Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass 4)

Aelin swallowed hard. Before she could say anything, Florine left her standing at the back of the line and strolled to the door. She paused before it, looking down the line at each dancer. She spoke only when her eyes met Aelin’s. “Give our king the performance he deserves.”

Florine opened the door, flooding the hallway with light and music and the scent of roasted meats.

The other dancers sucked in a collective breath and sprang forward, one by one, waving those dark glass flowers overhead.

As she watched them go, Aelin willed the blood in her veins into black fire. Aedion—her focus was on Aedion, not on the tyrant seated at the front of the room, the man who had murdered her family, murdered Marion, murdered her people. If these were her last moments, then at least she would go down fighting, to the sound of exquisite music.

It was time.

One breath—another.

She was the heir of fire.

She was fire, and light, and ash, and embers. She was Aelin Fireheart, and she bowed for no one and nothing, save the crown that was hers by blood and survival and triumph.

Aelin squared her shoulders and slipped into the bejeweled crowd.

Aedion had been watching the guards in the hours he’d been chained to the stool, and had figured out who best to attack first, who favored a certain side or leg, who might hesitate when faced with the Wolf of the North, and, most importantly, who was impulsive and stupid enough to finally run him through despite the king’s command.

The performances had begun, drawing the attention of the crowd that had been shamelessly gawking at him, and as the two dozen women floated and leaped and twirled into the wide space between the dais and his execution platform, for a moment Aedion felt … bad for interrupting. These women had no cause to be caught up in the bloodshed he was about to unleash.

It did seem fitting, though, that their sparkling costumes were of darkest black, accented with silver—Death’s Handmaidens, he realized. That was who they portrayed.

It was as much a sign as anything. Perhaps the dark-eyed Silba would offer him a kind death instead of a cruel one at the blood-drenched hands of Hellas. Either way, he found himself smiling. Death was death.

The dancers were tossing fistfuls of black powder, coating the floor with it—representing ashes of the fallen, probably. One by one, they made pretty little spins and bowed before the king and his son.

Time to move. The king was distracted by a uniformed guard whispering in his ear; the prince was watching the dancers with bored disinterest, and the queen was chatting with whichever courtier she favored that day.

The crowd clapped and cooed over the unfolding performance. They’d all come in their finery—such careless wealth. The blood of an empire had paid for those jewels and silks. The blood of his people.

An extra dancer was moving through the crowd: some understudy, no doubt trying to get a better view of the performance. And he might not have thought twice about it, had she not been taller than the others—bigger, curvier, her shoulders broader. She moved more heavily, as if somehow rooted innately to the earth. The light hit her, shining through the lace of the costume’s sleeves to reveal swirls and whorls of markings on her skin. Identical to the paint on the dancers’ arms and chests, save for her back, where the paint was a little darker, a little different.

Dancers like that didn’t have tattoos.

Before he could see more, between one breath and the next, as a cluster of ladies in massive ball gowns blocked her from sight, she vanished behind a curtained-off doorway, walking right past the guards with a sheepish smile, as if she were lost.

When she emerged again not a minute later, he only knew it was her from the build, the height. The makeup was gone, and her flowing tulle skirt had disappeared—

No—not disappeared, he realized as she slipped back through the doorway without the guards so much as looking at her. The skirt had been reversed into a silken cape, its hood covering her ruddy brown hair, and she moved … moved like a swaggering man, parading for the ladies around him.

Moved closer to him. To the stage.

The dancers were still tossing their black powder everywhere, circling around and around, flitting their way across the marble floor.

None of the guards noticed the dancer-turned-noble prowling toward him. One of the courtiers did—but not to cry an alarm. Instead, he shouted a name—a man’s name. And the dancer in disguise turned, lifting a hand in greeting toward the man who’d called and giving a cocky grin.

She wasn’t just in disguise. She’d become someone else completely.

Closer and closer she strutted, the music from the gallery orchestra rising into a clashing, vibrant finale, each note higher than the last as the dancers raised their glass roses above their heads: a tribute to the king, to Death.

