“You don’t get to call him that,” Aelin snapped. “You came to my home and murdered my family.”
“I came to find you. I came to have you burn it out of me!” the king sobbed. “Aelin of the Wildfire. I tried to get you to do it. But your mother knocked you unconscious before you could kill me, and the demon … The demon became devoted to wiping out your line after that, so no fire could ever cleanse him from me.”
Aelin’s blood turned to ice. No—no, it couldn’t be true, couldn’t be right.
“All of it was to find you,” the king said to her. “So you could save me—so you could end me at last. Please. Do it.” The king was weeping now, and his body seemed to waste away bit by bit, his cheeks hollowing out, his hands thinning.
As if his life force and the demon prince inside him had indeed been bonded—and one could not exist without the other.
“Chaol is alive,” the king murmured through his emaciated hands, lowering them to reveal red-rimmed eyes, already milky with age. “Broken, but I didn’t make the kill. There was—a light around him. I left him alive.”
A sob ripped from her throat. She had hoped, had tried to give him a shot at survival—
“You are a liar,” Dorian said again, his voice cold. So cold. “And you deserve this.” Light sparked at Dorian’s fingertips.
Aelin mouthed his name, trying to reel herself back in, gather her wits. The demon inside the king had hunted her not because of the threat Terrasen posed—but for the fire in her veins. The fire that could end them both.
She lifted a hand as Dorian stepped toward his father. They had to ask more, learn more—
The Crown Prince tipped his head back to the sky and roared, and it was the battle cry of a G.o.d.
Then the gla.s.s castle shattered.
79
The bridge exploded from beneath her, and the world turned into shards of flying gla.s.s.
Aelin plummeted into open air, towers crashing down around her.
She flung out her magic in a coc.o.o.n, burning through the gla.s.s as she fell and fell and fell.
People were screaming—screaming as Dorian brought the castle down for Chaol, for Sorscha, and sent a tidal wave of gla.s.s rushing toward the city lying below.
Down and down Aelin went, the ground surging up, the buildings around her rupturing, the light so bright on all the fragments—
Aelin pulled out every last drop of her magic as the castle collapsed, the lethal wave of gla.s.s cascading toward Rifthold.
Wildfire raced for the gates, raced against the wind, against death.
And as the wave of gla.s.s crested the iron gates, shredding through the corpses tied there as if they were paper, a wall of fire erupted before it, shooting sky-high, spreading wide. Halting it.
A wind shoved against her, brutal and unforgiving, her bones groaning as it pushed her up, not down. She didn’t care—not when she yielded the entirety of her magic, the entirety of her being, to holding the barrier of flame now shielding Rifthold. A few more seconds, then she could die.
The wind tore at her, and it sounded like it was roaring her name.
Wave after wave of gla.s.s and debris slammed into her wildfire.
But she kept that wall of flame burning—for the Royal Theater. And the flower girls at the market. For the slaves and the courtesans and the Faliq family. For the city that had offered her joy and pain, death and rebirth, for the city that had given her music, Aelin kept that wall of fire burning bright.
There was blood raining down among the gla.s.s—blood that sizzled on her little coc.o.o.n of flame, reeking of darkness and pain.
The wind kept blowing until it swept that dark blood away.
Still Aelin held the shield around the city, held on to the final promise she’d made to Chaol.
I’ll make it count.
She held on until the ground rose up to meet her—
And she landed softly in the gra.s.s.
Then darkness slammed into the back of her head.
The world was so bright.
Aelin Galathynius groaned as she pushed herself onto her elbows, the small hill of gra.s.s beneath her untouched and vibrant. Only a moment—she’d been out for only a moment.
She raised her head, her skull throbbing as she shoved her unbound hair from her eyes and looked at what she had done.
What Dorian had done.
The gla.s.s castle was gone.
Only the stone castle remained, its gray stones warming under the midday sun.
And where a cascade of gla.s.s and debris should have destroyed a city, a ma.s.sive, opaque wall glittered.
A wall of gla.s.s, its upper lip curved as if it indeed had been a cresting wave.
The gla.s.s castle was gone. The king was dead. And Dorian—
Aelin scrambled up, her arms buckling under her. There, not three feet away, was Dorian, sprawled on the gra.s.s, eyes closed.
