There was nothing Celaena or Rowan could do as a whip of darkness snapped out and struck the invisible barrier. The air shuddered, and the stones whined.

Rowan was already moving toward the oak doors, shouting orders to the archers to ready themselves and use what­ever magic they had to shield against the oncoming darkness. Celaena remained where she was. Another strike, and the barrier rippled.

“Aelin,” Rowan snapped, and she looked over her shoulder at him. “Get inside the gates.”

But she slung her bow across her back, and when she raised her hand, it was consumed with fire. “In the woods that night, it balked from the flame.”

“To use it, you’ll have to get outside the barrier, or it’ll just rebound against the walls.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“The last time, you took one look at that thing and fell under its spell.”

The darkness lashed again.

“It won’t be like last time,” she said, eyes on Narrok, on his three creatures. Not when she had a score to settle. Her blood heated, but she said, “I don’t know what ­else to do.”

Because if that darkness reached them, then all the blades and arrows would be useless. They ­wouldn’t have a chance to strike.

A cry sounded behind them, followed by a few more, then the clash of metal on metal. Someone shouted, “The tunnel! They’ve been let in through the tunnel!”

For a moment, Celaena just stood there, blinking. The escape tunnel. They had been betrayed. And now they knew where the soldiers ­were: creeping through the underground network, let in perhaps because the ward-­stones, with that strange sentience, ­were too focused on the threat above to be able to contain the one below.

The shouting and fighting grew louder. Rowan had stationed their weaker fighters inside to keep them safe—­right in the path of the tunnel entrance. It would be a slaughter­house. “Rowan—”

Another blow to the barrier from the darkness, and another. She began walking toward the stones, and Rowan growled. “Do not take one more step—”

She kept going. Inside the fortress, screaming had begun—­pain and death and terror. Each step away from it tore at her, but she headed to the stones, toward the megalith gates. Rowan grabbed her elbow. “That was an order.”

She knocked his hand away. “You’re needed inside. Leave the barrier to me.”

“You don’t know if it’ll work—”

“It will work,” she snarled. “I’m the expendable one, Rowan.”

“You are heir to the throne of—”

“Right now, I am a woman who has a power that might save lives. Let me do this. Help the others.”

Rowan looked at the ward-­stones, at the fortress and the sentries scrambling to help below. Weighing, calculating. At last, Rowan said, “Do not engage them. You focus on that darkness and keeping it away from the barrier, and that’s it. Hold the line, Aelin.”

But she didn’t want to hold the line—­not when her enemy was so close. Not when the weight of those souls at Calaculla and Endovier pressed on her, screaming as loudly as the soldiers inside the fortress. She had failed all of them. She had been too late. And it was enough. But she nodded, like the good soldier Rowan believed she was, and said, “Understood.”

“They will attack you the moment you set foot outside the barrier,” he said, releasing her arm. Her magic began to boil in her veins. “Have a shield ready.”

“I know” was her only answer as she neared the barrier and the swirling dark beyond. The curving stones of the gateway loomed, and she drew the sword from her back with her right hand, her left hand enveloped in flame.

Nehemia’s people, butchered. Her own people, butchered. Her people.

Celaena stepped under the archway of stones, magic zinging and kissing her skin. Just a few steps would take her outside the barrier. She could feel Rowan lingering, waiting to see if she would survive the first moments. But she would—­she was going to burn these things into ash and dust.

This was the least she owed those murdered in Endovier and Calaculla—­the least she could do, after so long. A monster to destroy monsters.

The flames on her left hand burned brighter as Celaena stepped beyond the archway and into the beckoning abyss.

52

The darkness lashed at Celaena the moment she passed beyond the invisible barrier.

A wall of flame seared across the spear of blackness, and, just as she’d gambled, the blackness recoiled. Only to strike again, swift as an asp.

She met it blow for blow, willing the fire to spread, a wall of red and gold encasing the barrier behind her. She ignored the reek of the creatures, the hollowness of the air at her ears, the overwhelming throbbing in her head, so much worse beyond the protection of the wards, especially now that all three creatures ­were gathered. But she did not give them one inch, even as blood began trickling from her nose.

The darkness lunged for her, simultaneously assaulting the wall, punching holes through her flame. She patched them by reflex, allowing the power to do as it willed, but with the command to protect—­to keep that barrier shielded. She took another step beyond the stone gateway.

Narrok was nowhere to be seen, but the three creatures ­were waiting for her.

Unlike the other night in the woods, they ­were armed with long, slender swords that they drew with their unearthly grace. And then they attacked.

Good.

She did not look them in the eyes, nor did she acknowledge the bleeding from her nose and the pressure in her ears. She merely called in a shield of fire around her left forearm and begin swinging that ancient sword.

Whether Rowan lingered to see her break his first order, then his next, then his next, she didn’t know.

The three creatures kept coming at her, swift and controlled, as if they’d had eons to practice swordplay, as if they ­were all of one mind, one body. Where she deflected one, another was there; where she punched one with flame and steel, another was ducking beneath it to grab her. She could not let them touch her, could not let herself meet their gaze.

The shield around the barrier burned hot at her back, the darkness of the creatures stinging and biting at it, but she held firm. She had not lied to Rowan about that—­about protecting the wall.

One of them swept its blade at her—­not to kill. To incapacitate.

It was second nature, somehow, that flames leapt down her blade as she struck back, willing fire into the sword itself. When it met the black iron of the creature, blue sparks danced, so bright that she dared look into the creature’s face to glimpse—­surprise. Horror. Rage.

The hilt of the sword was warm—­comforting—in her hand, and the red stone glowed as if with a fire of its own.

The three creatures stopped in unison, their sensual mouths pulling back from their too-­white teeth in a snarl. The one in the center, the one who had tasted her before, hissed at the sword, “Goldryn.”

The darkness paused, and she used its distraction to patch her shields, a chill snaking up her spine even as the flames warmed her. She lifted the sword higher and advanced another step.

“But you are not Athril, beloved of the dark queen,” one of them said. Another said, “And you are not Brannon of the Wildfire.”

“How do you—” But the words caught in her throat as a memory struck, from months ago—­a lifetime ago. Of a realm that was in-­between, of the thing that lived inside Cain speaking. To her, and—­Elena. Elena, daughter of Brannon. You ­were brought back, it said. All the players in the unfinished game.

A game that had begun at the dawn of time, when a demon race had forged the Wyrdkeys and used them to break into this world, and Maeve had used their power to banish them. But some demons had remained trapped in Erilea and waged a second war centuries later, when Elena fought against them. What of the others, who had been sent back to their realm? What if the King of Adarlan, in learning of the keys, had also learned where to find them? Where to . . . harness them?

Oh gods. “You are the Valg,” she breathed.

The three things inside those mortal bodies smiled. “We are princes of our realm.”