Three days, she’d been near death with vomiting and fever after gulping down that stagnant pond water. Three days, she’d shivered so badly she thought her bones would crack apart. Three days, quietly weeping in pitiful despair that she’d die here, alone in this endless forest, and no one would ever know.
And through it all, that stone in her breast pocket thrummed and throbbed. In her fevered dreams, she could have sworn it whispered to her, sang lullabies in languages that she did not think human tongues could utter.
She hadn’t heard it since, but she still wondered. Wondered if most humans would have died.
Wondered whether she carried a gift or a curse northward. And if this Celaena Sardothien would know what to do with it.
Tell her that you can open any door, if you have the key, Kaltain had said. Elide often studied the iridescent black stone whenever she halted for a needed break. It certainly didn’t look like a key: rough-hewn, as if it had been cleaved from a larger chunk of stone. Perhaps Kaltain’s words were a riddle meant only for its recipient.
Elide unslung her too-light pack from her shoulders and yanked open the canvas flap. She’d run out of food a week ago and had taken to scavenging for berries. They were all foreign, but a whisper of a memory from her years with her nursemaid, Finnula, had warned her to rub them on her wrist first—to see if they raised any reaction.
Most of the time, too much of the time, they did.
But every now and then she’d stumble across a bush sagging with the right ones, and she’d gorge herself before filling her pack. Fishing inside the pink-and-blue-stained canvas interior, Elide dug out the last handful, wrapped in her spare shirt, the white fabric now a splotchy red and purple.
One handful—to last until she found her next meal.
Hunger gnawed at her, but Elide ate only half. Maybe she’d find more before she stopped for the night.
She didn’t know how to hunt—and the thought of catching another living thing, of snapping its neck or bashing in its skull with a rock … She was not yet that desperate.
Perhaps it made her not a Blackbeak after all, despite her mother’s hidden bloodline.
Elide licked her fingers clean of the berry juice, dirt and all, and hissed as she stood on stiff, sore legs. She wouldn’t last long without food but couldn’t risk venturing into a village with the money Manon had given her, or toward any of the hunters’ fires she’d spotted these past few weeks.
No—she had seen enough of the kindness and mercy of men. She would never forget how those guards had leered at her naked body, why her uncle had sold her to Duke Perrington.
Wincing, Elide swung her pack over her shoulders and carefully set off down the hill’s far slope, picking her way among the rocks and roots.
Maybe she’d made a wrong turn. How would she know when she’d crossed Terrasen’s border, anyway?
And how would she ever find her queen—her court?
Elide shoved the thoughts away, keeping to the murky shadows and avoiding the splotches of sunlight. It’d only make her thirstier, hotter.
Find water, perhaps more important than finding berries, before darkness set in.
She reached the foot of the hill, suppressing a groan at the labyrinth of wood and stone.
It seemed she now stood in a dried streambed wending between the hills. It curved sharply ahead—northward. A sigh rattled out of her. Thank Anneith. At least the Lady of Wise Things had not abandoned her yet.
She’d follow the streambed for as long as possible, staying northward, and then—
Elide didn’t know what sense, exactly, picked up on it. Not smell or sight or sound, for nothing beyond the rot of the loam and the sunlight and stones and the whispering of the high-above leaves was out of the ordinary.
But—there. Like some thread in a great tapestry had snagged, her body locked up.
The humming and rustling of the forest went quiet a heartbeat later.
Elide scanned the hills, the streambed. The roots of an oak atop the nearest hill jutted from the slope’s grassy side, providing a thatch of wood and moss over the dead stream. Perfect.
She limped for it, ruined leg barking, stones clattering and wrenching at her ankles. She could nearly touch the tips of the roots when the first hollowed-out boom echoed.
Not thunder. No, she would never forget this one particular sound—for it, too, haunted her dreams both awake and asleep.
The beating of mighty, leathery wings. Wyverns.
And perhaps more deadly: the Ironteeth witches who rode them, senses as sharp and fine-tuned as their mounts’.