Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass #4) by Sarah J. Maas

Manon ran an eye over the feeding troughs in the center of the chamber. None of the mounts touched the meat and grain provided by the mortal men who maintained the aerie. One of those men was laying down fresh hay, and a flash of Manon’s iron teeth had him scurrying down the stairs, the tang of his fear lingering in the air like a smear of oil.

“Four weeks,” Asterin said, glancing at her pale-blue wyvern, visible on her perch through one of the many open archways. “Four weeks, and no action. What are we even doing here? When will we move?”

Indeed, the restrictions were grating on them all. Limiting flying to nighttime to keep the host mostly undetected, the stench of these men, the stone, the forges, the winding passages of the endless Keep—they took little bites out of Manon’s patience every day. Even the small mountain range in which the Keep was nestled was dense, made only of bare rock, with few signs of the spring that had now blanketed most of the land. A dead, festering place.

“We move when we’re told to move,” Manon said to Asterin, gazing toward the setting sun. Soon—as soon as that sun vanished over those jagged black peaks—they could take to the skies. Her stomach grumbled. “And if you’re going to question orders, Asterin, then I’ll be happy to replace you.”

“I’m not questioning,” Asterin said, holding Manon’s gaze for longer than most witches dared. “But it’s a waste of our skills to be sitting here like hens in a coop, at the duke’s bidding. I’d like to rip open that worm’s belly.”

Sorrel murmured, “I would advise you, Asterin, to resist the urge.” Manon’s tan-skinned Third, built like a battering ram, kept her attention solely on the quick, lethal movements of her Second. The stone to Asterin’s flame, ever since they’d been witchlings.

“The King of Adarlan can’t steal our mounts from us. Not now,” Asterin said. “Perhaps we should move deeper into the mountains and camp there, where at least the air is clean. There’s no point squatting here.”

Sorrel let out a warning growl, but Manon jerked her chin, a silent order to stand down as she herself stepped closer to her Second. “The last thing I need,” Manon breathed in Asterin’s face, “is to have that mortal swine question the suitability of my Thirteen. Keep yourself in line. And if I hear you telling your scouts any of this—”

“You think I would speak ill of you to inferiors?” A snap of iron teeth.

“I think you—and all of us—are sick of being confined to this shit-hole, and you have a tendency to say what you think and consider the consequences later.”

Asterin had always been that way—and that wildness was exactly why Manon had chosen her as her Second a century ago. The flame to Sorrel’s stone … and to Manon’s ice.

The rest of the Thirteen began filing in as the sun vanished. They took one glance at Manon and Asterin and wisely kept away, their eyes averted. Vesta even muttered a prayer to the Three-Faced Goddess.

“I want only for the Thirteen—for all the Blackbeaks—to win glory on the battlefield,” Asterin said, refusing to break Manon’s stare.

“We will,” Manon promised, loud enough for the others to hear. “But until then, keep yourself in check, or I’ll ground you until you’re worthy of riding with us again.”

Asterin lowered her eyes. “Your will is mine, Wing Leader.”

Coming from anyone else, even Sorrel, the honorific would have been normal, expected. Because none of them would ever have dared to cast that tone to it.

Manon lashed out, so fast that even Asterin couldn’t retreat. Manon’s hand closed around her cousin’s throat, her iron nails digging into the soft skin beneath her ears. “You step one foot out of line, Asterin, and these”—Manon dug her nails in deeper as blue blood began sliding down Asterin’s golden-tan neck—“find their mark.”

Manon didn’t care that they’d been fighting at each other’s sides for a century, that Asterin was her closest relative, or that Asterin had gone to the mat again and again to defend Manon’s position as heir. She’d put Asterin down the moment she became a useless nuisance. Manon let Asterin see all of that in her eyes.

Asterin’s gaze flicked to the bloodred cloak Manon wore—the cloak Manon’s grandmother had ordered her to take from that Crochan after Manon slit her throat, after the witch bled out on the floor of the Omega. Asterin’s beautiful, wild face went cold as she said, “Understood.”

Manon released her throat, flicking Asterin’s blood off her nails as she turned to the Thirteen, now standing by their mounts, stiff-backed and silent. “We ride. Now.”





Abraxos shifted and bobbed beneath Manon as she climbed into the saddle, well aware that one misstep off the wooden beam on which he was perched would lead to a very long, very permanent drop.

Below and to the south, countless army campfires flickered, and the smoke of the forges among them rose high in plumes that marred the starry, moonlit sky. Abraxos growled.

“I know, I know, I’m hungry, too,” Manon said, blinking the lid above her eye into place as she secured the harnesses that kept her firmly in the saddle. To her left and right, Asterin and Sorrel mounted their wyverns and turned to her. Her cousin’s wounds had already clotted.