Thank the gods. Even though they were the last beings Rowan wished to thank.

Aelin halted at the rocky shore, peering across the mirror-flat expanse now choked with debris. She rested a hand atop Goldryn’s hilt, flame dancing at her fingers, seemingly into the red stone itself.

“It would take years,” she observed, “to heal everyone infected by the Valg.”

“Each of those soldiers has a family, friends who would want us to try.”

“I know.” The chill wind whipped her hair across her face, blowing northward.

“Then why the walk out here?” She’d gone contemplative during their meeting in the tent, her brow furrowing.

“Could Yrene heal them? Erawan and Maeve? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”

“Is Erawan’s body made by him, or stolen? Is Maeve’s?” Rowan shook his head. “They might be wholly different.”

“I don’t see how I can ask Yrene to do it. Ask it of Chaol.” Aelin swallowed. “To even put Yrene near Erawan or Maeve … I can’t do it.”

Rowan wouldn’t be able to, either. Not for a thousand different reasons.

“But is it a mistake to put Yrene’s safety above that of this entire world?” Aelin mused, examining one of the enemy daggers she’d pilfered. An unusually fine blade, likely stolen in the first place. “She’s the greatest weapon we have, if the keys are not in play. Are we fools not to push to use it?”

It wasn’t his choice, his call. But he could offer her a sounding board. “Will you be able to live with yourself if something happens to Yrene, to her unborn child?”

“No. But the rest of the world will live, at least. My guilt would be secondary to that.”

“And if you don’t push Yrene to try to destroy them, and Erawan or Maeve wins—what then?”

“There is still the Lock. There’s still me.”

Rowan swallowed. Saw the reason she’d needed to be away from the others, needed to walk. “Yrene is a ray of hope for you. For us. That you might not need to forge the Lock at all. You, or Dorian.”

“The gods demand it.”

“The gods can go to hell.”

Aelin chucked away the dagger. “I hate this. I really do.”

He slid an arm around her shoulders. It was all he could offer her.

Over—she’d said she wanted it to be over. He’d do all he could to make it so.

Aelin leaned her head against his chest, and they stared across the cold lake in silence. “Would you let me do it, if I were Yrene? If I were carrying our child?”

He failed to block out the image of that dream—of Aelin, heavily pregnant, their children around her. “I don’t let you do anything.”

She waved a hand. “You know what I mean.”

He took a moment to answer. “No. Even if the world ended because of it, I couldn’t bear it.”

And with that Lock, he might very well have to make that decision, too.

Rowan ran his fingers over the claiming marks on her neck. “I told you that love was a weakness. It would be far easier if we all hated each other.”

She snorted. “Give it a few weeks on the road with this army, in those mountains, and we might not be such pleasant allies anymore.”

Rowan kissed the top of her head. “Gods help us.”

But Aelin pulled away at the words, the phrase that dropped off his tongue. She frowned toward the camped army.

“What?” he asked.

“I want to see those Wyrdmark books Chaol and Yrene brought with them.”

“What does this say?” Aelin asked Borte, tapping a finger on a scribbled line of text in Halha, the tongue of the southern continent.

Seated beside her at the desk in Prince Sartaq’s war tent, the ruk rider craned her neck to study the handwritten note beside a long column of Wyrdmarks. “A good spell for encouraging your herb beds to grow.”

Across the desk, Rowan snorted. A book lay open before him, his progress through it far slower than Aelin’s.

Most of the tomes were wholly written in Wyrdmarks, but annotations scribbled in the margins had driven her to seek out the young rukhin. Borte, thoroughly bored with helping Yrene, had leaped at the chance to assist them, passing Valg duty onto her scowling betrothed.

But for the two hours that Aelin and Rowan had perused the collection Chaol and Yrene had brought from Hafiza’s forbidden library atop the Torre, nothing had proved useful.

Aelin sighed at the canvas ceiling of the prince’s large tent. Fortunate that Sartaq had brought these trunks with him, rather than leaving them with their armada, but … exhaustion nipped at her, fogging the intricate lattice of symbols on the yellowed pages.

Rowan straightened. “This one opens something,” he said, flipping the book to face her. “I don’t know the other symbols, but that one says ‘open.’ ” Even with the hours of instruction on the journey back to this continent, Rowan and the others had not wholly mastered the language of the half-forgotten marks. But her mate remembered most—as if they’d been planted in his mind.

Aelin carefully studied the line of symbols across the page. Read through them a second time. “It’s not what we’re looking for.” She pulled on her bottom lip. “It’s a spell for opening a portal between locations—just in this world.”

“Like what Maeve can do?” Borte asked.

Aelin shrugged. “Yes, but this is for close traveling. More like what Fenrys can do.” Or had once been able to do, before Maeve had broken it from him.

Borte’s mouth quirked to the side. “What’s the point of it, then?”

“Entertaining people at parties?” Aelin handed the book back to Rowan.

Borte chuckled, and leaned back in her seat, toying with the end of a long braid. “Do you think the spell exists—to find an alternate way to seal the Wyrdgate?” The question was barely more than a whisper, and yet Rowan shot the girl a warning look. Borte just waved him off.

No. Elena would have told her, or Brannon, if such a thing had existed.

Aelin ran a hand over the dry, ancient page, the symbols blurring. “It’s worth a look, isn’t it?”

Rowan indeed resumed his careful browsing and decoding. He’d sit here for hours, she knew. And if they found nothing, she knew he’d sit here and reread them all just to be sure.

A way out—an alternate path. For her, for Dorian. For whichever of them would pay the price to forge the Lock and seal the gate. A desperate, foolish hope.

The hours passed, the stacks of books dwindling. Fenrys joined them after a time, unusually solemn as they searched and searched. And found nothing.

When there were no books left in the trunk, when Borte was nodding off and Rowan was pacing through the tent, Aelin did them all a favor and ordered them to return to the keep.

It had been worth a look, she told herself. Even if the leaden weight in her gut said otherwise.

Chaol found his father where he’d left him, seething in his study.

“You cannot give a single acre of this territory to the wild men,” his father hissed as Chaol wheeled into the room and shut the door.

Chaol crossed his arms, not bothering to look placating. “I can, and I will.”