He would sort through each wild thought when he was alone. He gripped the damp rail harder, fighting the urge to ask more.

   But then the captain gave him a weighing look, as if he could see through every mask Aedion had ever worn. For a heartbeat, Aedion considered ­putting the blade right through the captain and dumping his body in the Avery, despite the information he possessed. The captain glanced at the blade, too, and Aedion wondered if he was thinking the same thing—­regretting his decision to trust him. The captain should regret it, should curse himself for a fool.

   Aedion said, “Why ­were you tracking the rebels?”

   “Because I thought they might have valuable information.” It had to be truly valuable, then, if he’d risk revealing himself as a traitor to get it.

   Aedion had been willing to torture the captain—­to kill him, too. He’d done worse before. But torturing and killing his queen’s lover ­wouldn’t go over well if—when she returned. And the captain was now his greatest source of information. He wanted to know more about Aelin, about her plans, about what she was like and how he could find her. He wanted to know everything. Anything. Especially where the captain now stood on the game board—­and what the captain knew about the king. So Aedion said, “Tell me more about those rings.”

   But the captain shook his head. “I want to make a bargain with you.”

    20

   The black eye was still gruesome, but it improved over the next week as Celaena worked in the kitchens, tried and failed to shift with Rowan, and generally avoided everyone. The spring rains had come to stay and the kitchen was packed every night, so Celaena took to eating dinner on the shadowed steps, arriving just before the Story Keeper began speaking.

   Story Keeper—­that’s what Emrys was, a title of honor amongst both Fae and humans in Wendlyn. What it meant was that when he began telling a story, you sat down and shut up. It also meant that he was a walking library of the kingdom’s legends and myths.

   By that time, Celaena knew most of the fortress’s residents, if only in the sense that she could put names to faces. She’d observed them out of instinct, to learn her surroundings, her potential enemies and threats. She knew they observed her, too, when they thought she ­wasn’t paying attention. And any shred of regret she felt at not approaching them was burned up by the fact that no one bothered to approach her, either.

   The only person who made an effort was Luca, who still peppered Celaena with questions as they worked, still prattled on and on about his training, the fortress gossip, the weather. He’d only talked to her once about anything ­else—­on a morning when it had taken a monumental effort to peel herself out of bed, and only the scar on her palm had made her plant her feet on the icy floor. She’d been washing the breakfast dishes, staring out the window without seeing anything, too heavy in her bones, when Luca had dumped a pot in the sink and quietly said, “For a long while, I ­couldn’t talk about what happened to me before I came ­here. There ­were some days I ­couldn’t talk at all. ­Couldn’t get out of bed, either. But if—­when you need to talk . . .”

   She’d shut him down with a long look. And he hadn’t said anything like it since.

   Thankfully, Emrys gave her space. Lots of space, especially when Malakai arrived during breakfast to make sure Celaena hadn’t caused any trouble. She usually avoided looking at the other fortress couples, but ­here, where she ­couldn’t walk away . . . she hated their closeness, the way Malakai’s eyes lit up every time he saw him. Hated it so much that she choked on it.

   She never asked Rowan why he, too, came to hear Emrys’s stories. As far as they ­were each concerned, the other didn’t exist outside of training.

   Training was a generous way to describe what they ­were doing, as she had accomplished nothing. She didn’t shift once. He snarled and sneered and hissed, but she ­couldn’t do it. Every day, always when Rowan disappeared for a few moments, she tried, but—­nothing. Rowan threatened to drag her back to the barrows, as that seemed to be the only thing that had triggered any sort of response, but he’d backed off—­to her surprise—­when she told him that she’d slit her own throat before entering that place again. So they swore at each other, sat in brooding silence on the temple ruin, and occasionally had those unspoken shouting matches. If she was in a particularly nasty mood, he made her chop wood—­log after log, until she could hardly lift the ax and her hands ­were blistered. If she was going to be pissed off at the ­whole damn world, he said, if she was going to waste his time by not shifting, then she might as well be useful in some way.

   All this waiting—­for her. For the shift that made her shudder to think about.

   It was on the eighth day after her arrival, after scrubbing pots and pans until her back throbbed, that Celaena stopped in the middle of their hike up the now-­familiar ridge. “I have a request.” She never spoke to him unless she needed to—­mostly to curse at him. Now she said, “I want to see you shift.”

   A blink, those green eyes flat. “You don’t have the privilege of giving orders.”

   “Show me how you do it.” Her memories of the Fae in Terrasen ­were foggy, as if someone had smeared oil over them. She ­couldn’t remember seeing one of them change, where their clothes had gone, how fast it had been . . . He stared her down, seeming to say, Just this once, and then—

   A soft flash of light, a ripple of color, and a hawk was flapping midair, beating for the nearest tree branch. He settled on it, clicking his beak. She scanned the mossy earth. No sign of his clothes, his weapons. It had taken barely more than a few heartbeats.

   He gave a battle cry and swooped, talons slashing for her eyes. She lunged behind the tree just as there was another flash and shudder of color, and then he was clothed and armed and growling in her face. “Your turn.”

   She ­wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her tremble. It was—­incredible. Incredible to see the shift. “Where do your clothes go?”

   “Between, somewhere. I don’t particularly care.” Such dead, joyless eyes. She had a feeling she looked like that these days. She knew she had looked like that the night Chaol had caught her gutting Archer in the tunnel. What had left Rowan so soulless?

   He bared his teeth, but she didn’t submit. She’d been watching the demi-­Fae warrior males at the fortress, and they growled and showed their teeth about everything. They ­were not the ethereal, gentle folk that legend painted, that she vaguely remembered from Terrasen. No holding hands and dancing around the maypole with flowers in their hair. They ­were predators, the lot of them. Some of the dominant females ­were just as aggressive, prone to snarling when challenged or annoyed or even hungry. She supposed she might have fit in with them if she’d bothered to try.