Aedion grinned. Any place, any time, Prince.
Aelin muttered, “Insufferable,” and gave Rowan a playful shove in the arm. He didn’t move an inch. “Are you actually going to get into a pissing contest with every person we meet? Because if that’s the case, then it’ll take us an hour just to make it down one block of this city, and I doubt the residents will be particularly happy.”
Aedion fought the urge to take a deep breath as Rowan broke his stare to give their queen an incredulous look.
She crossed her arms, waiting.
“It’ll take time to adjust to a new dynamic,” Rowan admitted. Not an apology, but from what Aelin had told him, Rowan didn’t often bother with such things. She looked downright shocked by the small concession, actually.
Aedion tried to lounge in his chair, but his muscles were taut, his blood thrumming in his veins. He found himself saying to the prince, “Aelin never said anything about sending for you.”
“Does she answer to you, General?” A dangerous, quiet question. Aedion knew that when males like Rowan spoke softly, it usually meant violence and death were on their way.
Aelin rolled her eyes. “You know he didn’t mean it that way, so don’t pick a fight, you prick.”
Aedion stiffened. He could fight his own battles. If Aelin thought he needed protecting, if she thought Rowan was the superior warrior—
Rowan said, “I’m blood-sworn to you—which means several things, one of which being that I don’t particularly care for the questioning of others, even your cousin.”
The words echoed in his head, his heart.
Blood-sworn.
Aelin went pale.
Aedion asked, “What did he just say?”
Rowan had taken the blood oath to Aelin. His blood oath.
Aelin squared her shoulders, and said clearly, steadily, “Rowan took the blood oath to me before I left Wendlyn.”
A roaring sound went through him. “You let him do what?”
Aelin exposed her scarred palms. “As far as I knew, Aedion, you were loyally serving the king. As far as I knew, I was never going to see you again.”
“You let him take the blood oath to you?” Aedion bellowed.
She had lied to his face that day on the roof.
He had to get out, out of his skin, out of this apartment, out of this gods-damned city. Aedion lunged for one of the porcelain figurines atop the hearth mantel, needing to shatter something to just get that roaring out of his system.
She flung out a vicious finger, advancing on him. “You break one thing, you shatter just one of my possessions, and I will shove the shards down your rutting throat.”
A command—from a queen to her general.
Aedion spat on the floor, but obeyed. If only because ignoring that command might very well shatter something far more precious.
He instead said, “How dare you? How dare you let him take it?”
“I dare because it is my blood to give away; I dare because you did not exist for me then. Even if neither of you had taken it yet, I would still give it to him because he is my carranam, and he has earned my unquestioning loyalty!”
Aedion went rigid. “And what about our unquestioning loyalty? What have you done to earn that? What have you done to save our people since you’ve returned? Were you ever going to tell me about the blood oath, or was that just another of your many lies?”
Aelin snarled with an animalistic intensity that reminded him she, too, had Fae blood in her veins. “Go have your temper tantrum somewhere else. Don’t come back until you can act like a human being. Or half of one, at least.”
Aedion swore at her, a filthy, foul curse that he immediately regretted. Rowan lunged for him, knocking back his chair hard enough to flip it over, but Aelin threw out a hand. The prince stood down.
That easily, she leashed the mighty, immortal warrior.
Aedion laughed, the sound brittle and cold, and smiled at Rowan in a way that usually made men throw the first punch.
But Rowan just set his chair upright, sat down, and leaned back, as if he already knew where he’d strike Aedion’s death blow.
Aelin pointed at the door. “Get the hell out. I don’t want to see you again for a good while.”
The feeling was mutual.
All his plans, everything he’d worked for … Without the blood oath he was just a general; just a landless prince of the Ashryver line.
Aedion stalked to the front door and flung it open so hard he almost ripped it off its hinges.
Aelin didn’t call after him.
