?Careful, Lorcan, or you’ll sound like you care about someone other than yourself.” As a discarded bastard child growing up on the back streets of Doranelle, Lorcan had lost that ability centuries before Rowan had even been born. He’d never pitied him for it, though. Not when Lorcan had been blessed in every other regard by Hellas himself.
Lorcan spat on the roof. “I was going to offer to bring your body back to your beloved mountain to be buried alongside Lyria once I finish with the keys. Now I’ll just let you rot here. Alongside your pretty little princess.”
He tried to ignore the blow, the thought of that grave atop his mountain. “Is that a threat?”
“Why would I bother? If you’re truly planning something, I won’t need to kill her—she can do that all on her own. Maybe the king will put her in one of those collars. Just like his son.”
A chord of horror struck so deep in Rowan that his stomach turned. “Mind what you say, Lorcan.”
“I bet Maeve would offer good coin for her. And if she gets her hands on that Wyrdkey … You can imagine just as well as I what sort of power Maeve would wield then.”
Worse—so much worse than he could imagine if Maeve wanted Aelin not dead but enslaved. A weapon without limit in one hand, and the heir of Mala Fire-Bringer in her other. There would be no stopping her.
Lorcan read the hesitation, the doubt. Gold gleamed in his hand. “You know me, Prince. You know I’m the only one qualified to hunt down and destroy those keys. Let your queen take on the army gathering in the south—leave this task to me.” The ring seemed to glow in the moonlight as Lorcan extended it. “Whatever she’s planning, she’ll need this. Or else you can say good-bye.” Lorcan’s eyes were chips of black ice. “We all know how well you handled saying it to Lyria.”
Rowan leashed his rage. “Swear it.”
Lorcan smiled, knowing he’d won.
“Swear that this ring grants immunity to the Valg, and I’ll give it to you,” Rowan said, and he pulled the Amulet of Orynth from his pocket.
Lorcan’s focus snapped to the amulet, to the otherworldly strangeness it radiated, and swore.
A blade flashed, and then the scent of Lorcan’s blood filled the air. He clenched his fist, lifting it. “I swear on my blood and honor that I have not deceived you in any of this. The ring’s power is genuine.”
Rowan watched the blood drip onto the roof. One drop; two; three.
Lorcan might have been a prick, but Rowan had never seen him break an oath before. His word was his bond; it had always been the one currency he valued.
They both moved at once, chucking the amulet and the ring into the space between them. Rowan caught the ring and swiftly pocketed it, but Lorcan just stared at the amulet in his hands, his eyes shadowed.
Rowan avoided the urge to hold his breath and stayed silent.
Lorcan slid the chain around his neck and tucked the amulet into his shirt. “You’re all going to die. Carrying out this plan, or in the war that follows.”
“You destroy those keys,” Rowan said, “and there might not be a war.” A fool’s hope.
“There will be a war. It’s too late to stop it now. Too bad that ring won’t keep any of you from being spiked on the castle walls.”
The image flashed through his head—made all the worse, perhaps, because of the times he’d seen it himself, done it himself. “What happened to you, Lorcan? What happened in your miserable existence to make you this way?” He’d never asked for the full story, had never cared to. It hadn’t bothered him until now. Before, he would have stood beside Lorcan and taunted the poor fool who dared defy their queen. “You’re a better male than this.”
“Am I? I still serve my queen, even if she cannot see it. Who was the one who abandoned her the first time a pretty human thing opened her legs—”
“That is enough.”
But Lorcan was gone.
Rowan waited a few minutes before going back downstairs, turning the ring over and over in his pocket.
Aelin was awake in the bed when he entered, the windows shut and curtained, the hearth dark. “Well?” she said, the word barely audible above the rustling of the blankets as he climbed in beside her.
His night-keen eyes allowed him to see the scarred palm she held out as he dropped the ring into it. She slid it onto her thumb, wriggled her fingers, and frowned when nothing particularly exciting happened. A laugh caught in his throat.
“How mad is Lorcan going to be,” Aelin murmured as they lay down face-to-face, “when he eventually opens up that amulet, finds the Valg commander’s ring inside, and realizes we gave him a fake?”
The demon ripped down the remaining barriers between their souls as though they were paper, until only one remained, a tiny shell of self.
He did not remember waking, or sleeping, or eating. Indeed, there were very few moments when he was even there, looking out through his eyes. Only when the demon prince fed on the prisoners in the dungeons—when he allowed him to feed, to drink alongside him—that was the only time he now surfaced.
