Kingdom of Ash

by Sarah J. Maas

  She went down, shield rising to cover herself.

  He took it back.

  He took back everything he had said to her, every moment of anger in his heart.

  Aedion shoved through his own men, unable to breathe, to think.

  He took it back; he hadn’t meant a word of it, not really.

  Lysandra tried to rise on her injured leg. The ilken laughed.

  “Please,” Aedion bellowed. The word was devoured by the screams of the dying. “Please!”

  He’d make any bargain, he’d sell his soul to the dark god, if they spared her.

  He hadn’t meant it. He took it back, all those words.

  Useless. He’d called her useless. Had thrown her into the snow naked.

  He took it back.

  Aedion sobbed, flinging himself toward her as Lysandra tried again to rise, using her shield to balance her weight.

  Men rallied behind her, waiting to see what the Fire-Bringer would do. How she’d burn the ilken.

  There was nothing to see, nothing to witness. Nothing at all, but her death.

  Yet Lysandra rose, Aelin’s golden hair falling in her face as she hefted her shield and pointed the sword between her and the ilken.

  The queen has come; the queen fights alone.

  Men ran back to the front line. Turned on their heels and raced for her.

  Lysandra held her sword steady, kept it pointed at the ilken in defiance and rage.

  Ready for the death soon to come.

  She had been willing to give it up from the start. Had agreed to Aelin’s plans, knowing it might come to this.

  One shift, one change into a wyvern’s form, and she’d destroy the ilken. But she remained in Aelin’s body. Held that sword, her only weapon, upraised.

  Terrasen was her home. And Aelin her queen.

  She’d die to keep this army together. To keep the lines from breaking. To rally their soldiers one last time.

  Her leg leaked blood onto the snow, and the two ilken sniffed, laughing again. They knew—what lurked under her skin. That it was not the queen they faced.

  She held her ground. Did not yield one inch to the ilken, who advanced another step.

  For Terrasen, she would do this. For Aelin.

  He took it back. He took it all back.

  Aedion was barely a hundred feet away when the ilken struck.

  He screamed as the one on the left swept with its claws, the other on the right lunging for her, as if it would tackle her to the snow.

  Lysandra deflected the blow to the left with her shield, sending the ilken sprawling, and with a roar, slashed upward with her sword on the right.

  Ripping open the lunging ilken from navel to sternum.

  Black blood gushed, and the ilken shrieked, loud enough to set Aedion’s ears ringing. But it stumbled, falling into the snow, scrambling back as it clutched its opened belly.

  Aedion ran harder, now thirty feet away, the space between them clear.

  The ilken who’d gone sprawling on the left was not done. Lysandra’s eye on the one retreating, it lashed for her legs again.

  Aedion threw the Sword of Orynth with everything left in him as Lysandra twisted toward the attacking ilken.

  She began falling back, shield lifting in her only defense, still too slow to escape those reaching claws.

  The poison-slick tips brushed her legs just as his sword went through the beast’s skull.

  Lysandra hit the snow, shouting in pain, and Aedion was there, heaving her up, yanking his sword from the ilken’s head and bringing it down upon the sinewy neck. Once. Twice.

  The ilken’s head tumbled into the snow and mud, the other beast instantly swallowed by the Morath soldiers who had paused to watch.

  Who now looked upon the queen and her general and charged.

  Only to be met by a surge of Terrasen soldiers racing past Aedion and Lysandra, battle cries shattering from their throats.

  Aedion half-dragged the shifter deeper behind the re-formed lines, through the soldiers who had rallied to their queen.

  He had to get the poison out, had to find a healer who could extract it immediately. Only a few minutes remained until it reached her heart—

  Lysandra stumbled, a moan on her lips.

  Aedion swung his shield on his back and hauled her over a shoulder. A glimpse at her leg revealed shredded skin, but no greenish slime.

  Perhaps the gods had listened. Perhaps it was their idea of mercy: that the ilken’s poison had worn off on other victims before it’d gotten to her.

  But the blood loss alone … Aedion pressed a hand over the shredded, bloody skin to staunch the flow. Lysandra groaned.

