Trembling so hard she thought her body would fall apart at the seams, she turned. “I do not care about you,” she hissed to Emrys and Malakai and Luca. “I do not care about your knife. I do not care about your stories or your little kingdom.” She pinned Emrys with a stare. Luca and Malakai ­were across the room in an instant, stepping in front of the old man—­teeth bared. Good. They should feel threatened. “So leave me alone. Keep your gods-­damned lives to yourselves and leave me alone.”

She was shouting now, but she ­couldn’t stop hearing the screaming, ­couldn’t hone the anger into anything, ­couldn’t tell which way was up or down, only that Nehemia had lied about everything, and her friend once had sworn an oath not to—­sworn an oath and broken it, just as she’d broken Celaena’s own heart the day she let herself die.

She saw the tears in Emrys’s eyes then. Sorrow or pity or anger, she didn’t care. Luca and Malakai ­were still between them, growling softly. A family—­they ­were a family, and they stuck together. They would rip her apart if she hurt one of them.

Celaena let out a low, joyless laugh as she took in the three of them. Emrys opened his mouth to say what­ever it was he thought would help.

But Celaena let out another dead laugh and walked out the door.

•

After an entire night of tattooing the names of the fallen onto Gavriel’s flesh and listening to the warrior talk about the men he’d lost, Rowan sent him on his way and headed for the kitchen. He found it empty save for the ancient male, who sat at the empty worktable, hands wrapped around a mug. Emrys looked up, his eyes bright and . . . grieving.

The girl was nowhere to be seen, and for a heartbeat, he hoped she’d left again, if only so he didn’t have to face what he’d said yesterday. The door to the outside was open—­as if someone had thrown it wide. She’d probably gone that way.

Rowan took a step toward it, nodding his greeting, but the old male looked him up and down and quietly said, “What are you doing?”

“What?”

Emrys didn’t raise his voice as he said, “To that girl. What are you doing that makes her come in ­here with such emptiness in her eyes?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

Emrys pressed his lips into a tight line. “What do you see when you look at her, Prince?”

He didn’t know. These days, he didn’t know a damn thing. “That’s none of your concern, either.”

Emrys ran a hand over his weathered face. “I see her slipping away, bit by bit, because you shove her down when she so desperately needs someone to help her back up.”

“I don’t see why I would be of any use to—”

“Did you know that Evalin Ashryver was my friend? She spent almost a year working in this kitchen—­living ­here with us, fighting to convince your queen that demi-­Fae have a place in your realm. She fought for our rights until the very day she departed this kingdom—­and the many years after, until she was murdered by those monsters across the sea. So I knew. I knew who her daughter was the moment you brought her into this kitchen. All of us who ­were ­here twenty-­five years ago recognized her for what she is.”

It ­wasn’t often that he was surprised, but . . . Rowan just stared.

“She has no hope, Prince. She has no hope left in her heart. Help her. If not for her sake, then at least for what she represents—­what she could offer all of us, you included.”

“And what is that?” he dared ask.

Emrys met his gaze unflinchingly as he whispered, “A better world.”

•

Celaena walked and walked, until she found herself by the tree-­lined shore of a lake, glaringly bright in the midday sun. She figured it was as good a spot as any as she crumpled to the mossy bank, as her arms wrapped tight around herself and she bowed over her knees.

There was nothing that could be done to fix her. And she was . . . she was . . .

A whimpering noise came out of her, lips trembling so hard she had to clamp down to keep the sound inside.

But the sound was in her throat and her lungs and her mouth, and when she took a breath, it cracked out. Once she heard it, everything came spilling into the world, until her body ached with the force of it.

She vaguely felt the light shifting on the lake. Vaguely felt the sighing wind, warm as it brushed against her damp cheeks. And heard, so soft it was as if she dreamed it, a woman’s voice whispering, Why are you crying, Fireheart?

It had been ten years—­ten long years since she had heard her mother’s voice. But she heard it then over the force of her weeping, as clear as if she knelt beside her. Fireheart—­why do you cry?

“Because I am lost,” she whispered onto the earth. “And I do not know the way.”

It was what she had never been able to tell Nehemia—­that for ten years, she had been unsure how to find the way home, because there was no home left.

Storm winds and ice crackled against her skin before she registered Rowan sitting down beside her, legs out, palms braced behind him in the moss. She raised her head, but didn’t bother to wipe her face as she stared across the glittering lake.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No.” Swallowing a few times, she yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose, her head clearing with each breath.

They sat in silence, no sound but the quiet lapping of the lake on the mossy bank and the wind in the leaves. Then— “Good. Because ­we’re going.”

Bastard. She called him as much, and then asked, “Going where?”

He smiled grimly. “I think I’ve started to figure you out, Aelin Galathynius.”

•

“What in every burning ring of hell,” Celaena panted, gazing at the cave mouth nestled into the base of the craggy mountain, “are we doing ­here?”

It had been a five-­mile hike. Uphill. With hardly anything in her stomach.

The trees butted against the gray stones, flowing up the slope for a ways and then fading into lichen-­covered rock that eventually turned into the snow-­capped peak that marked the barrier between Wendlyn and Doranelle beyond. For some reason, this hulking giant made the hair on her neck stand up. And it had nothing to do with the frozen wind.

Rowan strode into the gaping maw of the cave mouth, his pale-gray cloak flapping behind him. “Hurry up.”

Pulling her own cloak tighter around her, she staggered after him. This was a bad sign. A horrible sign, actually, because what­ever was in that cave . . .

She walked into the dark, following Rowan by the light on his hair, letting her eyes adjust. The ground was rocky, the stones small and worn smooth. And littered with rusted weapons, armor, and—­clothes. No skeletons. Gods, it was so cold that she could see her breath, see—

“Tell me I’m hallucinating.”

Rowan had stopped at the edge of an enormous frozen lake, stretching into the gloom. Sitting on a blanket in its center, the chains around his wrists anchored under the ice, was Luca.

Luca’s chains clanked as he raised a hand in greeting. “I thought you’d never show. I’m freezing,” he called, and tucked his hands back under his arms. The sound echoed throughout the chamber.

The thick sheet of ice covering the lake was so clear that she could see the water beneath—­pale stones on the bottom, what looked to be old roots from trees long dead, and no sign of life whatsoever. An occasional sword or dagger or lance poked up from the stones. “What is this place?”

“Go get him,” was Rowan’s answer.

“Are you out of your mind?”

Rowan gave her a smile that suggested he was, in fact, insane. She stepped toward the ice, but he blocked her path with a muscled arm. “In your other form.”

Luca’s head was angled, as if trying to hear. “He ­doesn’t know what I am,” she murmured.

“You’ve been living in a fortress of demi-­Fae, you know. He won’t care.”

That was the least of her concerns, anyway. “How dare you drag him into this?”

“You dragged him in yourself when you insulted him—­and Emrys. The least you can do is retrieve him.” He blew out a breath toward the lake, and the ice thawed by the shore, then hardened. Holy gods. He’d frozen the ­whole damn lake. He was that powerful?