The wyvern’s eyes lifted and met Elide’s. Not looked at, but met, as if …
Elide kept perfectly still, even though every instinct was roaring at her to run for the stairs. The wyvern nudged past Manon, the floor shuddering beneath him, and sniffed in Elide’s direction. Then those giant, depthless eyes moved down—to her legs. No, to the chain.
There were so many scars all over him—so many brutal lines. She did not think Manon had made them, not with the way she spoke to him. Abraxos was smaller than the others, she realized. Far smaller. And yet the Wing Leader had picked him. Elide tucked that information away, too. If Manon had a soft spot for broken things, perhaps she would spare her as well.
Abraxos lowered himself to the ground, stretching out his neck until his head rested on the hay not ten feet from Elide. Those giant black eyes stared up at her, almost doglike.
“Enough, Abraxos,” Manon hissed, grabbing a saddle from the rack by the wall.
“How do they—exist?” Elide breathed. She’d heard stories of wyverns and dragons, and she remembered glimpses of the Little Folk and the Fae, but …
Manon hauled the leather saddle over to her mount. “The king made them. I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter.”
The King of Adarlan made them, like whatever was being made inside those mountains. The man who had shattered her life, murdered her parents, doomed her to this … Don’t be angry, Finnula had said, be smart. And soon the king and his miserable empire wouldn’t be her concern, anyway.
Elide said, “Your mount doesn’t seem evil.” Abraxos’s tail thumped on the ground, the iron spikes in it glinting. A giant, lethal dog. With wings.
Manon huffed a cold laugh, strapping the saddle into place. “No. However he was made, something went wrong with that part.”
Elide didn’t think that constituted going wrong, but kept her mouth shut.
Abraxos was still staring up at her, and the Wing Leader said, “Let’s go hunt, Abraxos.”
The beast perked up, and Elide jumped back a step, wincing as she landed hard on her ankle. The wyvern’s eyes shot to her, as if aware of the pain. But the Wing Leader was already finishing with the saddle, and didn’t bother to look in her direction as Elide limped out.
“You soft-hearted worm,” Manon hissed at Abraxos once the cunning, many-faced girl was gone. The girl might be hiding secrets, but her lineage wasn’t one of them. She had no idea that witch-blood flowed strong in her mortal veins. “A crippled leg and a few chains, and you’re in love?”
Abraxos nudged her with his snout, and Manon gave him a firm but gentle slap before leaning against his warm hide and ripping open the letter addressed in her grandmother’s handwriting.
Just like the High Witch of the Blackbeak Clan, it was brutal, to the point, and unforgiving.
Do not disobey the duke’s orders. Do not question him. If there is another letter from Morath about your disobedience, I will fly down there myself and hang you by your intestines, with your Thirteen and that runt of a beast beside you.
Three Yellowlegs and two Blueblood covens are arriving tomorrow. See to it there are no fights or trouble. I do not need the other Matrons breathing down my neck about their vermin.
Manon turned the paper over, but that was it. Crunching it in a fist, she sighed.
Abraxos nudged at her again, and she idly stroked his head.
Made, made, made.
That was what the Crochan had said before Manon slit her throat. You were made into monsters.
She tried to forget it—tried to tell herself that the Crochan had been a fanatic and a preachy twat, but … She ran a finger down the deep red cloth of her cloak.
The thoughts opened up like a precipice before her, so many all at once that she stepped back. Turned away.
Made, made, made.
Manon climbed into the saddle and was glad to lose herself in the sky.
“Tell me about the Valg,” Manon said, shutting the door to the small chamber behind her.
Ghislaine didn’t look up from the book she was poring over. There was a stack of them on the desk before her, and another beside the narrow bed. Where the eldest and cleverest of her Thirteen had gotten them from, who she’d likely gutted to steal them, Manon didn’t care.
“Hello, and come right in, why don’t you” was the response.
