Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass #4)(40)

In the square, people began swearing at the three men who were watching the clock with pale, gaunt faces. Some of the onlookers even threw bits of spoiled food at them. Maybe this city did deserve Aelin Galathynius’s flames. Maybe Chaol deserved to burn, too.

He turned back to the women.

“Shit,” Aelin swore, and he looked behind him in time to see the guards shove the first victim—a sobbing, middle-aged man—toward the block, using the pommels of their swords to knock his knees out from under him. They weren’t waiting until six. Another prisoner, also middle-aged, began shaking, and a dark stain spread across the front of his pants. Gods.

Chaol’s muscles were locked, and even Nesryn couldn’t draw her bow fast enough as the ax rose.

A thud silenced the city square. People applauded—applauded. The sound covered the second thud of the man’s head falling and rolling away.

Then Chaol was in another room, in the castle that had once been his home, listening to the thud of flesh and bone on marble, red mist coating the air, Dorian screaming—

Oath-breaker. Liar. Traitor. Chaol was all of those things now, but not to Dorian. Never to his true king.

“Take out the clock tower in the garden,” he said, the words barely audible. He felt Aelin turn toward him. “And magic will be free. It was a spell—three towers, all built of Wyrdstone. Take out one, and magic is free.”

She glanced northward without so much as a blink of surprise, as though she could see all the way to the glass castle. “Thank you,” she murmured. That was it.

“It’s for Dorian’s sake.” Perhaps cruel, perhaps selfish, but true. “The king is expecting you tomorrow,” he went on. “What if he stops caring about the public knowing and unleashes his magic on you? You know what happened with Dorian.”

She scanned the roof tiles as if reading her mental map of the celebration—the map he’d given her. Then she swore. “He could lay traps for me—and Aedion. With the Wyrdmarks, he could write out spells on the floor or in the doors, keyed to me or Aedion, and we would be helpless—the exact same way I trapped that thing in the library. Shit,” she breathed. “Shit.”

Gripping her slackened bow, Nesryn said, “Brullo told us the king has his best men escorting Aedion from the dungeons to the hall—perhaps spelling those areas, too. If he spells them.”

“If is too big a gamble to make. And it’s too late to change our plans,” Aelin said. “If I had those gods-damned books, I could maybe find some sort of protection for me and Aedion, some spell, but I won’t have enough time tomorrow to grab them from my old rooms. The gods know if they’re even still there.”

“They’re not,” Chaol said. Aelin’s brows flicked up. “Because I have them. I grabbed them when I left the castle.”

Aelin pursed her lips in what he could have sworn was reluctant appreciation. “We don’t have much time.” She began climbing over the roof and out of sight. “There are two prisoners left,” she clarified. “And I think those streamers would look better with some Valg blood on them, anyway.”

Nesryn remained on the rooftop while Aelin went to another across the square—faster than Chaol had thought possible. That left him on street level.

He hurried as swiftly as he could through the crowd, spotting his three men gathered near the other edge of the platform—ready.

The clock struck six just as Chaol positioned himself, after making sure two more of his men were waiting down a narrow alley. Just as the guards finally cleared away the body of the first prisoner and dragged forward the second. The man was sobbing, begging them as he was forced to kneel in the puddle of his friend’s blood.

The executioner lifted his ax.

And a dagger, courtesy of Aelin Galathynius, went clean through the executioner’s throat.

Black blood sprayed—some onto the streamers, as Aelin had promised. Before the guards could shout, Nesryn opened fire from the other direction. That was all the distraction Chaol needed as he and his men surged toward the platform amid the panicking, fleeing crowd. Nesryn and Aelin had both fired again by the time he hit the stage, the wood treacherously slick with blood. He grabbed the two prisoners and roared at them to run, run, run!

His men were blade-to-blade with the guards as he rushed the stumbling prisoners down the steps and into the safety of the alley—and the rebels waiting beyond.

Block after block they fled, leaving the chaos of the square behind, until they hit the Avery, and Chaol set about attaining them a boat.

Nesryn found him leaving the docks an hour later, unharmed but splattered with dark blood. “What happened?”

“Pandemonium,” Nesryn said, scanning the river under the setting sun. “Everything fine?”

He nodded. “And you?”

“Both of us are fine.” A kindness, he thought with a flicker of shame, that she knew he couldn’t bring himself to ask about Aelin. Nesryn turned away, heading back in the direction she’d come.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To wash and change—and then go tell the family of the man who died.”

It was protocol, even if it was horrible. Better to have the families genuinely mourn than risk being looked on any longer as rebel sympathizers. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’ll send one of the men.”