Chapter 32
Celaena awoke in her own bed, and knew there would be no more sedatives in her water.
There would be no more breakfast conversations with Nehemia, nor would there be any more lessons on the Wyrdmarks. There would be no more friends like her.
She knew without looking that someone had scrubbed her clean. Blinking against the brightness of the sunlight in her room—her head instantly pounding after days in the darkness of the dungeon—she found Fleetfoot sleeping pressed against her. The dog lifted her head to lick Celaena’s arm a few times before going back to sleep, her nose nestled between Celaena’s elbow and torso. She wondered if Fleetfoot could sense the loss, too. She’d often wondered if Fleetfoot loved the princess more than her.
You are nothing more than a coward.
She couldn’t blame Fleetfoot. Outside of this rotten, festering court and kingdom, the rest of the world had loved Nehemia. It was hard not to. Celaena had adored Nehemia from the moment she’d laid eyes on her, like they were twin souls who had at last found each other. A soul-friend. And now she was gone.
Celaena put a hand against her chest. How absurd—how utterly absurd and useless—that her heart still beat and Nehemia’s didn’t.
The Eye of Elena was warm, as if trying to offer some comfort. Celaena let her hand drop back to her mattress.
She didn’t even try to get out of bed that day, after Philippa coaxed her into eating and let slip that she’d missed Nehemia’s funeral. She’d been too busy guzzling down sedatives and hiding from her grief in the dungeons to be present when they put her friend in the cold earth, so far from the sun-warmed soil of Eyllwe.
You are nothing more than a coward.
So Celaena didn’t get out of bed that day. And she didn’t get out of it the next.
Or the next.
Or the next.
Chapter 33
The mines in Calaculla were stifling, and the slave girl could only imagine how much worse they would become when the summer sun was overhead.
She had been in the mines for six months—longer than anyone else had ever survived, she’d been told. Her mother, her grandmother, and her little brother hadn’t lasted a month. Her father hadn’t even made it to the mines before Adarlan’s butchers had cut him down, along with the other known rebels in their village. Everyone else had been rounded up and sent here.
She’d been alone for five and a half months now; alone, yet surrounded by thousands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the sky, or the grasslands of Eyllwe undulating in a cool breeze.
She would see them both again, though—the sky and the grasslands. She knew she would, because she’d stayed awake on nights she was supposed to have been sleeping, listening through the cracks in the floorboards as her father and his fellow rebels talked of ways to bring down Adarlan, and of Princess Nehemia, who was in the capital at that very moment, working for their freedom.
If she could just hold on, if she could just keep drawing breath, she might make it until Nehemia accomplished her goal. She would make it, and then bury her dead; and when the mourning months were over, she would find the nearest rebel group and join them. With every Adarlanian life she took, she would say the names of her dead again, so that they would hear her in the afterlife and know they were not forgotten.
She swung her pickax into the unforgiving wall of stone, her breath ragged in her parched throat. The overseer lounged against a nearby wall, sloshing water in his canteen, waiting for the moment when one of them would collapse, just so he could unfurl that whip of his.
She kept her head down, kept working, kept breathing.
She would make it.
She didn’t know how much time passed, but she felt the ripple go through the mines like a shudder in the earth. A ripple of stillness, followed by wails.
She felt it coming, swelling up toward her, closer and closer with each turned head and murmured words.
And then she heard it—the words that changed everything.
Princess Nehemia is dead. Assassinated by Adarlan.
The words were past her before she had time to swallow them.
There was a scrape of leather against rock. The overseer would tolerate the pause for only a few seconds longer before he started swinging.
Nehemia is dead.
She stared down at the pickax in her hands.
She turned, slowly, to look into the face of her overseer, the face of Adarlan. He cocked his wrist, pronged whip ready.
She felt her tears before she realized they were falling, sliding through six months’ worth of filth.
Enough. The word screamed through her, so loudly she began to shake.
Silently, she began to recite the names of her dead. And as the overseer raised his whip, she added her name to the end of that list and swung her ax into his gut.