  Aedion scanned the regrouping army for any hint of the healers’ white banners over their helmets. None. He whirled toward the front lines. Perhaps there was a Fae warrior skilled enough at healing, with enough magic left—

  Aedion halted. Beheld what broke over the horizon.

  Ironteeth witches.

  Several dozen mounted on wyverns.

  But not airborne. The wyverns walked on land.

  Heaving a mammoth, mobile stone tower behind them. No ordinary siege tower.

  A witch tower.

  It rose a hundred feet high, the entire structure built into a platform whose make he could not determine with the angle of the ground and the lines of chained wyverns dragging it across the plain. A dozen more witches flew in the air around it, guarding it. Dark stone—Wyrdstone—had been used to craft it, and window slits had been interspersed throughout every level.

  Not window slits. Portals through which to angle the power of the mirrors lining the inside, as Manon Blackbeak had described. All capable of being adjusted to any direction, any focus.

  All they needed was a source of power for the mirrors to amplify and fire out into the world.

  Oh gods.

  “Fall back!” Aedion screamed, even while his men continued to rally. “FALL BACK.”

  With his Fae sight, he could just make out the uppermost level of the tower, more open to the elements than the others.

  Witches in dark robes were gathered around what seemed to be a curved mirror angled into the hollow core of the tower.

  Aedion whirled and began running, carrying the shifter with him. “FALL BACK! ”

  The army beheld what approached. Whether they realized it was no siege tower, they understood his order clearly enough. Saw him sprinting, Aelin over his shoulder.

  Manon had never known the range of the tower, how far it might fire the dark magic rallied within it.

  There was nowhere to hide on the field. No dips in the earth where he might throw himself and Lysandra, praying the blast went over them. Nothing but open snow and frantic soldiers.

  “RETREAT!” Aedion’s throat strained.

  He glanced over a shoulder as the witches atop the tower parted to let through a small figure in onyx robes, her pale hair unbound.

  A black light began glowing around the figure—the witch. She lifted her hands above her head, the power rallying.

  The Yielding.

  Manon Blackbeak had described it to them. Ironteeth witches had no magic but that. The ability to unleash their dark goddess’s power in an incendiary blast that took out everyone around them. Including the witch herself.

  That dark power was still building, growing around the witch in an unholy aura, when she simply walked off the lip of the tower landing.

  Right into the hole in the tower’s center.

  Aedion kept running. Had no choice but to keep moving, as the witch dropped into the mirror-lined core of the tower and unleashed the dark power within her.

  The world shuddered.

  Aedion threw Lysandra into the mud and snow and hurled himself over her, as if it would somehow spare her from the roaring force that erupted from the tower, right at their army.

  One heartbeat, their left flank was fighting as they retreated once more.

  The next, a wave of black-tinted light slammed into
four thousand soldiers.

  When it receded, there was only ash and dented metal.

  CHAPTER 48

  The khagan’s forces had dealt enough of a blow to Morath that the bone drums had ceased.

  Not a sign of sure defeat, but enough to make Chaol’s heavily limping steps feel lighter as he entered Princess Hasar’s sprawling war tent. Her sulde had been planted outside, the roan horsehair blowing in the wind off the lake. Sartaq’s own spear had been sunk into the cold mud beside his sister’s. And beside the Heir’s spear …

  Leaning on his cane, Chaol paused at the ebony spear that had also been planted, its jet-black horsehair still shining despite its age. Not to signify the royals within, a marker of their Darghan heritage, but to represent the man they served. Ivory horsehair for times of peace; the Ebony for times of war.

  He hadn’t realized the khagan had given his Heir the Ebony to bring to these lands.

  At Chaol’s side, her dress blood-splattered but eyes clear, Yrene also halted. They’d traveled for weeks with the army, yet seeing the sign of their commitment to this war radiating the centuries of conquest it had overseen … It seemed almost holy, that sulde. It was holy.

  Chaol put a hand on Yrene’s back, guiding her through the tent flaps and into the ornately decorated space. For a woman who had arrived at Anielle not a moment too late, only Hasar would somehow have managed to get her royal tent erected during battle.

