“The All-Seeing One does not claim kinship with those spineless creatures,” Gavin growled.
Dorian could have sworn a dusty, bone-dry wind rattled through the pass. “Then what is he?”
“Can there not be many gods, from many places? Some born of this world, some born elsewhere?”
“That’s a question to debate at another time,” Dorian ground out. “When we’re not at war.” He took a long breath. Another one. “Please,” he breathed. “Please help me save my friends. Help me make it right.”
It was all he really had left—this task.
Gavin again watched him, weighed him. Dorian withstood it. Let him read whatever truth was written on his soul.
Pain clouded the king’s face. Pain, and regret, as Gavin finally said, “The key is at Morath.”
Dorian’s mouth went dry. “Where in Morath?”
“I don’t know.” Dorian believed him. The raw dread in Gavin’s eyes confirmed it. The ancient king nodded to Damaris. “That sword is not ornamental. Let it guide you, if you cannot trust yourself.”
“It really tells the truth?”
“It was blessed by the All-Seeing One himself, after I swore myself to him.” Gavin shrugged, a half-tamed gesture. As if the man had never really left the wilds of Adarlan where he’d risen from war leader to High King. “You’ll still have to learn for yourself what is truth and what is lie.”
“But Damaris will help me find the key at Morath?” To break into Erawan’s stronghold, where all those collars were made …
Gavin’s mouth tightened. “I cannot say. But I will tell you this: do not venture toward Morath just yet. Until you are ready.”
“I’m ready now.” A fool’s lie. Gavin knew it, too. It was an effort not to touch his neck, the pale band forever marring his skin.
“Morath is no mere keep,” Gavin said. “It is a hell, and it is not kind to reckless young men.” Dorian stiffened, but Gavin went on, “You will know when you are truly ready. Remain at this camp, if you can convince your companions. The path will find you here.”
Gavin’s edges warped further, his face turning murky.
Dorian dared a step forward. “Am I human?”
Gavin’s sapphire eyes softened—just barely. “I’m not the person who can answer that.”
And then the king was gone.
CHAPTER 5
The commander in the alley had claimed his latest orders had been dispatched from Doranelle.
None of them knew whether to believe him.
Sitting around a tiny fire in a dusty field on the outskirts of a ramshackle city, the blood long since washed from his hands, Lorcan Salvaterre again mulled over the logic of it.
Had they somehow overlooked the simplest option? For Maeve to have been in Doranelle this entire time, hidden from her subjects?
But that commander had been lying filth. He’d spat in Lorcan’s face before they’d ended it.
The other commander they’d found today, however, after a week of hunting him down at the nearest seaport, had claimed he’d received orders from a distant kingdom they’d searched three weeks ago. In the opposite direction of Doranelle.
Lorcan toed at the dirt.
None of them had felt like speaking since the commander this afternoon had contradicted the first’s claim.
“Doranelle is Maeve’s stronghold,” Elide said at last, her steady voice filling the heavy quiet. “Simple as it is, it would make sense for her to bring Aelin there.”
Whitethorn only stared into the fire. He hadn’t washed the blood from his dark gray jacket.
“It would be impossible, even for Maeve, to keep her hidden in Doranelle,” Lorcan countered. “We would have heard about it by now.”
He wasn’t sure when he’d last spoken to the woman before him.
She hadn’t balked from how he’d broken Maeve’s commanders, though. She’d cringed during the worst of it, yes, but she’d listened to every word Rowan and Lorcan had wrung from them. Lorcan supposed she’d seen worse at Morath—hated that she had. Hated that her monster of an uncle still breathed.
But that hunt would come later. After they found Aelin. Or whatever remained of her.
Elide’s eyes grew cold, so cold, as she said, “Maeve managed to conceal Gavriel and Fenrys from Rowan in Skull’s Bay. And somehow hid and spirited away her entire fleet.”
Lorcan didn’t reply. Elide went on, her gaze unwavering, “Maeve knows Doranelle would be the obvious choice—the choice we’d likely reject because it’s too simple. She anticipated that we’d believe she’d haul Aelin to the farthest reaches of Erilea, rather than right back home.”
“Maeve would have the advantage of an easily summoned army,” Gavriel added, his tattooed throat bobbing. “Which would make rescue difficult.”
Lorcan refrained from telling Gavriel to shut his mouth. He hadn’t failed to notice how often Gavriel went out of his way to help Elide, to talk to her. And yes, some small part of him was grateful for it, since the gods knew she wouldn’t accept any sort of help from him.
Hellas damn him, he’d had to resort to giving his cut-up shirt to Whitethorn and Gavriel to hand to her for her cycle. He’d threatened to skin them alive if they’d said it was his, and Elide, with her human sense of smell, hadn’t scented him on the fabric.
He didn’t know why he bothered. He hadn’t forgotten her words that day on the beach.
I hope you spend the rest of your miserable, immortal life suffering. I hope you spend it alone. I hope you live with regret and guilt in your heart and never find a way to endure it.
Her vow, her curse, whatever it had been, had held true. Every word of it.
He’d broken something. Something precious beyond measure. He’d never cared until now.
Even the severed blood oath, still gaping wide within his soul, didn’t come close to the hole in his chest when he looked at her.
She’d offered him a home in Perranth knowing he’d be a dishonored male. Offered him a home with her.
But it hadn’t been Maeve’s sundering of the oath that had rescinded that offer. It had been a betrayal so great he didn’t know how to fix it.
Where is Aelin? Where is my wife?
Whitethorn’s wife—and his mate. Only this mission of theirs, this endless quest to find her, kept Lorcan from plunging into a pit from which he knew he would not emerge.
Perhaps if they found her, if there was still enough left of Aelin to salvage after Cairn’s ministrations, he’d find a way to live with himself. To endure this … person he’d become. It might take him another five hundred years to do so.
He didn’t let himself consider that Elide would be little more than dust by then. The thought alone was enough to turn the paltry dinner of stale bread and hard cheese in his stomach.
A fool—he was an immortal, stupid fool for starting down this path with her, for forgetting that even if she forgave him, her mortality beckoned.
Lorcan said at last, “It would also make sense for Maeve to go to the Akkadians, as the commander today claimed. Maeve has long maintained ties with that kingdom.” He, Whitethorn, and Gavriel had been to war and back in that sand-blasted territory. He’d never wished to set foot in it again. “Their armies would shield her.”
For it would take an army to keep Whitethorn from reaching his mate.
He turned toward the prince, who gave no indication he’d been listening. Lorcan didn’t want to consider if Whitethorn would soon need to add a tattoo to the other side of his face.
“The commander today was much more forthcoming,” Lorcan went on to the prince he’d fought beside for so many centuries, who had been as cold-hearted a bastard as Lorcan himself until this spring. “You barely threatened him and he sang for us. The one who claimed Maeve was in Doranelle was still sneering by the end.”