But as her muscles soothed beneath that loving touch, her soul with it, her breath remained tight.
It didn’t get any better when Nesryn said, “The stygian spiders are Valg.”
Silence.
“We encountered their kin, the kharankui, deep in the Dagul Fells. They came into this world through a temporary crack between realms, and remained afterward to guard the entrance, should it ever reappear.”
“This cannot end well,” Fenrys muttered. Elide hummed her agreement.
“They feed on dreams and years and life,” Falkan said, a hand on his own chest. “As my friends have said the Valg do.”
Aelin had seen Valg princes drain a human of every last drop of youth and vigor and leave only a dried corpse behind. She wouldn’t put it past the spiders to have a similar gift.
“What does this mean for the war?” Rowan asked, his thumbs still stroking Aelin’s neck.
“Will they join Erawan’s forces is the better question,” Lorcan challenged with a face like stone.
“They do not answer to Erawan,” Nesryn said quietly, and Aelin knew. Knew from the look Chaol gave her, the sympathy and fear, knew in her bones before Nesryn even finished. “The stygian spiders, the kharankui, answer to their Valg queen. The only Valg queen. To Maeve.”
CHAPTER 50
Rowan’s hands tightened on Aelin’s shoulders as the words settled into her, hollow and cold. “Maeve is a Valg queen?” he breathed.
Aelin said nothing. Couldn’t find the words.
Her power roiled. She didn’t feel it.
Nesryn nodded solemnly. “Yes. The kharankui told us the entire history.”
And so Nesryn did as well. Of how Maeve had somehow found a way into this world, fleeing or bored with her husband, Orcus. Erawan’s elder brother. Of how Erawan, Orcus, and Mantyx had torn apart worlds to find her, Orcus’s missing wife, and only halted here because the Fae had risen to challenge them. Fae led by Maeve, whom the Valg kings did not know or recognize, in the form she had taken.
The life she had crafted for herself. The minds of all the Fae who had existed that she had ripped into, convincing them that there had been three queens, not two. Including the minds of Mab and Mora, the two sister-queens who had ruled Doranelle. Including Brannon himself.
“The spiders claimed,” Nesryn went on, “that even Brannon didn’t know. Even now, in the Afterworld, he doesn’t know. That was how deep Maeve’s powers went into his mind, into all their minds. She made herself their true queen.”
The words, the truth, pelted Aelin, one after another.
Elide’s face was white as death. “But she fears the healers.” A nod toward Yrene. “She keeps that owl, you said—an enslaved Fae healer—should the Valg ever discover her.”
For that was the other piece of it. The other thing Nesryn had revealed, Chaol and Yrene adding in their own accounts.
The Valg were parasites. And Yrene could cure their human hosts of them. Had done so for Princess Duva. And might be able to do with so many others enslaved with rings or collars.
But what had infested Duva … A Valg princess.
Aelin leaned back into her chair, her head resting against the solid wall of Rowan’s body. His hands shook against her shoulders. Shook as he seemed to realize what, exactly, had ripped into his mind. Where Maeve’s power had come from that allowed her to do so. Why she remained deathless and ageless, and had outlasted any other. Why Maeve’s power was darkness.
“It is also why she fears fire,” Sartaq said, jerking his chin to Aelin. “Why she fears you so.”
And why she’d wanted to break her. To be just like that enslaved healer bound in owl form at her side.
“I thought—I managed to cut her once,” Aelin said at last. That quiet, ancient darkness pushed in, dragging her down, down, down—“I saw her blood flow black. Then it changed to red.” She blew out a breath, pulling out of the darkness, the silence that wanted to devour her whole. Made herself straighten. Peer at Fenrys. “You said that her blood tasted ordinary to you when you swore the oath.”
The white wolf shifted back into his Fae body. His bronze skin was ashen, his dark eyes swimming with dread. “It did.”
Rowan growled, “It didn’t taste any different to me, either.”
“A glamour—like the form she maintains,” Gavriel mused.
Nesryn nodded. “From what the spiders said, it seems entirely possible that she would be able to convince you that her blood looked and tasted like Fae blood.”
Fenrys made a sound like he was going to be sick. Aelin was inclined to do the same.
And from far away—a memory-that-was-not-a-memory stirred. Of summer nights spent in a forest glen, Maeve instructing her. Telling her a story about a queen who walked between worlds.
Who had not been content in the realm in which she’d been born, and had found a way to leave it, using the lost knowledge of ancient wayfarers. World-walkers.
Maeve had told her. Perhaps a skewed, biased tale, but she’d told her. Why? Why do it at all? Some way to win her—or to make her hesitate, should it ever come to this?
“But Maeve hates the Valg kings,” Elide said, and even from the silent, drifting place to which Aelin had gone, she could see the razor-sharp mind churning behind Elide’s eyes. “She’s hidden for this long. Surely she wouldn’t ally with them.”
“She ran at the chance to get hold of a Valg collar,” Fenrys said darkly. “Seemed convinced that she could control the prince inside it.”
Not only through Maeve’s power, but because she was a demon queen.
Aelin forced herself to take another breath. Another. Her fingers curled, gripping an invisible weapon.
Lorcan had not uttered a word. Had done nothing but stand there, pale and silent. As if he’d stopped being in his body, too.
“We don’t know her plans,” Nesryn said. “The kharankui have not seen her for millennia, and only hear whisperings carried by lesser spiders. But they still worship her, and wait for her return.”
Chaol met Aelin’s stare, his gaze questioning.
Aelin said quietly, “I was Maeve’s prisoner for two months.”
Utter silence in the tent. Then she explained—all of it. Why she was not in Terrasen, who now fought there, where Dorian and Manon had gone.
Aelin swallowed as she finished, leaning into Rowan’s touch. “Maeve wished me to reveal the location of the two Wyrdkeys. Wanted me to hand them over, but I managed to get them away before she took me. To Doranelle. She wanted to break me to her will. To use me to conquer the world, I thought. But it perhaps now seems she wanted to use me as a shield against the Valg, to guard her always.” The words tumbled out, heavy and sharp. “I was her captive until nearly a month ago.” She nodded toward her court. “When I got free, they found me again.”
Silence fell again, her new companions at a loss. She didn’t blame them.
Then Hasar hissed, “We’ll make the bitch pay for that, too, won’t we?”
Aelin met the princess’s dark stare. “Yes, we will.”
The truth had slammed into Rowan like a physical blow.
Maeve was Valg.
A Valg queen. Whose estranged husband had once invaded this world and, if Chaol was correct, wished to enter it again, should Erawan succeed in opening the Wyrdgate.
He knew his cadre, or whatever they were now called, was in shock. Knew he himself had fallen into some sort of stupor.
The female they’d served, bowed to … Valg.
They had been so thoroughly deceived they had not even tasted it in her blood.
Fenrys looked like he was going to empty the contents of his stomach onto the tent floor. For him, the truth would be the most horrendous.
Lorcan’s face remained cold and blank. Gavriel kept rubbing his jaw, his eyes swimming with dismay.
Rowan loosed a long breath.
A Valg queen.
That’s who had held his Fireheart. What sort of power had tried to break into her mind.
What power had broken into Rowan’s mind. All their minds, if she could glamour her blood to look and taste ordinary.
He felt the tension rising in Aelin, a raging storm that nearly hummed into his hands as he gripped her shoulders.