With Celaena in her human form, the bells of some nearby town were heralding three o’clock by the time they reached the pine wood.
She didn’t ask what they were doing here. He’d tell her if he wanted to. Slowing to a prowl, Rowan tracked markers left on trees and stones, and she quietly trailed him, thirsty and hungry and a bit light-headed.
The terrain had shifted: pine needles crunched beneath her boots, and gulls, not songbirds, cried overhead. The sea had to be close. Celaena groaned as a cool breeze kissed her sweaty face, scented with salt and fish and sun-warmed rock. It wasn’t until Rowan halted by a stream that she noticed the reek—and the silence.
The ground had been churned up across the stream, the brush broken and trampled. But Rowan’s attention was fixed on the stream itself, on what had been wedged between the rocks.
Celaena swore. A body. A woman, by the shape of what was left of her, and—
A husk.
As if she had been drained of life, of substance. No wounds, no lacerations or signs of harm, save for a trickle of dried blood from her nose and ears. Her skin was leached of color, withered and dried, her hollowed-out face still stuck in an expression of horror—and sorrow. And the smell—not just the rotting body, but around it . . . the smell . . .
“What did this?” she asked, studying the disturbed forest beyond the stream. Rowan knelt as he examined the remains. “Why not just dump her in the sea? Leaving her in a stream seems idiotic. They left tracks, too—unless those are from whoever found her.”
“Malakai gave me the report this morning—and he and his men are trained not to leave tracks. But this scent . . . I’ll admit it’s different.” Rowan walked into the water. She wanted to tell him to stop, but he kept studying the remains from above, then below, circling. His eyes flashed to hers. They were furious. “So you tell me, assassin. You wanted to be useful.”
She bristled at the tone, but—that was a woman lying there, broken like a doll.
Celaena didn’t particularly want to smell anything on the remains, but she sniffed. And wished she hadn’t. It was a smell she’d scented twice now—once in that bloody chamber a decade ago, and then recently . . . “You claimed you didn’t know what that thing in the barrow field was,” she managed to say. The woman’s mouth was open in a scream, her teeth brown and cracked below the dried nosebleed. Celaena touched her own nose and winced. “I think this is what it does.”
Rowan braced his hands on his hips, sniffing again, turning in the stream. He scanned Celaena, then the body. “You came out of that darkness looking as if someone had sucked the life from you. Your skin was a shade paler, your freckles gone.”
“It forced me to go through . . . memories. The worst kind.” The woman’s horrified, sorrowful face gaped up at the canopy. “Have you ever heard of a creature that can feed on such things? When I glimpsed it, I saw a man—a beautiful man, pale and dark-haired, with eyes of full black. He wasn’t human. I mean, he looked it, but his eyes—they weren’t human at all.”
Her parents had been assassinated. She’d seen the wounds. But the smell in their room had been so similar . . . She shook her head as if to clear it, to shake the creeping feeling moving up her spine.
“Even my queen doesn’t know every foul creature roaming these lands. If the skinwalkers are venturing down from the mountains, perhaps other things are, too.”
“The townspeople might know something. Maybe they’ve seen it or heard rumors.”
Rowan seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he shook his head in disgust—and sorrow, to her surprise. “We don’t have the time; you wasted daylight by coming here in your human form.” They hadn’t brought any overnight supplies, either. “We have an hour before we head back. Make the most of it.”
•
The path led absolutely nowhere. It ran into a sea cliff with no way to the narrow strip of beach below, no sign of anyone living nearby. Rowan stood at the cliff ’s edge, arms crossed as he stared out at the jade sea. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, more to himself than to her. “This is the fourth body in the last few weeks—none of them reported missing.” He squatted on the sandy ground and drew a rough line in the dirt with a tattooed finger. The shape of Wendlyn’s coastline. “They’ve been found here.” Little dots, seemingly random save for being close to the water. “We’re here,” he said, making another dot. He sat back on his heels as Celaena peered at the crude map. “And yet you and I encountered the creature lurking amongst the barrow-wights here,” he added, and drew an X where she assumed the mounds were, deep inland. “I haven’t seen any further signs of it remaining by the barrows, and the wights have returned to their usual habits.”
“Were the other bodies the same?”
“All were drained like this, with expressions of terror on their faces—not a hint of a wound, beyond dried blood at the nose and ears.” From the way his tan skin paled beneath his tattoo, the way he gritted his teeth, she knew that it rankled his immortal pride not to know what this thing was.
“All dumped in the forest, not the sea?” A nod. “But all within walking distance of the water.” Another nod. “If it were a skilled, sentient killer, it would hide the bodies better. Or, again, use the sea.” She gazed to the blinding water, the sun starting its afternoon descent. “Or maybe it doesn’t care. Maybe it wants us to know what it’s doing. There were—there were times when I left bodies so that they’d be found by a certain person, or to send a type of message.” Grave being the latest of them. “What do the victims have in common?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We don’t even know their names or where they came from.” He rose and dusted his hands off. “We need to return to the fortress.”
She grabbed his elbow. “Wait. Have you seen enough of the body?”
A slow nod. Good. So had she—and she’d had enough of the smell, too. She’d committed it to memory, noting everything that she could. “Then we’ve got to bury her.”
“The ground’s too hard here.”
She stalked through the trees, leaving him behind. “Then we’ll do it the ancient way,” she called. She’d be damned if she left that woman’s body decomposing in a stream, damned if she left her there for all eternity, wet and cold.
Celaena pulled the too-light body out of the stream, laying it on the brown pine needles. Rowan didn’t say anything as she gathered kindling and branches and then knelt, trying not to look at the shriveled skin or the expression of lingering horror.
Neither did he mock her for the few times it took to get the fire started by hand, or make any snide comments once the pine needles finally crinkled and smoked, ancient incense for a rudimentary pyre. Instead, as she stepped from the rising flames, she felt him come to tower behind her, felt the surety and half wildness of him wrap around her like a phantom body. A warm breeze licked at her hair, her face. Air to help the fire; wind that helped consume the corpse.
The loathing she felt had nothing to do with her vow, or Nehemia. Celaena reached into the ageless pit inside her—just once—to see if she could pull up whatever trigger it was that caused the shift, so she could help her sad little fire burn more evenly, more proudly.
Yet Celaena remained stale and empty, stranded in her mortal body.
Still, Rowan didn’t say anything about it, and his wind fed the flames enough to make quick work of the body, burning far faster than a mortal pyre. They watched in silence, until there was nothing but ashes—until even those were carried up and away, over the trees, and toward the open sea.