Manon hit the earth, spat out a mouthful of blue blood, and was up in a heartbeat. The Yellowlegs heir slashed with an iron-­tipped hand, a blow that could have severed through bone and flesh. Manon ducked past her guard and threw Iskra onto the unforgiving stone.

   Iskra groaned above the shouts of the swarming witches, and Manon brought her fist down onto her face.

   Her knuckles howled in pain, but all she could see was that whip, the pain in Abraxos’s eyes, the fear. Struggling against Manon’s weight, Iskra swiped at her face. Manon reeled back, the blow cutting down her neck. She didn’t quite feel the stinging, or the warm trickle of blood. She just drew back her fist, knee digging harder into Iskra’s chest, and struck. Again. And again.

   She lifted her aching fist once more, but there ­were hands at her wrist, under her arms, hauling her off. Manon thrashed against them, still screaming, the sound wordless and endless.

   “Manon!” Sorrel roared in her ear, and nails cut into her shoulder—­not hard enough to damage but to make her pause, to realize there ­were witches everywhere, in the pit and in the viewing platform, gaping. Sword raised, Asterin was standing between her and—

   And Iskra, on the ground, face bloodied and swollen, her own Second’s sword out and poised to meet Asterin’s.

   “He is fine,” Sorrel said, squeezing her tighter. “Abraxos is fine, Manon. Look at him. Look at him and see that he’s fine.” Breathing through her mouth thanks to her blood-­clogged nose, Manon obeyed, and found him crouching, eyes wide and on her. His wound had already clotted.

   Iskra hadn’t moved an inch from where Manon had thrown her onto the floor. But Asterin and the other Second ­were growling, ready to launch into another fight that might very well rip this mountain apart.

   Enough.

   Manon shook off Sorrel’s firm grip. Everyone went dead silent as Manon wiped her bloody nose and mouth on the back of her wrist. Iskra snarled at her from the floor, blood from her broken nose leaking onto her cut lip.

   “You touch him again,” Manon said, “and I’ll drink the marrow from your bones.”

   •

   The Yellowlegs heir got a second beating that night from her mother in the mess hall—­plus two lashes of the whip for the blows she’d given Abraxos. She’d offered them to Manon, but Manon refused under the guise of indifference.

   Her arm was actually too stiff and aching to use the whip with any efficiency.

   Manon had just entered Abraxos’s cage the next day, Asterin on her heels, when the Blueblood heir appeared at the stairway ­en­­trance, her red-haired Second close behind. Manon, her face still swollen and eye beautifully black, gave the witch a tight nod. There ­were other pens down ­here, though she rarely ran into anyone ­else, especially not the two heirs.

   But Petrah paused at the bars, and it was then that Manon noticed the goat’s leg in her Second’s arms. “I heard the fight was something to behold,” Petrah said, keeping a respectful distance from Manon and the open door to the pen. Petrah smiled faintly. “Iskra looks worse.”

   Manon flicked her brows up, though the motion made her face throb.

   Petrah held out a hand to her Second, and the witch passed her the leg of meat. “I also heard that your Thirteen and your mounts only eat the meat they catch. My Keelie caught this on our morning flight. She wanted to share with Abraxos.”

   “I don’t accept meat from rival clans.”

   “Are we rivals?” Petrah asked. “I thought the King of Adarlan had convinced us to fly under one banner again.”

   Manon took a long breath. “What do you want? I have training in ten minutes.”

   Petrah’s Second bristled, but the heir smiled. “I told you—­my Keelie wanted to give this to him.”

   “Oh? She told you?” Manon sneered.

   Petrah cocked her head. “Doesn’t your wyvern talk to you?”

   Abraxos was watching with as much awareness as the other witches. “They don’t talk.”

   Petrah shrugged, tapping a hand casually over her heart. “Don’t they?”

   She left the goat leg before walking off into the raucous gloom of the pens.

   Manon threw the meat away.

   39

   “Tell me about how you learned to tattoo.”

   “No.”

   Hunched over the wooden table in Rowan’s room a night after their encounter with the creature in the lake, Celaena looked up from where she held the bone-­handled needle over his wrist. “If you don’t answer my questions, I might very well make a mistake, and . . .” She lowered the tattooing needle to his tan, muscled arm for emphasis. Rowan, to her surprise, let out a huff that might have been a laugh. She figured it was a good sign that he’d asked her to help shade in the parts of his arm he ­couldn’t reach himself; the tattoo around his wrist needed to be re-­inked now that the wounds from her burning him had faded. “Did you learn from someone? Master and apprentice and all that?”

   He gave her a rather incredulous look. “Yes, master and apprentice and all that. In the war camps, we had a commander who used to tattoo the number of enemies he’d killed on his flesh—­sometimes he’d write the ­whole story of a battle. All the young soldiers ­were enamored of it, and I convinced him to teach me.”

   “With that legendary charm of yours, I suppose.”

   That earned her a half smile at least. “Just fill in the spots where I—” A hiss as she took the needle and little mallet and made another dark, bloody mark in him. “Good. That’s the right depth.” With his immortal, fast-­healing body, Rowan’s ink was mixed with salt and powdered iron to keep the magic in his blood from wiping away any trace of the tattoo.

   She’d awoken that morning feeling . . . clear. The grief and pain ­were still there, writhing inside her, but for the first time in a long while, she felt as though she could see. As though she could breathe.

   Focusing on keeping her hand steady, she made another little mark, then another. “Tell me about your family.”

   “Tell me about yours and I’ll tell you about mine,” he said through gritted teeth as she kept going. He’d instructed her thoroughly before he had let her take the needles to his skin.

   “Fine. Are your parents alive?” A stupid, dangerous question to ask, given what had happened with his mate, but there was no grief in his face as he shook his head.

   “My parents ­were very old when they conceived me.” Not old in the human sense, she knew. “I was their only child in the millennia they’d been mated. They faded into the Afterworld before I reached my second de­cade.”