Page 15 of Court of Wolves

Dirty silver hair slashed the air when she glanced at him. “How?”

“Like I said, I notice shit. You care about them more than you care about yourself. You’d do anything to keep them safe.”

“Yeah,” she admitted quietly, drinking what was left in the cup and letting her shirt fall back into place. Neither of them smelled like perfumes courtiers right now, but that whoosh of fabric fanned her scent through the cell and it hit Bryon like a knife through the chest. Floral, not too sweet, something with depth and richness. Far too enticing.

“As for why?” His mouth thinned. “No doubt he’s planning something bigger and worse for next time.”

And Bryon would be fucking damned if he let her go alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It stood to reason that a port town as gleaming as the gold-stone, azure-roofed Bevhyre would have piss-thin ale. For once, being right didn’t fill Isak Sintali with a sense of satisfaction. Mostly it filled him with the watery taste of sad, artisan hops and grains that were trying too hard. When his sandwich arrived, it had a little Sainsan flag stuck through it to keep all the fillings inside. He was used to army rations even after months out of service, and the semi-edible food he’d fed himself with stolen money in Eosantha had seemed like a king’s feast. This? This was a saint’s feast. Minus the piss-thin ale.

He crammed the sandwich into his mouth and took a big bite as he scowled at the newspaper he’d liberated from a table across the pub. He had some coin from a job he did for a guy back in Eosantha, but he had to be frugal or it’d drain within a week. He’d already spent more than he’d like on a wagon through Venhaus to Port Crystellion and then a spot of damp wooden floor on a trout-smelling barge making its way across the Silver Sea into Sainsa.

As far as anyone at the port knew, he was a sailor born and bred in Venhaus. His features were different to a Venhausian,but he was dressed in the long, tailored style of their clothes with a row of gleaming buttons running across each shoulder and down his arms, and the fifty-something portmaster looked exhausted so he didn’t peer too closely at Isak’s finer features.

And now he was here, slumped in a finely carved chair by a window of gold and blue stained glass, wishing for ditches and murky doorways and gloomy, vaguely threatening alleyways. It was like being back in the perfect parts of Eosantha all over again. At least the fae here were too polite to stare. The humans, however, were content to meet the eyes of everyone and match them with a glare, but he avoided them. He could sense beastkind, at least one, which meant they could probably sense them. Isak wondered if they could sense the wrongness inside his blood, his bones, his soul.

“Fuck, I hope not,” he muttered, putting down the massive sandwich to flip open his pilfered newspaper. The front page, he’d learned in his two days here so far, were always printed with good news stories. The juicy stuff was inside.

In the week since the nightmare at the saints' circle, he’d watched the news closely. Viskae, his own saint, knew there would be others, that the three saints they saw in Venhaus weren’t the only ones. The saints' circle was still broken, stillopen.There’d been no indication of a new saint yet, but certainly signs of the others—storms, typhoons, whole farms wilting overnight, and a disease spreading through livestock. The Eversky’s and the Provider’s work. As for Enryr, the Hunchback Saint, that was harder to track. Information could corrupt; maybe that explained all the instability in Aether.

Isak had a much simpler explanation: Maia’s bitch queen aunt was to blame.

“Szellwyn’s gone,” he muttered to himself, swallowing a mouthful of piss. Sorry, ale. “Vassalian soldiers trappedSzellwyn’s forces between their cavalry and the mountains. Anyone who resisted was slaughtered.”

Just like the Crooked City on the border and Millszt,Viskae replied with heavy sombreness.

Yup.Ismene’s forces had rolled over them like a bull trampling ants. Isak was no tactician but even he could see she’d conquered the lower kingdom for access to the upper. And once she had that? Sainsa and V’haiv would be next.

Which was a little worrying since he wasinSainsa.

“Remind me why the fuck I came here again,” he muttered, quietly enough that people wouldn’t think he was a completely nutjob for talking to himself. He shoved another bite of sandwich into his mouth. The combination of fresh seafood, salty sea leaf, and lemon flower shouldn’t have worked. It wasdivine,and that pissed Isak off. He wanted to go home instead of traipsing across Sainsa, but he had no home. He was an indentured slave who became a soldier against his will. There was no home to go back to.

Because,Viskae said with heavy exasperation, probably because she’d answered this exact question sixty times already,your brother, your mate, and their friends—the saints reincarnated, upon whom the entire Saintlands’ fate rests—are at the mercy of the dark ones. If they aren’t freed, everything you love about this realm will blacken. Everything you’ve ever known will fall. It will be a land of hollow, screaming suffering, and there will be no pints of ale in that future.

“Solid reasoning,” he admitted. Even crappy alcohol was alcohol. And fuck did he need something to drink when he read the rest of the paper. It wasn’t just Szellwyn; with the exception of the fishing town Marszton, theentiretyof Lower Aether was under control of the Vassalian army or their elite teams. Fucking Foxes. Add to that the fact a good quarter of Venhaus was in smoking ruins… would anything be left standing?

No,Viskae answered.

“That wasn’t a question for you,” he muttered.

I don’t give a shit.Nothingwill be left. Finish your food and find passage to Saintsgarde. Something pulls me there; information awaits you in the capital.

Great. Information. Just what he needed to fight three true, invincible saints. “What about an army? A mystical weapon? Or that box my superiors were so obsessed with?”

Yes, yes, all of that.

Now she was bullshitting him. Isak sighed and finished his sandwich, but it turned sour in his stomach when he turned the page and saw a current map of the continent.

Vassal-controlled land had been rendered in red, as rich and vibrant as blood. It had bled across the entire lower half of the Saintlands, all the way to the mountains. They were already moving up the Aether kingdoms and only the top third of Venhaus remained, the port he’d left just days ago surviving butbarely—the red line was too close for comfort.

Isak sat back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his bristly jaw. “Shit.”

He’d known it was bad, knew saints making monsters and sacrificing hundreds of people couldnotbe good, but seeing it in vibrant, damning colour was… terrifying. It wasn’t really Vassal who conquered these kingdoms; it wasthe saints.

The dark ones,Viskae agreed.

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