Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7)

by Sarah J. Maas

Once upon a time, in a land long since burned to ash, there lived a young princess who loved her kingdom … Words she had spoken to a prince. Once—long ago. A prince of ice and wind. A prince who had been hers, and she his. Long before the bond between their souls became known to them. It was upon him that the task of protecting that once-glorious kingdom now fell. The prince whose scent was kissed with pine and snow, the scent of that kingdom she had loved with her heart of wildfire.

The wolf blinked at her—thrice. In the early days, months, years of this, they had crafted a silent code between them. Using the few moments she’d been able to dredge up speech, whispering through the near-invisible holes in the iron coffin. One blink for yes. Two for no. Three for Are you all right? Four for I am here, I am with you. Five for This is real, you are awake. Fenrys again blinked three times. Are you all right? Aelin swallowed against the thickness in her throat, her tongue peeling off the roof of her mouth. She blinked once. Yes. She counted his blinks. Six. He’d made that one up. Liar, or something like it. She refused to acknowledge that particular code. She blinked once again. Yes. Dark eyes scanned her. He’d seen everything. Every moment of it. If he were permitted to shift, he could tell her what was fabricated and what was real. If any of it had been real.

Fenrys blinked, over and over and over. I am here, I am with you. It didn’t stop the hammer from falling. Or the scream that shattered from her throat.

The ancient king nodded to Damaris. “That sword is not ornamental. Let it guide you, if you cannot trust yourself.” “It really tells the truth?” “It was blessed by the All-Seeing One himself, after I swore myself to him.” Gavin shrugged, a half-tamed gesture. As if the man had never really left the wilds of Adarlan where he’d risen from war leader to High King. “You’ll still have to learn for yourself what is truth and what is lie.” “But Damaris will help me find the key at Morath?” To break into Erawan’s stronghold, where all those collars were made … Gavin’s mouth tightened. “I cannot say. But I will tell you this: do not venture toward Morath just yet. Until you are ready.” “I’m ready now.” A fool’s lie. Gavin knew it, too. It was an effort not to touch his neck, the pale band forever marring his skin. “Morath is no mere keep,” Gavin said. “It is a hell, and it is not kind to reckless young men.” Dorian stiffened, but Gavin went on, “You will know when you are truly ready. Remain at this camp, if you can convince your companions. The path will find you here.” Gavin’s edges warped further, his face turning murky. Dorian dared a step forward. “Am I human?” Gavin’s sapphire eyes softened—just barely. “I’m not the person who can answer that.” And then the king was gone.

Tell Rowan that I’m sorry I lied. But tell him it was all borrowed time anyway. Even before today, I knew it was all just borrowed time, but I still wish we’d had more of it. He refused to accept that. Would never accept that she would be the ultimate cost to end this, to save their world. Rowan scanned the blanket of stars overhead. While all other constellations had wheeled past, the Lord of the North remained, the immortal star between his antlers pointing the way home. To Terrasen. Tell him he has to fight. He must save Terrasen, and remember the vows he made to me. Time was not on their side, not with Maeve, not with the war unleashing itself back on their own continent. But he had no intention of returning without her, parting request or no, regardless of the oaths he’d sworn upon marrying her to guard and rule Terrasen. And tell him thank you—for walking that dark path with me back to the light. It had been his honor. From the very beginning, it had been his honor, the greatest of his immortal life. An immortal life they would share together—somehow. He’d allow no other alternative. Rowan silently swore it to the stars. He could have sworn the Lord of the North flickered in response.

Yrene clutched her cloak to her chest. “I need to be doing something.” The Healer on High patted the railing. “You will, Yrene. Soon enough, you will.” Hafiza ascended the stairs with that, leaving Yrene in the hold amid the stacks of crates. She didn’t tell the Healer on High that she wasn’t entirely sure how much longer she’d be a help—not yet. Hadn’t whispered a word of that doubt to anyone, even Chaol. Yrene’s hand drifted across her abdomen and lingered.

The weight of Manon’s gaze fell upon him again, and Dorian didn’t balk from it. Didn’t balk from Manon’s words as she said, “If you find so little value in your existence that it compels you to trust this thing, then by all means, bring her along.” A challenge to look not toward Morath or the spider, but inward. She saw exactly what gnawed on his empty chest, if only because a similar beast gnawed on her own. “We’ll find out soon enough whether she spoke true about the Crochans.” The spider had. Damaris had warmed in his hand when Cyrene had spoken. And when they found the Crochans, when the Thirteen were distracted, he’d learn what he needed from the spider, too.

