Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7) by Sarah J. Maas

Manon frowned, as if trying to work out some puzzle she couldn’t quite grasp.

“But were you to succeed,” Glennis pressed, “who would you wish to be?”

He didn’t know. Couldn’t conjure an image beyond empty darkness. Damaris, at his side, would have no answer, either.

Dorian peered inward, feeling the sea of magic that roiled inside him.

He traced its shape with careful, invisible hands. Followed a thread within himself not to his gut, but to his still-cracked heart.

Who do you wish to be?

There, like the seed of power that Cyrene had stolen, it lay—the little snarl in his magic. Not a snarl, but a knot—a knot in a tapestry. One that he might weave.

One he might fashion into something if he dared.

Who do you wish to be? he asked the barely woven tapestry within himself. Let the threads and knots take form, crafting the picture within his mind. Starting small.

Glennis chuckled. “Your eyes are green now, king.”

Dorian started, heart thundering. The others again halted their lunches, gaping, some leaning in to peer at him more closely. But he fed his magic into the loom within himself, adding to the emerging picture.

“Och, golden hair does not suit you at all.” Asterin grimaced. “You look sickly.”

Who did he wish to be? Anyone but himself. But what he’d become.

His silent answer sent that magical loom tumbling from his invisible grip, and he knew if he looked, his dark hair and sapphire eyes would have returned. Asterin sighed in relief.

But Manon smiled grimly, as if she’d heard his unspoken answer. And understood.



Night was full overhead, the Crochans’ fires crackling away beneath the lattice of leafless trees, when Glennis asked, “Have any of you seen the Wastes?”

The Thirteen blinked toward the crone. She didn’t usually address them all at once, or ask such personal questions.

But at least Glennis spoke to them. Three days of travel, and Manon was no closer to winning the Crochans over than she’d been upon their departure from the Fangs. Though they spoke to her, and occasionally joined Glennis’s hearth for meals, it was with as few words as necessary.

Asterin answered for the coven. “No. Not one of us, though I spent some time in a forest on the other side of the mountains. But never that far.” Sorrow flickered in the witch’s gold-flecked black eyes, as if there was more to the tale than that. Indeed, Sorrel and Vesta, even Manon, looked with a bit of that sorrow at the witch.

Manon asked Glennis, the sole Crochan at this fire under the canopy, “Why do you ask?”

“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.”