Queen of Shadows

“Your father should fire Nelly,” Aelin said. “Opium addicts are piss-poor employees.”

“She makes good bread,” Nesryn said, and then fell back to where Chaol was walking behind them.

“What’d you learn?” Aedion demanded. “And do you care to explain why you needed to know about the Shadow Market?”

“Patience,” Aelin said. She turned to Lysandra. “You know, I bet the men around here would cut out their snarling if you turned into a ghost leopard and snarled back at them.”

Lysandra’s brows rose. “Ghost leopard?”

Aedion swore. “Do me a favor and never turn into one of those.”

“What are they?” Lysandra said. Rowan chuckled under his breath and stepped a bit closer to Aelin. She tried to ignore it. They’d barely spoken all morning.

Aedion shook his head. “Devils cloaked in fur. They live up in the Staghorns, and during the winter they creep down to prey on livestock. As big as bears, some of them. Meaner. And when the livestock runs out, they prey on us.”

Aelin patted Lysandra’s shoulder. “Sounds like your kind of creature.”

Aedion went on, “They’re white and gray, so you can barely make them out against the snow and rock. You can’t really tell they’re on you until you’re staring right into their pale green eyes …” His smile faltered as Lysandra fixed her green eyes on him and cocked her head.

Despite herself, Aelin laughed.

“Tell us why we’re here,” Chaol said as Aelin climbed over a fallen wooden beam in the abandoned Shadow Market. Beside her, Rowan held a torch high, illuminating the ruins—and the charred bodies. Lysandra had gone back to the brothel, escorted by Nesryn; Aelin had swiftly changed into her suit in an alley, and stashed her gown behind a discarded crate, praying no one snatched it before she could return.

“Just be quiet for a moment,” Aelin said, tracing the tunnels by memory.

Rowan shot her a glance, and she lifted a brow. What?

“You’ve come here before,” Rowan said. “You came to search the ruins.” That’s why you smelled of ash, too.

Aedion said, “Really, Aelin? Don’t you ever sleep?”

Chaol was watching her now, too, though maybe that was to avoid looking at the bodies littered around the halls. “What were you doing here the night you interrupted my meeting with Brullo and Ress?”

Aelin studied the cinders of the oldest stalls, the soot stains, the smells. She paused before one shop whose wares were now nothing but ash and twisted bits of metal. “Here we are,” she trilled, and strode into the hewn-rock stall, its stones burned black.

“It still smells like opium,” Rowan said, frowning. Aelin brushed her foot over the ashy ground, kicking away cinders and debris. It had to be somewhere—ah.

She swept away more and more, the ash staining her black boots and suit. At last a large, misshapen stone appeared beneath her feet, a worn hole near its edge.

She said casually, “Did you know that in addition to dealing opium, this man was rumored to sell hellfire?”

Rowan whipped his gaze to her.

Hellfire—nearly impossible to attain or make, mostly because it was so lethal. Just a vat of it could take out half of a castle’s retainer wall.

“He would never talk to me about it, of course,” Aelin went on, “no matter how many times I came here. He claimed he didn’t have it, yet he had some of the ingredients around the shop—all very rare—so … There must have been a supply of it here.”

She hauled open the stone trapdoor to reveal a ladder descending into the gloom. None of the males spoke as the reek of the sewers unfurled.

She crouched, sliding onto the first rung, and Aedion tensed, but he wisely said nothing about her going first.

Smoke-scented darkness enveloped her as she climbed down, down, down, until her feet hit smooth rock. The air was dry, despite their proximity to the river. Rowan came next, dropping his torch onto the ancient stones to reveal a cavernous tunnel—and bodies.

Several bodies, some of them nothing but dark mounds in the distance, cut down by the Valg. There were fewer to the right, toward the Avery. They’d probably anticipated an ambush at the river mouth and gone the other way—to their doom.

Not waiting for Aedion or Chaol to climb down, Aelin began following the tunnel, Rowan silent as a shadow at her side—looking, listening. After the stone door groaned closed above, she said into the darkness, “When the king’s men set this place alight, if the fire had hit that supply … Rifthold probably wouldn’t be here anymore. At least not the slums, and probably more.”

“Gods above,” Chaol murmured from a few paces behind.

Aelin paused at what looked like an ordinary grate in the sewer floor. But no water ran beneath, and only dusty air floated up to meet her.

“That’s how you’re planning to blow up the clock tower—with hellfire,” Rowan said, crouching at her side. He made to grab her elbow as she reached for the grate, but she sidled out of range. “Aelin—I’ve seen it used, seen it wreck cities. It can literally melt people.”

“Good. So we know it works, then.”

Aedion snorted, peering down into the gloom beyond the grate. “So what? You think he kept his supply down there?” If he had a professional opinion about hellfire, he kept it to himself.

“These sewers were too public, but he had to keep it near the market,” Aelin said, yanking on the grate. It gave a little, and Rowan’s scent caressed her as he leaned to help haul it off the opening.

“It smells like bones and dust down there,” Rowan said. His mouth quirked to the side. “But you suspected that already.”

Chaol said from a few feet behind, “That’s what you wanted to know from Nelly—where he was hiding. So he can sell it to you.”

Aelin lit a bit of wood from Rowan’s torch. She carefully poised it just beneath the lip of the hole before her, the flame lighting a drop of about ten feet, with cobblestones beneath.

A wind pushed from behind, toward the hole. Into it.

She set aside the flame and sat on the lip of the hole, her legs swinging in the dimness beneath. “What Nelly doesn’t know yet is that the opium monger was actually caught two days ago. Killed on sight by the king’s men. You know, I do think Arobynn sometimes had no idea whether he really wanted to help me or not.” It had been his casual mention of it at dinner that had set her thinking, planning.

Rowan murmured, “So his supply in the catacombs is now unguarded.”

She peered into the gloom below. “Finders keepers,” she said, and jumped.

50

“How did those lowlifes keep this place a secret?” Aelin breathed as she turned to Chaol.

The four of them stood atop a small staircase, the cavernous space beyond them illuminated in flickering gold by the torches Aedion and Rowan bore.

Chaol was shaking his head, surveying the space. Not a sign of scavengers, thank the gods. “Legend has it that the Shadow Market was built on the bones of the god of truth.”

“Well, they got the bones part right.”

In every wall, skulls and bones were artfully arranged—and every wall, even the ceiling, had been formed from them. Even the floor at the foot of the stairs was laid with bones of varying shapes and sizes.

“These aren’t ordinary catacombs,” Rowan said, setting down his torch. “This was a temple.”

Indeed, altars, benches, and even a dark reflection pool lay in the massive space. Still more sprawled away into shadow.

“There’s writing on the bones,” Aedion said, striding down the steps and onto the bone floor. Aelin grimaced.

“Careful,” Rowan said as Aedion went to the nearest wall. Her cousin lifted a hand in lazy dismissal.

“It’s in every language—all in different handwriting,” Aedion marveled, holding his torch aloft as he moved along the wall. “Listen to this one here: ‘I am a liar. I am a thief. I took my sister’s husband and laughed while I did it.’” A pause. He silently read another. “None of this writing … I don’t think these were good people.”