Queen of Shadows

Aedion’s vision was swimming, his every breath gloriously difficult.

Soon. He could feel Death squatting in the corner of his cell, counting down the last of his breaths, a lion waiting to pounce. Every so often, Aedion would smile toward those gathered shadows.

The infection had spread, and with two days until the spectacle at which he was to be executed, his death was coming none too soon. The guards assumed he was sleeping to pass the time.

Aedion was waiting for his food, watching the small barred window in the top of the cell door for any sign of the guards’ arrival. But he was fairly sure he was hallucinating when the door opened and the Crown Prince strolled in.

There were no guards behind him, no sign of any escort as the prince stared from the doorway.

The prince’s unmoving face told him immediately what he needed to know: this was not a rescue attempt. And the black stone collar around the prince’s throat told him everything else: things had not gone well the day Sorscha had been murdered.

He managed to grin. “Good to see you, princeling.”

The prince ran an eye over Aedion’s dirty hair, the beard that had grown during the past few weeks, and then over to the pile of vomit in the corner from when he hadn’t been able to make it to the bucket an hour ago.

Aedion drawled as best he could, “The least you could do is take me to dinner before looking at me like that.”

The prince’s sapphire eyes flicked to his, and Aedion blinked past the haze covering his vision. What studied him was cold, predatory, and not quite human.

Quietly, Aedion said, “Dorian.”

The thing that was now the prince smiled a little. The captain had said those rings of Wyrdstone enslaved the mind—the soul. He’d seen the collar waiting beside the king’s throne, and had wondered if it was the same. Worse.

“Tell me what happened in the throne room, Dorian,” Aedion wheezed, his head pounding.

The prince blinked slowly. “Nothing happened.”

“Why are you here, Dorian?” Aedion had never addressed the prince by his given name, but using it, reminding him, somehow seemed important. Even if it only provoked the prince into killing him.

“I came to look at the infamous general before they execute you like an animal.”

No chance of being killed today, then.

“The same way they executed your Sorscha?”

Though the prince didn’t move, Aedion could have sworn he recoiled, as if someone yanked on a leash, as if there was still someone in need of leashing.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the thing inside the prince said. But its nostrils flared.

“Sorscha,” Aedion breathed, his lungs aching. “Sorscha—your woman, the healer. I was standing beside you when they cut off her head. I heard you screaming as you dove for her body.” The thing went a bit rigid, and Aedion pressed, “Where did they bury her, Dorian? What did they do with her body, the body of the woman you loved?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” it said again.

“Sorscha,” Aedion panted, his breathing uneven. “Her name was Sorscha, and she loved you—and they killed her. The man who put that collar around your neck killed her.”

The thing was quiet. Then it tilted its head. The smile it gave him was horrifying in its beauty. “I shall enjoy watching you die, General.”

Aedion coughed out a laugh. The prince—the thing he’d become—turned smoothly and strode out. And Aedion might have laughed again, for spite and defiance, had he not heard the prince say to someone in the hall, “The general is sick. See to it that he’s attended to immediately.”

No.

The thing must have smelled it on him.

Aedion could do nothing as a healer was summoned—an older woman named Amithy—and he was held down, too weak to fight back as she attended his wounds. She shoved a tonic down his throat that made him choke; his wound was washed and bound, and his shackles were shortened until he couldn’t move his hands enough to rip out the stitching. The tonics kept coming, every hour, no matter how hard he bit, no matter how forcefully he tried to clamp his mouth shut.

So they saved him, and Aedion cursed and swore at Death for failing him, even as he silently prayed to Mala Light-Bringer to keep Aelin away from the party, away from the prince, and away from the king and his Wyrdstone collars.

The thing inside him left the dungeons and headed into the glass castle, steering his body like a ship. And now it forced him to be still as they stood before the man he often saw in those moments that pierced through the darkness.

The man was seated on a glass throne, smiling faintly as he said, “Bow.”

The thing inside him yanked hard on their bond, lightning spearing his muscles, ordering them to obey. It was how he’d been forced to descend into those dungeons, where that golden-haired warrior had said her name—said her name so many times that he began screaming, even if he made no sound. He was still screaming as his muscles betrayed him yet again, bringing him to his knees, the tendons on his neck lashing with pain, forcing him to bow his head.

“Still resisting?” the man said, glancing at the dark ring on his finger as though it possessed the answer already. “I can feel both of you in there. Interesting.”

Yes—that thing in the darkness was growing stronger, now able to reach through the invisible wall between them and puppet him, speak through him. But not entirely, not for long amounts of time. He patched up the holes as best he could, but it kept breaking through.

Demon. A demon prince.

And he saw that moment—over and over and over—when the woman he’d loved had lost her head. Hearing her name on the general’s raspy tongue had made him start whaling on the other wall in his mind, the barrier that kept him locked in the dark. But the darkness in his mind was a sealed tomb.

The man on the throne said, “Report.”

The command shuddered through him, and he spit out the details of his encounter, every word and action. And the thing—the demon—delighted in his horror at it.

“Clever of Aedion to try to quietly die on me,” the man said. “He must think his cousin has a good chance of arriving at your party, then, if he’s so desperate to rob us of our entertainment.”

He kept silent, as he had not been instructed to speak. The man looked him over, those black eyes full of delight. “I should have done this years ago. I don’t know why I wasted so much time waiting to see whether you’d have any power. Foolish of me.”

He tried to speak, tried to move, tried to do anything with that mortal body of his. But the demon gripped his mind like a fist, and the muscles of his face slid into a smile as he said, “It is my pleasure to serve, Majesty.”