Queen of Shadows

Kaltain stepped away.

“We can take you with us,” Elide tried again.

A small, hateful smile. “I have no interest in living. Not after what they did. I don’t think my body could survive without their power.” Kaltain huffed a laugh. “I shall enjoy this, I think.”

Manon tugged Elide to her side. “They’ll notice you without the chains—”

“They’ll be dead before they do,” Kaltain said. “I suggest you run.”

Manon didn’t ask questions, and Elide didn’t have time to say thank you before the witch grabbed her and they ran.

She was a wolf.

She was death, devourer of worlds.

The guards found her curled up in the cell, shuddering at the carnage. They didn’t ask questions, didn’t look twice at her face before they hauled her down the hall and into the catacombs.

Such screaming here. Such terror and despair. But the horrors under the other mountains were worse. So much worse. Too bad she would not have the opportunity to also spare them, slaughter them.

She was a void, empty without that sliver of power that built and ate and tore apart worlds inside of her.

His precious gift, his key, he had called her. A living gate, he promised. Soon, he had said he would add the other. And then find the third.

So that the king inside him might rule again.

They led her into a chamber with a table in the center. A white sheet covered it, and men watched as they shoved her onto the table—the altar. They chained her down.

With the blood on her, they did not notice the cut on her arm, or whose face she wore.

One of the men came forward with a knife, clean and sharp and gleaming. “This won’t take but a few minutes.”

Kaltain smiled up at him. Smiled broadly, now that they had brought her into the bowels of this hellhole.

The man paused.

A red-haired young man walked into the room, reeking of the cruelty born in his human heart and amplified by the demon inside him. He froze as he saw her.

He opened his mouth.

Kaltain Rompier unleashed her shadowfire upon them all.

This was not the ghost of shadowfire they had made her kill with—the reason why they had first approached her, lied to her when they invited her to that glass castle—but the real thing. The fire she had harbored since magic had returned—golden flame now turned to black.

The room became cinders.

Kaltain pushed the chains off her as though they were cobwebs and arose.

She disrobed as she walked out of the room. Let them see what had been done to her, the body they’d wasted.

She made it two steps into the hall before they noticed her, and beheld the black flames rippling off her.

Death, devourer of worlds.

The hallway turned to black dust.

She strode toward the chamber where the screaming was loudest, where female cries leaked through the iron door.

The iron did not heat, did not bend to her magic. So she melted an archway through the stones.

Monsters and witches and men and demons whirled.

Kaltain flowed into the room, spreading her arms wide, and became shadowfire, became freedom and triumph, became a promise hissed in a dungeon beneath a glass castle:

Punish them all.

She burned the cradles. She burned the monsters within. She burned the men and their demon princes. And then she burned the witches, who looked at her with gratitude in their eyes and embraced the dark flame.

Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she’d never see again.

She took out every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind.

Manon ran. But Elide was so slow—so painfully slow with that leg.

If Kaltain unleashed her shadowfire before they got out …

Manon grabbed Elide and hauled her over a shoulder, the beaded dress cutting into Manon’s hand as she sprinted up the stairs.

Elide didn’t say a word as Manon reached the dungeon landing and beheld Asterin and Sorrel finishing off the last of the soldiers. “Run!” she barked.

They were coated in that black blood, but they’d live.

Up and up, they hurtled out of the dungeons, even as Elide became a weight borne on pure defiance of the death surely racing toward them from levels below.

There was a shudder—

“Faster!”

Her Second made it to the giant dungeon doors and hurled herself against them, heaving them open. Manon and Sorrel dashed through; Asterin shoved them sealed with a bang. It would only delay the flame a second, if that.

Up and up, toward the aerie.

Another shudder and a boom—

Screaming, and heat—

Down the halls they flew, as if the god of wind were pushing at their heels.

They hit the base of the aerie tower. The rest of the Thirteen were gathered in the stairwell, waiting.

“Into the skies,” Manon ordered as they took the stairs, one after one, Elide so heavy now that she thought she’d drop her. Only a few more feet to the top of the tower, where the wyverns were hopefully saddled and prepared. They were.

Manon hurtled for Abraxos and shoved the shuddering girl into the saddle. She climbed up behind her as the Thirteen scrambled onto their mounts. Wrapping her arms around Elide, Manon dug her heels into Abraxos’s side. “Fly now!” she roared.

Abraxos leaped through the opening, soaring up and out, the Thirteen leaping with them, wings beating hard, beating wildly—

Morath exploded.

Black flame erupted, taking out stone and metal, racing higher and higher. People shouted and then were silenced, as even rock melted.

The air hollowed out and ruptured in Manon’s ears, and she curled her body around Elide’s, twisting them so the heat of the blast singed her own back.

The aerie tower was incinerated, and crumbled away behind them.

The blast sent them tumbling, but Manon gripped the girl tight, clenching the saddle with her thighs as hot, dry wind blasted past them. Abraxos screeched, shifting and soaring into the gust.

When Manon dared to look, a third of Morath was a smoldering ruin.

Where those catacombs had once been—where those Yellowlegs had been tortured and broken, where they had bred monsters—there was nothing left.

83

Aelin slept for three days.

Three days, while Rowan sat by her bed, healing his leg as best he could while the abyss of his power refilled.

Aedion assumed control of the castle, imprisoning any surviving guards. Most, Rowan had been viciously pleased to learn, had been killed in the storm of glass the prince had called down. Chaol had survived, by some miracle—probably the Eye of Elena, which they’d found tucked into his pocket. It was an easy guess who had put it there. Though Rowan honestly wondered if, when the captain woke up, he might wish he hadn’t made it after all. He’d encountered enough soldiers who felt that way.

After Aelin had so spectacularly leashed the people of Rifthold, they found Lorcan waiting by the doors to the stone castle. The queen hadn’t even noticed him as she sank to her knees and cried and cried, until Rowan scooped her into his arms and, limping slightly, carried her through the frenzied halls, servants dodging them as Aedion led the way to her old rooms.

It was the only place to go. Better to establish themselves in their enemy’s former stronghold than retreat to the warehouse apartment.

A servant named Philippa was asked to look after the prince, who had been unconscious the last time Rowan had seen him—when he plummeted to earth and Rowan’s wind stopped his fall.

He didn’t know what had happened in the castle. Through her weeping, Aelin hadn’t said anything.

She had been unconscious by the time Rowan reached her lavish suite of rooms, not even stirring as he kicked open the locked door. His leg had burned in pain, the rough healing he’d done barely holding the wound together, but he didn’t care. He’d barely set Aelin on the bed before Lorcan’s scent hit him again, and he whirled, snarling.

But there was already someone in Lorcan’s face, blocking the warrior’s path into the queen’s bedchamber. Lysandra.

“May I help you?” the courtesan had said sweetly. Her dress was in shreds, and blood both black and red coated most of her, but she held her head high and her back straight. She’d made it as far as the upper levels of the stone castle before the glass one above it had exploded. And showed no plans of leaving anytime soon.