But his chest was rising and falling.
Beside him, as if some benevolent G.o.d had indeed been looking after them, lay Chaol.
His face was b.l.o.o.d.y, but he breathed. No other wounds that she could detect.
She began shaking. She wondered if he had noticed when she’d slipped the real Eye of Elena into his pocket as she’d fled the throne room.
The scent of pine and snow hit her, and she realized how they had survived the fall.
Aelin got to her feet, swaying.
The sloping hill down to the city had been demolished, its trees and lampposts and greenery shredded by the gla.s.s.
She didn’t want to know about the people who had been on the grounds—or in the castle.
She forced herself to walk.
Toward the wall. Toward the panicked city beyond. Toward the new world that beckoned.
Two scents converged, then a third. A strange, wild scent that belonged to everything and nothing.
But Aelin did not look at Aedion, or Rowan, or Lysandra as she descended the hill to the city.
Every step was an effort, every breath a trial to pull herself back from the brink, to hold on to the here and now, and what had to be done.
Aelin approached the towering gla.s.s wall that now separated the castle from the city, that separated death from life.
She punched a battering ram of blue flame through it.
More yelling arose as the flame ate away at the gla.s.s, forming an archway.
The people beyond, crying and holding one another or gripping their heads or covering their mouths, went quiet as she strode through the door she’d made.
The gallows still stood just beyond the wall. It was the only raised surface that she could see.
Better than nothing.
Aelin ascended the butchering block, her court falling into rank behind her. Rowan was limping, but she didn’t allow herself to examine him, to even ask if he was all right. Not yet.
Aelin kept her shoulders back, her face grave and unyielding as she stopped at the edge of the platform.
“Your king is dead,” she said. The crowd stirred. “Your prince lives.”
“All hail Dorian Havilliard,” someone shouted down the street. No one else echoed it.
“My name is Aelin Ashryver Galathynius,” she said. “And I am the Queen of Terrasen.”
The crowd murmured; some onlookers stepped away from the platform.
“Your prince is in mourning. Until he is ready, this city is mine.”
Absolute silence.
“If you loot, if you riot, if you cause one lick of trouble,” she said, looking a few in the eye, “I will find you, and I will burn you to ash.” She lifted a hand, and flames danced at her fingertips. “If you revolt against your new king, if you try to take his castle, then this wall”—she gestured with her burning hand—“will turn to molten gla.s.s and flood your streets, your homes, your throats.”
Aelin lifted her chin, her mouth cutting a hard, unforgiving line as she surveyed the crowd filling the streets, people craning to see her, see the Fae ears and elongated canines, see the flames flickering around her fingers.
“I killed your king. His empire is over. Your slaves are now free people. If I catch you holding on to your slaves, if I hear of any household keeping them captive, you are dead. If I hear of you whipping a slave, or trying to sell one, you are dead. So I suggest that you tell your friends, and families, and neighbors. I suggest that you act like reasonable, intelligent people. And I suggest that you stay on your best behavior until your king is ready to greet you, at which time I swear on my crown that I will yield control of this city to him. If anyone has a problem with it, you can take it up with my court.” She motioned behind her. Rowan, Aedion, and Lysandra—bloodied, battered, filthy—grinned like h.e.l.lions. “Or,” Aelin said, the flames winking out on her hand, “you can take it up with me.”
Not a word. She wondered whether they were breathing.
But Aelin didn’t care as she strode off the platform, back through the gate she’d made, and all the way up the barren hillside to the stone castle.
She was barely inside the oak doors before she collapsed to her knees and wept.
80
Elide had been in the dungeon so long that she’d lost track of time.
But she’d felt that ripple in the world, could have sworn she heard the wind singing her name, heard panicked shouts—and then nothing.
No one explained what it was, and no one came. No one was coming for her.
She wondered how long Vernon would wait before he gave her to one of those things. She tried counting meals to track time, but the food they gave her was the same for breakfast and dinner, and her meal times changed around … As if they wanted her to lose track. As if they wanted her to fold herself into the darkness of the dungeon so that when they came for her, she’d be willing, desperate just to see the sun again.