House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas

Tharion flashed the commander a grin. “She’ll have to breach the mists first.”

He barely got the last word out before the prow of the boat entered the famed mists.

Yet he could have sworn a shudder went through the ocean behind them, as if a great leviathan of power was already surging, rising for him—

They crossed into the dense mists. The sense of pure power vanished. Nothing remained except the gray water around the boat and the drifting mists, too thick to see more than a few feet beyond the glow of the stag’s eyes.

Tharion faced forward at last and found his friends staring at him in varying degrees of alarm. Lidia Cervos was slowly shaking her head—like she understood the gravity of what he’d done better than any of them.

“Well,” he said as casually as he could, sitting down and crossing his legs, “not to invite myself to the party, but I’m coming with you guys as well.”





47


“You have no idea how many people I had to convince not to eat her carcass on her way down here,” Jesiba drawled as Ithan stared blankly at the shape of the body beneath the white sheet in the morgue.

At the sagging place between neck and head.

Hypaxia, working on something at the counter, called over, “This might take a while.”

Ithan peered around the sterile, tiled morgue and managed to say, “Why do you guys have a morgue down here?”

Jesiba sat on a medical-looking stool, back straight. “Where else are we supposed to raise dead bodies?”

“I don’t know why I asked.”

“You did a number on her, you know.”

Ithan glared at the sorceress. Jesiba winked at him.

But Hypaxia turned to them, and Ithan got his first good look at her face since coming down here. Exhaustion etched deep lines into it, and her eyes were bleak. Hopeless.

What had swearing her allegiance to this House cost her? Jesiba had claimed the ritual had been unusually fast—was that why she looked so drained? Part of him didn’t want to know.

He opened his mouth to tell her she didn’t have to do this for him, that she should rest, but … he didn’t have time. The longer they waited, the less chance they had to be successful at raising the decapitated—

Decapitated—

Nausea churned in his gut.

“Take a seat, Ithan,” Hypaxia said gently. Greenish light wreathed her fingers as she approached the table holding a bundle in her hands.

“Is that a sewing kit?” He was going to puke everywhere.

Jesiba snorted. “You’d better hope her head’s back on when Hypaxia wakes her.”

The former witch-queen pulled a glowing syringe of firstlight from a cabinet and laid it on a tray atop a wheeled cart. “As soon as she wakes, an injection of firstlight will heal the damage. But the head needs to be attached first so that the tendons can regrow and latch on.”

“Okay,” Ithan said, taking a deep breath against his rising nausea. “Okay.” Fuck, he was a monster for having made this necessary.

“Here we go,” Hypaxia said.

Jesiba caught Ithan’s eye. “Sure you want to resurrect a Fendyr?”

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t face the answer. So he said nothing.

Hypaxia began chanting.



* * *



Hunt had been in Morven Donnall’s throne room for all of ten seconds and he already hated it.

After the shining white boat had guided them through the mists, he’d expected some sort of summer paradise to lie beyond. Not a cloudy sky above a land of dense green hills and a gray-stoned castle perched on a cliff above a winding—also gray—river. In the distance, thatched-roof cottages marked farmsteads, and a small city of two- and three-story buildings crusted the hill, up to the castle itself.

No skyscrapers. No highways. No cars. The lamps he could make out were flame, not firstlight.

The boat sailed down the river toward the cliff, entering the castle through a yawning cave at its base. Everyone had stayed silent throughout the journey, assuming the stag on the prow had ears that worked as well as its mouth, and could broadcast every word to the male waiting in the castle for them.

A male now seated before them, on a throne seemingly crafted from a single set of antlers. The beast who’d grown them had to have been colossal, the likes of which didn’t exist elsewhere on Midgard. Did stags that big roam around here? The thought was … not comforting.

But neither were the shadows that curled like snakes around the king, wild and twining. A coiled crown of them sat atop Morven’s dark head, blacker than the Pit.

Bryce and Ruhn stood at the head of their little group, and Hunt swapped a look with Baxian, whose frown told Hunt he was deeply unimpressed by this place.

“Could use a reno, if you ask me,” Tharion muttered from Hunt’s other side, and Hunt’s mouth twitched upward.

The mer had some nerve, cracking jokes when he’d just acted directly against the Ocean Queen’s orders. Yeah, Hunt was glad to have Ketos with them, but fuck—what had the mer been thinking, jumping into the boat?

Hunt knew what he’d been thinking, actually. And didn’t blame the mer for his choice, but they had enough enemies out there as it was. If this somehow provoked the Ocean Queen to work against them …

From the glares the others kept throwing Ketos’s way, they weren’t happy about this development, either. But right now, they had another ruler to deal with.