Heir of Fire(85)
“Aedion can be trusted, Dorian,” Chaol said.
“He’s as two-faced as they come. I don’t believe for one heartbeat that he wouldn’t sell us out if it meant furthering his own cause.”
“He won’t,” Chaol snapped, cutting off Aedion’s reply. Chaol’s lips went blue from the cold.
Dorian knew he was hurting him—knew it, and didn’t quite care. “Because you want to be Aedion’s king someday?”
Chaol’s face drained of color, from the cold or from fear, and Aedion barked a laugh. “My queen will die heirless sooner than marry a man from Adarlan.”
Chaol tried to hide his flicker of pain, but Dorian knew his friend well enough to spot it. For a second he wondered what Celaena would think about Aedion’s claim. Celaena, who had lied—Celaena, who was Aelin, whom he had met ten years ago, whom he had played with in her beautiful castle. And that day in Endovier—that first day, he had felt as if there were something familiar about her . . . Oh gods.
Celaena was Aelin Galathynius. He had danced with her, kissed her, slept beside her, his mortal enemy. I’ll come back for you, she’d said her final day here. Even then, he’d known there was something else behind it. She would come back, but perhaps not as Celaena. Would it be to help him, or to kill him? Aelin Galathynius knew about his magic—and wanted to destroy his father, his kingdom. Everything she had ever said or done . . . He’d once thought it had been a charade to win favor as his Champion, but what if it had been because she was the heir of Terrasen? Was that why she was friends with Nehemia? What if, after a year in Endovier . . .
Aelin Galathynius had spent a year in that labor camp. A queen of their continent had been a slave, and would bear the scars of it forever. Perhaps that entitled her, and Aedion, and even Chaol who loved her, to conspire to deceive and betray his father.
“Dorian, please,” Chaol said. “I’m doing this for you—I swear it.”
“I don’t care,” Dorian said, staring them down as he walked out. “I will carry your secrets to the grave—but I want no part of them.”
He ripped his cold magic from the air and turned it inward, wrapping it around his heart.
•
Aedion took the secret subterranean exit out of the castle. He’d told Chaol it was to avoid any suspicion, to lose anyone else trailing them as they went back to their rooms. One look from the captain told him he knew precisely where Aedion was headed.
Aedion contemplated what the captain had told him—and though any other man would be horrified, though Aedion should be horrified . . . he wasn’t surprised. He’d suspected the king was wielding some sort of deadly power from the moment he’d given him that ring all those years ago, and it seemed in line with information his spies had long been gathering.
The Yellowlegs Matron had been here for a reason. Aedion was willing to bet good money that whatever monstrosities or weapons the king was creating, they would see them soon enough, perhaps with the witches in tow. Men didn’t build more armies and forge more weapons without having plans to use them. And they certainly didn’t hand out bits of mind-controlling jewelry unless they wanted absolute dominion. But he would face what was coming just as he had every other trial in his life: precisely, unyieldingly, and with lethal efficiency.
He spotted the two figures waiting in the shadows of a ramshackle building by the docks, the fog off the Avery making them little more than wisps of darkness.
“Well?” Ren demanded as Aedion leaned against a damp brick wall. Ren’s twin swords were out. Good Adarlanian steel, nicked and scratched enough to show they’d been used, and well-oiled enough to show Ren knew how to care for them. They seemed to be the only things Ren cared about—his hair was shaggy, and his clothes looked a bit worse for wear.