Kingdom of Ash
Elide held her breath as both males strained, arms shaking.
Nothing.
They tried again. Aelin’s breathing hitched. Elide tightened her hand on the queen’s knee.
“She managed to snap the chains on her ankles and hands,” Gavriel observed. “They’re not indestructible.”
But with the chains on the mask so close to her head, a swipe of a sword was impossible. Or perhaps the mask had been made from far stronger iron.
Rowan and Lorcan grunted as they heaved against the chains. It was of little use.
Panting softly, they paused. Red welts shone on their hands.
They’d tried to use their magic to break the iron.
Silence fell through the clearing. They couldn’t linger here—not for much longer. But to take Aelin in the chains, when she was so frantic to be free of them …
Aelin’s eyes opened.
They were empty. Wholly drained. A warrior accepting defeat.
Elide blurted, scrambling for anything to banish that emptiness, “Was there ever a key? Did you see them using a key?”
Two blinks. As if that meant something.
Rowan and Lorcan yanked again, straining.
But Aelin’s stare fell to the moss, the stones. Narrowed slightly, as if the question had settled. Through the small hole in her mask, Elide could barely see her mouth the words. A key.
“I don’t have it—we don’t have them,” Elide said, sensing the direction of Aelin’s thoughts. “Manon and Dorian do.”
“Quiet,” Lorcan hissed. Not at the level of her voice, but the deadly information Elide revealed.
Aelin again blinked twice with that strange intentionality.
Rowan snarled at the chains, heaving again.
But Aelin stretched out a hand to the moss and traced a shape.
“What is that?” Elide leaned forward as the queen did it again, her hollow face unreadable.
The Fae males paused at her question, and watched Aelin’s finger move through the green.
“A Wyrdmark,” Rowan said softly. “To open.”
Aelin traced it again, mute and still. As if none of them stood there.
“They work on iron?” Gavriel asked, tracking Aelin’s finger.
“She unlocked iron doors in Adarlan’s royal library with that symbol,” Rowan murmured. “But she needed …”
He let his words hang unfinished as he picked up the broken knife Aelin had discarded in the moss nearby and sliced it across his palm.
Kneeling before her, he extended his bloodied hand. “Show me, Fireheart. Show me again.” He tapped her ankle—the shackle there.
Silently, her movements stiff, Aelin leaned forward. She sniffed at the blood pooling in his hand, her nostrils flaring. Her eyes lifted to his, like the scent of his blood posed some question.
“I am your mate,” Rowan whispered, as if it was the answer she sought. And the love in his eyes, in the way his voice broke, his bloodied hand trembling … Elide’s throat tightened.
Aelin only looked at the blood pooling in his cupped palm. Her fingers curled, the gauntlet clicking. As if it were another answer, too.
“She can’t do it with the iron,” Elide said. “If it’s on her hands. It interferes with the magic in the blood.”
A blink from her, in that silent language.
“It’s why she put them on you, isn’t it,” Elide said, her chest straining. “To be sure you couldn’t use your own blood with the Wyrdmarks to free yourself.” As if all the other iron wasn’t already enough.
Another blink, her face still so hollow and cold. Tired.
Rowan’s jaw clenched. But he just dipped his finger into the blood in his palm and offered his hand to her. “Show me, Fireheart,” he said again.
Elide could have sworn he shuddered, and not from fear, as Aelin’s metal-crusted hand closed around his.
In halting, small movements, she guided his finger to trace the symbol onto the shackle around her ankle.
A soft flare of greenish light, then—
The hiss and sigh of the lock filled the clearing. The shackle tumbled to the moss.
Lorcan swore.
Rowan offered his hand, his blood, again. The shackle around her other ankle yielded to the Wyrdmark.
Then the manacles around her wrists. Then the beautiful, horrible gauntlets thudded to the moss.
Aelin lifted her bare hands to her face, reaching for the lock behind the mask, but halted.
“I’ll do it,” Rowan said, his voice still soft, still full of that love. He moved behind her, and Elide stared at the horrible mask, the suns and flames carved and embossed along its ancient surface.
A flare of light, a click of metal, and then it slid free.
Her face was pale—so pale, all traces of the sun-kissed coloring gone.
And empty. Aware, and yet not.
Wary.
Elide kept still, letting the queen survey her. The males moved to face her, and Aelin looked upon them in turn. Gavriel, who bowed his head. Lorcan, who stared right back at her, his dark gaze unreadable.
And Rowan. Rowan, whose breathing became jagged, his swallow audible. “Aelin?”
The name, it seemed, was an unlocking, too.
Not of the queen she’d so briefly known, but the power inside her.
Elide flinched as flame, golden and blazing, erupted around the queen. The shift burned away into ashes.
Lorcan dragged Elide back, and she allowed it, even as the heat vanished. Even as the flare of power contracted into an aura around the queen, a shimmering second skin.
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.
CHAPTER 31
They had taken her scars.
Maeve had taken them all away.
It told Rowan enough about what had been done. 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.
Healers could remove scars, yes, but the most likely reason for the lack of them on Aelin, on all the places where he’d once traced them with his hands, his mouth …
It was new skin. All of it. Save for her face, since he doubted they would be stupid enough to take off the mask.
Nearly every inch of her was covered in new skin, unvarnished as fresh snow. The blood coating her had burned away to reveal it.
New skin, because they’d needed to replace what had been destroyed. To heal her so they could begin again and again.