrow at the witch.

  Manon asked Glennis, the sole Crochan at this fire under the canopy, “Why do you ask?”

  “Curiosity,” the crone said. “None of us have been, either. We do not dare.”

  “For fear of us?” Asterin’s golden hair shifted as she leaned closer to the fire. She’d found a strip of leather in the camp to tie across her brow—not the black she’d worn for the past century, but a familiar sight, at least. One thing, it seemed, had not entirely altered.

  “For fear of what it will do to us, to see what is left of our once-great city, our lands.”

  “Nothing but rubble, they say,” Manon muttered.

  “And would you rebuild it, if you could?” Glennis asked. “Rebuild the city for yourselves?”

  “We never discussed what we’d do,” Asterin said. “If we could ever go home.”

  “A plan, perhaps,” Glennis mused, “would be wise. A powerful thing to have.” Her blue eyes settled on Manon. “Not just for the Crochans, but your own people.”

  Dorian nodded, though he was not a part of this conversation.

  Who did the Thirteen, the Ironteeth and Crochans, wish to be, to build, as a people?

  Manon opened her mouth, but the Shadows burst into the ring of their hearth, their faces tight. The Thirteen were instantly on their feet.

  “We scouted ahead, to the rendezvous site,” Edda panted.

  Manon braced herself. A whisper of power flickered through the camp, the only indication that Dorian’s magic had coiled around them in a near-impenetrable shield.

  “It reeks of death,” Briar finished.

  CHAPTER 33

  They had been too late.

  Not just by an hour, or a day. No, judging by the state of the bodies in the leaf-strewn clearing twenty miles south, the week they had been delayed
had cost the Eyllwe war band everything.

  Morath had left the warriors where they lay, a few red-caped Crochans—the ones who had summoned their northern sisters here—amongst the fallen. The smell of decay was enough to make Manon’s eyes water as they surveyed what had been left.

  She had done this.

  Brought this about, in delaying the Crochans through that skirmish. One look at Dorian, the king lingering at the edge of the clearing with an arm over his nose to ward against the reek, and she knew he thought it, too. The sharpness in his eyes spoke enough.

  “Some got away,” Edda announced, the Shadow’s face grim. “But most didn’t.”

  “They wanted survivors,” Bronwen said, loud enough for all to hear. “To sow fear.”

  Manon studied the shattered trees, the ancient oaks as broken as the bodies on the forest floor. Proof of who, exactly, had been responsible for the massacre.

  She had done that, too.

  Bronwen said, voice cold and low, “What mortal band could ever hope to survive an attack by one of the Ironteeth legions? Especially when that aerial legion was trained by such a skilled Wing Leader.”

  “Choose your words carefully,” Asterin warned.

  But Una, the pretty, brown-haired Crochan and another of Manon’s cousins, gripped her silver-bound broom and said, “You trained them. All of you—you trained the witches who did this.” Una pointed to the decaying bodies, the torn throats, the killing that had not stopped at quick deaths. Not at all. “And you expect us to forget that?”

  Silence fell. Even from Asterin. Glennis said nothing.

  Manon’s hands turned frail. Foreign. The iron within them brittle.

  She had done this. The soldiers in the wide clearing were nothing and no one to her, most were mere mortals, and yet … A woman lay near Manon’s boots, her torso split clean open from navel to sternum. Her brown eyes gazed unseeingly at the shattered canopy overhead, her mouth still gaping in pain.

  “I can burn them,” Dorian offered no one in particular.

  Who had she been, the warrior before her? Who had she fought for? Not kingdoms or rulers, but who in her life had been worth defending?

  “We should alert the King and Queen of Eyllwe,” Bronwen was saying. “Warn their princes, too. Tell them to lie low. Erawan is beyond taking prisoners.”

  Manon stared and stared at the slaughtered warrior. What she had once delighted in. What she had once flaunted before the world, and done with not a shred of regret. Only with the wish that her grandmother would approve. That the Ironteeth would approve.

  This was what they would be remembered for.

  What she would be remembered for.

  Erawan’s crowned rider. His Wing Leader.

  “Don’t burn them,” Manon said.

  Silence fell in the clearing.

  But Manon knelt on the festering earth, unsheathed her iron nails, and began digging.

  Yanking off her gloves, Asterin lowered herself to the ground nearby. Then Sorrel and Vesta. Then the rest of the Thirteen.

  The cold, firm earth did not yield easily. It tore at Manon’s fingers, root and rock burning as they scraped at her skin.

  Across the clearing, Karsyn, the witch whose broom Manon had returned, made to kneel as well. But Manon held up a filthy, already bleeding hand. The witch halted. “Only the Thirteen,” Manon said. “We will bury them.” The Crochans stared at her, and Manon ripped away the ancient soil. “We’ll bury all of them.”

  For hours, Manon and the Thirteen knelt in the blood-soaked earth and dug the grave.

  Dorian assisted Bronwen and Glennis in drafting messages to the King and Queen of Eyllwe and their two sons. Warning them of the danger—and nothing more. No request for aid, for armies.

  Just before dawn, the Crochan messengers returned. Their southern kin who had summoned them here had arrived right after the massacre, too late to save the human war band or the few witches they’d sent ahead. They had flown right to Banjali, where their four covens now aided the King and Queen of Eyllwe.