Manon turned to the Thirteen, the witches thrumming with impatience. “We fly now. We can reach the Crochans by nightfall.” “And what then?” Asterin asked. The only one of them who had permission to do so. Manon stalked for Abraxos, and Dorian followed, tossing Cyrene a spare cloak as his magic tugged her with him. “And then we make our move,” Manon hedged. And for once, she did not meet anyone’s stare. Didn’t do anything but gaze southward. The witch was keeping secrets, too. But were hers as dire as his?

“Someday,” he said as she traced one of the long scratches over the ancient surface, “this shield will pass to you. As it was given to me, and to your great-uncle before me.” Her breath was still jagged from the training they’d done. Only the two of them—as he’d promised. The hour once a week that he set aside for her. Her father placed the shield on the stone step below them, its thunk reverberating through her sandaled feet. It weighed nearly as much as she did, yet he carried it as if it were merely an extension of his arm. “And you,” her father went on, “like the many great women and men of this House, shall use it to defend our kingdom.” Her eyes rose to his face, handsome and unlined. Solemn and kingly. “That is your charge, your sole duty.” He braced a hand on the rim of the shield, tapping it for emphasis. “To defend, Aelin. To protect.” She had nodded, not understanding. And her father had kissed her brow, as if he half hoped she’d never need to

Connall raised his knife into the air between them. She could not surge to her feet. Could not rise against the chains and glass. Could do nothing, nothing— Cairn gripped her by the neck, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and ground her again into the blood-drenched shards. A rasping, broken scream cracked from her lips. Fenrys. Her only tether to life, to this reality— Connall’s blade glinted. He’d come to help at Mistward. He had defied Maeve then; perhaps he’d do it now, perhaps his hateful words had been a deception— The blade plunged down. Not into Fenrys. But Connall’s own heart. Fenrys moved—or tried to. Maw gaping in what might have been a scream, he tried and tried to lunge for his brother as Connall crashed to the tiled veranda. As blood began to pool. The owl on Maeve’s throne flapped its wings once, as if in horror. But Cairn let out a low laugh, the sound rumbling past Aelin’s head. Real. This was real. It had to be. Something cold and oily lurched through her. Her hands slackened at her sides. The light left Connall’s dark eyes, his black hair spilled on the floor around him in a dark mirror to the blood leaking away. Fenrys was shaking. Aelin might have been, too. “You tainted something that belonged to me, Aelin Galathynius,” Maeve said. “And now it must be purged.” Fenrys was whining, still attempting to crawl to the brother dead on the ground. Fae could heal; perhaps Connall’s heart could mend— Connall’s chest rose in a rattling, shallow breath. I...

Aelin whirled, glass ripping her soles apart, and hurled the shard in her other hand. Right at Maeve. It missed by a hairsbreadth. Scraping Maeve’s pale cheek before clattering off the throne behind her. The owl perched just above it screeched. Rough hands gripped her, Cairn shouting, raging shrieks of You little bitch, but she didn’t hear them. Not as a trickle of blood snaked down Maeve’s cheek. Black blood. As dark as night.

“Nox Owen.” The messenger bowed at the waist. “From Perranth.” “I’ve heard of you,” Ren said, scanning the man anew. “You’re a thief.” “Former thief,” Nox amended, winking. “Now rebel, and Lord Darrow’s most trusted messenger.”

“Then tell me where, and when, and I’ll do it.” “Just as you blindly obeyed our queen, you’ll now obey me?” “I obey no man,” she snarled. “But I’m not fool enough to believe I know more about armies and soldiers than you do. My pride is not so easily bruised.” Aedion took a step forward. “And mine is?” “What I did, I did for her, and for this kingdom. Look at these men, your men—look at the allies we’ve gathered and tell me that if they knew the truth, they would be so eager to fight.” “The Bane fought when we believed her dead. It would be no different.” “It might be for our allies. For the people of Terrasen.” She didn’t back down for a moment. “Go ahead and punish me for the rest of your life. For a thousand years, if you wind up Settling.”

