But she’d wanted to be a healer—like her mother and grandmother. She’d started shadowing her mother as soon as she could talk, learning slowly, as all the traditional healers did. And those years on that farm, however peaceful (if tedious and dull), hadn’t been enough to make her forget eleven years of training, or the urge to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She hadn’t been close to her cousins, despite their charity, and neither party had really tried to bridge the gap caused by distance and fear and war. So no one objected when she took whatever money she’d saved up and walked off the farm a few months before her eighteenth birthday.

She’d set out for Antica, a city of learning on the southern continent—a realm untouched by Adarlan and war, where rumor claimed magic still existed. She’d traveled on foot from Fenharrow, across the mountains into Melisande, through Oakwald, eventually winding up at Innish—where rumor also claimed one could find a boat to the southern continent, to Antica. And it was precisely here that she’d run out of money.

It was why she’d taken the job at the Pig. First, it had just been temporary, to earn enough to afford the passage to Antica. But then she’d worried she wouldn’t have any money when she arrived, and then that she wouldn’t have any money to pay for her training at the Torre Cesme, the great academy of healers and physicians. So she’d stayed, and weeks had turned into months. Somehow the dream of sailing away, of attending the Torre, had been set aside. Especially as Nolan increased the rent on her room and the cost of her food and found ways to lower her salary. Especially as that healer’s stomach of hers allowed her to endure the indignities and darkness of this place.

Yrene sighed through her nose. So here she was. A barmaid in a backwater town with hardly two coppers to her name and no future in sight.

There was a crunch of boots on stone, and Yrene glared down the alley. If Nolan caught the urchins eating his food—however stale and disgusting—he’d blame her. He’d say he wasn’t a charity and take the cost out of her paycheck. He’d done it once before, and she’d had to hunt down the urchins and scold them, make them understand that they had to wait until the middle of the night to get the food she so carefully laid out.

“I told you to wait until it’s past—” she started, but paused as four figures stepped from the mist.

Men. The mercenaries from before.

Yrene was moving for the open doorway in a heartbeat, but they were fast—faster.

One blocked the door while another came up behind her, grabbing her tight and pulling her against his massive body. “Scream and I’ll slit your throat,” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot and reeking of ale. “Saw you making some hefty tips tonight, girl. Where are they?”

Yrene didn’t know what she would have done next: fought or cried or begged or actually tried to scream. But she didn’t have to decide.

The man farthest from them was yanked into the mist with a strangled cry.

The mercenary holding her whirled toward him, dragging Yrene along. There was a ruffle of clothing, then a thump. Then silence.

“Ven?” the man blocking the door called.

Nothing.

The third mercenary—standing between Yrene and the mist—drew his short sword. Yrene didn’t have time to cry out in surprise or warning as a dark figure slipped from the mist and grabbed him. Not in front, but from the side, as if they’d just appeared out of thin air.

The mercenary threw Yrene to the ground and drew the sword from across his back, a broad, wicked-looking blade. But his companion didn’t even shout. More silence.

“Come out, you bleedin’ coward,” the ringleader growled. “Face us like a proper man.”

A low, soft laugh.

Yrene’s blood went cold. Silba, protect her.

She knew that laugh—knew the cool, cultured voice that went with it.

“Just like how you proper men surrounded a defenseless girl in an alley?”

With that, the stranger stepped from the mist. She had two long daggers in her hands. And both blades were dark with dripping blood.

CHAPTER

3

Gods. Oh, gods.

Yrene’s breath came quickly as the girl stepped closer to the two remaining attackers. The first mercenary barked a laugh, but the one by the door was wide-eyed. Yrene carefully, so carefully, backed away.

“You killed my men?” the mercenary said, blade held aloft.

The young woman flipped one of her daggers into a new position. The kind of position that Yrene thought would easily allow the blade to go straight up through the ribs and into the heart. “Let’s just say your men got what was coming to them.”

The mercenary lunged, but the girl was waiting. Yrene knew she should run—run and run and not look back—but the girl was only armed with two daggers, and the mercenary was enormous, and—

It was over before it really started. The mercenary got in two hits, both met with those wicked-looking daggers. And then she knocked him out cold with a swift blow to the head. So fast—unspeakably fast and graceful. A wraith moving through the mist.

He crumpled into the fog and out of sight, and Yrene didn’t listen too hard as the girl followed where he’d fallen.

Yrene whipped her head to the mercenary in the doorway, preparing to shout a warning to her savior. But the man was already sprinting down the alley as fast as his feet could carry him.

Yrene had half a mind to do that herself when the stranger emerged from the mist, blades clean but still out. Still ready.

“Please don’t kill me,” Yrene whispered. She was ready to beg, to offer everything in exchange for her useless, wasted life.

But the young woman just laughed under her breath and said, “What would have been the point in saving you, then?”

Celaena hadn’t meant to save the barmaid.

It had been sheer luck that she’d spotted the four mercenaries creeping about the streets, sheer luck that they seemed as eager for trouble as she was. She had hunted them into that alley, where she found them ready to hurt that girl in unforgivable ways.

The fight was over too quickly to really be enjoyable, or be a balm to her temper. If you could even call it a fight.

The fourth one had gotten away, but she didn’t feel like chasing him, not as the servant girl stood in front of her, shaking from head to toe. Celaena had a feeling that hurling a dagger after the sprinting man would only make the girl start screaming. Or faint. Which would … complicate things.

But the girl didn’t scream or faint. She just pointed a trembling finger at Celaena’s arm. “You—you’re bleeding.”

Celaena frowned down at the little shining spot on her bicep. “I suppose I am.”

A careless mistake. The thickness of her tunic had stopped it from being a troublesome wound, but she’d have to clean it. It would be healed in a week or less. She made to turn back to the street, to see what else she could find to amuse her, but the girl spoke again.

“I—I could bind it up for you.”

She wanted to shake the girl. Shake her for about ten different reasons. The first, and biggest, was because she was trembling and scared and had been utterly useless. The second was for being stupid enough to stand in that alley in the middle of the night. She didn’t feel like thinking about all the other reasons—not when she was already angry enough.