Light footsteps sounded, and Evangeline burst from the kitchen, rushing to her mistress with a quiet, nimble grace. With surprising tenderness, Lysandra slipped a reassuring arm around Evangeline as she rose to her feet. “I understand, Celaena, I do. But I am begging you: read that letter. For him.”
Aelin bared her teeth. “Get out.”
Lysandra walked to the door, keeping herself and Evangeline a healthy distance from Aelin. She paused in the doorway. “Sam was my friend, too. He and Wesley were my only friends. And Arobynn took them both away.”
Aelin just raised her brows.
Lysandra didn’t bother with a good-bye as she vanished down the stairs.
But Evangeline lingered on the threshold, glancing between her disappearing mistress and Aelin, her lovely hair glimmering like liquid copper.
Then the girl gestured to her scarred face and said, “She did this to me.”
It was an effort to keep seated, to keep from leaping down the stairs to slit Lysandra’s throat.
But Evangeline went on, “I cried when my mother sold me to Clarisse. Cried and cried. And I think Lysandra had annoyed the mistress that day, because they gave me to her as an acolyte, even though she was weeks away from paying her debts. That night, I was supposed to begin training, and I cried so hard I made myself sick. But Lysandra—she cleaned me up. She told me that there was a way out, but it would hurt, and I would not be the same. I couldn’t run, because she had tried running a few times when she was my age, and they had found her and beat her where no one could see.”
She had never known—never wondered. All those times she had sneered at and mocked Lysandra while they’d grown up …
Evangeline continued, “I said I’d do anything to get out of what the other girls had told me about. So she told me to trust her—and then gave me these. She started shouting loud enough for the others to come running. They thought she cut me out of anger, and said she’d done it to keep me from being a threat. And she let them believe it. Clarisse was so mad that she beat Lysandra in the courtyard, but Lysandra didn’t cry—not once. And when the healer said my face couldn’t be fixed, Clarisse made Lysandra buy me for the amount I would have cost if I had been a full courtesan, like her.”
Aelin had no words.
Evangeline said, “That’s why she’s still working for Clarisse, why she’s still not free and won’t be for a while. I thought you should know.”
Aelin wanted to tell herself not to trust the girl, that this could be part of Lysandra and Arobynn’s plan, but … but there was a voice in her head, in her bones, that whispered to her, over and over and over, each time clearer and louder:
Nehemia would have done the same.
Evangeline curtsied and went down the stairs, leaving Aelin staring at the worn envelope.
If she herself could change so much in two years, perhaps so could Lysandra.
And for a moment, she wondered how another young woman’s life would have been different if she had stopped to talk to her—really talk to Kaltain Rompier, instead of dismissing her as a vapid courtier. What would have happened if Nehemia had tried to see past Kaltain’s mask, too.
Evangeline was climbing into the rain-gleaming carriage beside Lysandra when Aelin appeared at the warehouse door and said, “Wait.”
10
Aedion’s vision was swimming, his every breath gloriously difficult.
Soon. He could feel Death squatting in the corner of his cell, counting down the last of his breaths, a lion waiting to pounce. Every so often, Aedion would smile toward those gathered shadows.
The infection had spread, and with two days until the spectacle at which he was to be executed, his death was coming none too soon. The guards assumed he was sleeping to pass the time.
Aedion was waiting for his food, watching the small barred window in the top of the cell door for any sign of the guards’ arrival. But he was fairly sure he was hallucinating when the door opened and the Crown Prince strolled in.
There were no guards behind him, no sign of any escort as the prince stared from the doorway.
The prince’s unmoving face told him immediately what he needed to know: this was not a rescue attempt. And the black stone collar around the prince’s throat told him everything else: things had not gone well the day Sorscha had been murdered.
He managed to grin. “Good to see you, princeling.”
The prince ran an eye over Aedion’s dirty hair, the beard that had grown during the past few weeks, and then over to the pile of vomit in the corner from when he hadn’t been able to make it to the bucket an hour ago.
Aedion drawled as best he could, “The least you could do is take me to dinner before looking at me like that.”
The prince’s sapphire eyes flicked to his, and Aedion blinked past the haze covering his vision. What studied him was cold, predatory, and not quite human.