Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass #3)(27)

12

The Blackbeak Clan was the last to fully assemble at the Ferian Gap.

As a result, they got the smallest and farthest rooms in the warren of halls carved into the Omega, the last of the Ruhnn Mountains and the northernmost of the sister-­peaks flanking the snow-­blasted pass.

Across the gap was the Northern Fang, the final peak of the White Fangs, which was currently occupied by the king’s men—­massive brutes who still didn’t know quite what to make of the witches who had stalked in from every direction.

They’d been ­here for a day and Manon had yet to glimpse any sign of the wyverns the king had promised. She’d heard them, even though they ­were ­housed across the pass in the Northern Fang. No matter how deep you got into the Omega’s stone halls, the shrieks and roars vibrated in the stone, the air pulsed with the boom of leathery wings, and the floors hissed with the scrape of talon on rock.

It had been five hundred years since all three Clans had assembled. There had been over twenty thousand of them at one point. Now only three thousand remained, and that was a generous estimate. All that was left of a once-­mighty kingdom.

Still, the halls of the Omega ­were a dangerous place to be. Already she’d had to pull apart Asterin and a Yellowlegs bitch who hadn’t yet learned that Blackbeak sentinels—­especially members of the Thirteen—­didn’t take lightly to being called soft-­hearted.

There had been blue blood splattered on their faces, and though Manon was more than pleased to see that Asterin, beautiful, brash Asterin, had done most of the damage, she’d still had to punish her Second.

Three unblocked blows. One to the gut, so Asterin could feel her own powerlessness; one to the ribs, so she’d consider her actions every time she drew breath; and one to the face, so her broken nose would remind her that the punishment could have been far worse.

Asterin had taken them all without scream or complaint or plea, just as any of the Thirteen would have done.

And this morning, her Second, nose swollen and bruised at the bridge, had given Manon a fierce grin over their miserable breakfast of boiled oats. Had it been another witch, Manon would have dragged her by the neck to the front of the room and made her regret the insolence, but Asterin . . .

Even though Asterin was her cousin, she ­wasn’t a friend. Manon didn’t have friends. None of the witches, especially the Thirteen, had friends. But Asterin had guarded her back for a century, and the grin was a sign that she ­wouldn’t put a dagger in Manon’s spine the next time they ­were knee-­deep in battle.

No, Asterin was just insane enough to wear the broken nose like a badge of honor, and would love her crooked nose for the rest of her not-­so-­immortal life.

The Yellowlegs heir, a haughty bull of a witch named Iskra, had merely given her offending sentinel a warning to keep her mouth shut and sent her down to the infirmary in the belly of the mountain. Fool.

All the coven leaders ­were under orders to keep their sentinels in line—­to suppress the fighting between Clans. Or ­else the three Matrons would come down on them like a hammer. Without punishment, without Iskra making an example of her, the offending witch would keep at it until she got strung up by her toes by the new High Witch of the Yellowlegs Clan.

They’d held a sham of a memorial ser­vice last night for Baba Yellowlegs in the cavernous mess hall—­lighting any old candles in lieu of the traditional black ones, wearing what­ever hoods they could find, and going through the Sacred Words to the Three-­Faced Goddess as though they ­were reading a recipe.

Manon had never met Baba Yellowlegs, and didn’t particularly care that she’d died. She was more interested in who had killed her, and why. They all ­were, and it was those questions that ­were exchanged between the expected words of loss and mourning. Asterin and Vesta had done the talking, as they usually did, chatting up the other witches while Manon listened from nearby. No one knew anything, though. Even her two Shadows, concealed in the dark pockets of the mess hall as they’d been trained to do, had overheard nothing.

It was the not knowing that made her shoulders tight as Manon stalked up the sloped hallway to where the Matrons and all the Coven leaders ­were to assemble, Blackbeak and Yellowlegs witches stepping aside to let her pass. She resented not knowing anything that might be useful, that might give the Thirteen or the Blackbeaks an advantage. Of course, the Bluebloods ­were nowhere to be seen. The reclusive witches had arrived first and claimed the uppermost rooms in the Omega, saying they needed the mountain breeze to complete their rituals every day.

Religious fanatics with their noses in the wind, was what Mother Blackbeak had always called them. But it had been their insane devotion to the Three-­Faced Goddess and their vision of the Witch Kingdom under Ironteeth rule that had mustered the Clans five centuries ago—­even if it had been the Blackbeak sentinels who’d won the battles for them.

Manon treated her body as she would any other weapon: she kept it clean and honed and ready at any time to defend and destroy. But even her training ­couldn’t keep her from being out of breath when she reached the atrium by the black bridge that connected the Omega to the Northern Fang. She hated the expanse of stone without even touching it. It smelled wrong.

It smelled like those two prisoners she’d seen with the duke. In fact, this ­whole place reeked like that. The scent ­wasn’t natural; it didn’t belong in this world.