  Bracing his muddy cane on the raised wooden platform, Chaol gritted his teeth as he took the step upward. Even the thick, plush rugs didn’t ease the pain that lashed down his spine, his legs.

  He stilled, leaning heavily on the cane while he breathed, letting his balance readjust.

  Yrene’s blood-flecked face tightened. “Let’s get you into a chair,” she murmured, and Chaol nodded. To sit down, even for a few minutes, would be a blessed relief.

  Nesryn entered behind them, and apparently heard Yrene’s suggestion, for she went immediately to the desk around which Sartaq and Hasar stood, and pulled out a carved wooden chair. With a nod of thanks, Chaol eased into it.

  “No gold couch?” Princess Hasar teased, and Yrene blushed, despite the blood on her golden-brown skin, and waved off her friend.

  The couch Chaol had brought with him from the southern continent—the couch from which Yrene had healed him, from which he had won her heart—was still safely aboard their ship. Waiting, should they survive, to be the first piece of furniture in the home he’d build for his wife.

  For the child she carried.

  Yrene paused beside his chair, and Chaol took her slim hand in his, entwining their fingers. Filthy, both of them, but he didn’t care. Neither did she, judging by the squeeze she gave him.

  “We outnumber Morath’s legion,” Sartaq said, sparing them from Hasar’s taunting, “but how we choose to cleave them while we cut a path to the city still must be carefully weighed, so we don’t expend too many forces here.”

  When the real fighting still lay ahead. As if these terrible days of siege and bloodshed, as if the men hewn down today, were just the start.

  Hasar said, “Wise enough.”

  Sartaq winced slightly. “It might not have wound up that way.” Chaol lifted a brow, Hasar doing the same, and Sartaq said, “Had you not arrived, sister, I was hours away from unleashing the dam and flooding the plain.”

  Chaol started. “You were?”

  The prince rubbed his neck. “A desperate last measure.”

  Indeed. A wave of that size would have wiped out part of the city, the plain and hot springs, and leagues behind it. Any army in its path would have drowned—been swept away. It might have even reached the khaganate’s army, marching to save them.

  “Then let’s be glad we didn’t do it,” Yrene said, face paling as she, too, considered the destruction. How close they had come to a disaster. That Sartaq had admitted to it told enough: he might be Heir, but he wished his sister to know he, too, was not above making mistakes. That they had to think through any plan of action, however easy it might seem.

  Hasar, it seemed, got the point, and nodded.

  A cleared throat cut through the tent, and they all turned toward the open flaps to find one of the Darghan captains, his sulde clenched in his mud-splattered hand. Someone was here to see them, the man stammered. Neither royal asked who as they waved the man to let them in.

  A moment later, Chaol was glad he was sitting down.

  Nesryn breathed, “Holy gods.”

  Chaol was inclined to agree as Aelin Galathynius, Rowan Whitethorn, and several others entered the tent.

  They were mud-splattered, the Queen of Terrasen’s braided hair far longer than Chaol had last seen. And her eyes … Not the soft, yet fiery gaze. But something older. Wearier.

  Chaol shot to his feet. “I thought you were in Terrasen,” he blurted. All the reports had confirmed it. Yet here she stood, no army in sight.

  Three Fae males—towering warriors as broad and muscled as Rowan—had entered, along with a delicate, dark-haired human woman.

  But Aelin was only staring at him. Staring and staring at him.

  No one spoke as tears began sliding down her face.

  Not at his being here, Chaol realized as he took up his cane and limped toward Aelin.

  But at him. Standing. Walking.

  The young queen let out a broken laugh of joy and flung her arms around his neck. Pain lanced down his spine at the impact, but Chaol held her right back, every question fading from his tongue.

  Aelin was shaking as she pulled away. “I knew you would,” she breathed, gazing down his body, to his feet, then up again. “I knew you’d do it.”

  “Not alone,” he said thickly. Chaol swallowed, releasing Aelin to extend an arm behind him. To the woman he knew stood there, a hand over the locket at her neck.

  Perhaps Aelin would not remember, perhaps their encounter years ago had meant nothing to her at all, but Chaol drew Yrene forward. “Aelin, allow me to introduce—”

  “Yrene Towers,” the queen breathed as his wife stepped to his side.

