Chapter 11

She caught his feint left, but when she dove right, he moved so swiftly that despite her

lifetime of training, she crashed into a darkened brazier behind him. The clatter echoed

through the too-quiet hall as she landed face-first on the stone floor, her teeth singing.

"Like I said," Rowan sneered down at her, "you have a lot to learn. About everything."

Her lip already aching and swollen, she told him exactly what he could go do to

himself.

He sauntered down the hall. "Next time you say anything like that," he said without

looking over his shoulder, "I'll have you chopping wood for a month."

Fuming, hatred and shame already burning her face, Celaena got to her feet. He

dumped her in a very small, very cold room that looked like little more than a prison cell,

letting her take all of two steps inside before he said, "Give me your weapons."

"Why? And no." Like hell she'd give him her daggers.

In a swift movement, he grabbed a bucket of water from beside her door and tossed the

contents onto the hall floor before holding it out. "Give me your weapons."

Training with him would be absolutely wonderful. "Tell me why."

"I don't have to explain myself to you."

"Then we're going to have another brawl."

His tattoo seeming impossibly darker in the dim hall, he stared at her beneath lowered

brows as if to say, You call that a brawl? But instead he growled, "Starting at dawn, you'll

earn your keep by helping in the kitchen. Unless you plan to murder everyone in the

fortress, there is no need for you to be armed. Or to be armed while we train. So I'll keep

your daggers until you've earned them back."

Well, that felt familiar. "The kitchen?"

He bared his teeth in a wicked grin. "Everyone pulls their weight here. Princesses

included. No one's above some hard labor, least of all you."

And didn't she have the scars to prove it. Not that she'd tell him that. She didn't know

what she'd do if he learned about Endovier and mocked her for it—or pitied her. "So my

training includes being a scullery maid?"

"Part of it." Again, she could have sworn she could read the unspoken words in his

eyes: And I'm going to savor every damn second of your misery.

"For an old bastard, you certainly haven't bothered to learn manners at any point in

your long existence." Never mind that he looked to be in his late twenties.

"Why should I waste flattery on a child who's already in love with herself?"

"We're related, you know."

"We've as much blood in common as I do with the fortress pig-boy."

She felt her nostrils flare, and he shoved the bucket in her face. She almost knocked it

right back into his, but decided that she didn't want a broken nose and began disarming Rowan counted every weapon she put in the bucket as though he'd already learned how

many she'd been carrying, even the hidden ones. Then he tucked the bucket against his

side and slammed the door without so much of a good-bye beyond "Be ready at dawn."

"Bastard. Old stinking bastard," she muttered, surveying the room.

A bed, a chamber pot, and a washbasin with icy water. She'd debated a bath, but opted

to use the water to clean out her mouth and tend to her lip. She was starving, but going to

find food involved meeting people. So once she'd mended her lip as best she could with

the supplies in her satchel, she tumbled into bed, reeking vagrant clothes and all, and lay

there for several hours.

There was one small window with no coverings in her room. Celaena turned over in

bed to look through it to the patch of stars above the trees surrounding the fortress.

Lashing out at Rowan like that, saying the things she did, trying to fight with him …

She'd deserved that punch. More than deserved it. If she was being honest with herself,

she was barely passable as a human being these days. She fingered her split lip and

winced.

She scanned the night sky until she located the Stag, the Lord of the North. The

unmoving star atop the stag's head—the eternal crown—pointed the way to Terrasen.

She'd been told that the great rulers of Terrasen turned into those bright stars so their

people would never be alone—and would always know the way home. She hadn't set foot

there in ten years. While he'd been her master, Arobynn hadn't let her, and afterward she

hadn't dared.

She had whispered the truth that day at Nehemia's grave. She'd been running for so

long that she didn't know what it was to stand and fight. Celaena loosed a breath and

rubbed her eyes.

What Maeve didn't understand, what she could never understand, was just how much

that little princess in Terrasen had damned them a decade ago, even worse than Maeve

herself had. She had damned them all, and then left the world to burn into ash and dust.

So Celaena turned away from the stars, nestling under the threadbare blanket against

the frigid cold, and closed her eyes, trying to dream of a different world.

A world where she was no one at all.Manon Blackbeak stood on a cliff beside the snow-swollen river, eyes closed as the damp

wind bit her face. There were few sounds she enjoyed more than the groans of dying men,

but the wind was one of them.

Leaning into the breeze was the closest she came to flying these days—save in rare

dreams, when she was again in the clouds, her ironwood broom still functioning, not the

scrap of useless wood it was now, chucked into the closet of her room at Blackbeak Keep.

It had been ten years since she'd tasted mist and cloud and ridden on the back of the

wind. Today would have been a flawless flying day, the wind wicked and fast. Today, she

would have soared.

