Heir of Fire

Chaol took a breath, preparing himself for the words that would doom him.

But it was Aedion who spoke.

“You want a spy? You want a traitor?” the general drawled, and flung his replicated black ring on the floor. “Then here I am. You want to know why the captain and I were meeting? It was because your stupid bastard of a boy-captain figured out that I’d been working with one of the rebels. He’s been blackmailing information out of me for months to give to his father to offer you when the Lord of Anielle needed a favor. And you know what?” Aedion grinned at them all, the Northern Wolf incarnate. If the king was shocked about the ring, he didn’t show it. “All you monsters can burn in hell. Because my queen is coming—and she will spike you to the walls of your gods-damned castle. And I can’t wait to help her gut you like the pigs you are.” He spat at the king’s feet, right on top of the fake ring that had stopped bouncing.

It was flawless—the rage and the arrogance and the triumph. But as he stared each of them down, Chaol’s heart fractured.

Because for a flicker, as those turquoise eyes met with his, there was none of that rage or triumph. Only a message to the queen that Aedion would never see. And there were no words to convey it—the love and the hope and the pride. The sorrow at not knowing her as the woman she had become. The gift Aedion thought he was giving her in sparing Chaol’s life.

Chaol nodded slightly, because he understood that he could not help, not at this point—not until that sword was removed from Sorscha’s neck. Then he could fight, and he might still get them out alive.

Aedion didn’t struggle as the guards clapped shackles around his wrists and ankles.

“I’ve always wondered about that ring,” the king said. “Was it the distance, or some true strength of spirit that made you so unresponsive to its suggestions? But regardless, I am so glad that you confessed to treason, Aedion.” He spoke with slow, deliberate glee. “So glad you did it in front of all these witnesses, too. It will make your execution that much easier. Though I think . . .” The king smiled and looked at the fake black ring. “I think I’ll wait. Perhaps give it a month or two. Just in case any last-minute guests have to travel a long, long way for the execution. Just in case someone gets it into her head that she can rescue you.”

Aedion snarled. Chaol bit back his own reaction. Perhaps the king had never had anything on them—perhaps this had only been a ruse to get Aedion to confess to something, because the king knew that the general would offer up his own life instead of an innocent’s. The king wanted to savor this, and savor the trap that he had now set for Aelin, even if it cost him a fine general in the process. Because once she heard that Aedion was captured, once she knew the execution date . . . she would run to Rifthold.

“After she comes for you,” Aedion promised the king, “they’ll have to scrape what’s left of you off the walls.”

The king only smiled. Then he looked to Dorian and Sorscha, who seemed to be hardly breathing. The healer remained on the floor and did not lift her head as the king braced his massive forearms on his knees and said, “And what do you have to say for yourself, girl?”

She trembled, shaking her head.

“That’s enough,” Dorian snapped, sweat gleaming on his brow. The prince winced in pain as his magic was repressed by the iron in his system. “Aedion confessed; now let her go.”

“Why should I release the true traitor in this castle?”

•

Sorscha couldn’t stop shaking as the king spoke.

All her years of remaining invisible, all her training, first from those rebels in Fenharrow, then the contacts they’d sent her family to in Rifthold . . . all of it ruined.

“Such interesting letters you send to your friend. Why, I might not ever have read them,” the king said, “if you hadn’t left one in the rubbish for your superior to find. See—you rebels have your spies, and I have mine. And as soon as you decided to start using my son . . .” She could feel the king smirking at her. “How many of his movements did you report to your rebel friends? What secrets of mine have you given away over the years?”

“Leave her alone,” Dorian growled. It was enough to set her crying. He still thought she was innocent.

And maybe, maybe he could get out of this if he was surprised enough by the truth, if the king saw his son’s shock and disgust.

So Sorscha lifted her head, even as her mouth trembled, even as her eyes burned, and stared down the King of Adarlan.

“You destroyed everything that I had, and you deserve everything that’s to come,” she said. Then she looked at Dorian, whose eyes were indeed wide, his face bone-white. “I was not supposed to love you. But I did. I do. And there is so much I wish . . . I wish we could have done together, seen together.”

The prince just stared at her, then walked to the foot of the dais and dropped to his knees. “Name your price,” he said to his father. “Ask it of me, but let her go. Exile her. Banish her. Anything—say it, and it will be done.”

She began shaking her head, trying to find the words to tell him that she hadn’t betrayed him—not her prince. The king, yes. She had reported his movements for years, in each carefully written letter to her “friend.” But never Dorian.

The king looked at his son for a long moment. He looked at the captain and Aedion, so quiet and so tall—beacons of hope for their future.

Then he looked again at his son, on his knees before the throne, on his knees for her, and said, “No.”

•

“No.”

Chaol thought he had not heard it, the word that cleaved through the air just before the guard’s sword did.

One blow from that mighty sword.

That was all it took to sever Sorscha’s head.

The scream that erupted out of Dorian was the worst sound that Chaol had ever heard.

Worse even than the wet, heavy thud of her head hitting the red marble.

Aedion began roaring—roaring and cursing at the king, thrashing against his chains, but the guards hauled him away, and Chaol was too stunned to do anything other than watch the rest of Sorscha’s body topple to the ground. And then Dorian, still screaming, was scrambling through the blood toward it—toward her head, as if he could put it back.

As if he could piece her together.

Chaol hadn’t been able to move a muscle from the moment the guard cut off Sorscha’s head to the moment Dorian, still kneeling in a pool of her blood, stopped screaming.