Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5)

by Sarah J. Maas

Princess Elena Galathynius had monitored the dread-lord’s army all afternoon as it washed across those mountains in ebony waves.

Dread trove?

“And even if we manage to contain him—trap him …” Gavin considered her words. “You know that we are only pushing the war onto someone else—to whoever one day rules these lands.” “This war,” she said quietly, “is but the second movement in a game that has been played since those ancient days across the sea.” “We put it off for someone else to inherit if he’s freed. And it will not save those soldiers down there from slaughter tomorrow.” “If we do not act, there won’t be anyone to inherit this war,” Elena said. Doubt danced in Gavin’s eyes. “Even now,” she pushed, “our magic is failing, our gods abandoning us. Running from us. We have no Fae allies beyond those in my father’s army. And their power, like his, is fading. But perhaps, when that third movement comes … perhaps the players in our unfinished game will be different. Perhaps it will be a future in which Fae and humans fight side by side, ripe with power. Maybe they will find a way to end this. So we will lose this battle, Gavin,” she said. “Our friends will die on that killing field come dawn, and we will use it as our distraction to contain Erawan so that Erilea might have a future.” His lips tightened, his sapphire eyes wide. “No one must know,” she said, her voice breaking. “Even if we succeed, no one must know what we do.” Doubt etched deep lines into his face. She gripped his hand harder. “No one, Gavin.”

Aelin broke the kiss, breathing ragged, satisfied to find Rowan’s own chest rising and falling in an uneven rhythm. So new—this thing between them was still so new, so … raw. Utterly consuming. The desire was only the start of it. Rowan made her magic sing. And maybe that was the carranam bond between them, but … her magic wanted to dance with his. And from the frost sparkling in his eyes, she knew his own demanded the same.

Her heart strained, and she pulled back to lift a hand to his face. Rowan read the softness in her eyes, her body, and his own inherent fierceness slipped into a gentleness that so few would ever see. Her throat ached with the effort of keeping the words in. She’d been in love with him for a while now. Longer than she wanted to admit.

Rowan laughed again—and Aelin thought she might never get sick of it, that laugh. That smile.

Her family—and her kingdom. Two dreams long believed lost, she realized as the northern wind ruffled her hair. That she would do anything—ruin herself, sell herself—to protect.

“But I do not think my brother and sister in this room would allow me to live for very long if they suspected I meant their queen ill—or their kingdom.” Aedion gave a grim nod, but beside him, Lysandra straightened—not in anger or surprise, but pride. It broke Aelin’s heart as much as it lightened it.

Wondered if they, too, had spied the Lord of the North standing watch deep in the forest, the white stag’s immortal glow muted in the rain, come to bid Aelin Galathynius farewell.

She didn’t have a heartbeat to spare to marvel that Abraxos had not balked at the fight, that he had not yielded. Her warrior-hearted wyvern. She’d give him an extra ration of meat.

So she ignored his question and said, “Perrington is not as he seems. He is a demon in a mortal body, and has shed his former skin to don a new one. A golden-haired man. He breeds evil in Morath that he plans to unleash any day now. This is a taste.” She flicked an iron-tipped hand to the destruction around them. “A way to break your spirits and win favor from other kingdoms by casting you as the enemy. Rally your forces before he is given a chance to grow his numbers to an unconquerable size. He means to take not just this continent, but the whole of Erilea.”

Her kind had no magical shields against attacks like that. Only when most desperate, most enraged, could a witch summon the core of magic in her—with devastating consequences. Even the most bloodthirsty and soulless of them only whispered of that act: the Yielding.

Even if this thing between them … even if he knew it was not mere lust, or even just love. This thing between them, the force of it, could devour the world. And if they picked it, picked them, it might very well cause the end of it.

No, Lorcan’s magic was that of will—of death and thought and destruction. There was no name for it. Not even his queen had known what it was, where it had come from. A gift from the dark god, from Hellas, Maeve had mused—a dark gift, for her dark warrior. And left it at that.

“We are hunters for His Dark Majesty,” the leader said with a mock bow. “We are the ilken. And we have been sent to retrieve our quarry.”

“And they disbanded and vanished soon after that, never to be seen again,” Aedion countered. “What’s your point? You think liberating Ilium will summon them again? They’re long gone, Aelin, their sea dragons with them.”

“You would be the undisputed queen if you got the kingsflame to bloom again.” “Too bad Lysandra can only shift herself and not things,” Aelin muttered. Lysandra clicked her beak in agreement, puffing her feathers. “They say the kingsflame bloomed once during Orlon’s reign,” Aedion mused. “Just one blossom, found in Oakwald.”

Not like Manon’s hair, which was the pure white of moonlight on snow. He wondered what had become of the Wing Leader—who had killed for him, spared him. Not spared him. Rescued him. He wasn’t a fool. He knew she’d done it for whatever reasons were useful to her. She was as alien to him as the warrior sitting at the other end of the boat—more so. And yet, that darkness, that violence and stark, honest way of looking at the world … There would be no secrets with her. No lies.

