Chapter 45
Celaena didn’t get a meal, or take a bath, or see a healer for her shoulder.
Instead, she hurried to the dungeon, not even looking at the guards that she passed. Exhaustion ripped at her, but fear kept her moving, almost sprinting down the stairs.
They want to use me. They tricked me, Kaltain had said. And in Dorian’s book of Adarlan’s noble lineages, the Rompier family had been listed as one with a strong magical line, supposedly vanished two generations ago.
Sometimes I think they brought me here, Kaltain had said. Not to marry Perrington, but for another purpose.
Brought Kaltain here, the way Cain had been brought here. Cain, of the White Fang Mountains, where powerful shamans had long ruled the tribes.
Her mouth went dry as she strode down the dungeon hallway to Kaltain’s cell. She stopped in front, staring through the bars.
It was empty.
All that was left inside was Celaena’s cloak, discarded in the kicked-up hay. As if Kaltain had struggled against whoever had come to take her.
Celaena was at the guards’ station a moment later, pointing down the hall. “Where is Kaltain?” Even as she said it, a memory began to clear, a memory hazed by days spent sedated in the dungeons.
The guards looked at each other, then at her torn and bloody clothes, before one said, “The duke took her—to Morath. To be his wife.”
She stalked out of the dungeon, heading for her rooms.
Something is coming, Kaltain had whispered. And I am to greet it.
My headaches are worse every day, and full of all those flapping wings.
Celaena nearly stumbled on a step. Roland has been suffering from awful headaches lately, Dorian told her a few days ago. And now Roland, who shared Dorian’s Havilliard blood, had gone to Morath, too.
Gone, or been taken?
Celaena touched her shoulder and felt the open, bloody wounds beneath. The creature had been clawing at its head, as though it were in pain. And when it had shoved through the door, for those last few seconds it had been frozen in place, she had seen something human in its warped eyes—something that looked so relieved, so grateful for the death she gave him.
“Who were you?” she whispered, recalling the human heart and manlike body of the creature under the library. “And what did he do to you?”
But Celaena had a feeling she already knew the answer.
Because that was the other thing the Wyrdkeys could do, the other power that the Wyrdmarks controlled: life.
They hear wings in the Ferian Gap, Nehemia had said. Our scouts do not come back.
The king was twisting far worse things than mortal men. Far, far worse things. But what did he plan to do with them—with the creatures, with the people like Roland and Kaltain?
She needed to learn how many of the Wyrdkeys he had found.
And where the others might be.