The disguised dancer stopped outside the ring of guards flanking Aedion’s stage, patting herself down as if checking for a handkerchief that had gone missing, muttering a string of curses.

An ordinary, believable pause—no cause for alarm. The guards went back to watching the dancers.

But the dancer looked up at Aedion beneath lowered brows. Even disguised as an aristo man, there was wicked, vicious triumph in her turquoise-and-gold eyes.

Behind them, across the hall, the dancers shattered their roses on the floor, and Aedion grinned at his queen as the entire world went to hell.

CHAPTER

18

It wasn’t just the glass flowers that had been rigged with a reactive powder, quietly purchased by Aelin at the Shadow Market. Every bit of sparkling dust the dancers had tossed about had been full of it. And it was worth every damned silver she’d spent as smoke erupted through the room, igniting the powder they’d been scattering everywhere.

The smoke was so thick she could barely see more than a foot ahead, and blended perfectly with the gray cloak that had doubled as the skirt of her costume. Just as Arobynn had suggested.

Screaming halted the music. Aelin was already moving for the nearby stage as the clock tower—that clock tower that would save or damn them all—struck noon.

There was no black collar around Aedion’s neck, and that was all she needed to see, even as relief threatened to wobble her knees. Before the clock’s first strike finished, she had drawn the daggers built into the bodice of her costume—all the silver thread and beading masking the steel on her—and slashed one across the throat of the nearest guard.

Aelin spun and shoved him into the man closest to him as she plunged her other blade deep into the gut of a third.

Florine’s voice rose above the crowd, ushering her dancers out-out-out.

The second strike of the clock tower sounded, and Aelin yanked her dagger from the belly of the groaning guard, another surging at her from the smoke.

The rest would go to Aedion on instinct, but they’d be slowed by the crowds, and she was already close enough.

The guard—one of those black-uniformed nightmares—stabbed with his sword, a direct attack to her chest. Aelin parried the thrust aside with one dagger, spinning into his exposed torso. Hot, reeking blood shot onto her hand as she shoved her other blade into his eye.

He was still falling as she ran the last few feet to the wooden platform and hurled herself onto it, rolling, keeping low until she was right up under two other guards who wer

e still trying to wave away the veils of smoke. They screamed as she disemboweled them both in two swipes.

The fourth strike of the clock sounded, and there was Aedion, the three guards around him impaled by shards of his stool.

He was huge—even bigger up close. A guard charged for them out of the smoke, and Aelin shouted “Duck!” before throwing her dagger at the man’s approaching face. Aedion barely moved fast enough to avoid the blow, and the guard’s blood splattered on the shoulder of her cousin’s tunic.

She lunged for the chains around Aedion’s ankles, sheathing her remaining blade at her side.

A jolt shocked through her, and blue light seared her vision as the Eye flared. She didn’t dare pause, not even for a heartbeat. Whatever spell the king had put on Aedion’s chains burned like blue fire as she sliced open her forearm with her dagger and used her blood to draw the symbols she’d memorized on the chains: Unlock.

The chains thudded to the ground.

Seventh strike of the clock.

The screaming shifted into something louder, wilder, and the king’s voice boomed over the panicking crowd.

A guard rushed at them, his sword out. Another benefit of the smoke: too risky to start firing arrows. But she’d only give Arobynn credit if she got out of this alive.

She unsheathed another blade, hidden in the lining of her gray cloak. The guard went down clutching at his throat, now split ear to ear. Then she whirled to Aedion, pulled the long chain of the Eye from around her neck, and threw it over his head. She opened her mouth, but he gasped out, “The sword.”

And that’s when she noticed the blade displayed behind his stool. The Sword of Orynth.

Her father’s blade.

She’d been too focused on Aedion, on the guards and the dancers, to realize what blade it was.

“Stay close,” was all she said as she grabbed the sword from the stand and shoved it into his hands. She didn’t let herself think too much about the weight of that blade, or about how it had even gotten there. She just grasped Aedion by the wrist and raced across the platform toward the patio windows, where the crowd was shrieking and guards were trying to establish a line.