She didn’t have it in her to feel a spark of surprise, to marvel at the brutality of the vengeance he’d exacted. Not as the words sank in. Not as her lungs opened up once again.
“I couldn’t risk bringing him here for you to kill,” Rowan went on, scanning her face. “Or risk leaving him alive, either.”
She lifted her palms, studying the unmarked, empty skin.
Cairn had done that. Had shredded her apart so badly they needed to put her back together again. Had wiped away all traces of who and what she’d been, what she’d seen and endured.
She lowered her hands to her sides. “I’m glad,” she said, and the words were true.
A shudder went through Rowan, and his head dipped slightly. “Are you …” He seemed to grapple with the right word. “Can I hold you?”
The stark need in his voice ripped at her, but she stepped back. “I …” She scanned the cave, blocking out the way his eyes guttered at her retreat. Across the chamber, the great lake flowed, smooth and flat as a black mirror. “I need to bathe,” she said, her voice low and raw. Even if there wasn’t a mark on her beyond dirty feet. “I need to wash it away,” she tried again.
Understanding softened his eyes. He pointed with a tattooed hand to the trough nearby. “There are a few extra cloths for you to wash with.” Dragging a hand through his silver hair, longer than she’d last seen it—in this world, this truth, at least—he added, “I don’t know how, but they also found some of your old clothes from Mistward and brought them here.”
But words were becoming distant again, dissolving on her tongue.
Her magic rumbled, pressing against her blood, squeezing her bones. Out, it howled. Out.
Soon, she promised.
Now. It thrashed. Her hands trembled, curling, as if she could keep it in.
So she turned away, aiming not toward the trough but the lake beyond.
The air stirred behind her, and she felt him following. When Rowan gleaned where she intended to bathe, he warned, “That water is barely above freezing, Aelin.”
She just dropped the cloak onto the black stones and stepped into the water.
Steam hissed, wafting around her in billowing clouds. She kept going, embracing the water’s bite with each step, even if it failed to pierce the heat of her.
The water was clear, though the gloom veiled the bottom that sloped away as she dove under the frigid surface.
The water was silent. Cool, and welcome, and calm.
So Aelin loosened the leash—only a fraction.
Flame leapt out, devoured by the frigid water. Consumed by it.
It pulled away that pressure, that endless fog of heat. Soothed and chilled until thoughts took form.
With each stroke beneath the surface, out into the darkness, she could feel it again. Herself. Or whatever was left of it.
Aelin. She was Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius, and she was Queen of Terrasen.
More magic rippled out, but she held her grip. Not all—not yet.
She had been captured by Maeve, tortured by her. Tortured by Cairn, her sentinel. But she had escaped, and her mate had come for her. Had found her, just as they had found each other despite centuries of bloodshed and loss and war.
Aelin. She was Aelin, and this was not some illusion, but the real world.
Aelin.
She swam out into the lake, and Rowan followed the jutting lip of stone along the shore’s edge.
She dropped beneath the surface, letting herself sink and sink and sink, toes grasping only open, cool water, straining for a bottom that did not arrive.
Down into the dark, the cold.
The ancient, icy water pulled away the flame and heat and strain. Pulled and sucked and waved it off.
Cooled that burning core of her until she took form, a blade red-hot from the fire plunged into water.
Aelin. That’s who she was.
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.