Kingdom of Ash

by Sarah J. Maas

  Such strange, difficult markings. Elide couldn’t read her own language, hadn’t tried to in ages. Didn’t suppose she’d be granted the opportunity anytime soon. But learning these marks, if it helped her companions in any way … she could try. Had tried, enough to know a few of them now.

  Gavriel dared another mouthful of the porridge, offering the innkeeper a tight smile. The man looked so relieved that Elide picked up her own spoon and choked down a bite. Bland and a bit sour—had he put salt in it, rather than sugar?—but … it was hot.

  Gavriel met her stare, and Elide again restrained her laugh.

  She felt, rather than saw, Lorcan enter. The innkeeper instantly found somewhere else to be. The man hadn’t been surprised to see five Fae enter his inn last night, so his vanishing whenever Lorcan appeared was certainly due to the glower the male had perfected.

  Indeed, Lorcan took one look at Elide and Gavriel and left the dining room.

  They’d barely spoken these weeks. Elide hadn’t known what to even say.

  A member of this court. Her court. Forever.

  He and Aelin certainly hadn’t warmed toward each other. No, only Rowan and Gavriel really spoke to him. Fenrys, despite his promise to Aelin not to fight with Lorcan, ignored him most of the time. And Elide … She’d made herself scarce often enough that Lorcan hadn’t bothered to approach her.

  Good. It was good. Even if she sometimes found herself opening her mouth to speak to him. Watching him as he listened to Aelin’s lessons on the Wyrdmarks. Or while he trained with the queen, the rare moments when the two of them weren’t at each other’s throats.

  Aelin had been returned to them. Was recovering as best she could.

  Elide didn’t taste her next bite of porridge. Gavriel, thankfully, said nothing.

  And Anneith didn’t speak, either. Not a whisper of guidance.

  It was better that way. To listen to herself. Better that Lorcan kept his distance, too.

  Elide ate the rest of her porridge in silence.

  Rowan was right: she nearly vomited after breakfast. Five minutes in the courtyard and she’d had to stop, that miserable gruel rising in her throat.

  Rowan had chuckled when she’d clapped a hand over her mouth. And then shifted into his hawk form to sail for the nearby coast and their awaiting ship, to check in with its captain.

  Rolling her shoulders, she’d watched him vanish into the clouds. He was right, of course. About letting herself rest.

  Whether the others knew what propelled her, they hadn’t said a word.

  Aelin sheathed Goldryn and loosed a long breath. Deep down, her power grumbled.

  She flexed her fingers.

  Maeve’s cold, pale face flashed before her eyes.

  Her magic went silent.

  Blowing out another shuddering breath, shaking the tremor from her hands, Aelin aimed for the inn’s open gates. A long, dusty road stretched ahead, the fields beyond barren. Unimpressive, forgotten land. She’d barely glimpsed anything on her run at dawn beyond mist and a few sparrows bobbing amongst the winter-dry grasses.

  Fenrys sat in wolf form at the edge of the nearest field, staring out across the expanse. Precisely where he’d been before dawn.

  She let him hear her steps, his ears twitching. He shifted as she approached, and leaned against the half-rotted fence surrounding the field.

  “Who’d you piss off to get the graveyard shift?” Aelin asked, wiping the sweat from her brow.

  Fenrys snorted and ran a hand through his hair. “Would you believe I volunteered for it?”

  She arched a brow. He shrugged, watching the field again, the mists still clinging to its farthest reaches. “I don’t sleep well these days.” He cut her a sidelong glance. “I don’t suppose I’m the only one.”

  She picked at the blister on her right hand, hissing. “We could start a secret society—for people who don’t sleep well.”

  “As long as Lorcan isn’t invited, I’m in.”

  Aelin huffed a laugh. “Let it go.”

  His face turned stony. “I said I would.”

  “You clearly haven’t.”

  “I’ll let it go when you stop running yourself ragged at dawn.”

  “I’m not running myself ragged. Rowan is overseeing it.”

  “Rowan is the only reason you’re not limping everywhere.”

