And in its place was a screaming, high-pitched and keening, loud as a teakettle, loud as a storm wind, loud as the sound the maid had emitted the morning she’d walked into Celaena’s parents’ bedroom and seen the child lying between their corpses.
It was so loud that she could hardly hear herself as she said, “I do not care.” She couldn’t hear anything over that silent screaming, so she raised her own voice, breath coming fast, too fast, as she repeated, “I. Do. Not. Care.”
Silence. Then Luca warily said from across the room, “Elentiya, don’t be rude.”
Elentiya. Elentiya. Spirit that cannot be broken.
Lies, lies, lies. Nehemia had lied about everything. About her stupid name, about her plans, about every damn thing. And she was gone. All that Celaena would have left of her were reminders like this—weapons similar to the ones the princess had worn with such pride. Nehemia was gone, and she had nothing left.
Trembling so hard she thought her body would fall apart at the seams, she turned. “I do not care about you,” she hissed to Emrys and Malakai and Luca. “I do not care about your knife. I do not care about your stories or your little kingdom.” She pinned Emrys with a stare. Luca and Malakai were across the room in an instant, stepping in front of the old man—teeth bared. Good. They should feel threatened. “So leave me alone. Keep your gods-damned lives to yourselves and leave me alone.”
She was shouting now, but she couldn’t stop hearing the screaming, couldn’t hone the anger into anything, couldn’t tell which way was up or down, only that Nehemia had lied about everything, and her friend once had sworn an oath not to—sworn an oath and broken it, just as she’d broken Celaena’s own heart the day she let herself die.
She saw the tears in Emrys’s eyes then. Sorrow or pity or anger, she didn’t care. Luca and Malakai were still between them, growling softly. A family—they were a family, and they stuck together. They would rip her apart if she hurt one of them.
Celaena let out a low, joyless laugh as she took in the three of them. Emrys opened his mouth to say whatever it was he thought would help.
But Celaena let out another dead laugh and walked out the door.
•
After an entire night of tattooing the names of the fallen onto Gavriel’s flesh and listening to the warrior talk about the men he’d lost, Rowan sent him on his way and headed for the kitchen. He found it empty save for the ancient male, who sat at the empty worktable, hands wrapped around a mug. Emrys looked up, his eyes bright and . . . grieving.
The girl was nowhere to be seen, and for a heartbeat, he hoped she’d left again, if only so he didn’t have to face what he’d said yesterday. The door to the outside was open—as if someone had thrown it wide. She’d probably gone that way.
Rowan took a step toward it, nodding his greeting, but the old male looked him up and down and quietly said, “What are you doing?”
“What?”
Emrys didn’t raise his voice as he said, “To that girl. What are you doing that makes her come in here with such emptiness in her eyes?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
Emrys pressed his lips into a tight line. “What do you see when you look at her, Prince?”
He didn’t know. These days, he didn’t know a damn thing. “That’s none of your concern, either.”
Emrys ran a hand over his weathered face. “I see her slipping away, bit by bit, because you shove her down when she so desperately needs someone to help her back up.”
“I don’t see why I would be of any use to—”
“Did you know that Evalin Ashryver was my friend? She spent almost a year working in this kitchen—living here with us, fighting to convince your queen that demi-Fae have a place in your realm. She fought for our rights until the very day she departed this kingdom—and the many years after, until she was murdered by those monsters across the sea. So I knew. I knew who her daughter was the moment you brought her into this kitchen. All of us who were here twenty-five years ago recognized her for what she is.”
It wasn’t often that he was surprised, but . . . Rowan just stared.
“She has no hope, Prince. She has no hope left in her heart. Help her. If not for her sake, then at least for what she represents—what she could offer all of us, you included.”
“And what is that?” he dared ask.
Emrys met his gaze unflinchingly as he whispered, “A better world.”
•
Celaena walked and walked, until she found herself by the tree-lined shore of a lake, glaringly bright in the midday sun. She figured it was as good a spot as any as she crumpled to the mossy bank, as her arms wrapped tight around herself and she bowed over her knees.
There was nothing that could be done to fix her. And she was . . . she was . . .
A whimpering noise came out of her, lips trembling so hard she had to clamp down to keep the sound inside.
But the sound was in her throat and her lungs and her mouth, and when she took a breath, it cracked out. Once she heard it, everything came spilling into the world, until her body ached with the force of it.
She vaguely felt the light shifting on the lake. Vaguely felt the sighing wind, warm as it brushed against her damp chee
ks. And heard, so soft it was as if she dreamed it, a woman’s voice whispering, Why are you crying, Fireheart?
It had been ten years—ten long years since she had heard her mother’s voice. But she heard it then over the force of her weeping, as clear as if she knelt beside her. Fireheart—why do you cry?
“Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.”
It was what she had never been able to tell Nehemia—that for ten years, she had been unsure how to find the way home, because there was no home left.
Storm winds and ice crackled against her skin before she registered Rowan sitting down beside her, legs out, palms braced behind him in the moss. She raised her head, but didn’t bother to wipe her face as she stared across the glittering lake.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
“No.” Swallowing a few times, she yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose, her head clearing with each breath.
They sat in silence, no sound but the quiet lapping of the lake on the mossy bank and the wind in the leaves. Then— “Good. Because we’re going.”
Bastard. She called him as much, and then asked, “Going where?”
He smiled grimly. “I think I’ve started to figure you out, Aelin Galathynius.”
•
“What in every burning ring of hell,” Celaena panted, gazing at the cave mouth nestled into the base of the craggy mountain, “are we doing here?”
It had been a five-mile hike. Uphill. With hardly anything in her stomach.
The trees butted against the gray stones, flowing up the slope for a ways and then fading into lichen-covered rock that eventually turned into the snow-capped peak that marked the barrier between Wendlyn and Doranelle beyond. For some reason, this hulking giant made the hair on her neck stand up. And it had nothing to do with the frozen wind.