“I am bringing back his queen, and riding with an army. I think he’d be happy to see his most hated enemy, if they did that for him.” Worry paled the Lion’s tanned features. Not for the reunion, but for what his son might be facing in the North.
Chaol considered. “My father is a bastard,” he said quietly. “He has been in my life from my conception. Yet he never once bothered to ask the questions you pose,” Chaol said. “He never once cared enough to do so. He never once worried. That will be the difference.”
“If Aedion chooses to forgive me.”
“He will,” Chaol said. He’d make Aedion do it.
“Why are you so certain?”
Chaol considered his words carefully before he again met Gavriel’s striking gaze. “Because you are his father,” he said. “And no matter what might lie between you, Aedion will always want to forgive you.” There it was, his own secret shame, still warring within him after all his father had done. Even after the trunk full of his mother’s letters. “And Aedion will realize, in his own way, that you went to save Aelin not for her sake or Rowan’s, but for his. And that you stayed with them, and march in this army, for his sake, too.”
The Lion gazed northward, eyes flickering. “I hope you are right.” No attempt at denial—that all Gavriel had done and would do was for Aedion alone. That he was marching north, into sure hell, for Aedion.
The warrior began to edge his horse past him again, but Chaol found himself saying, “I wish—I wish I had been so lucky to have you as my father.”
Surprise and something far deeper passed across Gavriel’s face. His tattooed throat bobbed. “Thank you. Perhaps it is our lot—to never have the fathers we wish, but to still hope they might surpass what they are, flaws and all.”
Chaol refrained from telling Gavriel he was already more than enough.
Gavriel said quietly, “I shall endeavor to be worthy of my son.”
Chaol was about to mutter that Aedion had better deem the Lion worthy when two forms took shape in the skies high above. Large, dark, and moving fast.
Chaol grabbed for the bow strapped across his back as soldiers cried out, Gavriel’s own bow already aimed skyward, but Rowan shouted above the fray, “Hold your fire!” Galloping hooves thundered toward them, then Aelin and the Fae Prince were there, the latter announcing, “It’s Nesryn and Borte.”
Within minutes, the two women had descended, their ruks crusted with ice from the air high above the peaks.
“How bad is it?” Aelin asked, now joined by Fenrys, Lorcan, and Elide.
Borte winced. “It makes no sense. None of it.”
Nesryn explained before Chaol could tell the girl to get to the point, “We’ve gone through the Gap thrice now. Even landed in the Omega.” She shook her head. “It’s empty.”
“Empty?” Chaol asked. “Not a soul there?”
The Fae warriors glanced to one another at that.
“A few of the furnaces were still going, so someone must be there,” Borte said, “but there wasn’t one witch or wyvern. Whoever remains behind is minimal—likely no more than trainers or breeders.”
The Ferian Gap was empty. The Ironteeth legion gone.
Rowan scanned the peak ahead. “We need to learn what they know, then.”
Nesryn’s nod was grim. “Sartaq already has people on it.”
CHAPTER 73
Dorian hunted through Morath in a hundred different skins.
On the silent feet of a cat, or scuttling along the floors as a cockroach, or hanging from a rafter as a bat, he spent the better part of a week listening. Looking.
Erawan still remained unaware of his presence. Perhaps the nature of his raw magic indeed provided him with anonymity—and Maeve had only known to recognize it thanks to whatever she’d pried from Aelin’s mind.
At night, Dorian returned to Maeve’s tower chamber, where they would go over all he had seen. What she did during the day to keep Erawan from noticing the small, ever-changing presence hunting through his halls, she did not reveal.
She’d brought the spiders, though. Dorian had heard the servants’ terrified whispers about the fleeting portal that the queen had opened to allow in six of the creatures to the catacombs. Where they, through some terrible magic, allowed in the Valg princesses.
Dorian couldn’t decide whether it was a relief that he had not encountered these hybrids yet. Though he’d seen the emaciated human bodies, mere husks, that were occasionally hauled down the corridors. Dinner, the guards carrying them had hissed to the petrified servants. To feed a bottomless hunger. To prime them for battle.
What the spider-princess creations could do, what they would do to his friends in the North … Dorian couldn’t stop recalling what Maeve had said to Erawan. That the Valg princesses had been held here for the second phase of whatever he was planning. Perhaps to ensure that they were well and truly destroyed once the bulk of his armies came through.
It honed his focus as he hunted. Pushed and nudged him onward, even when reason and instinct told him to flee this place. But he would not. Could not. Not without the key.
Sometimes, he could have sworn he felt it. The key. The horrible, otherworldly presence.
But when he’d chase after that wretched power down stairwells and along ancient corridors, only dust and shadows would greet him.
Often, it led him back to Erawan’s tower. To the locked iron door and Valg guards posted outside. One of the few remaining places he had not dared to search. Though other possibilities did still remain.
The reek from the subterranean chamber reached Dorian long before he soared down the winding stair, the dim passageway cavernous and looming to his fly’s senses. It had been the safest form for the day. The kitchen cat had been on the prowl earlier, and the Ironteeth witches hurried about the keep, readying for what he could only assume was an order to march north.
He’d been hunting for the key since dawn, Maeve occupying Erawan’s attention in the western catacombs across the keep. Where those spider-princesses tested their new bodies.
He’d never gone so deep under the keep. Beneath the storage rooms. Beneath the dungeons. He’d only found the stair by the smell that had leaked from behind the ordinary door at its top, the scent detected by the fly’s remarkable sense of smell. He’d passed the door so many times now on his fruitless hunting, deeming it a mere supply closet—until chance had intervened today.
Dorian rounded the last turn of the spiral stairs, and nearly tumbled from the air as the smell fully hit him. A thousand times worse in this form, with these senses.
A reek of death, of rot, of hate and despair. The scent that only the Valg could summon.
He’d never forget it. Had never quite left it behind.
Turn back. The warning was a whisper through his mind. Turn back.
The lower hall was lit with only a few torches in rusted iron brackets. No guards were posted along its length, or by the lone iron door at its far end.
The reek pulsed along the corridor, emanating from that door. Beckoning.
Would Erawan leave the key so unguarded? Dorian sent his magic skittering along the hall, testing for any hidden traps.
It found none. And when it reached the iron door, it recoiled. It fled.
He spooled his power back into himself, tucking it closer.
The iron door was dented and scratched with age. Nine locks lay along its edge, each more complicated than the last. Ancient, strange locks.
He didn’t hesitate. He aimed for the slight gap between the stones and the iron door, and shifted. The fly shrank into a gnat, so small it was nearly a dust mote. He flew beneath the door, blocking out the smell, the terrible pulsing against his blood.
It took him a moment to understand what he looked at in the rough-hewn chamber, illuminated by a small lantern dangling from the arched ceiling. A lick of greenish flame danced within. Not a flame of this world.
Its light slid over the heap of black stone in the center of the room. Pieces of a sarcophagus.
And all around it, built into shelves carved from the mountain itself, gleamed Wyrdstone collars.
Only the instincts of his small, inconsequential body kept Dorian in the air. Kept him circling the lightless chamber. The rubble in the center of the space.
Erawan’s tomb—directly beneath Morath. The site where Elena and Gavin trapped him, and then built the keep atop the sarcophagus that could not be moved.