  Truth. Aelin curled her aching hands into fists and slid them into her pockets. Fenrys said nothing—didn’t ask why she didn’t warm her fingers. Or the air around them.

  He just turned to her and blinked three times. Are you all right?

  A gull’s cry pierced the gray world, and Aelin blinked back twice. No.

  It was as much as she’d admit. She blinked again, thrice now. Are you all right?

  Two blinks from him, too.

  No, they were not all right. They might never be. If the others knew, if they saw past the swagger and temper, they didn’t let on.

  None of them commented that Fenrys hadn’t once used his magic to leap between places. Not that there was anywhere to go in the middle of the sea. But even when they sparred, he didn’t wield it.

  Perhaps it had died with Connall. Perhaps it had been a gift they had both shared, and touching it was unbearable.

  She didn’t dare peer inward, to the churning sea inside her. Couldn’t.

  Aelin and Fenrys stood by the field as the sun arced higher, burning off the mists.

  After a long minute, she asked, “When you took the oath to Maeve, what did her blood taste like?”

  His golden brows narrowed. “Like blood. And power. Why?”

  Aelin shook her head. Another dream, or hallucination. “If she’s on our heels with this army, I’m just … trying to understand it. Her, I mean.”

  “You plan to kill her.”

  The gruel in her stomach turned over, but Aelin shrugged. Even as she tasted ash on her tongue. “Would you prefer to do it?”

  “I’m not sure I’d survive it,” he said through his teeth. “And you have more of a reason to claim it than I do.”

  “I’d say we have an equal claim.”

  His dark eyes roved over her face. “Connall was a better male than—than how you saw him that time. Than what he was in the end.”

  She gripped his hand and squeezed. “I know.”

  The last of the mists vanished. Fenrys asked quietly, “Do you want me to tell you about it?”

  He didn’t mean his brother.

  She shook her head. “I know enough.” She surveyed her cold, blistered hands. “I know enough,” she repeated.

  He stiffened, a hand going to the sword at his side. Not at her words, but—

  Rowan dove from the skies, a full-out plunge.

  He shifted a few feet from the ground, landing with a predator’s grace as he ran the last steps toward them.

  Goldryn sang as she unsheathed it. “What?”

  Her mate just pointed to the skies.

  To what flew there.

  CHAPTER 45

  Rock roared against rock, and Yrene braced a hand on the shuddering stones of Westfall Keep as the tower swayed. Down the hallway, people screamed, some wailing, some lunging over family members to cover them with their bodies while debris rained.

  Dawn had barely broken, and the battle was already raging.

  Yrene pressed herself into the stones, heart hammering, counting the breaths until the shaking stopped. The last assault, it had been six.

  She got to three, mercifully.

  Five days of this. Five days of this endless nightmare, with only the blackest hours of the night offering reprieve.

  She had barely seen Chaol for more than a passing kiss and embrace. The first time, he’d been sporting a wound to the temple that she’d healed away. The next, he’d been leaning heavily on his cane, covered in dirt and blood, much of it not his own.

  It was the black blood that had made her stomach turn. Valg. There were Valg out there. Infesting human hosts. Too many for her to cure.
No, that part would come after the battle. If they survived.

  Soon, too soon, the injured and dying had begun pouring in. Eretia had organized a sick bay in the great hall, and it was there that Yrene had spent most of her time. Where she’d been headed, after managing a few hours of dreamless sleep.

  The tower steadied itself, and Yrene announced to no one in particular, “The ruks are still holding off the tide. Morath only fires the catapults because they cannot breach the keep walls.”

  It was only partially true, but the families crouched in the hall, their bedrolls and precious few belongings with them, seemed to settle.

  The ruks had indeed disabled many of the catapults that Morath had hauled here, but a few remained—just enough to hammer the keep, the city. And while the ruks might have been holding off the tide, it would not be for long.

  Yrene didn’t want to know how many had fallen. She only saw the number of riders in the great hall and knew it would be too many. Eretia had ordered the injured ruks to take up residence in one of the interior courtyards, assigning five healers to oversee them, and the space was so full you could barely move through it.

