Queen of Shadows

He glowered at her before striding out of the bedroom. In the mountains, he would have made her go on a run, or chop wood for hours, or pull extra kitchen duty.

This apartment was too small, too full of males used to getting their own way and a queen used to getting hers. Worse, a queen hell-bent on keeping secrets. He’d dealt with young rulers before: Maeve had dispatched him to enough foreign courts that he knew how to get them to heel. But Aelin …

She’d taken him out to hunt demons. And yet this task, whatever she had done, required even him to be kept in ignorance.

Rowan filled the kettle, focusing on each movement—if only to keep from throwing it through the window.

“Making breakfast? How domestic of you.” Aelin leaned against the doorway, irreverent as always.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping like the dead, considering your busy night?”

“Can we not get into a fight about it before my first cup of tea?”

With lethal calm, he set the kettle on the stove. “After tea, then?”

She crossed her arms, sunlight kissing the shoulder of her pale-blue robe. Such a creature of luxury, his queen. And yet—yet she hadn’t bought a single new thing for herself lately. She loosed a breath, and her shoulders slumped a bit.

The rage roaring through his veins stumbled. And stumbled again when she chewed on her lip. “I need you to come with me today.”

“Anywhere you need to go,” he said. She looked toward the table, at the stove. “To Arobynn?” He hadn’t forgotten for one second where they would be going tonight—what she would be facing.

She shook her head, then shrugged. “No—I mean, yes, I want you to come tonight, but … There’s something else I need to do. And I want to do today, before everything happens.”

He waited, restraining himself from going to her, from asking her to tell him more. That had been their promise to each other: space to sort out their own miserable lives—to sort out how to share them. He didn’t mind. Most of the time.

She rubbed at her brows with her thumb and forefinger, and when she squared her shoulders—those silk-clad shoulders that bore a weight he’d do anything to relieve—she lifted her chin. “There’s a grave I need to visit.”

She didn’t have a black gown fit for mourning, but Aelin figured Sam would have preferred to see her in something bright and lovely anyway. So she wore a tunic the color of spring grass, its sleeves capped with dusty golden velvet cuffs. Life, she thought as she strode through the small, pretty graveyard overlooking the Avery. The clothes Sam would have wanted her to wear reminded her of life.

The graveyard was empty, but the headstones and grass were well kept, and the towering oaks were budding with new leaves. A breeze coming in off the glimmering river set them sighing and ruffled her unbound hair, which was back now to its normal honey-gold.

Rowan had stayed near the little iron gate, leaning against one of those oaks to keep passersby on the quiet city street behind them from noticing him. If they did, his black clothes and weapons painted him as a mere bodyguard.

She had planned to come alone. But this morning she’d awoken and just … needed him with her.

The new grass cushioned each step between the pale headstones bathed in the sunlight streaming down.

She picked up pebbles along the way, discarding the misshapen and rough ones, keeping those that gleamed with bits of quartz or color. She clutched a fistful of them by the time she approached the last line of graves at the edge of the large, muddy river flowing lazily past.

It was a lovely grave—simple, clean—and on the stone was written:

Sam Cortland

Beloved

Arobynn had left it blank—unmarked. But Wesley had explained in his letter how he’d asked the tombstone carver to come. She approached the grave, reading it over and over.

Beloved—not just by her, but by many.

Sam. Her Sam.

For a moment, she stared at that stretch of grass, at the white stone. For a moment she could see that beautiful face grinning at her, yelling at her, loving her. She opened her fist of pebbles and picked out the three loveliest—two for the years since he’d been taken from her, one for what they’d been together. Carefully, she placed them at the apex of the headstone’s curve.

Then she sat down against the stone, tucking her feet beneath her, and rested her head against the smooth, cool rock.

“Hello, Sam,” she breathed onto the river breeze.

She said nothing for a time, content to be near him, even in this form. The sun warmed her hair, a kiss of heat along her scalp. A trace of Mala, perhaps, even here.

She began talking, quietly and succinctly, telling Sam about what had happened to her ten years ago, telling him about these past nine months. When she was done, she stared up at the oak leaves rustling overhead and dragged her fingers through the soft grass.

“I miss you,” she said. “Every day, I miss you. And I wonder what you would have made of all this. Made of me. I think—I think you would have been a wonderful king. I think they would have liked you more than me, actually.” Her throat tightened. “I never told you—how I felt. But I loved you, and I think a part of me might always love you. Maybe you were my mate, and I never knew it. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about that. Maybe I’ll see you again in the Afterworld, and then I’ll know for sure. But until then … until then I’ll miss you, and I’ll wish you were here.”

She would not apologize, nor say it was her fault. Because his death wasn’t her fault. And tonight … tonight she would settle that debt.

She wiped at her face with the back of her sleeve and got to her feet. The sun dried her tears. She smelled the pine and snow before she heard him, and when she turned, Rowan stood a few feet away, staring at the headstone behind her.

“He was—”

“I know who he was to you,” Rowan said softly, and held out his hand. Not to take hers, but for a stone.

She opened her fist, and he sorted through the pebbles until he found one—smooth and round, the size of a hummingbird’s egg. With a gentleness that cracked her heart, he set it on the headstone beside her own pebbles.

“You’re going to kill Arobynn tonight, aren’t you?” he said.

“After the dinner. When he’s gone to bed. I’m going back to the Keep and ending it.”

She’d come here to remind herself—remind herself why that grave before them existed, and why she had those scars on her back.

“And the Amulet of Orynth?”

“An endgame, but also a distraction.”

The sunlight danced on the Avery, nearly blinding. “You’re ready to do it?”

She looked back at the gravestone, and at the grass concealing the coffin beneath. “I have no choice but to be ready.”

40

Elide spent two days on voluntary kitchen duty, learning where and when the laundresses ate and who brought their food. By that point, the head cook trusted her enough that when she volunteered to bring the bread up to the dining hall, he didn’t think twice.

No one noticed when she sprinkled the poison onto a few rolls of bread. The Wing Leader had sworn it wouldn’t kill—just make the laundress sick for a few days. And maybe it made her selfish for placing her own survival first, but Elide didn’t hesitate as she dumped the pale powder onto some of the rolls, blending it into the flour that dusted them.

Elide marked one roll in particular to make sure she gave it to the laundress she’d noted days before, but the others would be given out at random to the other laundresses.

Hell—she was likely going to burn in Hellas’s realm forever for this.

But she could think about her damnation when she had escaped and was far, far away, beyond the Southern Continent.

Elide limped into the raucous dining hall, a quiet cripple with yet another platter of food. She made her way down the long table, trying to keep the weight off her leg as she leaned in again and again to deposit rolls onto plates. The laundress didn’t even bother to thank her.

The next day, the Keep was abuzz with the news that a third of the laundresses were sick. It must have been the chicken at dinner, they said. Or the mutton. Or the soup, since only some of them had had it. The cook apologized—and Elide had tried not to apologize to him when she saw the terror in his eyes.