Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass #4) - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,3

was nothing more than ash floating out the porthole window and across the vast, night-darkened ocean.

Though she had braced herself, it had still been a shock weeks later when the ship had passed some unseen marker just off the coast and her magic vanished. All that fire she’d spent so many months carefully mastering … gone as if it had never existed, not even an ember left flickering in her veins. A new sort of emptiness—different from the hole Rowan’s absence left in her.

Stranded in her human skin, she’d curled up on her cot and recalled how to breathe, how to think, how to move her damn body without the immortal grace she’d become so dependent on. She was a useless fool for letting those gifts become a crutch, for being caught unguarded when they were again ripped from her. Rowan definitely would have kicked her ass for that—once he’d recovered himself. It was enough to make her glad she’d asked him to stay behind.

So she had breathed in the brine and the wood, and reminded herself that she’d been trained to kill with her bare hands long before she’d ever learned to melt bones with her fire. She did not need the extra strength, speed, and agility of her Fae form to bring down her enemies.

The man responsible for that initial brutal training—the man who had been savior and tormentor, but never declared himself father or brother or lover—was now steps away, still speaking with his oh-so-important client.

Aelin pushed against the tension threatening to lock up her limbs and kept her movements feline-smooth as she closed the final twenty feet between them.

Until Arobynn’s client rose to his feet, snapping something at the King of the Assassins, and stormed toward his guard.

Even with the hood, she knew the way he moved. She knew the shape of the chin poking from the shadows of the cowl, the way his left hand tended to brush against his scabbard.

But the sword with the eagle-shaped pommel was not hanging at his side.

And there was no black uniform—only brown, nondescript clothes, spotted with dirt and blood.

She grabbed an empty chair and pulled it up to a table of card players before the client had taken two steps. She slid into the seat and focused on breathing, on listening, even as the three people at the table frowned at her.

She didn’t care.

From the corner of her eye, she saw the guard jerk her chin toward her.

“Deal me in,” Aelin muttered to the man beside her. “Right now.”

“We’re in the middle of a game.”

“Next round, then,” she said, relaxing her posture and slumping her shoulders as Chaol Westfall cast his gaze in her direction.

3

Chaol was Arobynn’s client.

Or he wanted something from her former master badly enough to risk meeting here.

What the hell had happened while she was away?

She watched the cards being slapped down on the ale-damp table, even as the captain’s attention fixed on her back. She wished she could see his face, see anything in the gloom underneath that hood. Despite the splattering of blood on his clothes, he moved as though no injuries plagued him.

Something that had been coiled tightly in her chest for months slowly loosened.

Alive—but where had the blood come from?

He must have deemed her nonthreatening, because he merely motioned to his companion to go, and they both strolled toward the bar—no, toward the stairs beyond. He moved at a steady, casual pace, though the woman at his side was too tense to pass for unconcerned. Fortunately for them all, no one looked his way as he left, and the captain didn’t glance in her direction again.

She’d moved fast enough that he likely hadn’t been able to detect that it was her. Good. Good, even if she would have known him moving or still, cloaked or bare.

There he went, up the stairs, not even glancing down, though his companion continued watching her. Who the hell was that? There hadn’t been any female guards at the palace when she’d left, and she had been fairly certain the king had an absurd no-women rule.

Seeing Chaol changed nothing—not right now.

She curled her hand into a fist, keenly aware of the bare finger on her right hand. It hadn’t felt naked until now.

A card landed before her. “Three silvers to join,” the bald, tattooed man beside her said as he dealt the cards, inclining his head toward the tidy pile of coins in the center.

Meeting with Arobynn—she’d never thought Chaol was stupid, but this … Aelin