His magic had felt the bond between Aelin and Rowan—the bond that went deeper than blood, than their magic, and he’d assumed it was just that they were mates, and hadn’t announced it to anyone. But if Rowan already had a mate, and had lost her …

Rowan considered for a moment, and then said, “I have known many kings in my life, Dorian Havilliard. And it was a rare man indeed who asked for help when he needed it, who would put aside pride.”

“You taught Aelin.” Again, silence. Then, “Aelin is my heart. I taught her what I knew, and it worked because our magics understood each other deep down—just as our souls did.

A snort. “No. Gods, no. We wanted to kill each other.” The amusement flickered. “She was … in a very dark place. We both were. But we led each other out of it. Found a way—together.”

“You’re not frightened of …?” He couldn’t say the rest. He’d somehow grown accustomed to having the shifter guard Aelin’s back—had found the idea mighty appealing. Rowan at her right, Aedion at her left, Lysandra at her back: nothing and no one would get to their queen.

“No—no, never,” Lysandra said. Something eased in his chest. “But the more I think about it, the more … the more it seems like this was all planned, laid out long ago. Erawan had decades before Aelin was born to strike—decades during which no one with her powers, or Dorian’s powers, existed to challenge him. Yet, as fate or fortune would have it, he moves now. At a time when a Fire-Bringer walks the earth.” “What are you getting at?” He’d considered all this before, during those long watches on the road. It was all horrifying, impossible, but—so much of their lives defied logic or normalcy. The shifter next to him proved that. “Morath is unleashing its horrors,” Lysandra said. “Maeve stirs across the sea. Two goddesses walk hand in hand with Aelin. More than that, Mala and Deanna have watched over her the entirety of her life. But perhaps it wasn’t watching. Perhaps it was … shaping. So they might one day unleash her, too. And I wonder if the gods have weighed the costs of that storm. And deemed the casualties worth it.”

The soldiers blinked. One of the townsfolk behind them began weeping as a crown of fire appeared atop Aelin’s hair. As the cloth smothering Goldryn burned away and the ruby glowed bloodred.

The soldiers exchanged glances. The flame around Aelin’s head burned brighter, a beacon in the dark. Symbols have power indeed.

But as the sea breeze brushed past, and the man simply fell apart into nothing but ashes, Aedion realized with no small amount of shock what she had done. She’d burned him alive. From the inside out. Someone screamed. Aelin merely said, “I warned you.” A few soldiers now bolted.

Good. Fire could destroy—but also cleanse.

Brannon chuckled again. “We would have had fun together, you and I.”

“The Lock, Heir of Terrasen. I summoned you here for it. In the Stone Marshes, there lies a sunken city—the Lock is hidden there. It is needed to bind the keys back into the broken Wyrdgate. It is the only way to get them back into that gate and seal it permanently. My daughter begs you—”

Manon looked to the Thirteen, standing around Asterin in a half circle. One by one, they lifted two fingers to their brows. A murmur went through the crowd. The gesture not to honor a High Witch. But a Witch-Queen. There had not been a Queen of Witches in five hundred years, either among the Crochans or the Ironteeth. Not one.

Manon met Sorrel’s eyes, then Asterin’s. And Manon gave the Thirteen her final order. “Run.” Then Manon Blackbeak whirled and brought Wind-Cleaver down upon her grandmother.

Her grandmother spoke so softly that even Manon could barely hear over her own gasps for air. “As your mother labored to push you out, she confessed who your father was. She said you … you would be the one who broke the curse, who saved us. She said your father was a rare-born Crochan Prince. And she said that your mixed blood would be the key.” Her grandmother lifted her nails to her mouth and licked off Manon’s blue blood. No. No. “So you have been a Kin Slayer your whole life,” her grandmother purred. “Hunting down those Crochans—your relatives. When you were a witchling, your father searched the lands for you. He never stopped loving your mother. Loving her,” she spat. “And loving you. So I killed him.” Manon gazed at the drop below, the death that beckoned. “His despair was delicious when I told him what I’d done to her. What I would make you into. Not a child of peace—but war.” Made.

“Do you know why that Crochan was spying in the Ferian Gap this spring? She had been sent to find you. After a hundred and sixteen years of searching, they had finally learned the identity of their dead prince’s lost child.” Her grandmother’s smile was hideous in its absolute triumph. Manon willed strength to her arms, to her legs. “Her name was Rhiannon, after the last Crochan Queen. And she was your half sister. She confessed it to me upon our tables. She thought it’d save her life. And when she saw what you had become, she chose to let the knowledge die with her.”

“I am a Blackbeak,” Manon rasped, blood choking her words. Her grandmother took a step, smiling as she crooned, “You are a Crochan. The last of their royal bloodline with the death of your sister at your own hand. You are a Crochan Queen.”

“To the very end, Abraxos,” she said. His roar was his only confirmation.

