Page 114 of Kingdom of Ash

“Curiosity,” the crone said. “None of us have been, either. We do not dare.”

“For fear of us?” Asterin’s golden hair shifted as she leaned closer to the fire. She’d found a strip of leather in the camp to tie across her brow—not the black she’d worn for the past century, but a familiar sight, at least. One thing, it seemed, had not entirely altered.

“For fear of what it will do to us, to see what is left of our once-great city, our lands.”

“Nothing but rubble, they say,” Manon muttered.

“And would you rebuild it, if you could?” Glennis asked. “Rebuild the city for yourselves?”

“We never discussed what we’d do,” Asterin said. “If we could ever go home.”

“A plan, perhaps,” Glennis mused, “would be wise. A powerful thing to have.” Her blue eyes settled on Manon. “Not just for the Crochans, but your own people.”

Dorian nodded, though he was not a part of this conversation.

Who did the Thirteen, the Ironteeth and Crochans, wish to be, to build, as a people?

Manon opened her mouth, but the Shadows burst into the ring of their hearth, their faces tight. The Thirteen were instantly on their feet.

“We scouted ahead, to the rendezvous site,” Edda panted.

Manon braced herself. A whisper of power flickered through the camp, the only indication that Dorian’s magic had coiled around them in a near-impenetrable shield.

“It reeks of death,” Briar finished.

CHAPTER 33

They had been too late.

Not just by an hour, or a day. No, judging by the state of the bodies in the leaf-strewn clearing twenty miles south, the week they had been delayed had cost the Eyllwe war band everything.

Morath had left the warriors where they lay, a few red-caped Crochans—the ones who had summoned their northern sisters here—amongst the fallen. The smell of decay was enough to make Manon’s eyes water as they surveyed what had been left.

She had done this.

Brought this about, in delaying the Crochans through that skirmish. One look at Dorian, the king lingering at the edge of the clearing with an arm over his nose to ward against the reek, and she knew he thought it, too. The sharpness in his eyes spoke enough.

“Some got away,” Edda announced, the Shadow’s face grim. “But most didn’t.”

“They wanted survivors,” Bronwen said, loud enough for all to hear. “To sow fear.”

Manon studied the shattered trees, the ancient oaks as broken as the bodies on the forest floor. Proof of who, exactly, had been responsible for the massacre.

She had done that, too.

Bronwen said, voice cold and low, “What mortal band could ever hope to survive an attack by one of the Ironteeth legions? Especially when that aerial legion was trained by such a skilled Wing Leader.”

“Choose your words carefully,” Asterin warned.

But Una, the pretty, brown-haired Crochan and another of Manon’s cousins, gripped her silver-bound broom and said, “You trained them. All of you—you trained the witches who didthis.” Una pointed to the decaying bodies, the torn throats, the killing that had not stopped at quick deaths. Not at all. “And you expect us to forget that?”

Silence fell. Even from Asterin. Glennis said nothing.

Manon’s hands turned frail. Foreign. The iron within them brittle.

She had done this. The soldiers in the wide clearing were nothing and no one to her, most were mere mortals, and yet … A woman lay near Manon’s boots, her torso split clean open from navel to sternum. Her brown eyes gazed unseeingly at the shattered canopy overhead, her mouth still gaping in pain.

“I can burn them,” Dorian offered no one in particular.

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