  The two women stared at each other.

  Yrene’s mouth quivered as she opened the silver locket and pulled out a piece of paper. Hands trembling, she extended it to the queen.

  Aelin’s own hands shook as she accepted the scrap.

  “Thank you,” Yrene whispered.

  Chaol supposed it was all that really needed to be said.

  Aelin unfolded the paper, reading the note she’d written, seeing the lines from the hundreds of foldings and rereadings these past few years.

  “I went to the Torre,” Yrene said, her voice cracking. “I took the money you gave me, and went to the Torre. And I became the heir apparent to the Healer on High. And now I have come back, to do what I can. I taught every healer I could the lessons you showed me that night, about self-defense. I didn’t waste it—not a coin you gave me, or a moment of the time, the life you bought me.” Tears were rolling and rolling down Yrene’s face. “I didn’t waste any of it.”

  Aelin closed her eyes, smiling through her own tears, and when she opened them, she took Yrene’s shaking hands. “Now it is my turn to thank you.” But Aelin’s gaze fell upon the wedding band on Yrene’s finger, and when she glanced to Chaol, he grinned.

  “No longer Yrene Towers,” Chaol said softly, “but Yrene Westfall.”

  Aelin let out one of those choked, joyous laughs, and Rowan stepped up to her side. Yrene’s head tilted back to take in the warrior’s full height, her eyes widening—not only at Rowan’s size, but at the pointed ears, the slightly elongated canines and tattoo. Aelin said, “Then let me introduce you, Lady Westfall, to my own husband, Prince Rowan Whitethorn Galathynius.”

  For that was indeed a wedding band on the queen’s finger, the emerald mud-splattered but bright. On Rowan’s own hand, a gold-and-ruby ring gleamed.

  “My mate,” Aelin added, fluttering her lashes at the Fae male. Rowan rolled his eyes, yet couldn’t entirely
contain his smile as he inclined his head to Yrene.

  Yrene bowed, but Aelin snorted. “None of that, please. It’ll go right to his immortal head.” Her grin softened as Yrene blushed, and Aelin held up the scrap of paper. “May I keep this?” She eyed Yrene’s locket. “Or does it go in there?”

  Yrene folded the queen’s fingers around the paper. “It is yours, as it always was. A piece of your bravery that helped me find my own.”

  Aelin shook her head, as if to dismiss the claim.

  But Yrene squeezed Aelin’s closed hand. “It gave me courage, the words you wrote. Every mile I traveled, every long hour I studied and worked, it gave me courage. I thank you for that, too.”

  Aelin swallowed hard, and Chaol took that as excuse enough to sit again, his back giving a grateful tinge. He said to the queen, “There is another person responsible for this army being here.” He gestured to Nesryn, the woman already smiling at the queen. “The rukhin you see, the army gathered, is as much because of Nesryn as it is because of me.”

  A spark lit Aelin’s eyes, and both women met halfway in a tight embrace. “I want to hear the entire story,” Aelin said. “Every word of it.”

  Nesryn’s subdued smile widened. “So you shall. But later.” Aelin clapped her on the shoulder and turned to the two royals still by the desk. Tall and regal, but as mud-splattered as the queen.

  Chaol blurted, “Dorian?”

  Rowan answered, “Not with us.” He glanced to the royals.

  “They know everything,” Nesryn said.

  “He’s with Manon,” Aelin said simply. Chaol wasn’t entirely sure whether to be relieved. “Hunting for something important.”

  The keys. Holy gods.

  Aelin nodded. Later. He’d think on where Dorian might now be later. Aelin nodded again. The full story would come then too.

  Nesryn said, “May I present Princess Hasar and Prince Sartaq.”

  Aelin bowed—low. “You have my eternal gratitude,” Aelin said, and the voice that came out of her was indeed that of a queen.

  Any shock Sartaq and Hasar had shown upon the queen bowing so low was hidden as they bowed back, the portrait of courtly grace. “My father,” Sartaq said, “remained in the khaganate to oversee our lands, along with our siblings Duva and Arghun. But my brother Kashin sails with the rest of the army. He was not two weeks behind us when we left.”