  Yrene hurried onward, mindful of the debris scattered on the tower stair. She’d nearly snapped her neck yesterday slipping on a piece of fallen wood.

  The groans of the injured reached her long before she entered the great hall, the doors flung open to reveal row after row of soldiers, from the khaganate and Anielle alike. The healers didn’t have cots for all, so many had been laid on bedrolls. When those had run out, cloaks and blankets piled over cold stone had been used.

  Not enough—not enough supplies, and not enough healers. They should have brought more from the rest of the host.

  Yrene rolled up her sleeves, aiming for the wash station near the doors. Several of the children whose families sheltered in the keep had taken up the task of emptying dirty tubs and filling them with hot water every few minutes. Along with the basins by the wounded.

  Yrene had balked to let children witness such bloodshed and pain, but there was no one else to do it. No one else so eager to help.

  Anielle’s lord might have been a grand bastard, but its people were a brave, noble-hearted group. One that had left more of a mark on her husband than his hateful father.

  Yrene scrubbed her hands, though she’d washed them before coming down here, and shook them dry. They couldn’t waste their precious few cloths on drying their hands.

  Her magic had barely refilled, despite the sleep she’d gotten. She knew that if she looked to the battlements, she’d spy Chaol using his cane, perhaps even atop the battle-horse they’d outfitted with his brace. His limp had been deep when she’d last seen him, just yesterday afternoon.

  He hadn’t complained, though—hadn’t asked her to stop expending her power. He’d fight whether he was standing or using the cane or the chair or a horse.

  Eretia met Yrene halfway across the hall floor, her dark skin shining with sweat. “They’re bringing in a rider. Her throat’s been slashed by talons, but she’s still breathing.”

  Yrene suppressed her shudder. “Poison on the talons?” So many of the Valg beasts possessed it.

  “The scout who flew by to warn us of her arrival wasn’t sure.”

  Yrene pulled her tool kit from the satchel at her hip, scanning the hall for a place to work on the incoming rider. Not much room—but there, by the washbasins where she’d just cleaned her hands. Enough space. “I’ll meet them at the doors.” Yrene made to hurry for the gaping entryway.

  But Eretia gripped Yrene’s upper arm, her thin fingers digging gently into her skin. “You’ve rested enough?”

  “Have you?” Yrene shot back. Eretia had still been here when Yrene had trudged to bed hours ago, and it seemed Eretia had either arrived well before Yrene this morning, or hadn’t left at all.

  Eretia’s brown eyes narrowed. “I am not the one who needs to be careful of how much I push myself.”

  Yrene knew Eretia didn’t mean in regard to Chaol and the link between their bodies.

  “I know my limits,” Yrene said stiffly.

  Eretia gave a knowing look to Yrene’s still-flat abdomen. “Many would not risk it at all.”

  Yrene paused. “Is there a threat?”

  “No, but any pregnancy, especially in the early months, is draining. That’s without the horrors of war, or using your magic to the brink every day.”

  For a heartbeat, Yrene let the words settle in. “How long have you known?”

  “A few weeks. My magic sensed it on you.”

  Yrene swallowed. “I haven’t told Chaol.”

  “I’d think if there were ever a time to do so,” the healer said, gesturing to the shuddering keep around them, “it would be now.”

  Yrene knew that. She’d been trying to find a way to tell him for a while. But placing that burden on him, that worry for her safety and the safety of the life growing in her … She hadn’t wanted to distract him. To add to the fear she already knew he fought against, just in having her here, fighting beside him.

  And for Chaol to know that if he fell, it would not be her life alone that now ended … She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Not yet.

  Perhaps it made her selfish, perhaps stupid, but she couldn’t. Even if the moment she’d realized it in the ship’s bathing chamber, when her cycle still had not come and she had begun counting the days, she had wept with joy. And then realized what, exactly, carrying a child during war would entail. That this war might very well be still raging, or in its final, horrible days, when she gave birth.

