Celaena hit the top of the stairs. The shouts behind her grew; people were calling her name. She would stop for no one.
She turned down the familiar hallway, nearly sobbing with relief at the sight of the wooden door. It was shut; there were no signs of forced entry.
She drew her two remaining daggers, summoning the words she’d need to quickly explain to Nehemia how and where to hide. When her assailant arrived, Nehemia’s only task would be to keep quiet and concealed. Celaena would deal with the rest. And she’d enjoy the hell out of it.
She reached the door and slammed into it, exploding through the locks.
The world slowed to the beat of an ancient, ageless drum.
Celaena beheld the room.
The blood was everywhere.
Before the bed, Nehemia’s bodyguards lay with their throats cut from ear to ear, their internal organs spilling out onto the floor.
And on the bed …
On the bed …
She could hear the shouts growing closer, reaching the room, but their words were somehow muffled, as though she were underwater, the sounds coming from the surface above.
Celaena stood in the center of the freezing bedroom, gazing at the bed, and the princess’s broken body atop it.
Nehemia was dead.
Part Two
The Queen’s Arrow
Chapter 30
Celaena stared at the body.
An empty body, artfully mutilated, so cut up that the bed was almost black with blood.
People had rushed into the room behind her, and she smelled the faint tang as someone was sick nearby.
But she just stayed there, letting the others fan out around her as they rushed to assess the three cooling bodies in the room. That ancient, ageless drum—her heartbeat—pulsed through her ears, drowning out any sound.
Nehemia was gone. That vibrant, fierce, loving soul; the princess who had been called the Light of Eyllwe; the woman who had been a beacon of hope—just like that, as if she were no more than a wisp of candlelight, she was gone.
When it had mattered most, Celaena hadn’t been there.
Nehemia was gone.
Someone murmured her name, but didn’t touch her.
There was a gleam of sapphire eyes in front of her, blocking out her vision of the bed and the dismembered body atop it. Dorian. Prince Dorian. There were tears running down his face. She reached out a hand to touch them. They were oddly warm against her freezing, distant fingers. Her nails were dirty, bloody, cracked—so gruesome against the smooth white cheek of the prince.
And then that voice from behind her said her name again.
“Celaena.”
They had done this.
Her bloody fingers slid down Dorian’s face, to his neck. He just stared at her, suddenly still.
“Celaena,” that familiar voice said. A warning.
They had done this. They had betrayed her. Betrayed Nehemia. They had taken her away. Her nails brushed Dorian’s exposed throat.
“Celaena,” the voice said.
Celaena slowly turned.
Chaol stared at her, a hand on his sword. The sword she’d brought to the warehouse—the sword she’d left there. Archer had told her that Chaol had known they were going to do this.
He had known.
She shattered completely, and launched herself at him.
Chaol had only enough time to release his sword as she lunged, swiping for his face with a hand.
She slammed him into the wall, and stinging pain burst from the four lines she gouged across his cheek with her nails.
She reached for the dagger at her waist, but he grasped her wrist. Blood slid down his check, down his neck.
His guards shouted, rushing closer, but he hooked a foot behind hers, twisting as he shoved, and threw her to the ground.
“Stay back,” he ordered them, but it cost him. Pinned beneath him, she slammed a fist up beneath his jaw, so hard his teeth sang.
And then she was snarling, snarling like some kind of wild animal as she snapped for his neck. He reared back, throwing her against the marble floor again. “Stop.”
But the Celaena he knew was gone. The girl he’d imagined as his wife, the girl he’d shared a bed with for the past week, was utterly gone. Her clothes and hands were caked with the blood of the men in the warehouse. She wedged a knee up, pounding it between his legs so hard he lost his grip on her, and then she was on top of him, dagger drawn, plunging down toward his chest—
He grabbed her wrist again, crushing it in his hand as the blade hovered over his heart. Her whole body trembled with effort, trying to shove it the remaining few inches. She reached for her other dagger, but he caught that wrist, too.
“Stop.” He gasped, winded from the blow she’d landed with her knee, trying to think past that blinding pain. “Celaena, stop.”
“Captain,” one of his men ventured.
“Stay back,” he snarled again.
Celaena threw her weight into the dagger she held aloft, and gained an inch. His arms strained. She was going to kill him. She was truly going to kill him.
He made himself look into her eyes, look at the face so twisted with rage that he couldn’t find her.
“Celaena,” he said, squeezing her wrists so hard that he hoped the pain registered somewhere—wherever she had gone. But she still wouldn’t loosen her grip on the blade. “Celaena, I’m your friend.”
She stared at him, panting through gritted teeth, her breath coming quicker and quicker before she roared, the sound filling the room, his blood, his world: “You will never be my friend. You will always be my enemy.”
She bellowed the last word with such soul-deep hatred that he felt it like a punch to the gut. She surged again, and he lost his grip on the wrist that held the dagger. The blade plunged down.
And stopped. There was a sudden chill in the room, and Celaena’s hand just stopped, as though it had been frozen in midair. Her eyes left his face, but Chaol couldn’t see who it was she hissed at. For a heartbeat, it seemed as if she was thrashing against some invisible force, but then Ress was behind her, and she was too busy struggling to notice as the guard slammed the pommel of his sword into her head.
As Celaena fell atop him, a part of Chaol fell along with her.
Chapter 31
Dorian knew that Chaol had no choice, no other way out of the situation, as his friend carried Celaena out of that bloody chamber, into the servants’ stairwell, and down, down, down, until they reached the castle dungeons. He tried not to look at Kaltain’s curious, half-mad face as Chaol laid Celaena in the cell beside hers. As he locked the cell door.
“Let me give her my cloak,” Dorian said, reaching to unfasten it.
“Don’t,” Chaol said quietly. His face was still bleeding. She’d gouged four lines across his cheek with her nails. Her nails. Gods above.
“I don’t trust her with anything in there except hay.” Chaol had already taken the time to remove her remaining weapons—including six lethal-looking hairpins from her braid—and checked her boots and tunic for any hidden ones.
Kaltain was smiling faintly at Celaena. “Don’t touch her, don’t talk to her, and don’t look at her,” Chaol said, as if there wasn’t a wall of bars separating the two women. Kaltain just huffed and curled up on her side. Chaol barked orders to the guards about food and water rations, and how often the watch was to be changed, and then stalked from the dungeon.
Dorian silently followed. He didn’t know where to begin. There was grief sweeping down on him in waves as he realized again and again that Nehemia was dead; there was the sickness and terror of what he’d seen in that bedroom; and there was the horror and relief that he’d somehow used his power to stop Celaena’s hand before she stabbed Chaol, and that no one except Celaena had noticed.
And when she’d hissed at him … he’d seen something so savage in her eyes that he shuddered.
They were halfway up the winding stone stairs out of the dungeons when C