from the hall, the girl still chirping away.
The weight of Lysandra’s disappointment lingered like a phantom touch.
Ren cleared his throat. “You want to tell me what’s going on between you two?”
Aedion cut him a flat stare that would have sent lesser men running. “Get a map. I want to go over the passes again.”
Ren, to his credit, went in search of one.
Aedion gazed at the fire, so pale without his queen’s spark of magic.
How long would it be until the wind howling outside the castle was replaced by the baying of Erawan’s beasts?
Aedion got his answer at dawn the next day.
Seated at one end of the long table in the Great Hall, Lysandra and Evangeline having a quiet breakfast at the other, Aedion mastered the shake in his fingers as he opened the letter the messenger had delivered moments before. Ren and Murtaugh, seated around him, had refrained from demanding answers while he read. Once. Twice.
Aedion at last set down the letter. Took a long breath as he frowned toward the watery gray light leaking through the bank of windows high on the wall.
Down the table, the weight of Lysandra’s stare pressed on him. Yet she remained where she was.
“It’s from Kyllian,” Aedion said hoarsely. “Morath’s troops made landfall at the coast—at Eldrys.”
Ren swore. Murtaugh stayed silent. Aedion kept seated, since his knees seemed unlikely to support him. “He destroyed the city. Turned it to rubble without unleashing a single troop.”
Why the dark king had waited this long, Aedion could only guess.
“The witch towers?” Ren asked. Aedion had told him all Manon Blackbeak had revealed on their trek through the Stone Marshes.
“It doesn’t say.” It was doubtful Erawan had wielded the towers, since they were massive enough to require being transported by land, and Aedion’s scouts surely would have noticed a one-hundred-foot tower hauled through their territory. “But the blasts leveled the city.”
“Aelin?” Murtaugh’s voice was a near-whisper.
“Fine,” Aedion lied. “On her way back to the Orynth encampment the day before it happened.” Of course, there was no mention of her whereabouts in Kyllian’s letter, but his top commander had speculated that since there was no body or celebrating enemy, the queen had gotten out.
Murtaugh went boneless in his seat, and Fleetfoot laid her golden head atop his thigh. “Thank Mala for that mercy.”
“Don’t thank her yet.” Aedion shoved the letter into the pocket of the thick cloak he wore against the draft in the hall. Don’t thank her at all, he almost added. “On their way to Eldrys, Morath took out ten of Wendlyn’s warships near Ilium, and sent the rest fleeing back up the Florine, along with our own.”
Murtaugh rubbed his jaw. “Why not give chase—follow them up the river?”
“Who knows?” Aedion would think on it later. “Erawan set his sights on Eldrys, and so he has now taken the city. He seems inclined to launch some of his troops from there. If unchecked, they’ll reach Orynth in a week.”
“We have to return to the camp,” Ren said, face dark. “See if we can get our fleet back down the Florine and strike with Rolfe from the sea. While we hammer from the land.”
Aedion didn’t feel like reminding them that they hadn’t heard from Rolfe beyond vague messages about his hunt for the scattered Mycenians and their legendary fleet. The odds of Rolfe emerging to save their asses were as slim as the fabled Wolf Tribe at the far end of the Anascaul Mountains riding out of the hinterland. Or the Fae who’d fled Terrasen a decade ago returning from wherever they’d gone to join Aedion’s forces.
The calculating calm that had guided Aedion through battle and butchering settled into him, as solid as the fur cloak he wore. Speed would be their ally now. Speed and clarity.
The lines have to hold, Rowan ordered before they’d parted. Buy us whatever time you can.
He’d make good on that promise.
Evangeline fell silent as Aedion’s attention slid to the shifter down the table. “How many can your wyvern form carry?”
CHAPTER 2
Elide Lochan had once hoped to travel far and wide, to a place where no one had ever heard of Adarlan or Terrasen, so distant that Vernon didn’t stand a chance of finding her.
She hadn’t anticipated that it might actually happen.
Standing in the dusty, ancient alley of an equally dusty, ancient city in a kingdom south of Doranelle, Elide marveled at the noontime bells ringing across the clear sky, the sun baking the pale stones of the buildings, the dry wind sweeping