Empire of Storms

Aedion said, “I would have shot you and your runt of a wyvern clean out of the sky if given my way. Be grateful my queen finds you more useful alive.”

Then he was gone.

Dorian set the tray within Manon’s reach and watched her sniff at it. She took a slow, cautious bite—as if letting it slide into her healing belly and seeing how it settled there. As if indeed testing it for poison. While she waited, Manon said, “You don’t give orders on this ship?”

It was a focused effort not to bristle. “You know my circumstances. I am now at the mercy of my friends.”

“And the Queen of Terrasen is your friend?”

“There is no one else I’d want guarding my back.” Other than Chaol, but … it was no use even thinking about him, missing him.

Manon at last took another bite of her fish stew. Then another. And another.

And he realized she was avoiding speaking to him. Enough so that he asked, “It was your grandmother who did that to you, wasn’t it?”

Her spoon stilled in the chipped wooden bowl. Slowly, she turned her face toward him. Unreadable, a face crafted of nightmares and midnight fantasies.

“I’m sorry,” he admitted, “if the cost of saving me that day in Rifthold was … was this.”

“Find out if my Thirteen are alive, princeling. Do that, and I am yours to command.”

“Where did you last see them?”

Nothing. She swallowed another spoonful.

He pushed, “Were they present when your grandmother did that to you?”

Her shoulders curved a bit, and she scooped another spoonful of cloudy liquid but didn’t sip. “The cost of Rifthold was the life of my Second. I refused to pay it. So I bought my Thirteen time to run. The moment I swung my sword at my grandmother, my title, my legion, was forfeit. I lost the Thirteen while I fled. I do not know if they are alive, or if they have been hunted down.” Her eyes snapped to his, bright from more than the steam of her stew. “Find them for me. Learn if they live or if they have returned to the Darkness.”

“We’re in the middle of the ocean. There won’t be news of anything for a while.”

She went back to eating. “They are all I have left.”

“Then I suppose you and I are both heirs without crowns.”

A humorless snort. Her white hair shifted in the sea breeze.

Dorian rose and walked to the door. “I’ll do what I can.”

“And—Elide.”

Again, that name. “Who is she?”

But Manon was back at her stew. “Just tell Aelin Galathynius that Elide Lochan is alive—and looking for her.”

The conversation with the king took everything out of her. Once that food was in her belly, once she’d downed more water, Manon lay back in bed and slept.

And slept.

And slept.

The door banged open at one point, and she had the vague recollection of the Queen of Terrasen, then her general-prince, demanding answers about something. Elide, perhaps.

But Manon had lain there, half awake, unwilling to think or speak. She wondered if she would have stopped bothering to breathe, if her body hadn’t done it all on its own.

She had not realized how impossible the survival of the Thirteen might indeed have been until she was practically begging Dorian Havilliard to find them for her. Until she had found herself desperate enough to sell her sword for any news of them.

If they even wanted to serve her after everything. A Blackbeak—and a Crochan.

And her parents … murdered by her grandmother. They had promised the world a child of peace. And she had let her grandmother hone her into a child of war.

The thoughts swirled and eddied, sapping her strength, muting colors and sounds. She awoke and saw to her needs when necessary, ate when food was left, but she let that heavy, meaningless sleep take hold.

Sometimes, Manon dreamed that she was in that room in the Omega, her half sister’s blood on her hands and in her mouth. Sometimes, she stood beside her grandmother, a witch fully grown and not the witchling she’d been at the time, and helped the Matron carve up a handsome, bearded man who begged for her life—his offspring’s life. Sometimes, she flew over a lush green land, the song of a western wind singing her home.

Often, the dream was that a great cat, pale and speckled like old snow on granite, sat in the cabin with her, its long tail slashing back and forth when it noticed her glazed attention. Sometimes, it was a grinning white wolf. Or a calm-eyed golden mountain lion.

Manon wished they’d put their jaws around her throat and crunch down.

They never did.

So Manon Blackbeak slept. And so she dreamed.

43

Lorcan was still wondering what the hell he was doing three days later. They’d left that plains town far behind them, but the terror of that night lay draped over the carnival caravan like a heavy blanket with each mile the wagons hurried down the roads.

The others hadn’t wised up to how, exactly, they’d survived the ilken—hadn’t realized the ilken were near-impossible to kill, and no mere mortal could have slain one, let alone four. Nik and Ombriel gave him and Elide a wide berth—and only catching their wary, examining stares at the dinner campfire every night revealed they were still piecing together who and what he was.

Elide kept well away from him, too. They hadn’t had a chance to set up their usual tents thanks to fleeing so quickly, but tonight, safely within the walls of a small plains town, they’d have to share a room at the cheap inn Molly had begrudgingly paid for.

It was hard not to watch Elide as she took in the town, then the inn—the keen-eyed observation, the hint of surprise and confusion that sometimes crossed her face.

He used a tendril of his magic to keep her foot stabilized. She never commented on it. And sometimes that dark, fell magic of his would brush up against whatever it was she carried—the gift from a dying woman to a hotheaded assassin—and recoil.

Lorcan hadn’t pushed to see it since that night, though he’d spent a great deal of time contemplating what might have come out of Morath. Collars and rings were likely the start of it.

Whitethorn and the bitch-queen had no idea about the ilken—perhaps about the majority of horrors Elide had shared with him. He wondered what a wall of wildfire would do to the creatures—wondered if the ilken were somehow training against Aelin Galathynius’s arsenal. If Erawan was smart, he’d have something in mind.

While the others trudged into the ramshackle inn in search of food and rest, Elide informed Molly that she was going on a walk along the river, and headed into the cobblestone streets. And though his stomach was grumbling, Lorcan trailed her, ever the husband wishing to guard his beautiful wife in a town that had seen better days—decades. No doubt caused by Adarlan’s relentless road-building across the continent and the fact that this town had been left far from any artery through the land.

The thunderstorm he’d scented building on the horizon lumbered toward the stone-wrought town, the light shifting from gold to silver. Within minutes, the thick humidity was washed away by a sweep of welcome coolness. Lorcan gave Elide all of three blocks before he fell into step beside her and said, “It’s going to rain.”

She slid a flat glance at him. “I do know what thunder means.”

The walled town had been built on either side of a small, half-forgotten river—two large water gates on either end demanding tolls to enter the city and tracking the goods that passed through. Old water, fish, and rotting wood reached him before the sight of the muddy, calm waters did, and it was precisely at the edge of the river docks that Elide paused.

“What are you looking for?” he asked at last, an eye on the darkening skies. The dockworkers, sailors, and merchants monitored the clouds, too, as they scurried about. Some lingered to tie up the long, flat-bellied barges and latch down the smooth poles they used to navigate the river. He’d seen a kingdom, perhaps three hundred years ago, that relied on barges to sail its goods from one end to another. Its name eluded him, lost to the catacombs of his memory. Lorcan wondered if it still existed, tucked away between two mountain ranges on the other side of the world.

Elide’s bright eyes tracked a group of well-dressed men heading into what looked to be a tavern. “Storms mean looking for shelter,” she murmured. “Shelter means being stuck inside with nothing to do but gossip. Gossip means news from merchants and sailors about the rest of the land.” Those eyes cut to him, dry humor dancing there. “That is what thunder means.”