“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?”

Aelin leaned against the stone wall, hands sliding into her pockets. Nothing human in her face. Though Elide marked the way her hands, even within their confines, shifted.

Bound in irons. Battered.

Only weeks ago, it had been the queen herself in Vernon’s place. And now it seemed she stood here through sheer will. Stood here, ready to pry the information from Vernon, for Elide’s sake.

It strengthened Elide enough that she said to her uncle, “Your breaths are limited. I would suggest you use them wisely.”

“Ruthless.” Vernon smirked. “The witch-blood in your veins ran true after all.”

She couldn’t stand it. To be in this room with him. To breathe the same air as the man who had smiled while her father had been executed, smiled while he locked her in that tower for ten years. Smiled while he’d touched Kaltain, done far worse perhaps, then tried to sell Elide to Erawan for breeding. “Why?” she asked.

It was the only question she could really think of, that really mattered. “Why do any of it?”

“Since my breaths are limited,” Vernon said, “I suppose it makes no difference what I tell you.” A small smile curled his lips. “Because I could,” her uncle said. Lorcan growled. “Because my brother, your father, was an insufferable brute, whose only qualification to rule was the order of our birth. A warrior-brute,” Vernon spat, sneering toward Lorcan. Then at Elide. “Your mother’s preference seems to have passed to you, too.” A hateful shake of the head. “Such a pity. She was a rare beauty, you know. Such a pity that she was killed, defending Her Majesty.” Heat flared across the room, but Aelin’s face remained unmoved. “There might have been a place for her in Perranth had she not—”