CHAPTER
29
Rowan Whitethorn debated for a good minute if it was worthwhile to hunt down the demi-Fae prince and tear him into bloody ribbons for what he’d called Aelin, or if he was better off here, with his queen, while she paced in front of her bedroom fireplace. He understood—he really did—why the general was enraged. He’d have felt the same. But it wasn’t a good-enough excuse. Not even close.
Perched on the edge of the plush mattress, he watched her move.
Even without her magic, Aelin was a living wildfire, more so now with the red hair—a creature of such roaring emotions that he could sometimes only watch her and marvel.
And her face.
That gods-damned face.
While they’d been in Wendlyn, it had taken him a while to realize she was beautiful. Months, actually, to really notice it. And for these past few weeks, against his better judgment, he’d thought often about that face—especially that smart-ass mouth.
But he hadn’t remembered just how stunning she was until she’d taken off her hood earlier, and it had struck him stupid.
These weeks apart had been a brutal reminder of what life had been like until he had found her drunk and broken on that rooftop in Varese. The nightmares had started the very night she’d left—such relentless dreams that he’d nearly vomited when he flung himself out of them, Lyria’s screaming ringing in his ears. The memory of it sent cold licking down his spine. But even that was burned away by the queen before him.
Aelin was well on her way to wearing a track in the rug before the fireplace.
“If that’s any indication of what to expect from our court,” Rowan said at last, flexing his fingers in an attempt to dislodge the hollow shakiness he hadn’t been able to master since his magic had been smothered, “then we’ll never have a dull moment.”
She flung out a hand in a dismissive wave of irritation. “Don’t tease me right now.” She scrubbed at her face and huffed a breath.
Rowan waited, knowing she was gathering the words, hating the pain and sorrow and guilt on every line of her body. He’d sell his soul to the dark god to never have her look like that again.
“Every time I turn around,” she said, approaching the bed and leaning against the carved post, “I feel like I’m one wrong move or word away from leading them to ruin. People’s lives—your life—depend on me. There’s no room for error.”
There it was, the weight that had been slowly crushing her. It killed him that he’d have to add to it when he told her the news he carried—the reason he’d disobeyed her first order to him.
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He could offer her nothing but the truth. “You will make mistakes. You will make decisions, and sometimes you will regret those choices. Sometimes there won’t be a right choice, just the best of several bad options. I don’t need to tell you that you can do this—you know you can. I wouldn’t have sworn the oath to you if I didn’t think you could.”
She slid onto the bed beside him, her scent caressing him. Jasmine, and lemon verbena, and crackling embers. Elegant, feminine, and utterly wild. Warm, and steadfast—unbreakable, his queen.
Save for the weakness they both shared: that bond between them.
For in his nightmares, he sometimes heard Maeve’s voice over the crack of a whip, cunning and cold. Not for all the world, Aelin? But what about for Prince Rowan?
He tried not to think about it: the fact that Aelin would hand over one of the Wyrdkeys for him. He locked that knowledge up so tightly that it could escape only in his dreams, or when he woke reaching across a cold bed for a princess who was thousands of miles away.
Aelin shook her head. “It was so much easier being alone.”
“I know,” he said, clamping down on the instinct to sling his arm around her shoulders and tuck her in close. He focused on listening to the city around them instead.
He could hear more than mortal ears, but the wind no longer sang its secrets to him. He no longer felt it tugging at him. And stuck in his Fae body, unable to shift … Caged. Restless. Made worse by the fact that he couldn’t shield this apartment from any enemy attacks while they were here.
Not powerless, he reminded himself. He had been bound head to toe in iron before and had still killed. He could keep this apartment secure—the old-fashioned way. He was just … off-balance. At a time when being off-balance could be fatal to her.
For a while, they sat there in silence.
“I said some appalling things to him,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, unable to help the growl. “He said some equally appalling things to you. Your tempers are evenly matched.”
She let out a breathy chuckle. “Tell me about the fortress—what it was like when you went back to help rebuild.”