Then she pivoted back toward him. “Maeve said you and the others were in the North. That you’d been spotted by her spies there. Did you plant that deception for her, too?”
He shook his head. “Lysandra has been thorough, it seems.”
Aelin’s throat bobbed. “I believed her.”
It sounded like a confession, somehow.
So Rowan found himself saying, “I told you once that even if death separated us, I would rip apart every world until I found you.” He gave her a slash of a smile. “Did you really believe this would stop me?”
She pursed her mouth, and at last, those agonizing emotions began to surface in her eyes. “You were supposed to save Terrasen.”
“Considering that the sun shines, I’d say Erawan hasn’t won yet. So we’ll save it together.”
He didn’t let himself think of the final cost of destroying Erawan. And Aelin seemed in no hurry to discuss it, either, as she said, “You should have gone to Terrasen. It needs you.”
“I need you more.” He didn’t balk from the stark honesty roughening his voice. “And Terrasen will need you, too. Not Lysandra masquerading as you, but you.”
A shallow nod. “Maeve raised her army. I doubt it was only to guard me while she was away.”
He’d put the thought aside, to consider later. “It might just be to shore up her defenses, should Erawan win across the sea.”
“Do you truly think that’s what she plans to do with it?”
“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”
And if Maeve meant to bring that army to Terrasen, to either unite with Erawan or simply be another force battering their kingdom, to strike when they were weakest, they had to hurry. Had to get back. Immediately. His mate’s eyes shone with the same understanding and dread.
Aelin’s throat bobbed as she whispered, “I’m so tired, Rowan.”
His heart strained again. “I know, Fireheart.”
He opened his mouth to say more, to coax her onto land so he might at least hold her if words couldn’t ease her burden, but that’s when he saw it.
A boat, ancient and every inch of it carved, drifted out of the gloom.
“Get back to shore.” The boat wasn’t drifting—it was being tugged. He could just barely make out two dark forms slithering beneath the surface.
Aelin didn’t hesitate, yet her strokes remained steady as she swam for him. She didn’t balk at the hand he extended, and he wrapped his cloak around her while the boat ambled past.
Black, eel-like creatures about the size of a mortal man pulled it. Their fins drifted behind them like ebony veils, and with each propelling sweep of their long tails, he glimpsed milky-white eyes. Blind.
They led the flat-bottomed vessel large enough for fifteen Fae males right to the edge of the lake. A flash of short, spindly bodies through the dimness and the Little Folk had it moored to a nearby stalagmite.
The others must have heard his order to Aelin, because they emerged, swords out. A foot behind them, Elide lingered with Fenrys, the male still in wolf form.
“They can’t mean for us to take that into the caves,” Lorcan murmured.
But Aelin turned toward them, hair dripping onto the stone at her bare feet. Half a thought from her could have had her dry, yet she made no move to do so. “We’re being hunted.”
“We know that,” Lorcan shot back, and were it not for the fact that Aelin was currently allowing him to rest a hand upon her shoulder, Rowan would have thrown the male into the lake.
But Aelin’s features didn’t shift from that graveness, that unruffled calm. “The only way to the sea is through these caves.”
It was an outrageous claim. They were a hundred miles inland, and there was no record of these mountains ever connecting to any cave system that flowed to the ocean itself. To do so, they’d have to go northward through this range, then veer westward at the Cambrian Mountains, and sail beneath them right to the coast.
“And I suppose they told you that?” Lorcan’s face was hard as granite.
“Watch it,” Rowan snarled. Fenrys indeed bared his teeth at the dark-haired warrior, fur bristling.
But Aelin said simply, “Yes.” Her chin didn’t dip an inch. “The land above is crawling with soldiers and spies. Going beneath them is the only way.”
Elide stepped forward. “I will go.” She cut a cold glance toward Lorcan. “You can take your chances above, if you’re so disbelieving.”
Lorcan’s jaw tightened, and a small part of Rowan relished seeing the delicate Lady of Perranth fillet the centuries-hardened warrior with a few words. “Considering the potential pitfalls of the situation is wise.”
“We don’t have time to consider,” Rowan cut in before Elide could voice the retort on her tongue. “We need to keep moving.”
Gavriel stalked forward to study the moored boat and what seemed to be bundles of supplies on its sturdy planks. “How will we navigate our way, though?”
“We’ll be escorted,” Aelin answered.
“And if they abandon us?” Lorcan challenged.
Aelin leveled unfazed eyes upon him. “Then you’ll have to find a way out, I suppose.”
A hint—just a spark—of temper belied those calm words.
There was nothing else to debate after that. And they had little to pack. The others gave Aelin privacy to dress by the fire while they inspected the boat, and when his mate emerged again, clad in boots, pants, and various layers beneath her gray surcoat, the sight of her in clothes from Mistward was enough to make his gut clench.
No longer a naked, escaped captive. Yet none of that wickedness, that joy and unchecked wildness illuminated her face.
The rest of their party waited on the boat, seated on the benches built into its high-lipped sides. Fenrys and Elide both sat as seemingly far from Lorcan as they could get, Gavriel a golden, long-suffering buffer between them.
Rowan lingered at the shore’s edge, a hand extended for Aelin while she approached. Each of her steps seemed considered—as if she still marveled at being able to move freely. As if still adjusting to her legs without the burden of chains.
“Why?” Lorcan mused aloud, more to himself. “Why go to these lengths for us?”
He got his answer—they all did—a heartbeat later.
Aelin halted a few feet away from the boat and Rowan’s outstretched hand. She turned back toward the cave itself. The Little Folk peeked from those birch branches, from the rocks, from behind stalagmites.
Slowly, deeply, Aelin bowed to them.
Rowan could have sworn all those tiny heads lowered in answer.
A pair of bony grayish hands rose above a nearby rock, something glittering held between them, and set the object on the stone.
Rowan went still. A crown of silver and pearl and diamond gleamed there, fashioned into upswept swan’s wings.
“The Crown of Mab,” Gavriel breathed. But Fenrys looked away, toward the looming dark, his tail curling around him.
Aelin staggered a step closer to the crown. “It—it fell into the river.”
Rowan didn’t want to know how she’d encountered it, why she’d seen it fall into a river. Maeve had kept her sisters’ two crowns under constant guard, only bringing them out to be displayed in her throne room on state occasions. In memory of her siblings, she’d intoned. Rowan had sometimes wondered if it was a reminder that she had outlasted them, had kept the throne for herself in the end.