  Yrene had decided that she’d do everything in her power to make sure it did not end with her child being born into a world of darkness.

  “I’ll tell him when the time is right,” Yrene said a shade sharply.

  From the open hall doors, shouts rose to “Clear the way! Clear the way for the injured!”

  Eretia frowned, but rushed with Yrene to meet the townsfolk bearing an already-bloodied stretcher and the near-dead ruk rider atop it.

  The horse beneath Chaol shifted but stayed firm where they stood along the lower battlements of the keep walls. Not as fine a horse as Farasha, but solid enough. A bravehearted beast who had taken well to his brace-equipped saddle, which was all he’d asked for.

  Walking, Chaol knew, would not be an option when he dismounted. The strain in his spine told him enough about how hard Yrene was already working, the sun barely risen. But he could fight just as well from horseback—could lead these soldiers all the same.

  Ahead, stretching too far for him to count, Erawan’s army launched at the city for another day of all-out assault on the walls.

  The ruks soared, dodging arrows and spears, snatching soldiers from the ground and pulling them apart. Atop the birds, the rukhin unleashed their own torrent of fury in careful, clever passes organized by Sartaq and Nesryn.

  But after five days, even the mighty ruks were slowing.

  And Morath’s siege towers, which they had once easily shattered into scraps of metal and wood, were now making their way to the walls.

  “Ready the men for impact,” Chaol ordered the grim-faced captain standing nearby. The captain shouted the command down the lines Chaol had gathered just before dawn.

  A few bands of Morath soldiers had managed to get grappling hooks into the walls these past two days, hoisting up siege ladders and droves of soldiers with them. Chaol had cut them down, and though the warriors of Anielle had been unsure what to do with the demon-infested men who came to slay them, they’d obeyed his barked commands. Quickly staunched the flow of soldiers over the walls, severing the ties that held the ladders to them.

  But the siege towers that approached … those would not be so easily dislodged. And neither would the soldiers who crossed the metal bridge that would span the tower and the keep walls.

  Behind him, levels up, he knew his father watched. Had already signaled through the lantern system Sartaq had demonstrated how to use that they needed ruk
s to fly back—to knock the towers down.

  But the ruks were making a pass at the far rear of Morath’s army, where the commanders had kept the Valg lines in order. It had been Nesryn’s idea last night: to stop going for the endless front lines and instead take out those who ordered them. Try to sow chaos and disarray.

  The first siege tower neared, metal groaning as wyverns—chained to the ground and wings clipped—hauled it closer. Soldiers already lined up behind it in twin columns, ready to storm upward.

  Today would hurt.

  Chaol’s horse shifted beneath him again, and he patted a gauntlet-covered hand on the stallion’s armored neck. The thud of metal on metal was swallowed by the din. “Patience, friend.”

  Far out, past the reach of the archers, the catapult was reloading. They’d launched a boulder only thirty minutes ago, and Chaol had ducked beneath an archway, praying the tower base it struck did not collapse.

  Praying Yrene wasn’t near it.

  He’d barely seen her during these days of bloodshed and exhaustion. Hadn’t had a chance to tell her what he knew. To tell her what was in his heart. He’d settled for a deep but brief kiss, and then rushed to whatever part of the battlements he’d been needed at.

  Chaol drew his sword, the freshly polished metal whining as it came free of the sheath. The fingers of his other hand tightened around the handles of his shield. A ruk rider’s shield, light and meant for swift combat. The brace that held him in the saddle remained steady, its buckles secure.

  The soldiers lining the battlements stirred at the nearing siege tower. The horrors inside.

  “They were once men,” Chaol called, his voice carrying over the clamor of the battle beyond the keep walls, “they can still die like them.”

  A few swords stopped quivering.

  “You are people of Anielle,” Chaol went on, hefting his shield and angling his sword. “Let’s show them what that means.”

  The siege tower slammed into the side of the keep, and the metal bridge at its uppermost level snapped down, crushing the battlement parapets beneath.