Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7)

Who did he wish to be? Anyone but himself. But what he’d become.

His silent answer sent that magical loom tumbling from his invisible grip, and he knew if he looked, his dark hair and sapphire eyes would have returned. Asterin sighed in relief.

But Manon smiled grimly, as if she’d heard his unspoken answer. And understood.



Night was full overhead, the Crochans’ fires crackling away beneath the lattice of leafless trees, when Glennis asked, “Have any of you seen the Wastes?”

The Thirteen blinked toward the crone. She didn’t usually address them all at once, or ask such personal questions.

But at least Glennis spoke to them. Three days of travel, and Manon was no closer to winning the Crochans over than she’d been upon their departure from the Fangs. Though they spoke to her, and occasionally joined Glennis’s hearth for meals, it was with as few words as necessary.

Asterin answered for the coven. “No. Not one of us, though I spent some time in a forest on the other side of the mountains. But never that far.” Sorrow flickered in the witch’s gold-flecked black eyes, as if there was more to the tale than that. Indeed, Sorrel and Vesta, even Manon, looked with a bit of that sorrow at the witch.

Manon asked Glennis, the sole Crochan at this fire under the canopy, “Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity,” the crone said. “None of us have been, either. We do not dare.”

“For fear of us?” Asterin’s golden hair shifted as she leaned closer to the fire. She’d found a strip of leather in the camp to tie across her brow—not the black she’d worn for the past century, but a familiar sight, at least. One thing, it seemed, had not entirely altered.

“For fear of what it will do to us, to see what is left of our once-great city, our lands.”

“Nothing but rubble, they say,” Manon muttered.

“And would you rebuild it, if you could?” Glennis asked. “Rebuild the city for yourselves?”

“We never discussed what we’d do,” Asterin said. “If we could ever go home.”

“A plan, perhaps,” Glennis mused, “would be wise. A powerful thing to have.” Her blue eyes settled on Manon. “Not just for the Crochans, but your own people.”

Dorian nodded, though he was not a part of this conversation.

Who did the Thirteen, the Ironteeth and Crochans, wish to be, to build, as a people?

Manon opened her mouth, but the Shadows burst into the ring of their hearth, their faces tight. The Thirteen were instantly on their feet.

“We scouted ahead, to the rendezvous site,” Edda panted.

Manon braced herself. A whisper of power flickered through the camp, the only indication that Dorian’s magic had coiled around them in a near-impenetrable shield.

“It reeks of death,” Briar finished.





CHAPTER 33


They had been too late.

Not just by an hour, or a day. No, judging by the state of the bodies in the leaf-strewn clearing twenty miles south, the week they had been delayed had cost the Eyllwe war band everything.

Morath had left the warriors where they lay, a few red-caped Crochans—the ones who had summoned their northern sisters here—amongst the fallen. The smell of decay was enough to make Manon’s eyes water as they surveyed what had been left.

She had done this.

Brought this about, in delaying the Crochans through that skirmish. One look at Dorian, the king lingering at the edge of the clearing with an arm over his nose to ward against the reek, and she knew he thought it, too. The sharpness in his eyes spoke enough.

“Some got away,” Edda announced, the Shadow’s face grim. “But most didn’t.”

“They wanted survivors,” Bronwen said, loud enough for all to hear. “To sow fear.”

Manon studied the shattered trees, the ancient oaks as broken as the bodies on the forest floor. Proof of who, exactly, had been responsible for the massacre.

She had done that, too.

Bronwen said, voice cold and low, “What mortal band could ever hope to survive an attack by one of the Ironteeth legions? Especially when that aerial legion was trained by such a skilled Wing Leader.”

“Choose your words carefully,” Asterin warned.

But Una, the pretty, brown-haired Crochan and another of Manon’s cousins, gripped her silver-bound broom and said, “You trained them. All of you—you trained the witches who did this.” Una pointed to the decaying bodies, the torn throats, the killing that had not stopped at quick deaths. Not at all. “And you expect us to forget that?”

Silence fell. Even from Asterin. Glennis said nothing.

Manon’s hands turned frail. Foreign. The iron within them brittle.

She had done this. The soldiers in the wide clearing were nothing and no one to her, most were mere mortals, and yet … A woman lay near Manon’s boots, her torso split clean open from navel to sternum. Her brown eyes gazed unseeingly at the shattered canopy overhead, her mouth still gaping in pain.

“I can burn them,” Dorian offered no one in particular.

Who had she been, the warrior before her? Who had she fought for? Not kingdoms or rulers, but who in her life had been worth defending?

“We should alert the King and Queen of Eyllwe,” Bronwen was saying. “Warn their princes, too. Tell them to lie low. Erawan is beyond taking prisoners.”

Manon stared and stared at the slaughtered warrior. What she had once delighted in. What she had once flaunted before the world, and done with not a shred of regret. Only with the wish that her grandmother would approve. That the Ironteeth would approve.

This was what they would be remembered for.

What she would be remembered for.

Erawan’s crowned rider. His Wing Leader.

“Don’t burn them,” Manon said.

Silence fell in the clearing.

But Manon knelt on the festering earth, unsheathed her iron nails, and began digging.

Yanking off her gloves, Asterin lowered herself to the ground nearby. Then Sorrel and Vesta. Then the rest of the Thirteen.

The cold, firm earth did not yield easily. It tore at Manon’s fingers, root and rock burning as they scraped at her skin.

Across the clearing, Karsyn, the witch whose broom Manon had returned, made to kneel as well. But Manon held up a filthy, already bleeding hand. The witch halted. “Only the Thirteen,” Manon said. “We will bury them.” The Crochans stared at her, and Manon ripped away the ancient soil. “We’ll bury all of them.”



For hours, Manon and the Thirteen knelt in the blood-soaked earth and dug the grave.

Dorian assisted Bronwen and Glennis in drafting messages to the King and Queen of Eyllwe and their two sons. Warning them of the danger—and nothing more. No request for aid, for armies.

Just before dawn, the Crochan messengers returned. Their southern kin who had summoned them here had arrived right after the massacre, too late to save the human war band or the few witches they’d sent ahead. They had flown right to Banjali, where their four covens now aided the King and Queen of Eyllwe.

Not that the Eyllwe royals seemed to need it. No, the other Crochan messenger had returned with a message from the king himself: the loss of the war band was grave indeed, but Eyllwe was not broken by it. Their rebels and gathered forces, while small, were still resisting Morath, still unbroken. They would continue to hold the line in the South, and would do so until their final breaths.

Dorian gleaned the unwritten words, though: they did not have a single soldier to spare for Terrasen. After what he’d seen, Dorian was now inclined to agree.

Eyllwe had given too much, for too long. It was time for the rest of them to shoulder the burden.

Dorian wondered if Manon noted the Crochans who watched her. Not with hatred, but some small degree of respect. Together, the Thirteen dug a massive grave, not even asking their wyverns to haul away the dirt.

The sun rose, then began its descent. Slowly, the grave took form. Large enough for every fallen warrior.

He had to go to Morath. Soon.