“Is she really marrying that Fae Prince?”
“Maybe. Likely.”
“Are you—upset about it?”
And though she asked it casually, that healer’s mask a portrait of calm curiosity, he selected his words carefully.
“Aelin was very important to me. She still is—though in a different way. And for a while … it was not easy, to change the dreams I’d planned for my future. Especially the dreams with her.”
Yrene angled her head, the lantern light dancing in her soft curls. “Why?”
“Because when I met Aelin, when I fell in love with her, she was not … She went by another name. Another title and identity. And things between us fell apart before I knew the truth, but … I think I knew. When I learned she was truly Aelin. I knew that between her and Dorian, I …”
“You would never leave Adarlan. Or him.”
He fiddled with the cane beside him, running his hands over the smooth wood. “She knew it, too, I think. Long before I did. But she still … She left, at one point. It’s a long story, but she went off to Wendlyn alone. And that was where she met Prince Rowan. And out of respect to me, because we had not truly ended it, she waited. For him. They both did. And when she came back to Rifthold, it ended. Between us, I mean. Officially. Badly. I handled it badly, and she did, too, and it just … We made our peace, before we parted ways months ago. And they left together. As it should be. They are … If you ever meet them, you’ll get it. Like Hasar, she isn’t an easy person to be with, to understand. Aelin frightens everyone.” He snorted. “But not him. I think that’s why she fell in love with him, against her best intentions. Rowan beheld all Aelin was and is, and he was not afraid.”
Yrene was quiet for a moment. “But you were?”
“It was a … rough period for me. Everything I knew was trampled. Everything. And she … I think I placed the blame for a great deal of it upon her. Began to see her as a monster.”
“Is she?”
“It depends on who’s telling the story, I suppose.” Chaol studied the intricate pattern of the red-and-green rug beneath his boots. “But I don’t think so. There is no one else that I would trust to handle this war. No one else I would trust to take on all of Morath but Aelin. Even Dorian. If there’s some way to win, she’ll find it. The costs might be high, but she’ll do it.” He shook his head. “And it’s your birthday. We should probably talk of nicer things.”
Yrene didn’t smile. “You waited for her while she was gone. Didn’t you? Even knowing what—who—she really was.”
He hadn’t admitted it, even to himself.
His throat tightened. “Yes.”
She now studied that woven carpet beneath them. “But you—you don’t still love her?”
“No,” he said, and had never meant anything more. He added softly, “Or Nesryn.”
Her brows rose at that, but he wrapped a hand around the cane, groaning softly as he pushed to his feet and made his way toward her. She tracked each movement, unable to set aside the healing, her eyes darting over his legs, his middle, the way he gripped the cane.
Chaol halted a step away, pulling a small bundle out of his pocket. Silently, he extended it to her, the black velvet like the rippling dunes beyond them.
“What’s that?”
He only held out the folded piece of fabric. “They didn’t have a box I liked, so I just used the cloth—”
Yrene took it from his hand, her fingers shaking slightly as she folded back the edges of the bundle that he’d been carrying all day.
In the lantern light, the silver locket shimmered and danced as she lifted it up between her fingers, eyes wide. “I can’t take this.”
“You’d better,” he said as she lowered the oval locket into her palm to examine it. “I had your initials carved onto it.”
Indeed, she was already tracing the swirling letters he’d asked the jeweler in Antica to engrave on the front. She turned it over to the back—
Yrene put a hand to her throat, right over that scar.
“Mountains. And seas,” she whispered.
“So you never forget that you climbed them and crossed them. That you—only you—got yourself here.”
She let out a small, soft laugh—a sound of pure joy. He couldn’t let himself identify the other sound within it.
“I bought it,” Chaol clarified instead, “so you could keep whatever it is you always carry in your pocket inside. So you don’t have to keep moving it from dress to dress. Whatever it is.”
Surprise lighted her eyes. “You know?”
“I don’t know what it is, but I see you holding something in there all the time.”
He’d calculated that it was small, and based the locket’s size upon it. He’d never seen an indentation or weight in her pockets to suggest its bulk, and had studied other objects she’d placed within there while working on him—papers, vials—against the utter flatness of it. Perhaps it was a lock of hair, some small stone—
“It’s nothing as fine as a party in the desert—”
“No one has given me a gift since I was eleven.”
Since her mother.
“A birthday gift, I mean,” she clarified. “I …”
She slid the locket’s fine silver chain over her head, the links catching in the stray, luscious curls. He watched her lift the mass of her hair over the chain, setting it dangling down to the edge of her breasts. Against the honey-brown of her skin, the locket was like quicksilver. She traced her slim fingers over the engraved surface.
Chaol’s chest tightened as she lifted her head, and he found silver lining her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
He shrugged, unable to come up with a response.
Yrene only walked over, and he braced himself, readied himself, as her hands cupped his face. As she stared into his eyes.
“I am glad,” she whispered, “that you do not love that queen. Or Nesryn.”
His heart thundered through every inch of him.
Yrene rose onto her toes and pressed a kiss, light as a caress, to his mouth. Never breaking his stare.
He read the unspoken words there. He wondered if she read the ones not voiced by him, either.
“I will cherish it always,” Yrene said, and he knew she wasn’t talking about the locket. Not as she lowered a hand from his face to his chest. Atop his raging heart. “No matter what may befall the world.” Another featherlight kiss. “No matter the oceans, or mountains, or forests in the way.”
Any leash on himself snapped. Letting his cane thump to the floor, Chaol drifted a hand around her waist, his thumb stroking along the sliver of bare skin the dress revealed. The other he plunged into that luxurious, heavy hair, cupping the back of her head as he tilted her face upward. As he studied those brown-gold eyes, the emotion simmering in them.
“I am glad that I do not love them, either, Yrene Towers,” he whispered onto her lips.
Then his mouth was on hers, and she opened for him, the heat and silk of her driving a groan from deep in his throat.
Her hands speared into his hair, onto his shoulders, across his chest and up his neck. As if she could not touch enough of him.
Chaol reveled in the fingers she dug into his clothes, as if they were claws seeking purchase. He slid his tongue against hers, and her moan as she pushed herself against him—
Chaol backed them toward the bed, its white sheets near-glowing in the lantern light, not caring that his steps were uneven, staggering. Not with that dress little more than cobwebs and mist, not when he never took his mouth from hers, remained unable to take his mouth from hers.
Yrene’s knees hit the mattress behind them, and she drew her lips away enough to protest, “Your back—”
“I’ll manage.” He slanted his mouth over hers again, her kiss searing him to his very soul.
His. She was his, and he had never had anything he could call such. Wanted to call such.
Chaol couldn’t bring himself to rip his mouth away from Yrene’s long enough to ask if she considered him hers. To explain that he already knew his own answer. Had perhaps known from the moment she’d walked into that sitting room and did not look at him with an ounce of pity or sadness.