“We have enough enemies as it is,” Lysandra went on. “But if you truly wish to make me one of them as well, that’s fine. I don’t regret what I did, nor will I ever.” “Fine,” was all he could think to say. She shrewdly looked him over. As if weighing the man within. “It was real, Aedion,” she said. “All of it. I don’t care if you believe me or not. But it was real for me.”

Perhaps it had all been for nothing. The Queen Who Was Promised. Promised to die, to surrender herself to fulfill an ancient princess’s debt. To save this world. She wouldn’t be able to do it. She would fail in that, even if she outlasted Maeve.

For Terrasen, she had gladly done this. All of it. For Terrasen, she deserved to pay this price. She had tried to make it right. Had tried, and failed. And she was so, so tired. Fireheart. The whispered word floated through the eternal night, a glimmer of sound, of light. Fireheart. The woman’s voice was soft, loving. Her mother’s voice. Aelin turned her face away. Even that movement was more than she could bear. Fireheart, why do you cry? Aelin could not answer. Fireheart. The words were a gentle brush down her cheek. Fireheart, why do you cry? And from far away, deep within her, Aelin whispered toward that ray of memory, Because I am lost. And I do not know the way. Cairn was still talking. Still scraping his knife over the coffin’s lid. But Aelin did not hear him as she found a woman lying beside her. A mirror—or a reflection of the face she’d bear in a few years’ time. Should she live that long. Borrowed time. Every moment of it had been borrowed time. Evalin Ashryver ran gentle fingers down Aelin’s cheek. Over the mask. Aelin could have sworn she felt them against her skin. You have been very brave, her mother said. You have been very brave, for so very long. Aelin couldn’t stop the silent sob that worked its way up her throat. But you must be brave a little while longer, my Fireheart. She leaned into her mother’s touch. You must be brave a little while longer, and remember … Her mother placed a phantom hand over Aelin’s heart. It is the strength of this that matters....

Aelin slammed her hand into the lid. Cairn paused. Aelin pounded her fist into the iron again. Again. You do not yield. Again. You do not yield. Again. Again. Until she was alive with it, until her blood was raining onto her face, washing away the tears, until every pound of her fist into the iron was a battle cry. You do not yield. You do not yield. You do not yield. It rose in her, burning and roaring, and she gave herself wholly to it. Distantly, close by, wood crashed. Like someone had staggered into something. Then shouting. Aelin hammered her fist into the metal, the song within her pulsing and cresting, a tidal wave racing for the shore. “Get me that gloriella!” The words meant nothing. He was nothing. Would always be nothing. Over and over, she pounded against the lid. Over and over, that song of fire and darkness flared through her, out of her, into the world. You do not yield. Something hissed and crackled nearby, and smoke poured through the lid. But Aelin kept striking. Kept striking until the smoke choked her, until its sweet scent dragged her under and away. And when she awoke chained on the altar, she beheld what she had done to the iron coffin. The top of the lid had been warped. A great hump now protruded, the metal stretched thin. As if it had come so very close to breaking entirely.

He had to have imagined it. He scanned the starry sky, the slumbering lands beyond, the Lord of the North above. It hit him a heartbeat later. Erupted around him and roared. Over and over and over, as if it were a hammer against an anvil. The others whirled to him. That raging, fiery song charged closer. Through him. Down the mating bond. Down into his very soul. A bellow of fury and defiance. From down the hill, Lorcan rasped, “Rowan.” It was impossible, utterly impossible, and yet— “North,” Gavriel said, turning his bay gelding. “The surge came from the North.” From Doranelle. A beacon in the night. Power rippling into the world, as it had done in Skull’s Bay. It filled him with sound, with fire and light. As if it screamed, again and again, I am alive, I am alive, I am alive. And then silence. Like it had been cut off. Extinguished.

But the dark-haired Crochan who’d first intercepted them stormed at Manon, her sword out. “You did this.” Dorian gripped Damaris, but made no move to draw it. Not while Manon didn’t back down. “Saved your asses? Yes, I’d say we did.” The witch seethed. “You led them here.” “Bronwen,” Glennis warned, wiping blue blood from her face. The young witch—Bronwen—bristled. “You think it mere coincidence that they arrive, and then we’re attacked?” “They fought with us, not against us,” Glennis said. She turned to Manon. “Do you swear it?” Manon’s golden eyes glowed in the firelight. “I swear it. I did not lead them here.” Glennis nodded, but Dorian stared at Manon. Damaris had gone cold as ice. So cold the golden hilt bit into his skin. Glennis, somehow satisfied, nodded again. “Then we shall talk—later.” Bronwen spat on the bloody ground and prowled off. A lie. Manon had lied.