Whatever control he’d had that day—
What day?
He could not remember a time when the demon had not been there inside of him.
And yet—
Manon.
A name.
Do not think of that one—do not think of her. The demon hated that name.
Manon.
Enough. We do not speak of them, the descendants of our kings.
Speak of whom?
Good.
“You’re ready for tomorrow?” Aelin said to Chaol as they stood on the roof of her apartment, gazing toward the glass castle. In the setting sun, it was awash in gold and orange and ruby—as if it were already aflame.
Chaol prayed it wouldn’t come to that, but … “As ready as I can be.”
He’d tried not to look too hesitant, too wary, when he’d arrived minutes ago to run through tomorrow’s plan one last time and Aelin had instead asked him to join her up here. Alone.
She was wearing a loose white shirt tucked into tight brown pants, her hair unbound, and hadn’t even bothered to put on shoes. He wondered what her people would think of a barefoot queen.
Aelin braced her forearms on the roof rail, hooking one ankle over the other as she said, “You know that I won’t unnecessarily endanger any lives.”
“I know. I trust you.”
She blinked, and shame washed through him at the shock on her face. “Do you regret,” she said, “sacrificing your freedom to get me to Wendlyn?”
“No,” he said, surprising himself to find it true. “Regardless of what happened between us, I was a fool to serve the king. I like to think I would have left someday.”
He needed to say that to her—had needed to say it from the moment she’d returned.
“With me,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You would have left with me—when I was just Celaena.”
“But you were never just Celaena, and I think you knew that, deep down, even before everything happened. I understand now.”
She studied him with eyes that were far older than nineteen. “You’re still the same person, Chaol, that you were before you broke the oath to your father.”
He wasn’t sure whether or not that was an insult. He supposed he deserved it, after all he’d said and done.
“Maybe I don’t want to be that person anymore,” he said. That person—that stupidly loyal, useless person—had lost everything. His friend, the woman he loved, his position, his honor. Lost everything, with only himself to blame.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About Nehemia—about everything.” It wasn’t enough. It never would be.
But she gave him a grim smile, eyes darting to the faint scar on his cheek. “I’m sorry I mauled your face, then tried to kill you.” She turned to the glass castle again. “It’s still hard for me, to think about what happened this winter. But in the end I’m grateful you sent me to Wendlyn, and made that bargain with your father.” She closed her eyes and took a shallow br
eath. When she opened her eyes, the setting sun filled them with liquid gold. Chaol braced himself. “It meant something to me. What you and I had. More than that, your friendship meant something to me. I never told you the truth about who I was because I couldn’t face that truth. I’m sorry if what I said to you on the docks that day—that I’d pick you—made you think I’d come back, and it would all be fixed. Things changed. I changed.”
He’d waited for this conversation for weeks now, months now—and he’d expected himself to yell, or pace, or just shut her out entirely. But there was nothing but calm in his veins, a steady, peaceful calm. “You deserve to be happy,” he said. And meant it. She deserved the joy he so often glimpsed on her face when Rowan was near—deserved the wicked laughter she shared with Aedion, the comfort and teasing with Lysandra. She deserved happiness, perhaps more than anyone.
She flicked her gaze over his shoulder—to where Nesryn’s slim silhouette filled the doorway onto the roof, where she’d been waiting for the past few minutes. “So do you, Chaol.”
“You know she and I haven’t—”
“I know. But you should. Faliq—Nesryn is a good woman. You deserve each other.”
“This is assuming she has any interest in me.”
A knowing gleam in those eyes. “She does.”
Chaol again glanced toward Nesryn, who gazed at the river. He smiled a bit.
But then Aelin said, “I promise I’ll make it quick and painless. For Dorian.”
His breathing locked up. “Thank you. But—if I ask …” He couldn’t say it.
“Then the blow is yours. Just say the word.” She ran her fingers over the Eye of Elena, its blue stone gleaming in the sunset. “We do not look back, Chaol. It helps no one and nothing to look back. We can only go on.”
There she was, that queen looking out at him, a hint of the ruler she was becoming. And it knocked the breath out of him, because it made him feel so strangely young—when she now seemed so old. “What if we go on,” he said, “only to more pain and despair? What if we go on, only to find a horrible end waiting for us?”
Aelin looked northward, as if she could see all the way to Terrasen. “Then it is not the end.”