Freya was broken and there was nothing she could say to change that. She never spoke much anyway always distracted by anything that caught her attention. You could say she was away with the fairies. The torture she that had been forced upon her had...
The girl had not appeared since then. Not in the villages or anywhere during Celaena's stay at Doranelle. she figured she must have been a hallucination of her fear filled state. but nobody could know for sure.
Then this girl completely left her mind with the threat of the valg princes head their direction she had much worse things to focus on. little did she know that they would be seeing each other again so soon.
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"Get your sword and your weapons, and hurry," Rowan said to Celaena as she instantly came to her feet, reaching for the dagger beside the bed. He was already halfway across the room, slinging on his clothes and weapons with lethal efficiency. She didn't bother with questions—he would tell her what was necessary. Celaena had already felt the returning feeling of the girl whose power she had felt months previous. why was she coming with the valg?
She hopped into her pants and boots. "I think we've been betrayed," Rowan said, and her fingers caught on a buckle of her sword-belt as she turned to the open window.
Quiet. Absolute quiet in the forest. And along the horizon, a growing smear of blackness.
"They're coming tonight," she breathed. "I did a sweep of the perimeter."
Rowan stuffed a knife into his boot. "It's as if someone told them where every trap, every warning bell is located. They'll be here within the hour." "Are the ward-stones still working?" She finished braiding her hair and strapped her sword across her back.
"Yes—they're intact. I raised the alarm, and Malakai and the others are readying our defenses on the walls." A small part of her smiled at the thought of what it must have been like for Malakai to find a half-naked Rowan shouting orders in his room.
She asked, "Who would have betrayed us?" "I don't know, and when I find them, I'll splatter them on the walls. But for now, we have bigger problems to worry about." The darkness on the horizon had spread, devouring the stars, the trees, the light. "What is that?" Rowan's mouth tightened into a thin line. "Bigger problems."
~
The ward-stones were the last line of defense before the fortress itself. If Narrok planned to lay siege to Mistward, they couldn't outlast him forever—but hopefully the barrier would wear down the creatures and their power a bit. On the battlements, in the courtyard and atop the towers, stood the demi-Fae. Archers would take down as many men as possible once the barrier fell, and they would use the oak doors of the fortress as a bottleneck into the courtyard.
But there were still the creatures and Narrok, along with the darkness that they carried with them. Birds and animals streamed past the fortress as they fled—an exodus of flapping wings, padding feet, claws clicking on stone. Herding the animals to safety were the Little Folk, hardly more than a gleam of night-seeing eyes. Whatever darkness Narrok and the creatures brought ... once you went in, you did not come out.