Manon assessed him again, and he withstood it. “You have nothing to say about my own … choices?” “My friends are fighting and likely being killed in the North,” Dorian said. “We don’t have the time to spend weeks winning the Crochans over.” There it was, the brutal truth. To gain some degree of welcome here, they’d had to cross that line. Perhaps such callous decisions were part of wearing a crown. He’d keep her secret—so long as she wished it hidden. “No self-righteous speeches?” “This is war,” he said simply. “We’re past that sort of thing.”

He sniffed the air. Looked right at Lysandra. At the blood leaking down her left arm, seeping into the ocean blue of Aelin’s worn tunic. His dark eyes widened with surprise and delight, the word taking form on his lips. Shifter. “Kill him,” she ordered the silver-haired Fae royals, her heart thundering. No one dared tell her to burn him herself. Endymion raised a hand, and the Valg-possessed man began gasping. Yet not before his eyes darkened wholly, until no white shone. Not from the death sweeping over him. But as he seemed to convey a message down a long, obsidian bond. The message that might doom them: Aelin Galathynius was not here.

“Orynth will be a slaughterhouse,” she whispered, her shoulders curving beneath the weight—not just of being a woman thrust into this conflict, but a woman playing another, who might be able to pretend, but only so far. Who did not truly have the power to halt the hordes marching north. She’d been willing to shoulder that burden, though. For Aelin. For this kingdom. Even if she’d lied to him about it, she’d been willing to accept this weight.

“Why would I tell him? I serve Terrasen, and the Galathynius family. I always have.” “Some might say Darrow has a strong claim to the throne, given his relationship with Orlon.” “I realized today that the assassin I came to call a friend is actually the queen I believed dead. I think the gods are pointing me in a certain direction, don’t you?” She lingered between the tent flaps. Delicious warmth beckoned within. “And if I were to tell you we needed your help tonight, and that the risk was being branded a traitor?” Nox only sketched a bow. “Then I’d say I owe my friend Celaena a favor for her warning at the castle, plus saving my life before that.” She didn’t know why she trusted him. But she’d developed an instinct for men that had always proved correct, even if she had been unable to act on it in the past. Had only been able to brace herself for them. But Nox Owen—the kindness in his face was true. His words were true. Another ally Aelin had wrangled for them, this time unwittingly.

Her silvery falcon’s wings wrangled the bitter wind, setting her soaring with a speed that shot liquid lightning through her heart. Beyond the ghost leopard, this form had become a favorite.

“Is it so bad, to care?” The gods knew he’d been struggling to do so himself. “I don’t know how to,” she growled. Ridiculous. An outright lie. Perhaps it was because of the high likelihood that he’d be collared again at Morath, perhaps it was because he was a king who’d left his kingdom in an enemy’s grip, but Dorian found himself saying, “You do care. You know it, too. It’s what makes you so damn scared of all this.” Her golden eyes raged, but she said nothing. “Caring doesn’t make you weak,” he offered. “Then why don’t you heed your own advice?” “I care.” His temper rose to meet hers. And he decided to hell with it—decided to let go of that leash he’d put on himself. Let go of that restraint. “I care about more than I should. I even care about you.” Another wrong thing to say. Manon stood—as high as the tent would allow. “Then you’re a fool.” She shoved on her boots and stomped into the frigid night.

Caring doesn’t make you weak. The king was a fool. Little more than a boy. What did he know of anything? Still the words burrowed under her skin, her bones. Is it so bad, to care? She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

Despair shone in her eyes. True despair, without light or hope. The sort of despair that wished for death. The sort of despair that began to erode strength, to eat away at any resolve to endure. She blinked at him. Four times. I am here, I am with you. Fenrys knew it for what it was. The final message. Not before death, but before the sort of breaking that no one would walk away from. Before Maeve returned with the Wyrdstone collar. Cairn rotated the poker in his hands, heat rippling off its point. And Fenrys couldn’t allow it. He couldn’t allow it. In his shredded soul, in what was left of him after all he’d been forced to see and do, he couldn’t allow it. The blood oath kept his limbs planted. A dark chain that ran into his soul. He would not allow it. That final breaking. He pushed upward against the bond’s dark chain, screaming, though no sound came from his open maw. He pushed and pushed and pushed against those invisible chains, against that blood-sworn order to obey, to stay down, to watch. He defied it. All that the blood oath was. Pain lanced through him, into his very core. He blocked it out as Cairn pointed the smoldering poker at the young queen with a heart of wildfire. He would not allow it. Snarling, the male inside him thrashing, Fenrys bellowed at the dark chain binding him. He shredded into it, biting and tearing with every scrap of defiance he possessed. Let it kill him, wreck him. He would not serve. Not another heartbeat. He would not obey. He would no...

