For some reason, her stomach dropped as he said, “Go to bed. Since you’re banned from the kitchen tomorrow, we’re training at dawn.” Well, she certainly deserved the dismissal after burning him like that. So she turned, and maybe she looked as pathetic as she felt, because he suddenly said, “Wait. Shut the door.”
She obeyed. He didn’t give her leave to sit, so she leaned against the wooden door and waited. He kept his back to her, and she watched the powerful muscles expand and contract as he took a deep breath. Then another. Then—
“When my mate died, it took me a very, very long time to come back.”
It took her a moment to think of what to say. “How long ago?”
“Two hundred three years, twenty-seven days ago.” He gestured to the tattoo on his face, neck, arms. “This tells the story of how it happened. Of the shame I’ll carry until my last breath.”
The warrior who had come the other day had such hollow eyes . . . “Others come to you to have their own grief and shame tattooed on them.”
“Gavriel lost three of his soldiers in an ambush in the southern mountains. They were slaughtered. He survived. For as long as he’s been a warrior, he’s tattooed himself with the names of those under his command who have fallen. But where the blame lies has little to do with the point of the markings.”
“Were you to blame?”
Slowly, he turned—not quite all the way, but enough to give her a sidelong glance. “Yes. When I was young, I was . . . ferocious in my efforts to win valor for myself and my bloodline. Wherever Maeve sent me on campaigns, I went. Along the way, I mated a female of our race. Lyria,” he said, almost reverently. “She sold flowers in the market in Doranelle. Maeve disapproved, but . . . when you meet your mate, there is nothing you can do to alter it. She was mine, and no one could tell me otherwise. Mating her cost me Maeve’s favor, and I still yearned so badly to prove myself. So when war came calling and Maeve offered me a chance to redeem myself, I took it. Lyria begged me not to go. But I was so arrogant, so misguided, that I left her at our mountain home and went off to war. I left her alone,” he said, and again looked at Celaena.
You left me, she had said to him. That was when he’d snapped—the wounds of centuries ago rising up to swallow him as viciously as her own past consumed her.
“I was gone for months, winning all that glory I so foolishly sought. And then we got word that our enemies had been secretly trying to gain entrance to Doranelle through the mountain passes.” Her stomach dropped to her feet. Rowan ran a hand through his hair, scratched at his face. “I flew home. As fast as I’d ever flown. When I got there, I found that . . . found she had been with child. And they had slaughtered her anyway, and burnt our house to cinders.
“When you lose a mate, you don’t . . .” A shake of the head. “I lost all sense of self, of time and place. I hunted them down, all the males who hurt her. I took a long while killing them. She was pregnant—had been pregnant since I’d left her. But I’d been so enamored with my own foolish agenda that I hadn’t scented it on her. I left my pregnant mate alone.”
Her voice broke, but she managed to say, “What did you do after you killed them?”
His face was stark and his eyes focused on some far-off sight. “For ten years, I did nothing. I vanished. I went mad. Beyond mad. I felt nothing at all. I just . . . left. I wandered the world, in and out of my forms, hardly marking the seasons, eating only when my hawk told me it needed to feed or it would die. I would have let myself die—except I . . . couldn’t bring myself . . .” He trailed off and cleared his throat. “I might have stayed that way forever, but Maeve tracked me down. She said it was enough time spent in mourning, and that I was to serve her as prince and commander—to work with a handful of other warriors to protect the realm. It was the first time I had spoken to anyone since that day I found Lyria. The first time I’d heard my name—or remembered it.”
“So you went with her?”
“I had nothing. No one. At that point, I hoped serving her might get me killed, and then I could see Lyria again. So when I returned to Doranelle, I wrote the story of my shame on my flesh. And then I bound myself to Maeve with the blood oath, and have served her since.”
“How—how did you come back from that kind of loss?”
“I didn’t. For a long while I couldn’t. I think I’m still . . . not back. I might never be.”
She nodded, lips pressed tight, and glanced toward the window.
“But maybe,” he said, quietly enough that she looked at him again. He didn’t smile, but his eyes were inquisitive. “Maybe we could find the way back together.”
He would not apologize for today, or yesterday, or for any of it. And she would not ask him to, not now that she understood that in the weeks she had been looking at him it had been like gazing at a reflection. No wonder she had loathed him.
“I think,” she said, barely more than a whisper, “I would like that very much.”
He held out a hand. “Together, then.”
She studied the scarred, callused palm, then the tattooed face, full of a grim sort of hope. Someone who might—who did understand what it was like to be crippled at your very core, someone who was still climbing inch by inch out of that abyss.
