Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass) by Sarah J. Maas Page B

Fleetfoot leaned against the silently weeping girl.
    Aelin said to the shape-shifter and the general, locking out the sorrow from her heart, locking out the pain and worry from her mind, “We travel now.”
    And when they dispersed to gather the horses, Aedion brushing a kiss to Evangeline’s soaked head before Murtaugh and Ren led her back to the inn with considerable gentleness, Darrow striding ahead with nofarewell whatsoever, when Aelin was alone, she finally approached that shadowed, gnarled tree.
    The Little Folk had known about the wyvern attack this morning.
    So she’d supposed that this little effigy, already falling apart under the torrent of rain, was another message of sorts. One just for her.
    Brannon’s temple on the coast had been rendered carefully—a clever little contraption of twigs and rocks to form the pillars and altar … And on the sacred rock in its center, they’d created a white stag from raw sheep’s wool, his mighty antlers no more than curling thorns.
    An order—where to go, what she needed to obtain. She was willing to listen, play along. Even if it had meant telling the others only half the truth.
    Aelin broke apart the temple reconstruction but left the stag in her palm, the wool deflating in the rain.
    Horses nickered as Aedion and Lysandra hauled them closer, but Aelin felt him a heartbeat before he emerged between the distant, night-veiled trees. Too far in the wood to be anything but a ghost, a figment of an ancient god’s dream.
    Barely breathing, she watched him for as long as she dared, and when Aelin mounted her horse, she wondered if her companions could tell that it was not rain gleaming on her face as she tugged on her black hood.
    Wondered if they, too, had spied the Lord of the North standing watch deep in the forest, the white stag’s immortal glow muted in the rain, come to bid Aelin Galathynius farewell.

6
    Dorian Havilliard, King of Adarlan, hated the silence.
    It had become his companion, walking beside him through the near-empty halls of his stone castle, crouching in the corner of his cluttered tower room at night, sitting across the table at each meal.
    He had always known he would one day be king.
    He had not expected to inherit a shattered throne and vacant stronghold.
    His mother and younger brother were still ensconced in their mountain residence in Ararat. He had not sent for them. He’d given the order to remain, actually.
    If only because it would mean the return of his mother’s preening court, and he’d gladly take the silence over their tittering. If only because it would mean looking into his mother’s face, his brother’s face, and lying about who had destroyed the glass castle, who had slaughtered most of their courtiers, and who had ended his father.Lying about what his father had been—the demon that had dwelled inside him.
    A demon that had reproduced with his mother—not once, but twice.
    Standing on the small stone balcony atop his private tower, Dorian gazed at the glittering sprawl of Rifthold beneath the setting sun, at the sparkling ribbon of the Avery as it wended inland from the sea, curving around the city like the coils of a snake, and then flowing straight through the continent’s heart.
    He lifted his hands before the view, his palms callused from the exercises and swordplay he’d made himself start learning once more. His favorite guards—Chaol’s men—were all dead.
    Tortured and killed.
    His memories of his time beneath the Wyrdstone collar were dim and blurred. But in his nightmares, he sometimes stood in a dungeon far beneath this castle, blood that was not his own coating his hands, screams that were not his own ringing in his ears, begging him for mercy.
    Not him, he told himself. The Valg prince had done it. His father had done it.
    He’d still had difficulty meeting the stare of the new Captain of the Guard, a friend of Nesryn Faliq, as he’d asked the man to show him how to fight, help him become stronger,