Perhaps yesterday’s outing to the healers’ compound hadn’t been out of spite. Maybe he’d . . . been trying to do something nice for her. “Shift, or it’ll take us twice as long.”
“I can’t. You know it doesn’t work like that.”
“Don’t you want to see how fast you can run?”
“I can’t use my other form in Adarlan anyway, so what’s the point?” Which was the start of a whole massive issue she hadn’t yet let herself contemplate.
“The point is that you’re here now, and you haven’t properly tested your limits.” It was true. She hadn’t really seen what she was capable of. “The point is, another husk of a body was found, and I consider that to be unacceptable.”
Another body—from that creature. A horrible, wretched death. It was unacceptable.
He gave her braid a sharp, painful tug. “Unless you’re still frightened.”
Her nostrils flared. “The only thing that frightens me is how very much I want to throttle you.” More than that, she wanted to find the creature and destroy it, for those it had murdered and for what it had made her walk through. She would kill it—slowly. A miserable sort of pressure and heat began building under her skin.
Rowan murmured, “Hone it—the anger.”
Was that why he’d told her about the body? Bastard—bastard for manipulating her, for making her pull double duty in the kitchen. But his face was unreadable as he said, “Let it be a blade, Aelin. If you cannot find the peace, then at least hone the anger that guides you to the shift. Embrace and control it—it is not your enemy.”
Arobynn had done everything he could to make her hate her heritage, to fear it. What he’d done to her, what she’d allowed herself to become . . . “This will not end well,” she breathed.
He didn’t back down. “See what you want, Aelin, and seize it. Don’t ask for it; don’t wish for it. Take it.”
“I’m certain the average magic instructor would not recommend this to most people.”
“You are not most people, and I think you like it that way. If it’s a darker set of emotions that will help you shift on command, then that’s what we’ll use. There might come a day when you find that anger doesn’t work, or when it is a crutch, but for now . . .” A contemplative look. “It was the common denominator those times you shifted—anger of varying kinds. So own it.”
He was right—and she didn’t want to think on it any more than that, or let herself get that enraged, not when she had been so angry for so long. For now . . .
Celaena took a long breath. Then another. She let the anger anchor her, a knife slicing past the usual hesitation and doubt and emptiness.
She brushed up against that familiar inner wall—no, a veil, shimmering with a soft light. All this time, she thought she’d been reaching down for the power, but this was more of a reach in. Not a wish, but a command. She would shift—because there was a creature prowling these lands, and it deserved to pay. With a silent growl, she punched herself through the veil, pain shooting along every inch and pore as she shifted.
A fierce, challenging grin, and Rowan moved, so fast she could hardly follow as he appeared on her other side and yanked on her braid again. When she whirled, he was already gone, and— She yelped as he pinched her side. “Stop—”
He was standing in front of her now, a wild invitation in his eyes. She’d been studying the way he moved, his tricks and tells, the way he assumed she’d react. So when she crossed her arms, feigning the tantrum he expected, she waited. Waited, and then—
He shot left to pinch or poke or hit her, and she whirled, slamming down his arm with an elbow and whacking him upside the head with her other hand. He stopped dead and blinked a few times. She smirked at him.
He bared his teeth in a feral, petrifying grin. “Oh, you’d better run now.”
When he lunged, she shot through the trees.
•
She had a suspicion that Rowan was letting her get ahead for the first few minutes, because though she moved faster, she could barely adjust enough to her altered body to leap over rocks and fallen trees. He’d said they were going southwest, and that was where she went, dodging between the trees, the anger simmering away, shifting into something else entirely.
Rowan was a silver and white streak beside and behind her, and every time he got too close, she veered the other way, testing out the senses that told her where the trees were without seeing them—the smell of oak and moss and living things, the open coolness of the mist passing between them like a path that she followed.
They hit a plateau, the ground easy beneath her boots. Faster—she wanted to see if she could go faster, if she could outrun the wind itself.
Rowan appeared at her left, and she pumped her arms, her legs, savoring the breath in her lungs—smooth and calm, ready to see what she would do next. More—this body wanted more.
She wanted more.
And then she was going swifter than she ever had in her life, the trees a blur, her immortal body singing as she let its rhythms fall into place. Her powerful lungs gobbled down the misty air and filled with the smell and taste of the world, only instinct and reflex guiding her, telling her she could go faster still, feet eating up the loamy earth step by step by step.
Gods. Oh, gods.
She could have flown, could have soared for the sudden surge of ecstasy in her blood, the sheer freedom granted by the marvel of creation that was her body.
Rowan shot at her from the right, but she dodged a tree with such ease she let out a whoop, then threw herself between two long-hanging braches, mere hurdles that she landed with feline skill.
Rowan was at her side again, lunging with a snap of his teeth, but she whirled and leapt over a rock, letting t
he moves she’d honed as an assassin blend into the instincts of her Fae body.
She could die for love of this speed, this surety in her bones. How had she been afraid of this body for so long? Even her soul felt looser. As if it had been locked up and buried and was only now starting to shake free. Not joy, perhaps not ever, but a glimmer of what she had been before grief had decimated her so thoroughly.
Rowan raced beside her, but made no move to grab her. No, Rowan was . . . playing.
He threw a glance at her, breathing hard but evenly. And it might have been the sun through the canopy, but she could have sworn that she saw his eyes alight with a glimmer of that same, feral contentment. She could have sworn he was smiling.
•
It was the fastest twenty miles of her life. Granted, the last five were slower, and by the time Rowan brought them to a halt, they were both gulping down air. It was only then, as they stared at each other between the trees, that she realized the magic hadn’t once flared—hadn’t once tried to overpower or erupt. She could feel it waiting down in her gut, warm but calm. Slumbering.
She wiped the sweat from her brow, her neck, her face. Though she was panting, she still could have run for miles more. Gods, if she had been this fast the night Nehemia had—
It wouldn’t have made a difference. Nehemia had orchestrated every step in her own destruction, and would have found another way. And she had only done it because Celaena refused to help—refused to act. Having this glorious Fae body changed nothing.
She blinked, realizing she’d been staring at Rowan, and that whatever satisfaction she’d seen on his face had again turned to ice. He tossed something at her—the shirt he’d carried with him. “Change.” He turned and stripped off his own shirt. His back was just as tan and scarred as the rest of him. But seeing those markings didn’t make her want to show him what her own ruined back looked like, so she moved between the trees until she was sure he couldn’t see her, and swapped her shirt. When she returned to where he’d dumped the pack, he tossed her a skein of water, which she gulped down. It tasted . . . She could taste each layer of minerals in the water, and the musk of the skein itself.