Perhaps they would never get out of it, perhaps they would never be whole again, but . . . “Together,” she said, and took his outstretched hand.
And somewhere far and deep inside her, an ember began to glow.
Part Two
Heir of Fire
36
“Things are ready for your meeting tonight with Captain Westfall?” Aedion could have sworn Ren Allsbrook bristled as he bit out the name.
Seated beside the young lord on the ledge of the roof of the warehouse apartment, Aedion considered Ren’s tone, decided it wasn’t enough of a challenge to warrant a verbal slap, and gave a nod as he went back to cleaning his nails with one of his fighting knives.
Ren had been recovering for days now, after the captain had set him up in the guest room of the apartment. The old man had refused to take the main bedroom, saying he’d prefer the couch, but Aedion wondered what exactly Murtaugh had observed when they arrived in the apartment. If he suspected who the owner was—Celaena or Aelin or both—he revealed nothing.
Aedion hadn’t seen Ren since the opium den, and didn’t really know why he’d bothered to come tonight. He said, “You’ve managed to build yourself a network of lowlifes here. That’s a far cry from the lofty towers of Allsbrook Castle.”
Ren’s jaw tightened. “You’re a far cry from the white towers of Orynth, too. We all are.” A breeze ruffled Ren’s shaggy hair. “Thank you. For—helping that night.”
“It was nothing,” Aedion said coolly, giving him a lazy smile.
“You killed for me, then hid me. That isn’t nothing. I owe you.”
Aedion was plenty used to accepting gratitude from other men, from his men, but this . . . “You should have told me,” he said, dropping the grin as he watched the golden lights twinkling across the city, “that you and your grandfather had no home.” Or money. No wonder Ren’s clothes were so shabby. The shame Aedion had felt that night had almost overwhelmed him—and had haunted him for the past few days, honing his temper to a near-lethal edge. He’d tried working it off with the castle guards, but sparring with the men who protected the king had only sharpened it.
“I don’t see how it’s relevant to anything,” Ren said tightly. Aedion could understand pride. The kind Ren had went deep, and admitting this vulnerability was as hard for him as it was for Aedion to accept Ren’s gratitude. Ren said, “If you find out how to break the spell on magic, you’re going to do it, right?”
“Yes. It could make a difference in whatever battles lie ahead.”
“It didn’t make a difference ten years ago.” Ren’s face
was a mask of ice, and then Aedion remembered. Ren hardly had a drop of magic. But Ren’s two elder sisters . . . The girls had been away at their mountain school when everything went to hell. A school for magic.
As if reading his thoughts, as if this were a reprieve from the city below them, Ren said, “When the soldiers dragged us to the butchering blocks, that was what they mocked my parents about. Because even with their magic, my sisters’ school was defenseless—they could do nothing against ten thousand soldiers.”
“I’m sorry,” Aedion said. That was all he could offer for the time being, until Aelin returned.
Ren looked right at him. “Going back to Terrasen will be . . . hard. For me, and for my grandfather.” He seemed to struggle with the words, or just with the idea of telling anyone anything, but Aedion gave him the time he needed. At last Ren said, “I’m not sure I’m civilized enough anymore. I don’t know if . . . if I could be a lord, even. If my people would want me as lord. My grandfather is better suited, but he’s an Allsbrook by marriage and he says he doesn’t want to rule.”
Ah. Aedion found himself actually pausing—contemplating. The wrong word, the wrong reaction, could make Ren shut up forever. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. So he said, “My life has been war and death for the past ten years. It will probably be war and death for the next few as well. But if there’s ever a day when we find peace . . .” Gods, that word, that beautiful word. “It’ll be a strange transition for all of us. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t see how the people of Allsbrook wouldn’t embrace a lord who spent years trying to break Adarlan’s rule—or a lord who spent years in poverty for that dream.”
“I’ve . . . done things,” Ren said. “Bad things.” Aedion had suspected as much from the moment Ren gave them the address of the opium den.
“So have we all,” Aedion said. So has Aelin. He wanted to say it, but he still didn’t want Ren or Murtaugh or anyone knowing a damn thing about her. It was her story to tell.
Aedion knew the conversation was about to take a turn for the ugly when Ren tensed and asked too quietly, “What do you plan to do about Captain Westfall?”
“Right now, Captain Westfall is useful to me, and useful to our queen.”
“So as soon as he’s outlived his usefulness . . .”
“I’ll decide that when the time comes—if it’s safe to leave him alive.” Ren opened his mouth, but Aedion added, “This is the way it has to be. The way I operate.” Even if he’d helped save Ren’s life and given him a place to stay.