Kingdom of Ash

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.

Where all this mess had begun. Where, centuries later, his father had claimed he and Perrington ventured in their youth, using the Wyrdkey to unlock both door and sarcophagus, and unwittingly freed Erawan.

The demon king had seized the duke’s body. His father …

Dorian’s heart raced as he passed collar after collar, around and around the room. Erawan hadn’t needed one to contain his father, not when the man possessed no magic in his veins.

Yet Erawan had said that the man hadn’t bowed—not wholly. Had fought him for decades.

He hadn’t let himself think on it this past week. On whether his father’s final words atop the glass castle had indeed been true. How he’d killed him, without the excuse of the collar to justify it.

His head pounded as he continued to circle the tomb. The collars leaked their unholy stench into the world, pulsing in time with his blood.

They seemed to sleep. Seemed to wait.

Did a prince lurk within each one? Or were these shells, ready to be filled?

Kaltain had warned him of this chamber. This place where Erawan would bring him, should he be caught. Why Erawan had chosen this place to store his collars … Perhaps it was a sanctuary, if such a thing could exist for a Valg king. Where Erawan might come to gaze upon the method of his own imprisonment, and remind himself that he would not be contained again. That he’d use these collars to enslave those who’d attempt to seal him back into the sarcophagus.

Dorian’s magic thrashed, impatient and frantic. Was there a collar in here designated for him? For Aelin?

Around and around, he flew past the sarcophagus and the collars. No sign of the key.

He knew how the collars would feel against his skin. The icy bite of the Wyrdstone.

Kaltain had fought it. Destroyed the demon within.

He could still feel the weight of his father’s knee digging into his chest as he’d pinned him to the marble floor in a glass castle that no longer existed. Still feel the slick stone of the collar against his neck as it sealed. Still see Sorscha’s limp hand as he tried to reach for her one last time.

The room spun and spun, his blood throbbing with it.

Not a prince, not a king.

The collars reached for him with invisible, clawing fingers.

He was no better than them. Had learned to enjoy what the Valg prince had shown him. Had shredded apart good men, and let the demon feed off his hate, his rage.

The room began to eddy, spiraling, dragging him into its depths.

Not human—not entirely. Perhaps he didn’t want to be. Perhaps he would stay in another form forever, perhaps he’d just submit—

A dark wind snapped through the room. Snatched him in its gaping maw and dragged him.

He thrashed, screaming silently.

He wouldn’t be taken. Not like this, not again—

But it hauled him away from the collars. Under the door and out of the room.

Into the palm of a pale hand. Dark, depthless eyes peered down at him. An enormous red mouth parted to reveal bone-white teeth.

“Stupid boy,” Maeve hissed. The words were a thunderclap.

He panted, the gnat’s body shaking from wingtip to wingtip. One press of her finger and he’d be gone.

He braced himself, waiting for it.

But Maeve kept her palm open. And as she began to walk down the hall, away from the sealed chamber, she said, “What you felt in there—that is why I left their world.” She gazed ahead, a shadow darkening her face. “Every day, that was what I felt.”

Kneeling on the floor in a corner of Maeve’s chamber, Dorian hurled the contents of his stomach into the wooden bucket.

Maeve watched from the chair by the fire, cruel amusement on her red lips.

“You saw the horrors of the dungeons and did not fall ill,” she said when he vomited again. The unspoken question shone in her eyes. Why today?

Dorian lifted his head, wiping his mouth on the shoulder of his jacket. “Those collars …” He ran a hand over his neck. “I didn’t think it would affect me like that. To see them again.”

“You were reckless in entering that chamber.”

“Would I have been able to get out, if you hadn’t found me?” He didn’t ask how she’d done so, how she’d sensed the peril. That power of hers no doubt kept track of him wherever he went.

“The collars can do nothing without being attached to a host. But that room is a place of hatred and pain, the memory of it etched into the stones.” She examined her long nails. “It snared you. You let yourself be snared.”

Hadn’t Kaltain said nearly the same thing regarding the collars? “It took me by surprise.”

Maeve let out a hum, well aware of his lie. But she said, “The collars are one of his more brilliant creations. Neither of his brothers was clever enough to come up with it. But Erawan—he always had a gift for ideas.” She leaned back in the chair, crossing her legs. “But that gift also made him arrogant.” She nodded to him. “That he let you remain in Rifthold with your father, rather than bring you here, only proves it. He thought he could control you both from afar. Had he been more cautious, he would have brought you to Morath immediately. Begun work on you.”

The collars flashed before his eyes, leaking their poisoned, oily scent into the world, beckoning, waiting for him—

Dorian heaved again.

Maeve let out a low laugh that raked talons down his spine. His temper.

Dorian mastered himself and twisted toward her. “You gave over those spiders for his princesses, knowing what they’d endure, knowing how it would feel to be trapped like that, albeit in a different manner.” How, he didn’t say. How could you do that, when you knew that sort of terror?

Maeve fell silent for a moment, and he could have sworn something like regret passed over her face. “I would not have done it, unless my need to prove my loyalty compelled me.” Her attention drifted to where Damaris hung at his side. “You do not wish to verify my claim?”

Dorian didn’t touch the golden hilt. “Do you want me to?”

She clicked her tongue. “You are different indeed. I wonder if some of the Valg did cross over when your father bred your mother.”

Dorian cringed. He still hadn’t dared to ask Damaris about it—whether he was human. Whether it mattered now.

“Why?” he asked, gesturing to the keep around them. “Why does Erawan do any of this?” A week after he’d asked the Valg king himself, Dorian still wanted to—needed to know.

“Because he can. Because Erawan delights in such things.”

