Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass #5)(153)

Fenrys and Gavriel swapped wary glances. “We still serve her, Rowan,” Gavriel murmured. “And we still have to kill Lorcan when the time comes.”

“Why bring this up at all? I won’t get in your way. Neither will Aelin, believe me.”

“Because,” Fenrys said, “Maeve’s style isn’t to execute. It’s to punish—slowly. Over years. But she wants Lorcan dead. And not half dead, or throat slit, but irrevocably dead.”

“Beheaded and burned,” Gavriel said grimly.

Rowan loosed a breath. “Why?”

Fenrys cast his glance over the edge of the stairs—to where Aelin slept, her golden hair shining in the moonlight. “Lorcan and you are the most powerful males in the world.”

“You forget Lorcan and Aelin can’t even stand to be in the same breathing space. I doubt there’s a chance of an alliance between them.”

“All we’re saying,” Fenrys explained, “is that Maeve does not make decisions without considerable motive. Be ready for anything. Sending her armada, wherever it is, is only the start.”

The marsh beasts roared, and Rowan wanted to roar right back. If Aelin and Cairn ever encountered each other, if Maeve had some plan beyond her greed for the keys …

Aelin turned in her sleep, scowling at the ruckus, Lysandra dozing beside her in ghost leopard form, that fluffy tail twitching. Rowan pushed off the wall, more than ready to join his queen. But he found Fenrys staring at her as well, his face tight and drawn. Fenrys’s voice was a broken whisper as he said, “Kill me. If that order is given. Kill me, Rowan, before I have to do it.”

“You’ll be dead before you can get within a foot of her.”

Not a threat—a promise and a plain statement of fact. Fenrys’s shoulders slumped in thanks.

“I’m glad, you know,” Fenrys said with unusual graveness, “that I got this time. That Maeve unintentionally gave me that. That I got to know what it was like—to be here, as a part of this.”

Rowan didn’t have words, so he looked to Gavriel.

But the Lion was merely nodding as he stared down at the little camp below. At his sleeping son.





54


The last leg of the trek the next morning was the longest yet, Manon thought.

Close—so close to this Lock the queen with a witch emblem in her pocket was seeking.

She’d fallen asleep, pondering how it could be connected, but gleaned nothing. They’d all been awake before dawn, dragged to consciousness by the oppressive humidity, so heavy it felt like a blanket weighing on Manon’s shoulders.

The queen was mostly quiet from where she walked at the head of their company, her mate scouting overhead, and her cousin and the shape-shifter flanking her, the latter wearing the skin of a truly horrific swamp viper. The Wolf and the Lion brought up the rear, sniffing and listening for anything wrong.

The people who had once dwelled within these lands had not met easy or pleasant ends. She could feel their pain even now, whispering through the stones, rippling through the water. That marsh beast that had snuck up on her last night was the mildest of the horrors here. At her side, Dorian Havilliard’s tense tan face seemed to suggest he felt the same.

Manon waded waist-deep through a pool of warm, thick water and asked, if only to get it out of where it rattled in her skull, “How will she use the keys to banish Erawan and his Valg? Or, for that matter, get rid of the things he’s created that aren’t of his original realm, but are some hybrid?”

Sapphire eyes slid toward her. “What?”

“Is there a way of weeding out who belongs and who doesn’t? Or will all those with Valg blood”—she put a hand on her sodden chest—“be sent into that realm of darkness and cold?”

Dorian’s teeth gleamed as he clenched them. “I don’t know,” he admitted, watching Aelin nimbly hop over a stone. “If she does, I assume she’ll tell us when it’s most convenient for her.”

And the least convenient for them, he didn’t need to add.

“And she gets to decide, I suppose? Who stays and who goes.”

“Banishing people to live with the Valg isn’t something Aelin would willingly do.”

“But she does decide, ultimately.”

Dorian paused atop a little hill. “Whoever holds those keys gets to decide. And you’d better pray to whatever wicked gods you worship that it’s Aelin holding them in the end.”

“What about you?”

“Why should I wish to go anywhere near those things?”

“You’re as powerful as she is. You could wield them. Why not?”

The others were swiftly pulling ahead, but Dorian remained still. Even had the audacity to grip her wrist—hard. “Why not?” There was such unyielding coldness in that beautiful face. She couldn’t turn away from it. A hot, humid breeze shoved past, dragging her hair with it. The wind didn’t touch him, didn’t ruffle one raven-dark hair on his head. A shield—he was shielding himself. Against her, or whatever was in this swamp? He said softly, “Because I was the one who did it.”

She waited.

His sapphire eyes were chips of ice. “I killed my father. I shattered the castle. I purged my own court. So if I had the keys, Wing Leader,” he finished as he released her wrist, “I have no doubt that I would do the same once more—across this continent.”