Queen of Shadows
Manon looked toward the fire. No embers. She reached a hand over it. Not a hint of warmth.
Manon scanned the room.
No signs of a struggle. But …
Manon was out the door the next moment, headed back downstairs.
She made it three steps before her prowl turned into a full-on sprint. She took the stairs two and three at a time and leaped the last ten feet onto the landing, the impact shuddering through her legs, now strong, so wickedly strong, with magic returned.
If there had been a time for Vernon to get back at her for taking Elide from him, it would have been while she was away. And if magic ran in Elide’s family along with the Ironteeth blood in her veins … Its return might have awakened something.
They want kings, Kaltain had said that day.
Hall after hall, stairwell after stairwell, Manon ran, her iron nails sparking as she gripped corners to swing herself around. Servants and guards darted out of her way.
She reached the kitchens moments later, iron teeth out. Everyone went dead silent as she leaped down the stairs, heading right for the head cook. “Where is she?”
The man’s ruddy face went pale. “W-who?”
“The girl—Elide. Where is she?”
The cook’s spoon clattered to the floor. “I don’t know; I haven’t seen her in days, Wing Leader. She sometimes volunteers at the laundry, so maybe—”
Manon was already sprinting out.
The head laundress, a haughty bull, snorted and said she hadn’t seen Elide, and perhaps the cripple had gotten what was coming to her. Manon left her screaming on the floor, four lines gouged across her face.
Manon hurtled up the stairs and across an open stone bridge between two towers, the black rock smooth against her boots.
She had just reached the other side when a woman shouted from the opposite end of the bridge, “Wing Leader!”
Manon slammed to a stop so hard she almost collided with the tower wall. When she whirled, a human woman in a homespun gown was running for her, reeking of whatever soaps and detergents they used in the laundry.
The woman gulped down great breaths of air, her dark skin flushed. She had to brace her hands on her knees to catch her breath, but then she lifted her head and said, “One of the laundresses sees a guard who works in the Keep dungeons. She said that Elide’s locked up down there. No one’s allowed in but her uncle. Don’t know what they’re planning to do, but it can’t be good.”
“What dungeons?” There were three different ones here—along with the catacombs in which they kept the Yellowlegs coven.
“She didn’t know. He’ll only tell her so much. Some of us girls were trying to—to see if there was anything to be done, but—”
“Tell no one that you spoke to me.” Manon turned. Three dungeons, three possibilities.
“Wing Leader,” the young woman said. Manon looked over her shoulder. The woman put a hand on her heart. “Thank you.”
Manon didn’t let herself think about the laundress’s gratitude, or what it meant for those weak, helpless humans to have even considered trying to rescue Elide on their own.
She did not think that woman’s blood would be watery or taste of fear.
Manon launched into a sprint—not to the dungeon, but to the witches’ barracks.
To the Thirteen.
81
Elide’s uncle sent two stone-faced female servants down to scrub her, both bearing buckets of water. She tried to fight when they stripped her, but the women were walls of iron. Any sort of Blackbeak blood in Elide’s veins, she realized, had to be the diluted kind. When she was naked before them, they dumped the water on her and attacked her with their brushes and soaps, not even hesitating as they washed her everywhere, even when she shrieked at them to stop.
A sacrificial offering; a lamb to the slaughter.
Shaking, weak from the effort of fighting them, Elide had hardly any strength to retaliate as they dragged combs through her hair, yanking hard enough that her eyes watered. They left it unbound, and dressed her in a plain green robe. With nothing beneath.
Elide begged them, over and over. They might as well have been deaf.
When they left, she tried to squeeze out the cell door after them. The guards shoved her back in with a laugh.
Elide backed up until she was pressed against the wall of her cell.
Every minute was closer to her last.
A stand. She’d make a stand. She was a Blackbeak, and her mother had secretly been one, and they would both go down swinging. Force them to gut her, to kill her before they could touch her, before they could implant that stone inside her, before she could birth those monsters—
The door clicked open. Four guards appeared.
“The prince is waiting in the catacombs.”
Elide dropped to her knees, shackles clanking. “Please. Please—”
“Now.”
Two of them shoved into the cell, and she couldn’t fight back against the hands that grabbed under her arms and dragged her toward that door. Her bare feet tore on the stones as she kicked and thrashed, despite the chain, trying to claw free.
Closer and closer, they hauled her like a bucking horse toward the open cell door.
The two waiting guards sniggered, eyes on the flap of the robe that fell open as she kicked, revealing her thighs, her stomach, everything to them. Elide sobbed, even as she knew the tears would do her no good. They just laughed, devouring her with their eyes—
Until a hand with glittering iron nails shoved through the throat of one of them, puncturing it wholly. The guards froze, the one at the door whirling at the spray of blood—
He screamed as his eyes were slashed into ribbons by one hand, his throat shredded by another.
Both guards collapsed to the ground, revealing Manon Blackbeak standing behind them.
Blood ran down her hands, her forearms.
And Manon’s golden eyes glowed as if they were living embers as she looked at the two guards gripping Elide. As she beheld the disheveled robe.
They released Elide to grab their weapons, and she sagged to the floor.
Manon just said, “You’re already dead men.”
And then she moved.
Elide didn’t know if it was magic, but she’d never seen anyone in her life move like that, as if she were a phantom wind.
Manon snapped the neck of the first guard with a brutal crunch. As the second lunged for her, Elide scrambling out of the way, Manon only laughed—laughed and twirled away, moving behind him to plunge her hand into his back, into his body.
His shriek blasted through the cell. Flesh tore, revealing a white column of bone—his spine—which she gripped, her nails shredding deep, and broke in two.
Elide trembled—at the man who fell to the ground, bleeding and broken, and at the witch standing over him, bloodied and panting. The witch who had come for her.
“We need to run,” Manon said.
Manon knew rescuing Elide would be a statement—and knew there were others who would want to make it with her.
But chaos had broken out in the Keep as she had raced to summon her Thirteen. News had come.
The King of Adarlan was dead. Destroyed by Aelin Galathynius.
She had shattered his glass castle, used her fire to spare the city from a deadly wave of glass, and declared Dorian Havilliard King of Adarlan.
The Witch Killer had done it.
People were in a panic; even the witches were looking to her for answers. What would they do now that the mortal king was dead? Where would they go? Were they free of their bargain?
Later—Manon would think of those things later. Now she had to act.
So she had found her Thirteen and ordered them to get the wyverns saddled and ready.
Three dungeons.
Hurry, Blackbeak, whispered a strange, soft female voice in her head that was at once old and young and wise. You race against doom.
Manon had hit the nearest dungeon, Asterin, Sorrel, and Vesta at her back, the green-eyed demon twins behind them. Men began dying—fast and bloody.
No use arguing—not when the men took one look at them and drew their weapons.
The dungeon held rebels of all kingdoms, who pleaded for death when they saw them, in such states of unspeakable torment that even Manon’s stomach turned. But no sign of Elide.
They had swept the dungeon, Faline and Fallon lingering to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.