Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass #5)(110)

Dorian risked a glance at Aedion, but his face was hard, calculating, ever the general—fixed on the dead queen now standing in this room with them. Lysandra—Lysandra was gone.

No, in ghost leopard form, slinking through the shadows. Rowan’s hand was resting casually on his sword, though Dorian’s own magic swept the room and realized the weapon was to be the physical distraction from the magical blow he’d deal Elena if she so much as looked funny at Aelin. Indeed, a hard shield of air now lay between the two queens—and sealed this room, too.

Elena shook her head, her silver hair flowing. “You were meant to retrieve the Wyrdkeys before Erawan could get this far.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Aelin snapped. “Forgive me if you weren’t entirely clear on your directions.”

Elena said, “I do not have time to explain, but know it was the only choice. To save us, to save Erilea, it was the only choice I could make.” And for all their snapping at each other, the queen exposed her palms to Aelin. “Deanna and my father spoke true. I’d thought … I’d thought it was broken, but if they told you to find the Lock … ” She bit her lip.

Aelin said, “Brannon said to go to the Stone Marshes of Eyllwe to find the Lock. Where, precisely, in the marshes?”

“There was once a great city in the heart of the marshes,” Elena breathed. “It is now half drowned on the plain. In a temple at its center, we laid the remnants of the Lock. I didn’t … My father attained the Lock at terrible cost. The cost … of my mother’s body, her mortal life. A Lock for the Wyrdkeys—to seal shut the gate, and bind the keys inside them forever. I did not understand what it had been intended for; my father never told me about any of it until it was too late. All I knew was that the Lock was only able to be used once—its power capable of sealing anything we wished. So I stole it. I used it for myself, for my people. I have been paying for that crime since.”

“You used it to seal Erawan in his tomb,” Aelin said quietly.

The pleading faded from Elena’s face. “My friends died in the valley of the Black Mountains that day so I might have the chance to stop him. I heard their screaming, even in the heart of Erawan’s camp. I will not apologize for trying to end the slaughter so that the survivors could have a future. So you could have a future.”

“So you used the Lock, then chucked it into a ruin?”

“We placed it inside the holy city on the plain—to be a commemoration of the lives lost. But a great cataclysm rocked the land decades later … and the city sank, the marsh water flowed in, and the Lock was forgotten. No one ever retrieved it. Its power had already been used. It was just a bit of metal and glass.”

“And now it’s not?”

“If both my father and Deanna mentioned it, it must be vital in stopping Erawan.”

“Forgive me if I do not trust the word of a goddess who tried to use me like a puppet to blow this town into smithereens.”

“Her methods are roundabout, but she likely meant you no harm—”

“Bullshit.”

Elena flickered again. “Get to the Stone Marshes. Find the Lock.”

“I told Brannon, and I’ll tell you: we have more pressing matters at hand—”

“My mother died to forge that Lock,” Elena snapped, eyes blazing bright. “She let go of her mortal body so that she could forge the Lock for my father. I was the one who broke the promise for how it was to be used.”

Aelin blinked, and Dorian wondered if he should indeed be worried when even she was speechless. But Aelin only whispered, “Who was your mother?”

Dorian ransacked his memory, all his history lessons on his royal house, but couldn’t recall.

Elena made a sound that might have been a sob, her image fading into cobwebs and moonlight. “She who loved my father best. She who blessed him with such mighty gifts, and then bound herself in a mortal body and offered him the gift of her heart.”

Aelin’s arms slackened at her sides.

Aedion blurted, “Shit.”

Elena laughed humorlessly as she said to Aelin, “Why do you think you burn so brightly? It is not just Brannon’s blood that is in your veins. But Mala’s.”

Aelin breathed, “Mala Fire-Bringer was your mother.”

Elena was already gone.

Aedion said, “Honestly, it’s a miracle you two didn’t kill each other.”

Dorian didn’t bother to correct him that it was technically impossible, given that one of them was already dead. Rather, he weighed all that the queen had said and demanded. Rowan, remaining silent, seemed to be doing the same. Lysandra sniffed around the blood-marks, as if testing for whatever remnants of the ancient queen might be around.

Aelin stared out the open balcony doors, eyes hooded and mouth a tight line. She unfurled her fist and examined the Eye of Elena, still held in her palm.

The clock struck one in the morning. Slowly, Aelin turned to them. To him.

“Mala’s blood flows in our veins,” she said hoarsely, fingers closing around the Eye before she slipped it into the shirt’s pocket.

He blinked, realizing that it indeed did. That perhaps both of them had been so considerably gifted because of it. Dorian said to Rowan, if only because he might have heard or witnessed something in all his travels, “Is it truly possible—for a god to become mortal like that?”