  Not that the Eyllwe royals seemed to need it. No, the other Crochan messenger had returned with a message from the king himself: the loss of the war band was grave indeed, but Eyllwe was not broken by it. Their rebels and gathered forces, while small, were still resisting Morath, still unbroken. They would continue to hold the line in the South, and would do so until their final breaths.

  Dorian gleaned the unwritten words, though: they did not have a single soldier to spare for Terrasen. After what he’d seen, Dorian was now inclined to agree.

  Eyllwe had given too much, for too long. It was time for the rest of them to shoulder the burden.

  Dorian wondered if Manon noted the Crochans who watched her. Not with hatred, but some small degree of respect. Together, the Thirteen dug a massive grave, not even asking their wyverns to haul away the dirt.

  The sun rose, then began its descent. Slowly, the grave took form. Large enough for every fallen warrior.

  He had to go to Morath. Soon.

  Before this occurred again. Before one more mass grave was dug. He couldn’t endure the thought of it, worse than the thought of another collar going around his neck.

  Night was full overhead by the time Dorian managed to slip away. By the time he found an empty clearing, drew the marks, and plunged Damaris into earth shining with his own blood.

  His summons was answered quickly this time.

  Yet it was not Gavin who emerged, shimmering, from the night air.

  Dorian’s magic flared, rallying to strike, as the figure took form.

  As Kaltain Rompier, clad in an onyx gown and dark hair unbound, smiled sadly at him.

  Every word vanished from Dorian’s tongue.

  But his magic remained swirling about him, invisible hands eager to crack bone.

  Not that there was any life to steal from Kaltain Rompier.

  Yet she still held up a slender hand, her gauzy dress and silken hair floating on a phantom wind. “I mean you no harm.”

  “I didn’t summon you.” It was the only thing he could think to say.

  Kaltain’s dark eyes slid toward Damaris, jutting from the circle of Wyrdmarks. “Didn’t you?”

  He didn’t want to contemplate why or how the sword had somehow called her, not Gavin. Whether the sword had a will of its own, or whether the god who’d blessed it had orchestrated this meeting. For whatever truth it deemed necessary to show him.

  “I thought you were destroyed at Morath,” he rasped.

  “I was.” Her face was softer than he’d ever seen it in life. “In so many ways, I was.”

  Manon and Elide had told him what she’d endured. What she’d done for them. He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Then the words tumbled out, spilling from where he’d kept them since the Stone Marshes of Eyllwe. “For not seeing as I should have. For not knowing where they took you. For not helping you when I had the chance.”

  “Did you have the chance?” The question was calm, yet he could have sworn an edge sharpened in her voice.

  He opened his mouth to deny it. But he made himself look back—at who he’d been long before the collar, before Sorscha. “I knew you were in the castle dungeon. I was content to let you rot there. And then Perrington—Erawan, I mean, took you to Morath, and I didn’t bother to wonder about it.” Shame sluiced through him. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  A Crown Prince who had not served his kingdom or his people, not really. Gavin had been right.

  Kaltain’s edges shimmered. “I was not wholly blameless, you know.”

  “What happened to you in Morath is in no way your fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she agreed, a shadow passing over her face. “But I made choices of my own in going to Rifthold last autumn, in pursuing my ambition for you—your crown. I regret some of them.”

  His gaze slid to her bare forearm, to the scar that lingered even in death. “You saved my friends,” he
said, and knelt before her. “You gave up everything to save them, and get the Wyrdkey away from Erawan.” He would do the same, if he could survive Morath’s horrors. “I am in your debt.”

  Kaltain stared down at where he knelt. “I never had friends of my own. Not as you have. I always envied you for it. You, and Aelin.”

  He lifted his head. “You know who she is?”

  A hint of a smile. “Death has its advantages.”

  He couldn’t stop his next question. “Is—is it better there? Are you at peace?”

  “I am not allowed to say,” Kaltain replied softly, her eyes shining with understanding. “And I am not allowed to say who dwells here with me.”

  He nodded, fighting past the tightness in his chest, the disappointment. But he cocked his head to the side. “Who forbids you from doing so?” If the twelve gods of this land were stranded in Erilea, they certainly didn’t rule over other realms.

  Kaltain’s lips curved upward. “I am not allowed to say, either.” When he opened his mouth to ask more, she cut him off. “There are other forces at work. Beyond what is tangible and what is known.”

  He glanced toward Damaris. “Other gods?”

  Kaltain’s silence was answer enough. But—another time. He’d contemplate it another time.

  “I never thought to summon you,” he admitted. “You, who knew Morath’s true horrors. I didn’t realize …” He let the words trail off as he rose to his feet.

  “That there’d be anything left of me to summon?” she finished. He winced. “The key ate away much—but not everything.”

  “Is the third one indeed at Morath, then?”

  She nodded gravely. Her body shimmered, fading swiftly. “Though I do not know where he kept it. I wasn’t … ready to receive the second one before I took matters into my own hands.” She ran her slender fingers over the black scar snaking down her arm.

  He’d never spoken to her—not really. Had barely given her more than a passing glance, or grimaced his way through polite conversation with her.

  And yet here she stood, the woman who had taken out a third of Morath, who had devoured a Valg prince from sheer will alone.