Manon leaned against the door and crossed her arms. Only with books, only when reading, was Ghislaine so snappish. On the battlefield, in the air, the dark-skinned witch was quiet, easy to command. A solid soldier, made more valuable by her razor-sharp intelligence, which had earned her the spot among the Thirteen.
Ghislaine shut the book and twisted in her seat. Her black, curly hair was braided back, but even the plait couldn’t keep it entirely contained. She narrowed her sea-green eyes—the shame of her mother, as there wasn’t a trace of gold in them. “Why would you want to know about the Valg?”
“Do you know about them?”
Ghislaine pivoted on her chair until she was sitting backward in it, her legs straddling the sides. She was in her flying leathers, as if she couldn’t be bothered to remove them before falling into one of her books. “Of course I know about the Valg,” she said with a wave of her hand—an impatient, mortal gesture.
It had been an exception—an unprecedented exception—when Ghislaine’s mother had convinced the High Witch to send her daughter to a mortal school in Terrasen a hundred years ago. She had learned magic and book-things and whatever else mortals were taught, and when Ghislaine had returned twelve years later, the witch had been … different. Still a Blackbeak, still bloodthirsty, but somehow more human. Even now, a century later, even after walking on and off killing fields, that sense of impatience, of life clung to her. Manon had never known what to make of it.
“Tell me everything.”
“There’s too much to tell you in one sitting,” Ghislaine said. “But I’ll give you the basics, and if you want more, you can come back.”
An order, but this was Ghislaine’s space, and books and knowledge were her domain. Manon motioned with an iron-tipped hand for her sentinel to go on.
“Millennia ago, when the Valg broke into our world, witches did not exist. It was the Valg, and the Fae, and humans. But the Valg were … demons, I suppose. They wanted our world for their own, and they thought a good way to get it would be to ensure that their offspring could survive here. The humans weren’t compatible—too breakable. But the Fae … The Valg kidnapped and stole whatever Fae they could, and because your eyes are getting that glazed look, I’m just going to jump to the end and say the offspring became us. Witches. The Ironteeth took after our Valg ancestors more, while the Crochans got more of the Fae traits. The people of these lands didn’t want us here, not after the war, but the Fae King Brannon didn’t think it was right to hunt us all down. So he gave us the Western Wastes, and there we went, until the witch wars made us exiles again.”
Manon picked at her nails. “And the Valg are … wicked?”
“We are wicked,” Ghislaine said. “The Valg? Legend has it that they’re the origin of evil. They are blackness and despair incarnate.”
“Sounds like our kind of people.” And maybe good ones indeed to ally with, to breed with.
But Ghislaine’s smile faded. “No,” she said softly. “No, I do not think they would be our kind of people at all. They have no laws, no codes. They would see the Thirteen as weak for our bonds and rules—as something to break for amusement.”
Manon stiffened slightly. “And if the Valg were ever to return here?”
“Brannon and the Fae Queen Maeve found ways to defeat them—to send them back. I would hope that someone would find a way to do so again.”
More to think about.
She turned, but Ghislaine said, “That’s the smell, isn’t it? The smell here, around some of the soldiers—like it’s wrong, from another world. The king found some way to bring them here and stuff them into human bodies.”
She hadn’t thought that far, but … “The duke described them as allies.”
“That word does not exist for the Valg. They find the alliance useful, but will honor it only as long as it remains that way.”
Manon debated the merits of ending the conversation there, but said, “The duke asked me to pick a Blackbeak coven for him to experiment on. To allow him to insert some sort of stone in their bellies that will create a Valg-Ironteeth child.”
Slowly, Ghislaine straightened, her ink-splattered hands hanging slack on either side of the chair. “And do you plan to obey, Lady?”
Not a question from a scholar to a curious student, but from a sentinel to her heir.
“The High Witch has given me orders to obey the duke’s every command.” But maybe … maybe she would write her grandmother another letter.
“Who will you pick?”
Manon opened the door. “I don’t know. My decision is due in two days.”
Ghislaine—whom Manon had seen glut herself on the blood of men—had paled by the time Manon shut the door.