Crown of Midnight (41 page)

“Will they harm me?”

“You killed a witch—and you’re now marked by a witch. It will not be the usual sort of wound.” Mort’s eyes narrowed. “You understand that you may have just landed yourself in a heap of trouble.”

Celaena groaned.

“Baba Yellowlegs was a leader—a queen to her clan,” Mort went on. “When they destroyed the Crochan family, they joined with the Blackbeaks and the Bluebloods in the Ironteeth Alliance. They still honor those oaths.”

“But I thought all the witches were gone—scattered to the winds.”

“Gone? The Crochans and those who followed them have been in hiding for generations. But the clans in the Ironteeth Alliance still travel about, as Baba did. Though many more of them live in the ruined and dark places of the world, content in their wickedness. But I suspect that when the Yellowlegs learn of their matron’s death, they will muster the Blackbeaks and the Bluebloods and demand answers from the king. And you will be fortunate if they do not come on their brooms and drag you into it.”

She grimaced. “I hope you’re wrong.”

Mort’s brows lowered slightly. “So do I.”

Celaena spent an hour in the tomb, reading through the riddle on the wall, puzzling over Yellowlegs’s words. Wyrdkeys, Wyrdgates … it was all so strange, so incomprehensible and terrifying. And if the king had them—if he even had
one
…

Celaena shuddered.

When staring at the riddle gave her no further answers, Celaena trudged back to her rooms for a much-needed nap.

At least she’d finally discovered a possible source of the king’s power. But she still needed to learn more. And then the real question: what was the king planning to do with the keys that he had not done already?

She had a feeling she didn’t want to know.

But the library catacombs might contain the answer to that most horrible of questions. There was a book she could use to gain access to that answer—a book that might have the unlocking spell she was looking for. And she knew that
The Walking Dead
would find her the moment she began looking for it.

Halfway up to her rooms, all plans for a nap vanished as Celaena turned back around and went to retrieve Damaris, and every other ancient blade she could carry.

He shouldn’t be here. He was only asking for trouble—another fight that might wind up tearing the castle in two. And if Celaena attacked him again, Chaol knew with absolute certainty that he’d let her kill him, if she really wanted.

He didn’t even know what he’d say to her. But he had to say something, if only to end the silence and the tension that kept him awake night after night and prevented him from focusing on his duties.

She wasn’t in her rooms, but he went in anyway, wandering over to her desk. It was as messy as Dorian’s, and covered in papers and books. He might have turned away had he not seen the strange symbols written on everything, symbols that reminded him of the mark he’d seen burn on her forehead at the duel. He’d somehow forgotten about it in the months that had gone by. Was it … was it something connected to her past?

Glancing over his shoulder, listening for any sign of Philippa or Celaena, he rifled through the documents. Just scribblings—drawings of the symbols and random underlined words. Perhaps they were no more than doodles, he tried to tell himself.

He was about to turn away when he caught sight of a document peeking out from a stack of books. It was written in careful calligraphy and signed by multiple people.

Easing it out from under the books, Chaol picked up the thick paper and read.

The world dropped out from beneath his feet.

It was Celaena’s will. Signed two days before Nehemia’s death.

And she’d given everything—every last copper—to him.

His throat tightened as he stared at the sum and the list of assets, including an apartment in a warehouse in the slums and all the wealth inside.

And she had signed it all to him, with only one request: that he consider giving some of it to Philippa.

“I’m not going to change it.”

He whirled, finding her leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed. Though the position was so familiar, her face was cold, blank. He let the document slip from his fingers.

The list of noble houses in his pocket became leaden. What if he’d been jumping to conclusions? Perhaps the song wasn’t actually a dirge of Terrasen. Maybe it had been another language he’d never heard of.

She watched him like a cat. “It would be too much trouble to bother changing it,” she went on. She wore a beautiful, ancient-looking blade at her side, along with a few daggers he’d never seen before. Where had she gotten them?

There were so many words trying to work their way out of him that he couldn’t speak at all. All of that money—she’d left everything to him. Left it to him because of what she’d felt for him … even Dorian had seen it from the start.

“At least now,” she said, pushing off the doorframe and turning away, “when the king sacks you for being so damn lousy at your job, you’ll have something to fall back on.”

He couldn’t breathe. She hadn’t just done it out of generosity. But rather because she knew that if he ever lost his position, he’d have to consider going back to Anielle, to his father’s money. And that it’d kill part of him to do that.

But she’d have to be dead for him to see that money. Verifiably dead, and not a traitor to the crown, either—if she died a traitor, then all her assets had to go to the king.

And the only way she’d die a traitor would be for her to do what he feared: ally with this secret organization, find Aelin Galathynius, and return to Terrasen. This was a hint that she had no intention of doing that. She had no plans to reclaim her lost title, and posed no threat to Adarlan or Dorian. He’d been wrong. Yet again, he’d been wrong.

“Get out of my chambers,” she said from the foyer, before striding into the gaming room and slamming the door behind her.

He hadn’t wept when Nehemia died, or when he’d thrown Celaena in the dungeons, or even when she’d returned with Grave’s head, utterly different from the woman he had grown to love so fiercely.