“You made it sound as if he was the mildest of all three brothers.”

“He is.” She ran a hand over her throat. “Orcus and Mantyx are the ones who taught him all he knows. Should they return here, what Erawan creates in these mountains will seem like lambs.”

He’d heeded that warning from Kaltain, at least. He hadn’t dared venture into the caverns beyond the valley. To the stone altars and the monstrosities Erawan crafted upon them.

He asked, “You never had children? With Orcus?”

“Does my future husband truly wish to know?”

Dorian settled back on his heels. “I wish to understand my enemy.”

She weighed his words. “I did not allow my body to ripen, to ready for children. A small rebellion, and my first, against Orcus.”

“Are the Valg princes and princesses the offspring of the other kings?”

“Some are, some are not. No worthy heir has stepped forward. Though who knows what has occurred in their world in these millennia.” Their world. Not her own. “The princes Erawan summoned have not been strong—not as they were. I am certain it annoys Erawan to no end.”

“Which is why he has brought over the princesses?”

A nod. “The females are the deadliest. But harder to contain within a host.”

The white band of skin on his neck seemed to burn, but he kept his stomach down: this time. “Why did you leave your world?”

She blinked at him, as if surprised.

“What?” he asked.

She angled her head. “It has been a long, long time since I conversed with someone who knows me for what I am. And with someone whose mind remained wholly their own.”

“Even Aelin?”

A muscle in her slim jaw feathered. “Even Aelin of the Wildfire. I could not infiltrate her mind entirely, but little things … those, I could convince her to see.”

“Why did you capture and torture her?” Such a simple way of describing what had happened in Eyllwe and after it.

“Because she would never agree to work with me. And she would never have protected me from Erawan or the Valg.”

“You’re strong—why not protect yourself? Use those spiders to your advantage?”

“Because our kind only fears certain gifts. Mine, alas, are not those things.” She toyed with a strand of her black hair. “I usually keep another Fae female with me. One who has powers that work against the Valg. Different from those Aelin Galathynius possesses.” That she didn’t specify what those powers were told Dorian not to waste his breath in asking her. “She swore the blood oath to me long ago, and has rarely left my side since. But I did not dare bring her to Morath. To have her here would not have convinced Erawan that I came in good faith.” She twirled the strand of hair around a finger. “So you see, I am as defenseless against Erawan as you.”

Dorian highly doubted that, but he rose to his feet at last, aiming for the table where water and food had been laid out. A fine spread, for a demon king’s castle in the dead of winter. He poured himself a glass of water and gulped down the contents. “Is this Erawan’s true form?”

“In a manner of speaking. We are not like the human and Fae, where your souls are invisible, unseen. Our souls have a shape to them. We have bodies that we can fashion around them—adorn them, like jewelry. The form you see on Erawan was always his preferred decoration.”

“What do your souls look like beneath?”

“You would find them displeasing.”

He suppressed a shudder.

“I suppose that makes us shape-shifters, too,” Maeve mused as Dorian aimed for the chair beside hers. He’d spent his nights sleeping on the floor before the fire, one eye watching the queen dozing in the canopied bed behind him. But she had made no move to harm him. Not one.

“Do you feel Valg, or Fae?”

“I am what I am.” For a heartbeat, he could almost glimpse the weight of her eons of existence in her eyes.

“But who do you wish to be?” A careful question.

“Not like Erawan. Or his brothers. I never have.”

“That’s not exactly an answer.”

“Do you know who and what you wish to be?” A challenge—and genuine question.

“I’m figuring it out,” he said. Strange. So strange, to have this conversation. Sparing them both for the time being, Dorian rubbed at his face. “The key is in his tower. I’m sure of it.”

Maeve’s mouth tightened.

Dorian said, “There is no way in—not with the guards. And I’ve flown the exterior enough to know there are no windows, no cracks for me to even creep through.” He held her otherworldly stare. Did not shrink from it. “We need to get in. If only to confirm that it’s there.” She’d once held the keys—she knew what they felt like. That she had come so close then …

“And I suppose you expect me to do that?”

He crossed his arms. “I can think of no one else that Erawan would admit inside.”

Maeve’s solitary blink was her only sign of surprise. “To seduce and betray a king—one of the oldest tricks in the book, as you humans say.”

“Can Erawan be seduced by anyone?”

He could have sworn disgust flitted over her pale face before she said, “He can.”

They did not waste time. Did not wait.

And even Dorian found himself unable to look away as Maeve flicked a hand at herself and her purple gown melted away, replaced by a sheer, flowing black dress. Little more than a robe. Golden thread had been woven through it, artfully concealing the parts of her that only the one who removed the garment would see, and when she turned from the mirror, her face was grave.

“You will not like what you are about to witness.” Then she slung her cloak around her, hiding that lush body and sinful gown, and swept out the door.

He shifted into a slithering insect, swift and flexible, and trailed her, lingering at her heels as Maeve wound through the halls. To the base of that tower.

He tucked into a crack in the black wall as Maeve said to the Valg posted outside, “You know who I am. What I am. Tell him I have come.”

He could have sworn Maeve’s hands trembled slightly.

But one of the guards—whom Dorian had never once seen so much as blink—turned to the door, knocked once, and strode inside.

He emerged moments later, resumed his post, and said nothing.

Maeve waited. Then strolling footsteps sounded from the tower interior.

And when the door opened again, the putrid wind and swirling darkness within threatened to send him running. Erawan, still clad in his clothes despite the late hour, lifted his brows. “We have a meeting tomorrow, sister.”

Maeve took a step closer. “I did not come to discuss war.”

Erawan stilled. And then said to the guards, “Leave us.”