Behind her, Mother Blackbeak was still talking with the enormous man from the

caravan who called himself a duke. It had been more than coincidence, she supposed, that

soon after she'd left that blood-soaked field in Fenharrow she'd received a summons from

her grandmother. And more than coincidence that she'd been not forty miles from the

rendezvous point just over the border in Adarlan.

Manon was on guard duty while her grandmother, the High Witch of the Blackbeak

clan, spoke to the duke beside the raging Acanthus River. The rest of her coven had taken

their positions around the small encampment—twelve other witches, all around Manon's

age, all of them raised and trained together. Like Manon, they had no weapons, but it

seemed that the duke knew enough to realize Blackbeaks didn't need weapons to be

deadly.

You didn't need a weapon at all when you were born one.

And when you were one of Manon's Thirteen, with whom she had fought and flown for

the past hundred years … Often just the name of the coven was enough to send enemies

fleeing. The Thirteen did not have a reputation for mercy—or making mistakes.

Manon eyed the armored guards around the camp. Half were watching the Blackbeak

witches, the others monitoring the duke and her grandmother. It was an honor that the

High Witch had chosen the Thirteen to guard her—no other coven had been summoned.

No other coven was needed if the Thirteen were present.

Manon slid her attention to the nearest guard. His sweat, the faint tang of fear, and the

heavy musk of exhaustion drifted toward her. From the look and smell of it, they'd been

traveling for weeks. There were two prison wagons with them. One emitted a very distinct

male odor—and perhaps a remnant of cologne. One was female. Both smelled wrong.

Manon had been born soulless, her grandmother said. Soulless and heartless, as a

Blackbeak ought to be. She was wicked right down to the marrow of her bones. But the

people in those wagons, and the duke, they smelled wrong. Different. Alien.

The nearby guard shifted on his feet. She gave him a smile. His hand tightened on the

hilt of his sword.Because she could, because she was growing bored, Manon cocked her jaw, sending

her iron teeth snapping down. The guard took a step back, his breath coming faster, the

acrid tang of fear sharpening.

With her moon-white hair, alabaster skin, and burnt-gold eyes, she'd been told by ill-

fated men that she was beautiful as a Fae queen. But what those men realized too late was

that her beauty was merely a weapon in her natural-born arsenal. And it made things so, so

fun.

Feet crunched in the snow and bits of dead grass, and Manon turned from the trembling

guard and the roaring brown Acanthus to find her grandmother approaching.

In the ten years since magic had vanished, their aging process had warped. Manon

herself was well over a century old, but until ten years ago, she had looked no older than

sixteen. Now, she looked to be in her midtwenties. They were aging like mortals, they had

soon realized with no small amount of panic. And her grandmother …

The rich, voluminous midnight robes of Mother Blackbeak flowed like water in the

crisp breeze. Her grandmother's face was now marred with the beginnings of wrinkles, her

ebony hair sprinkled with silver. The High Witch of the Blackbeak Clan wasn't just

beautiful—she was alluring. Even now, with mortal years pressing down upon her bone-

white skin, there was something entrancing about the Matron.

"We leave now," Mother Blackbeak said, walking north along the river. Behind them,

the duke's men closed ranks around the encampment. Smart for mortals to be so cautious

when the Thirteen were present—and bored.

One jerk of the chin from Manon was all it took for the Thirteen to fall in line. The

twelve other sentinels kept the required distance behind Manon and her grandmother,

footsteps near silent in the winter grass. None of them had been able to find a single

Crochan in the months they'd been infiltrating town after town. And Manon fully

expected some form of punishment for it later. Flogging, perhaps a few broken fingers—

nothing too permanent, but it would be public. That was her grandmother's preferred

method of punishment: not the how, but the humiliation.

Yet her grandmother's gold-flecked black eyes, the heirloom of the Blackbeak Clan's

purest bloodline, were bent on the northern horizon, toward Oakwald Forest and the

towering White Fangs far beyond. The gold-speckled eyes were the most cherished trait in

their Clan for a reason Manon had never bothered to learn—and when her grandmother

had seen that Manon's were wholly of pure, dark gold, the Matron had carried her away

from her daughter's still-cooling corpse and proclaimed Manon her undisputed heir.

Her grandmother kept walking, and Manon didn't press her to speak. Not unless she

wanted her tongue ripped clean from her mouth.

"We're to travel north," her grandmother said when the encampment was swallowed up

by the foothills. "I want you to send three of your Thirteen south, west, and east. They are

to seek out our kith and kin and inform them that we will all assemble in the Ferian Gap.

Every last Blackbeak—no witch or sentinel left behind."

Nowadays there was no difference—every witch belonged to a coven and was therefore

a sentinel. Since the downfall of their western kingdom, since they had started clawing for