Twin tattoos of roaring gray sea dragons snaked around her tan forearms, the beasts seeming to slither as her muscles shifted with the movement. Their scales, he realized, matched her eyes perfectly

“What manner of beasts,” Dorian said again. Rolfe’s pale green eyes darkened. “Sea-wyverns. Witches rule the skies with their wyverns—but these waters are now ruled by beasts bred for naval battle, foul corruptions of an ancient template. Imagine a creature half the size of a first-rate ship—faster than a racing dolphin—and the damage it can cause with tooth and claw and a poisoned tail big as a mast. Worse, if you kill one of their vicious offspring, the adults will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”

From the tight cast of Rowan’s tattooed face, he knew the prince was doing the same. Especially as Dorian felt his magic reach toward the Fae Prince’s, as it had done that day with Aelin atop the glass castle.

Fenrys got what he wanted: women, glory, wealth. Connall, though skilled, was forever in his twin’s shadow. So when the queen approached him about the blood oath, at a time when Fenrys, not Connall, had been selected to fight in the war with the Akkadians … Connall had sworn it. And when Fenrys returned to find his brother bound to the queen, and learned what Maeve forced him to do behind closed doors … Fenrys had bargained: he’d swear the oath, but only to get Maeve to back off his brother. For over a century now, Fenrys had served in the queen’s bedroom, had sat chained by invisible shackles beside her dark throne.

Rowan knew most underestimated the sharp intelligence under that disarming smile. Knew that Dorian’s value wasn’t his godlike magic, but his mind. He’d latched on to Rolfe’s fear and trauma at the hands of the Valg and laid the foundation—one he’d make sure Aelin would exploit.

Rowan said, “Ten years ago, we did nothing to stop this. If Maeve had sent a force, we might have kept it from growing so out of control. Our brethren were hunted and killed and tortured. Maeve let it happen for spite, because Aelin’s mother would not yield to her wishes. So yes—my Fireheart is one flame in the sea of darkness. But she is willing to fight, Fenrys. She is willing to take on Erawan, take on Maeve and the gods themselves, if it means peace can be had.”

“But Aelin is one person,” Rowan went on. “And even her gifts might not be enough to win. Alone,” he breathed, meeting Fenrys’s stare, then Gavriel’s, “she will die. And once that flame goes out, it is done. There is no second chance. Once that fire extinguishes, we are all doomed, in every land and every world.” The words were poison on his tongue, his very bones aching at the thought of that death—what he’d do if it should happen.

Well, it was nice to know absolute hell awaited them and that the information about Maeve’s armada was correct. But then Rowan added, “And I missed you like hell.”

Lorcan yielded a step, his nostrils flaring delicately. As if he could sense that stone awakening. “What are you,” he said quietly.

This winter, he’d had a damn fine commander at his disposal, brutal and vicious and willing to do just about anything Lorcan ordered. The next time he’d seen Rowan, the prince had been roaring, desperate to fling himself into lethal darkness to save the life of a princess with no throne. Lorcan had known—in that moment. Lorcan had known, as he’d pinned Rowan into the grass outside Mistward, the prince thrashing and screaming for Aelin Galathynius, that everything was about to change. Knew that the commander he’d valued was altered irrevocably. No longer would they glut themselves on wine and women; no longer would Rowan gaze toward a horizon without some glimmer of longing in his eyes. Love had broken a perfect killing tool. Lorcan wondered if it would take him centuries more to stop being so pissed about it. And the queen—princess, whatever Aelin called herself … She was a fool. She could have bartered Athril’s ring for Maeve’s armies, for an alliance to wipe Morath off the earth. Even not knowing what the ring was, she could have used it to her advantage. But she’d chosen Rowan. A prince with no crown, no army, no allies.

Her limpid, dark eyes rose to his face. And for a moment, he could see the woman she’d become—was already becoming. Someone who, regardless of where she’d been born, any queen would prize at her side.

“It must be hard to find the time to care at all,” Fenrys cut in, “when you are facing a mortal life span.” A sly, cutting glance at Rowan. “Or is she due to Settle soon?” Oh, he was a bastard. A bitter, hard-edged bastard, the laughing side of the coin to Lorcan’s sullen brooding. Maeve certainly had a type. Rowan’s face yielded nothing. “The matter of Aelin’s Settling is none of your concern.” “Isn’t it? Knowing if she’s immortal changes things. Many things.” “Fenrys,” Gavriel warned. She knew enough about it—the transition pureblooded Fae, and some demi-Fae, went through once their bodies locked into immortal youth. It was a rough process, their bodies and magic needing months to adjust to the sudden freezing and reordering of their aging process. Some Fae had no control over their power—some lost it entirely during the time it took to Settle. And demi-Fae … some might be longer-lived, some might have the true immortal gift given to them. Like Lorcan. And possibly Aedion. They’d find out in the next few years if he’d take after his mother … or the male sitting across the room from her. If they survived the war.

“It is different with her,” Gavriel said softly. “Dependent on the ruler it is sworn to. You two took the oath to each other with love in your hearts. You had no desire to own or rule him.”

Aelin tried not to flinch at the truth of that word—love. That day … when Rowan had looked into her eyes as he drank her blood … she’d started to realize what it was. That the feeling that passed between them, so powerful there was no language to describe it … It was not mere friendship, but something born of and strengthened by it.

They could burn the entire world to ashes with it. He was hers and she was his, and they had found each other across centuries of bloodshed and loss, across oceans and kingdoms and war.