“What would it entail?”
“There are two roads,” Yrene said, letting some of her magic seep into Elide’s leg, soothing the aching muscles, the spots where bone ground against bone with no buffer. The lady sighed. “The first is the hardest. It would require me to completely restructure your foot and ankle. Meaning, I would have to break apart the bone, take out the parts that healed or fused incorrectly, and then regrow them. You could not walk while I did it, and even with the help I could give you for the pain, the recovery would be agonizing.” There was no way around that truth. “I’d need three weeks to take apart your bones and put them back together, but you’d need at least a month of resting and learning to walk on it again.”
Elide’s face had gone pale. “And the other option?”
“The other option would be to not do the healing, but to give you salve—like the one you said Lorcan gave you—to help with the aches. But I will warn you: the pain will never entirely leave you. With the way your bones grind together here”—she gently touched the spot on Elide’s upper foot, then a spot down by her toes—“arthritis is already setting in. As the bones continue to grind together, the arthritis, that pain you feel when you walk, will only worsen. There may come a point in a few years—maybe five, maybe ten, it’s hard to tell—when you find the pain to be so bad that no salve can help you.”
“So I would need the healing then, regardless.”
“It’s up to you whether you want the healing at all. I only want you to have a better idea of the road ahead.” She smiled at the lady. “It’s up to you to decide how you wish to face it.”
Yrene tapped Elide’s foot, and the lady lowered it back to the floor before putting her sock back on, then her boot. Efficient, easy motions.
Yrene sipped from her tea, cool enough now to drink. The fresh verve of the peppermint zapped through her, clearing her mind and calming her stomach.
Elide said, “I don’t know if I can face that pain again.”
Yrene nodded. “With that sort of injury, it would require facing a great many things inside yourself.” She smiled toward the wagon entrance. “My husband and I just went through one such journey together.”
“Was it hard?”
“Incredibly. But he did it. We did it.”
Elide considered, then shrugged. “We’d have to survive this war first, I suppose. If we live … then we can talk about it.”
“Fair enough.”
Elide frowned at the wagon’s ceiling. “I wonder what they’ve learned up there.”
Up in the Omega and Northern Fang, where Chaol and the others were now meeting with the breeders and wranglers who had been left behind.
Yrene didn’t want to know more than that, and Chaol had not offered any other insight into how they’d be extracting information from the men.
“Hopefully something worth our visit to this awful place,” Yrene muttered, then drained the rest of her tea. The sooner they left, the better.
It was as if the gods were laughing at her—at them both. A knock on the wagon doors had Elide limping toward them, just before Borte appeared. Her face uncharacteristically solemn.
Yrene braced herself, but it was Elide whom the ruk rider addressed.
“You’re to come with me,” Borte said breathlessly. Behind the girl, Arcas waited, a sparrow perched on the saddle. Falkan Ennar. Not a companion, Yrene realized, but an additional guard.
Elide asked, “What’s wrong?”
Borte shifted, with impatience or nerves, Yrene couldn’t tell. “They found someone in the mountain. They want you up there—to decide what to do with him.”
Elide had gone still. Utterly still.
Yrene asked, “Who?”
Borte’s mouth tightened. “Her uncle.”
Elide wondered if the rukhin would shun her forever if she vomited all over Arcas. Indeed, during the swift, steep flight up to the bridge spanning the Omega and Northern Fang, it was all she could do not to hurl the contents of her stomach all over the bird’s feathers.
“They found him hiding in the Northern Fang,” Borte had said before she’d hauled Elide into the saddle, Falkan already flying up the sheer face of the pass. “Trying to pretend to be a wyvern trainer. But one of the other trainers sold him out. Queen Aelin called for you as soon as they had him secure. Your uncle, not the trainer, I mean.”
Elide hadn’t been able to respond. Had only nodded.
Vernon was here. At the Gap. Not in Morath with his master, but here.
Gavriel and Fenrys were waiting when Arcas landed in the cavernous opening into the Northern Fang. The rough-hewn rock loomed like a gaping maw, the reek of what lay within making her stomach turn again. Like rotting meat and worse. Valg, undoubtedly, but also a smell of hate and cruelty and tight, airless corridors.
The two Fae males silently fell into step beside her as they entered. No sign of Lorcan, or Aelin. Or her uncle.
Men lay dead in some of the dim hallways that Fenrys and Gavriel led her through, killed by the rukhin when they’d swept in. None of them leaked black blood, but they still had that reek to them. Like this place had infected their very souls.
“They’re just up here,” Gavriel said quietly—gently.
Elide’s hands began shaking, and Fenrys placed one of his own on her shoulder. “He’s well restrained.”
She knew not with mere ropes or chains. Likely with fire and ice and perhaps even Lorcan’s own dark power.
But it did not stop her from shaking, from how small and brittle she became as they turned a corner and beheld Aelin, Rowan, and Lorcan standing before a shut door. Farther down the hall, Nesryn and Sartaq, Lord Chaol with them, waited. Letting them decide what to do.
Letting Elide decide.
Lorcan’s grave face was frozen with rage, his depthless eyes like frigid pools of night. He said quietly, “You don’t need to go in there.”
“We had you brought here,” Aelin said, her own face the portrait of restrained wrath, “so you could choose what to do with him. If you wish to speak to him before we do.”
One look at the knives at Rowan’s and Lorcan’s sides, at the way the queen’s fingers curled, and Elide knew what their sort of talking would include. “You mean to torture him for information?” She didn’t dare meet Aelin’s eyes.
“Before he receives what is due to him,” Lorcan growled.
Elide glanced between the male she loved and the queen she served. And her limp had never felt so pronounced, so obvious, as she took a step closer. “Why is he here?”
“He has yet to reveal that,” Rowan said. “And though we have not confirmed that you are here, he suspects.” A glance toward Lorcan. “The call is yours, Lady.”
“You will kill him regardless?”
Lorcan asked, “Do you wish us to?” Months ago, she had told him to. And Lorcan had agreed to do it. That had been before Vernon and the ilken had come to abduct her—before the night when she had been willing to embrace death rather than go with him to Morath.
Elide peered inward. They gave her the courtesy of silence. “I would like to speak to him before we decide his fate.”
A bow of Lorcan’s head was his only answer before he opened the door behind him.
Torches flickered, the chamber empty save for a worktable against one wall.
And her uncle, bound in thick irons, seated on a wooden chair.
His finery was worn, his dark hair unkempt, as if he’d struggled while they’d bound him. Indeed, blood crusted one of his nostrils, his nose swollen.
Shattered.
A glance to her right confirmed the blood on Lorcan’s knuckles.
Vernon straightened as Elide stopped several feet away, the door shutting, Lorcan and Aelin mere steps behind. The others remained in the hall.
“What mighty company you keep these days, Elide,” Vernon said.
That voice. Even with the broken nose, that silky, horrible voice raked talons along her skin.
But Elide kept her chin up. Kept her eyes upon her uncle. “Why are you here?”
“First you let the brute at me,” Vernon drawled, nodding to Lorcan, “then you send in the sweet-faced girl to coax answers?” A smile toward Aelin. “A technique of yours, Majesty?”