Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass #5)(145)

“I don’t regret it.”

Dark, depthless eyes slid to her. “Good.”

She didn’t know why she said it, why she felt a need or like it was worth anything to him at all, but Elide stood on her toes, kissed his stubble-rough cheek, and said, “I will always find you, too, Lorcan.”

She felt him staring at her, even when she’d climbed into bed minutes later.

When she awoke, clean strips of linen for her cycle were next to the bed.

His own shirt, washed and dried overnight—now cut up for her to use as she would.





51


Eyllwe’s coast was burning.

For three days, they sailed past village after village. Some still burning, some only cinders. And at each of them, Aelin and Rowan had labored to put out those flames.

Rowan, in his hawk form, could fly in, but … It killed her. Absolutely killed her that they could not afford to halt long enough to go to shore. So she did it from the ship, burrowing deep into her power, stretching it as far as it could go across sea and sky and sand, to wink out those fires one by one.

By the end of the third day, she was flagging, so thirsty that no amount of water was able to slake it, her lips chapped and peeling.

Rowan had gone to shore three times now to ask who had done it.

Each time the answer was the same: darkness had swept over them in the night, the kind that blotted out the stars, and then the villages were burning beneath flaming arrows not spotted until they had found their targets.

But where that darkness, where Erawan’s forces were … there was no sign of them.

No sign of Maeve, either.

Rowan and Lysandra had flown high and wide, searching for either force, but … nothing.

Ghosts, some villagers were now claiming, had attacked them. The ghosts of their unburied dead, raging home from distant lands.

Until they started whispering another rumor.

That Aelin Galathynius herself was burning Eyllwe, village by village. For vengeance that they had not aided her kingdom ten years ago.

No matter that she was putting out the flames. They did not believe Rowan when he tried to explain who soothed their fires from aboard the distant ship.

He told her not to listen, not to let it sink in. So she tried.

And it had been during one of those times that Rowan had run his thumb over the scar on her palm, leaning to kiss her neck. He’d breathed her in, and she knew he detected an answer to the question that had caused him to flee that morning on the ship. No, she was not carrying his child.

They had only discussed the matter once—last week. When she’d crawled off him, panting and coated in sweat, and he’d asked if she was taking a tonic. She merely told him no.

He’d gone still.

And then she had explained that if she’d inherited so much of Mab’s Fae blood, she might very well have inherited the Fae’s struggle to conceive. And even if the timing was horrible … if this was to be the one shot she had of providing Terrasen a bloodline, a future … she would not waste it. His green eyes turned distant, but he’d nodded, kissing her shoulder. And that had been that.

She hadn’t mustered the nerve to ask if he wanted to sire her children. If he wanted to have children, given what had happened to Lyria.

And during that brief moment before he’d flown back to shore to put out more flames, she hadn’t possessed the nerve to explain why she’d hurled her guts up that morning, either.

The past three days had been a blur. From the moment Fenrys had uttered those words, Nameless is my price, everything had been a blur of smoke and flame and waves and sun.

But as the sun set on the third day, Aelin again shoved those thoughts away as the escort ship began signaling ahead, the crew frantically working to drop anchor.

Sweat beaded on her brow, her tongue parchment-dry. But she forgot her thirst, her exhaustion, as she beheld what Rolfe’s men had spied moments ago.

A flat, waterlogged land under a cloudy sky spread inland as far as the eye could see. Moldy green and bone-white grasses crusted the bumps and hollows, little islands of life among the mirror-smooth gray water between them. And among them all, jutting up from brackish water and humped land like the limbs of an ill-buried corpse … ruins. Great, crumbling ruins, a once-lovely city drowned on the plain.

The Stone Marshes.





Manon let the humans and Fae meet with the captains of the other two ships.

She heard the news soon enough: what they sought lay about a day and a half inland. Precisely where, they didn’t know—or how long it’d take to find its exact location. Until they returned, the ships would remain anchored here.

And Manon, it seemed, would join them on their trip inland. As if the queen suspected that if she were left behind, their little fleet would not be intact when they returned.

Clever woman.

But that was the other problem. The one facing Manon right now, already looking anxious and put-out.

Abraxos’s tail lashed a bit, the iron spikes scraping and scratching the pristine ship deck. As if he’d heard the queen’s order a minute ago: the wyvern has to go.

On the flat, open expanse of the marshes, he’d be too noticeable.

Manon placed a hand on his scarred snout, meeting those depthless black eyes. “You need to lie low somewhere.”

A warm, sorrowful huff into her palm.