It’d kill him—to sever the oath. It would break his soul. His body would go soon after that. But Fenrys put one paw forward. His claws dug into the ground. Cairn’s face paled at that step. That impossible step. Fenrys’s eyes slid toward hers. Neither needed the silent code between them for the word she beheld in his gaze. The order and plea. Run.

What had happened here, what had been so terrible that the wolf had been able to do the impossible to spare Aelin from enduring it?

Aelin knelt there, burning, and did not speak. The flames flickered around her, though the moss, the roots, did not burn. Didn’t so much as steam. And through the fire, Aelin’s now-long hair half hiding her nakedness, Elide got a good look at what had been done to her. Aside from a bruise along her ribs, there was nothing. Not a mark. Not a callus. Not a single scar. The ones Elide had marked in those days before Aelin had been taken were gone. As if someone had wiped them away.

When he’d seen her back, the smooth skin where the scars of Endovier and the scars from Cairn’s whipping should have been, he’d suspected. But kneeling, burning in nothing but her skin … There were no scars where there should have been. The almost-necklace of them from Baba Yellowlegs: gone. The shackle marks from Endovier: gone. The scar where she’d been forced by Arobynn Hamel to break her own arm: gone. And on her palms … It was upon her exposed palms that Aelin now gazed. As if realizing what was missing. The scars across her palms, one from the moment they had become carranam, the other from her oath to Nehemia, had disappeared entirely. Like they had never been. Her flames burned brighter.

Aelin made long, gentle strokes over his fur, her head angled as she spoke too softly for Rowan to hear. Slowly, painfully, Fenrys cracked open an eye. Agony filled it—agony and yet something like relief, and joy, at the sight of her bare face. And exhaustion. Such exhaustion that Rowan knew death would be a welcome embrace, a kiss from Silba herself, goddess of gentle ends. Aelin spoke again, the sound either contained or swallowed by her shield. No tears. Only that sorrow—and clarity. A queen’s face, he realized as Lorcan and Gavriel took up spots along the glen’s border. It was a queen’s face that looked upon Fenrys. A queen who took his massive paw in her hands, pushing back folds of fur and skin to unsheathe a curved claw. She slid it over her bare forearm, splitting skin. Leaving blood in its wake. Rowan’s breath caught. Gavriel and Lorcan whirled toward them. Aelin spoke again, and Fenrys blinked once in answer. She deemed that answer enough. “Holy gods,” Lorcan breathed as Aelin extended her bleeding forearm to Fenrys’s mouth. “Holy rutting gods.” For Fenrys’s loyalty, for his sacrifice, there was no greater reward she could offer. To keep him from death, there was no other way to save him. Only this. Only the blood oath. And as Fenrys managed to lap the blood from her wound, as he swore a silent vow to their queen, blinking a few more times, Rowan’s chest became unbearably tight. Severing the blood oath to one queen had snapped his life force, his soul. Swearing t...

“I didn’t break,” she said quietly. His heart cracked at the words. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Why?” Lorcan mused aloud, more to himself. “Why go to these lengths for us?” He got his answer—they all did—a heartbeat later. Aelin halted a few feet away from the boat and Rowan’s outstretched hand. She turned back toward the cave itself. The Little Folk peeked from those birch branches, from the rocks, from behind stalagmites. Slowly, deeply, Aelin bowed to them. Rowan could have sworn all those tiny heads lowered in answer. A pair of bony grayish hands rose above a nearby rock, something glittering held between them, and set the object on the stone. Rowan went still. A crown of silver and pearl and diamond gleamed there, fashioned into upswept swan’s wings. “The Crown of Mab,” Gavriel breathed. But Fenrys looked away, toward the looming dark, his tail curling around him. Aelin staggered a step closer to the crown. “It—it fell into the river.”

