He avoided the urge to roll his eyes, though Damaris warmed in his grip. Be what you wish—a thing far easier said than done. Especially with the weight of a crown.

Dorian put a hand on his stomach, despite the layers of clothes and cloak. Only toned muscle greeted him. “Is that what you do to summon the change: first think of what you want to become?”

“With limits. I need a clear image within my mind, or else it will not work at all.”

“So you cannot change into something you have not seen.”

“I can invent certain traits—eye color, build, hair—but not the creature itself.” A hideous smile bloomed on her mouth. “Use that lovely magic of yours. Change your pretty eyes,” the spider dared. “Change their color.”

Gods damn him, but he tried. He thought of brown eyes. Pictured Chaol’s bronze eyes, fierce after one of their sparring sessions. Not how they had been before his friend had sailed to the southern continent.

Had Chaol managed to be healed? Had he and Nesryn convinced the khagan to send aid? How would Chaol even learn where he was, what had happened to all of them, when they’d been scattered to the winds?

“You think too much, young king.”

“Better than too little,” he muttered.

Damaris warmed again. He could have sworn it had been in amusement.

Cyrene chuckled. “Do not think of the eye color so much as demand it.”

“How did you learn this without instruction?”

“The power is in me now,” the spider said simply. “I listened to it.”

Dorian let a tendril of his magic snake toward the spider. She tensed. But his magic brushed up against her, gentle and inquisitive as a cat. Raw magic, to be shaped as he desired.

He willed it toward her—willed it to find that seed of power within her. To learn it.

“What are you doing,” the spider breathed, shifting on her feet.

His magic wrapped around her, and he could feel it—each hateful, horrible year of existence.

Each—

His mouth dried out. Bile surged in his throat at the scent his magic detected. He’d never forget that scent, that vileness. He’d bear the mark on his throat forever as proof.

Valg. The spider, somehow, was Valg. And not possessed, but born.

He kept his face neutral. Uninterested. Even as his magic located that glowing, beautiful bit of magic.

Stolen magic. As the Valg stole all things.

Took everything they wanted.

His blood became a dull, pounding roar in his ears.

Dorian studied her tiny frame, her ordinary face. “You’ve been rather quiet regarding the quest for revenge that sent you hunting across the continent.”

Cyrene’s dark eyes turned to depthless pits. “Oh, I have not forgotten that. Not at all.”

Damaris remained warm. Waiting.

He let his magic wrap soothing hands around the seed of power trapped within the black hell inside the spider.

He didn’t care to know why and how the stygian spiders were Valg. How they’d come here. Why they’d lingered.

They fed off dreams and life and joy. Delighted in it.

The seed of shape-shifting power flickered in his hands, as if grateful for a kind touch. A human touch.

This. His father had allowed these sorts of creatures to grow, to rule. Sorscha had been slaughtered by these things, their cruelty.

“I can make a bargain with you, you know,” Cyrene whispered. “When the time comes, I will make sure you are spared.”

Damaris went colder than ice.

Dorian met her stare. Withdrew his magic, and could have sworn that seed of shape-shifting power trapped within her reached for him. Tried to beg him not to go.

He smiled at the spider. She smiled back.

And then he struck.

Invisible hands wrapped around her neck and twisted. Right as his magic plunged into her navel, into where the stolen seed of human magic resided, and wrapped around it.

He held on, a baby bird in his hands, as the spider died. Studied the magic, every facet of it, before it seemed to sigh in relief and fade into the wind, free at last.

Cyrene slumped to the ground, eyes unseeing.

Half a thought and Dorian had her incinerated. No one came to inquire after the stench that rose from her ashes. The black stain that lingered beneath them.

Valg. Perhaps a ticket for him into Morath, and yet he found himself staring at that dark stain on the half-thawed earth.

He let go of Damaris, the blade reluctantly quieting.

He’d find his way into Morath. Once he mastered the shifting.

The spider and all her kind could burn in hell.

Dorian’s heart was still racing when he found himself an hour later lying in a tent not even tall enough to stand in, on one of two bedrolls.

Manon entered the tent just as he toed off his boots and hauled the heavy wool blankets over him. They smelled of horses and hay, and might very well have been snatched from a stable, but he didn’t care. It was warm and better than nothing.

Manon surveyed the tight space, the second bedroll and blanket. “Thirteen is an uneven number,” she said by way of explanation. “I’ve always had a tent to myself.”

“Sorry to ruin that for you.”

She cut him a drily amused glance before seating herself on the bedroll and unlacing her boots. But her fingers halted as her nostrils flared.

Slowly, she looked over her shoulder at him. “What did you do.”

Dorian held her stare. “You did what you had to today,” he said simply. “I did as well.” He didn’t bother trying to touch Damaris where it lay nearby.

She sniffed him again. “You killed the spider.” No judgment in her face, just raw curiosity.

“She was a threat,” he admitted. And a Valg piece of shit.

Wariness now flooded her eyes. “She could have killed you.”

He gave her a half smile. “No, she couldn’t have.”

Manon assessed him again, and he withstood it. “You have nothing to say about my own … choices?”

“My friends are fighting and likely being killed in the North,” Dorian said. “We don’t have the time to spend weeks winning the Crochans over.”

There it was, the brutal truth. To gain some degree of welcome here, they’d had to cross that line. Perhaps such callous decisions were part of wearing a crown.

He’d keep her secret—so long as she wished it hidden.

“No self-righteous speeches?”

“This is war,” he said simply. “We’re past that sort of thing.”

And it wouldn’t matter, would it, when his eternal soul would be the asking price to staunch so much of the slaughter? He’d already had it wrecked enough. If crossing line after line would spare any others from harm, he’d do it. He didn’t know what manner of king that made him.

Manon hummed, deeming that an acceptable answer. “You know about court intrigue and scheming,” she said, deft fingers again flying over the laces and hooks of the boots. “How would you … play this, as you called it earlier? My situation with the Crochans.”

Dorian rested a hand under his head. “The problem is that they hold all the cards. You need them far more than they need you. The only card you have to play is your heritage—and that they seem to have rejected, even with the skirmish. So how do we make it vital for them? How do you prove that they need their last living queen, the last of the Crochan bloodline?” He contemplated it. “There is also the prospect of peace between your peoples, but you …” He winced. “You’re no longer recognized as Heir. Any bargaining you might have as a Blackbeak would be on behalf of only you and the Thirteen, not the rest of the Ironteeth. It wouldn’t be a true peace treaty.”