Kingdom of Ash

 

That lake water had never seen sunlight, had flowed from the dark, cold heart of the mountains themselves. It would kill even the most hardened of Fae warriors within minutes.

Yet there was Aelin, swimming as if it were a sun-warmed forest pool.

She treaded water, dipping her head back every now and then to scrub at her hair.

He hadn’t realized that she was burning so hotly until she’d stepped into the frigid lake and steam had risen.

Silently, she’d dove in, swimming beneath the surface, the water so clear he could see every stroke of her faintly glowing body. As if the water had peeled away the skin of the woman and revealed the blazing soul beneath.

But that glow faded with each passing breath she emerged to take, dimming further each time she plunged beneath the surface.

Had she wished for him not to touch her because of that internal inferno, or simply because she first wanted to wash away the stain of Cairn? Perhaps both. At least she’d begun speaking, her eyes clearing a bit.

They remained clear as she treaded water, the glow still barely clinging, and peered up at where he stood on a sliver of black rock jutting into the lake.

“You could join me,” she said at last.

No heat in her words, yet he felt the invitation. Not to taste her body the way he yearned to, needed to in order to know she was here with him, but rather to be with her. “Unlike you,” he said, trying to steady his voice as the recognition on her face threatened to buckle his knees, “I don’t think my magic would warm me so well if I got in.”

He wanted to, though. Gods, he wanted to leap in. But he made himself add, “This lake is ancient. You should get out.” Before something came creeping along.

She did no such thing, her arms continuing their sweeping circles in the water. Aelin only stared at him again in that grave, cautious way. “I didn’t break,” she said quietly. His heart cracked at the words. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

She didn’t say it for praise, to boast. But rather to tell him, her consort, of where they stood in this war. What their enemies might know.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” he managed to say.

“She … she tried to convince me that this was the bad dream. When Cairn was done with me, or during it, I don’t know, she’d try to worm her way into my mind.” She glanced around the cave, as if she could see the world beyond it. “She spun fantasies that felt so real …” She bobbed under the surface. Perhaps she’d needed the cooling water of the lake to be able to hear her own voice again; perhaps she needed the distance between them so she could speak these words. She emerged, slicking back her hair with a hand. “They felt like this.”

Half of him didn’t want to know, but he asked, “What sort of illusions?”

A long pause. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Too soon to push—if ever.

Then she asked softly, “How long?”

It took the entirety of his three centuries of training to keep the devastation, the agony for her, from his face. “Two months, three days, and seven hours.”

Her mouth tightened, either at the length of time, or the fact that he’d counted every single one of those hours apart.

She ran her fingers through her hair, its strands floating around her in the water. Still too long for two months to have passed. “They healed me after each … session. So that I stopped knowing what had been done and what was in my mind and where the truth lay.” Erase her scars, and Maeve stood a better chance at convincing her none of this was real. “But the healers couldn’t remember how long my hair was, or Maeve wanted to confuse me further, so they grew it out.” Her eyes darkened at the memory of why, perhaps, they had needed to regrow her hair in the first place.

“Do you want me to cut it back to the length it was when I last saw you?” His words were near-guttural.

“No.” Ripples shivered around her. “I want it so I can remember.”

What had been done to her, what she’d survived and what she had protected. Even with all he’d done to Cairn, the way he’d made sure the male was kept alive and screaming throughout, Rowan wished the male were still breathing, if only so he could take longer killing him.

And when he found Maeve …

That was not his kill. He’d ended Cairn, and didn’t regret it. But Aelin … Maeve was hers.

Even if the woman treading water before him didn’t seem to have vengeance on her mind. Not so much as a hint of the burning rage that fueled her.

He didn’t blame her. Knew it would take time, time and distance, to heal the internal wounds. If they could ever really heal at all.

But he’d work with her, help in whatever way he could. And if she never returned to who she had been before this, he would not love her any less.

Aelin dunked her head, and when she emerged, she said, “Maeve was about to put a Valg collar around my neck. She left to retrieve it.” The scent of her lingering fear drifted toward him, and Rowan lurched a step closer to the water’s edge. “It’s why I—why I got away. She had me moved to the army camp for safekeeping, and I …” Her voice stalled, yet she met his stare. Let him read the words she could not say, in that silent way they’d always been able to communicate. Escape wasn’t my intention.

“No, Fireheart,” he breathed, shaking his head, horror creeping over him. “There … there was no collar.”

She blinked, head angling. “That was a dream, too?”

His heart cracked as he struggled for the words. Made himself voice them. “No—it was real. Or Maeve thought it was. But the collars, the Valg presence … It was a lie that we crafted. To draw Maeve out, hopefully away from you and Doranelle.”

Only the faint lapping of water sounded. “There was no collar?”

Rowan lowered himself to his knees and shook his head. “I—Aelin, if I’d known what she’d do with the knowledge, what you’d decide to do—”

He might have lost her. Not from Maeve or the gods or the Lock, but from his own damned choices. The lie he’d spun.

Aelin drifted beneath the surface again. So deep that when the flare happened, it was little more than a flutter.

The light burst from her, rippling across the lake, illumining the stones, the slick ceiling above. A silent eruption.

His breathing turned ragged. But she swam toward the surface again, light streaming off her body like tendrils of clouds. It had nearly vanished when she emerged.

“I’m sorry,” he managed to say.

Again, that angle of the head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

He did, though. He’d added to her terror, her desperation. He’d—

“If you had not planted that lie for Maeve, if she had not told me, I don’t think we’d be here right now,” she said.

He tried to rein in the twisting in his gut, the urge to reach for her, to beg for her forgiveness. Tried and tried.

She only asked, “What of the others?”

She didn’t know—couldn’t know how and why and where they’d all parted ways. So Rowan told her, as succinctly and calmly as he could.

When he finished, Aelin was quiet for long minutes.

She stared out into the blackness, the rippling of her treading water the only sound. Her body had nearly lost that freshly forged glow.