The grayish hand slipped over the rock’s edge again and nudged the crown in silent gesture. Take it. “You want to know why?” Gavriel softly asked Lorcan as Aelin strode for the rock. Nothing but solemn reverence on her face. “Because she is not only Brannon’s Heir, but Mab’s, too.” A throwback to her great-great-grandmother, Maeve had taunted her. Who had inherited her strength, her immortal lifespan. Aelin’s fingers closed around the crown, lifting it gently. It sparkled like living moonlight between her hands. My sister Mab’s line ran true, Elide claimed Maeve had said on the beach. In every way, it seemed. But Aelin made no move to don the crown while she approached him once more, her gait steadier this time. Trying not to dwell on the unbearable smoothness of her hand as it wrapped around his, Rowan helped her aboard, then climbed in himself before freeing the ropes tethering them to the shore. Gavriel went on, awe in every word, “And that makes her their queen, too.” Aelin met Gavriel’s gaze, the crown near-glowing in her hands. “Yes,” was all she said as the boat sailed into the darkness.

She hadn’t asked him why he remained in his wolf’s body. No one asked her why she remained in her Fae form, after all. But she supposed that if he donned his Fae form, he might feel inclined to talk. To answer questions that he was perhaps not yet ready to discuss. Might begin simply screaming and screaming at what had been done to them, to Connall.

“It’s good to have you back.” He added, stumbling a bit on the word, “Brother.” For that’s what they would be. Had never been before, but what Fenrys had done for Aelin … Yes, brother was what Rowan would call him. Even if Fenrys’s own— Fenrys’s dark eyes flickered. “She killed Connall. Made him stab himself in the heart.” A pearl-and-ruby necklace scattered from Gavriel’s fingers. The temperature in the tomb spiked, but there was no flash of flame, no swirl of embers. As if Aelin’s magic had surged, only to be leashed again. Yet Aelin continued shoving gold and jewels into her pockets. She’d witnessed it, too. That slaughter. But it was Gavriel, approaching on silent feet even with the jewels and gold on the floor, who clasped Fenrys’s other shoulder. “We will make sure that debt is paid before the end.” The Lion had never uttered such words—not toward their former queen. But fury burned in Gavriel’s tawny gaze. Sorrow and fury.

But Asterin moved, unbuttoning her leather jacket, then hoisting up her white shirt. Rising in the stirrups to bare her scarred, brutalized abdomen. “She does not lie.” UNCLEAN There, the word remained stamped. Would always be stamped. “How many of you,” Asterin called out, “have been similarly branded? By your Matron, by your coven leader? How many of you have had your stillborn witchlings burned before you might hold them?” The silence that fell now was different from before. Shaking—shuddering. Manon glanced at the Thirteen to find tears in Ghislaine’s eyes as she took in the brand on Asterin’s womb. Tears in the eyes of all of them, who had not known. And it was for those tears, which Manon had never seen, that she faced the host again. “You will be killed in this war, or after it. And you will never see our homeland again.”

“The choice of how our people’s future shall be shaped is yours,” Manon told each of the witches assembled, all the Blackbeaks who might fly to war and never return. “But I will tell you this.” Her hands shook, and she fisted them on her thighs. “There is a better world out there. And I have seen it.” Even the Thirteen looked toward her now.

Manon lifted her chin. “You are my people. Whether my grandmother decrees it so or not, you are my people, and always will be. But I will fly against you, if need be, to ensure that there is a future for those who cannot fight for it themselves. Too long have we preyed on the weak, relished doing so. It is time that we became better than our foremothers.” The words she had given the Thirteen months ago. “There is a better world out there,” she said again. “And I will fight for it.” She turned Abraxos away, toward the plunge behind them. “Will you?”

His dark eyes roved over her face. “Connall was a better male than—than how you saw him that time. Than what he was in the end.” She gripped his hand and squeezed. “I know.” The last of the mists vanished. Fenrys asked quietly, “Do you want me to tell you about it?” He didn’t mean his brother. She shook her head. “I know enough.” She surveyed her cold, blistered hands. “I know enough,” she repeated.

