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There had been people he loved in that room of red marble and glass; the woman had lost her head—
Lost, as if the beheading were her fault.
A prince would have stopped the blade. A prince would have saved her. Yet he had not saved her, and he knew there was no one coming to save him.
I was not supposed to love you. The woman had said that—and then she died. She should not have loved him, and he should not have dared to love her. He deserved this darkness, and once the invisible boundary shattered and the waiting thing pounced, infiltrating and filling him … he’d have earned it.
Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir of fire, beloved of Mala Light-Bringer, and rightful Queen of Terrasen,
There were two men in this city responsible for destroying her life and the people she’d loved. She would not leave Rifthold until she’d buried them both.
you came back, but without an army. Without allies. You came back empty-handed.”
You do not get to pick and choose which parts of her to love, Dorian had once said to him. He’d been right. So painfully right. Nesryn let herself out. At first light, Chaol went to the nearest jeweler and pawned the ring for a handful of silver.
But he wished she had killed him. He hated her for not killing him.
Liar. Aelin was and had always been a gods-damned liar. She was as much an oath-breaker as he was. Worse.
“Because then it’s all for nothing. Everything that happened … it’s all for nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
Rowan was the most powerful full-blooded Fae male alive. And his scent was all over her. Yet she had no gods-damned idea.
She mutely handed him her favorite lavender-scented soap, which he sniffed at, sighed in resignation, and then began using.
“Whatever my queen wants.”
“Oh?” she purred, and he braced himself for the tempest. “And what message does it send? That I’m a whore? As if what I do in the privacy of my own room, with my body, is anyone’s concern.”
can’t run with Evangeline.” “I could dig Clarisse a grave no one would ever discover,” Aelin said. And meant it. Lysandra knew she meant it, too. “Not yet—not now.” “You say the word, and it’s done.”
She opened her fist of pebbles and picked out the three loveliest—two for the years since he’d been taken from her, one for what they’d been together. Carefully, she placed them at the apex of the headstone’s curve.
She opened her fist, and he sorted through the pebbles until he found one—smooth and round, the size of a hummingbird’s egg. With a gentleness that cracked her heart, he set it on the headstone beside her own pebbles.
“Don’t forget your cloak. You’d feel rather guilty when all those poor mortal women combust at the sight of you.” “I’d say likewise, but I think you’d enjoy seeing men bursting into flames as you strutted by.”
It had been with a child’s hands that she’d last held it, and with a child’s eyes that she’d last seen the cerulean blue front with the ivory stag and the golden star between its antlers.
“Good night, Aelin,”
For Wesley. For Sam. For Aelin.
“As we have in the past. To whatever end.”
But if it was death separating us … I would find you.
“I want to take my time with you—to learn … every inch of you. And this apartment has very, very thin walls. I don’t want to have an audience,” he added as he leaned down again, brushing his mouth over the cut at the base of her throat, “when I make you moan, Aelin.”
Chaol just held Aelin’s gaze, his shoulders squaring as he said, “Never again.”
But perhaps the monsters needed to look out for each other every now and then.
“If I die because of you, I’ll beat the shit out of you in hell.”
“You make me proud to serve you.”
“What if we go on,” he said, “only to more pain and despair? What if we go on, only to find a horrible end waiting for us?” Aelin looked northward, as if she could see all the way to Terrasen. “Then it is not the end.”
She said softly, “You make me want to live, Rowan. Not survive; not exist. Live.”
Then she smiled with every last shred of courage, of desperation, of hope for the glimmer of that glorious future. “Let’s go rattle the stars.”
“Have you come to save me at last, Aelin Galathynius?”
“You make me want to live, too, Aelin Galathynius,” he said. “Not exist—but live.” He cupped her cheek, and took a steadying breath—as if he’d thought about every word these past three days, over and over again. “I spent centuries wandering the world, from empires to kingdoms to wastelands, never settling, never stopping—not for one moment. I was always looking toward the horizon, always wondering what waited across the next ocean, over the next mountain. But I think … I think that whole time, all those centuries, I was just looking for you.”
“You light up the darkness.”
“To a new world,” the Queen of Terrasen said. The King of Adarlan lifted his glass, such endless shadows dancing in his eyes, but—there. A glimmer of life. “To freedom.”
And as they passed by the domed Royal Theater, there was music—beautiful, exquisite music—playing within.
And the smell—of pine and snow … How had she never realized that Rowan’s scent was of Terrasen, of home?