But when Chaol walked out, leaving that damning will behind him, he didn’t even make it to his own room. He barely made it into an empty broom closet before the sobs hit.

Celaena stood in the gaming room, staring at the pianoforte as she heard Chaol quickly leave. She hadn’t played in weeks.

Originally, it had been just because she didn’t have time. Because Archer and the tomb and Chaol had occupied every moment of her day. Then Nehemia had died—and she hadn’t gone into this room once, hadn’t wanted to look at the instrument, hadn’t wanted to hear or make music ever again.

Shoving the encounter with Chaol out of her mind, Celaena slowly folded back the lid of the pianoforte and stroked the ivory keys.

But she couldn’t push down, couldn’t bring herself to make a sound. Nehemia should have been here—to help with Yellowlegs and the riddle, to tell her what to do with Chaol, to smile as Celaena played something particularly clever for her.

Nehemia was gone. And the world … it was moving on without her.

When Sam had died, she had tucked him into her heart, tucked him in alongside her other beloved dead, whose names she kept so secret she sometimes forgot them. But Nehemia—Nehemia wouldn’t fit. It was as if her heart was too full of the dead, too full of those lives that had ended well before their time.

She couldn’t seal Nehemia away like that, not when that bloodstained bed and those ugly words still haunted her every step, every breath.

So Celaena just hovered at the pianoforte, tracing her fingers over the keys again and again, and let the silence devour her.

An hour later, Celaena stood before the strange, second staircase at the end of the forgotten hall of ancient records, a clock chiming somewhere far in the library above. The images of Fae and flora danced along the fire-lit stairwell, spiraling out of sight, down and down into unknown depths. She’d found
The Walking Dead
almost immediately—discarded on a lonely table between some stacks. As though it had been waiting for her. And it had been the work of a few minutes to find a spell inside that claimed to unlock any door. She’d quickly memorized it, practicing a few times on a locked closet.

It had taken all of her self-control not to scream when she’d heard the lock snap free the first time. Or the second.

It was no wonder Nehemia and her family kept such power a secret. And no wonder the King of Adarlan had sought it out for himself.

Staring down into the stairwell, Celaena touched Damaris, then looked at the two jeweled daggers hanging from her belt. She was fine. No reason to be nervous. What sort of evil did she expect to find in a library, of all places?

Surely the king had better places to hide his dark dealings. At best, she’d find more hints as to whether he had any Wyrdkeys and
where he kept them. At worst … she would run into the cloaked person she’d seen outside the library that night. But the glowing eyes she’d glimpsed on the other side of that door belonged to a rodent of some sort—nothing more. And if she was wrong … Well, whatever it was, after taking down the ridderak,
this
shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Right
. Celaena stepped forward, pausing on the landing.

Nothing. No feelings of terror, no otherworldly warnings. Not a thing.

She took another step, then another, holding her breath as she wound around the staircase until she could no longer see the top. She could have sworn that the etchings on the wall moved all around her, that the beautiful, feral faces of the Fae turned to look as she passed.

The only noises were her footsteps and the whispering of the torch flame. A chill ran down her spine, and Celaena stopped as the dark void of the hallway came into view.

She was at the sealed iron door a moment later. She didn’t give herself the luxury of reconsidering her plan as she took out her piece of chalk and traced two Wyrdmarks onto the door, whispering the accompanying words at the same time. They burned on her tongue, but as she finished speaking, she heard a faint, dull
thud
as something in the door slid open.

She swore under her breath. The spell truly worked. She didn’t want to think about all that implied, about how it was able to work on iron, the one element supposedly immune to magic. And not when there were so many awful spells contained in
The Walking Dead
—spells to summon demons, to raise the dead, to torture others until they begged for death …

With a firm tug, she yanked the door open, wincing as it whined across the gray stone floor. A stale, cold breeze ruffled her hair. She drew Damaris.

After checking and double-checking that she could not be locked inside, she crossed the threshold.

Her torch revealed a small staircase of about ten steps, which led down to another long, narrow passageway. Cobwebs and dust filled every inch of it, but it wasn’t the neglected look of the place that made her pause.

Rather it was the doors, the dozens of iron doors that lined both sides of the hallway. All as nondescript as the door behind her, all revealing nothing of what might be behind them. At the opposite end of the hall, another iron door gleamed dully in the torchlight.

What was this place?

She descended the stairs. It was so silent. As if the very air held its breath.

She held her torch high, Damaris in her other hand, and approached the first iron door. It had no handle, the surface marked only by a single line. The door across from it had two marks. Numbers one and two. Odd numbers on the left, even on the right. She kept moving, igniting torch after torch, brushing away the curtains of cobwebs. As she walked farther down the hall, the numbers on the doors rose.

Is this some sort of dungeon?

But the floor held no traces of blood, no remnants of bones or weapons. It didn’t even smell that bad—just dusty. Dry. She tried opening one of the doors, but it was firmly locked. All of the doors were locked. And some instinct told her to keep them that way.

Her head throbbed slightly with the beginnings of a headache.