He had not prepared a speech to rally them. A speech would not keep these men from dying today. So Aedion drew the Sword of Orynth, hefted his shield, and joined the Bane’s steady beat. Conveying all the defiance and rage in his heart, he clashed the ancient sword against the dented, round metal. Rhoe’s shield. Aedion had never told Aelin. Had wanted to wait until they returned to Orynth to reveal that the shield he’d carried, had never lost, had belonged to her father. And so many others before that. It had no name. Even Rhoe had not known its age. And when Aedion had spirited it away from Rhoe’s room, the only thing he grabbed when the news came that his family had been butchered, he had let the others forget about it, too. Even Darrow had not recognized it. Worn and simple, the shield had gone unnoticed at Aedion’s side, a reminder of what he’d lost. What he’d defend to his final breath.

They were mud-splattered, the Queen of Terrasen’s braided hair far longer than Chaol had last seen. And her eyes … Not the soft, yet fiery gaze. But something older. Wearier.

But where Aedion was fire, Gavriel seemed to be stone. Indeed, his eyes were solemn as he said, “Aedion is my pride.”

“Maeve wished me to reveal the location of the two Wyrdkeys. Wanted me to hand them over, but I managed to get them away before she took me. To Doranelle. She wanted to break me to her will. To use me to conquer the world, I thought. But it perhaps now seems she wanted to use me as a shield against the Valg, to guard her always.” The words tumbled out, heavy and sharp. “I was her captive until nearly a month ago.” She nodded toward her court. “When I got free, they found me again.” Silence fell again, her new companions at a loss. She didn’t blame them. Then Hasar hissed, “We’ll make the bitch pay for that, too, won’t we?” Aelin met the princess’s dark stare. “Yes, we will.”

Aelin stormed into the frigid night, Rowan barely keeping up with her. No embers trailed her. Mud did not hiss beneath her boots. There was no fire at all. Not a spark. As if Maeve had snuffed out that flame. Made her fear it. Hate it.

I’ve been trying like hell to convince myself that it’s real, reminding myself I only need to pretend to be how I was just long enough.” Long enough to forge the Lock and die. He said softly, “I know, Aelin.” He hadn’t bought the winks and smirks for a heartbeat. Aelin let out a sob that cracked something in him. “I can’t feel me—myself anymore. It’s like she snuffed it out. Ripped me from it. She, and Cairn, and everything they did to me.” She gulped down air, and Rowan wrapped her in his arms and pulled her onto his lap. “I am so tired,” she wept. “I am so, so tired, Rowan.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “You fight,” he said simply. “We fight. Until we can’t anymore. We fight.” She sat up, but remained on his lap, staring into his face with a rawness that destroyed him. Rowan laid a hand on her chest, right over that burning heart. “Fireheart.” A challenge and a summons. She placed her hand atop his, warm despite the frigid night. As if that fire had not yet gone out entirely. But she only gazed up at the stars. To the Lord of the North, standing watch. “We fight,” she breathed.

Helpless. She had been helpless. As so many in this city, in Terrasen, in this continent, were helpless. Goldryn’s hilt warmed in her hand. She wouldn’t be that way again. For whatever time she had left.

Gavriel asked after a moment, “Why didn’t Aelin offer me the blood oath?” The male hadn’t asked these weeks. And Rowan wasn’t sure why Gavriel inquired now, but he gave him the truth. “Because she won’t do it until Aedion has taken the oath first. To offer it to you before him … she wants Aedion to take it first.” “In case he doesn’t wish me to be near his kingdom.” “So that Aedion knows she placed his needs before her own.” Gavriel bowed his head. “I would say yes, if she offered.” “I know.” Rowan clapped his oldest friend on the back. “She knows, too.” The Lion gazed northward. “Do you think … we haven’t heard any news from Terrasen.” “If it had fallen, if Aedion had fallen, we would know. People here would know.” Gavriel rubbed at his chest. “We’ve been to war. He’s been to war. Fought on battlefields as a child, gods be damned.” Rage flickered over Gavriel’s face. Not at what Aedion had done, but what he’d been made to do by fate and misfortune. What Gavriel had not been there to prevent. “But I still dread every day that passes and we hear nothing. Dread every messenger we see.” A terror Rowan had never known, different from his fear for his mate, his queen. The fear of a father for his child. He didn’t allow himself to look toward Aelin. To remember his dreams while hunting for her. The family he’d seen. The family they’d make together. “We must convince the khaganate royals to march northward when this battle is over,” Gavriel swore softly. Rowan nodded. “If we can ...