The two healers vanished around a tent. Aelin flexed her fingers, shaking the lightness from them. “It didn’t stop them from doing it.”
“They didn’t have a choice.”
She met his dark stare. Fenrys’s mouth tightened. “No one would have left you in those states. No one.”
Broken and bloody and burned—
She gripped Goldryn’s hilt. Helpless.
“They defied her in their own way,” Fenrys went on. “Sometimes, she’d order them to bring you back to consciousness. Often, they claimed they couldn’t, that you’d fallen too deeply into oblivion. But I knew—I think Maeve did, too—that they put you there. For as long as possible. To buy you time.”
She swallowed. “Did she punish them?”
“I don’t know. It was never the same healers.”
Maeve likely had. Had likely ripped their minds apart for their defiance.
Aelin’s grip tightened on the sword at her side.
Helpless. She had been helpless. As so many in this city, in Terrasen, in this continent, were helpless.
Goldryn’s hilt warmed in her hand.
She wouldn’t be that way again. For whatever time she had left.
Gavriel padded up beside Rowan, took one look at the queen and Fenrys, and murmured, “Not the news we needed to hear.”
Rowan closed his eyes for a heartbeat. “No, it was not.”
Gavriel settled a hand on Rowan’s shoulder. “It changes nothing, in some ways.”
“How.”
“We served her. She was … not what Aelin is. What a queen should be. We knew that long before we knew the truth. If Maeve wants to use what she is against us, to ally with Morath, then it changes things. But the past is over. Done with, Rowan. Knowing Maeve is Valg or just a wretched person doesn’t change what happened.”
“Knowing a Valg queen wants to enslave my mate, and nearly did so, changes a great deal.”
“But we know what Maeve fears, why she fears it,” Gavriel countered, his tawny eyes bright. “Fire, and the healers. If Maeve comes with that army of hers, we are not defenseless.”
It was true. Rowan could have cursed himself for not thinking of it already. Another question formed, though. “Her army,” Rowan said. “It’s made up of Fae.”
“So was her armada,” Gavriel said warily.
Rowan ran a hand through his hair. “Will you be able to live with it—fighting our own people?” Killing them.
“Will you?” Gavriel countered.
Rowan didn’t answer.
Gavriel asked after a moment, “Why didn’t Aelin offer me the blood oath?”
The male hadn’t asked these weeks. And Rowan wasn’t sure why Gavriel inquired now, but he gave him the truth. “Because she won’t do it until Aedion has taken the oath first. To offer it to you before him … she wants Aedion to take it first.”
“In case he doesn’t wish me to be near his kingdom.”
“So that Aedion knows she placed his needs before her own.”
Gavriel bowed his head. “I would say yes, if she offered.”
“I know.” Rowan clapped his oldest friend on the back. “She knows, too.”
The Lion gazed northward. “Do you think … we haven’t heard any news from Terrasen.”
“If it had fallen, if Aedion had fallen, we would know. People here would know.”
Gavriel rubbed at his chest. “We’ve been to war. He’s been to war. Fought on battlefields as a child, gods be damned.” Rage flickered over Gavriel’s face. Not at what Aedion had done, but what he’d been made to do by fate and misfortune. What Gavriel had not been there to prevent. “But I still dread every day that passes and we hear nothing. Dread every messenger we see.”
A terror Rowan had never known, different from his fear for his mate, his queen. The fear of a father for his child.
He didn’t allow himself to look toward Aelin. To remember his dreams while hunting for her. The family he’d seen. The family they’d make together.
“We must convince the khaganate royals to march northward when this battle is over,” Gavriel swore softly.
Rowan nodded. “If we can smash this army tomorrow, and convince the royals that Terrasen is the only course of action, then we could indeed be heading north soon. You might be fighting at Aedion’s side by Yulemas.”
Gavriel’s hands clenched at his sides, tattoos spreading over his knuckles. “If he will allow me that honor.”
Rowan would make Aedion allow it. But he only said, “Gather Elide and Lorcan. The ruks are almost ready to depart.”
CHAPTER 51
Lorcan lingered by the edge of the ruk encampment, barely taking in the magnificent birds or their armored riders as they settled down for the night. A few, he knew, would not yet find their rest, instead bearing them and needed supplies back to the keep towering over the city and plain.
He didn’t care, didn’t marvel that he was soon to be airborne on one of those incredible beasts. Didn’t care that tomorrow, they would all take on the dark army gathered beyond.
He’d fought in more battles, more wars, than he cared to remember. Tomorrow would be little different, save for the demons they’d slay, rather than men or Fae.
Demons like his former queen, apparently.
He had offered himself to her, had wanted her, or believed he did. And she had laughed at him. He didn’t know what it meant. About her, about himself.
He’d thought his darkness, Hellas’s gifts, had been drawn to her, that they’d been matched.
Perhaps the dark god had wanted him not to swear fealty to Maeve, but to kill her. To get close enough to do so.
Lorcan didn’t adjust his cape against the gust of frigid air off the distant lake. Rather, he leaned into the cold, into the ice on the wind. As if it might rip away the truth.
“We’re leaving.”
Elide’s low voice cut through the roaring silence of his thoughts.
“The ruks are ready,” she added.
There was no fear or pity on her face, her black hair gilded by the torches and campfires. Of all of them, she’d mastered the news with little difficulty, stepping up to the desk as if she’d been born on a battlefield.
“I didn’t know,” he said, voice strained.
Elide knew what he meant. “We have bigger things to worry about anyway.”
He took a step toward her. “I didn’t know,” he said again.
She tipped her head back to study his face and pursed her mouth, a muscle ticking in her jaw. “Do you want me to give you some sort of absolution for it?”
“I served her for nearly five hundred years. Five hundred years, and I just thought her to be immortal and cold.”
“That sounds like the definition of a Valg to me.”
He bared his teeth. “You live for eons and see what it does to you, Lady.”
“I don’t see why you’re so shocked. Even with her being immortal and cold, you loved her. You must have accepted those traits. What difference does it make what we call her, then?”
“I didn’t love her.”
“You certainly acted like you did.”
Lorcan snarled, “Why is that the point you keep returning to, Elide? Why is it the one thing you cannot let go of?”
“Because I’m trying to understand. How you could come to love a monster.”
“Why?” He pushed into her space. She didn’t balk one step.
Indeed, her eyes were blazing as she hissed, “Because it will help me understand how I did the same.”
Her voice snagged on the last words, and Lorcan stilled as they settled into them. He’d never … he’d never had anyone who—
“Is it a sickness?” she demanded. “Is it something broken within you?”
“Elide.” Her name was a rasp on his lips. Lorcan dared reach a hand for her.
But she pulled out of reach. “If you think that because you swore the blood oath to Aelin, it means anything for you and me, you’re sorely mistaken. You’re immortal—I’m human. Let us not forget that little fact, either.”