Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass #3)(111)

She hadn’t been old enough in Terrasen to have anyone teach her about the deadly side to her power—­and no one had explained, since her lessons had been so limited. She hadn’t felt like she was burning out. It had come on so quickly. Maybe that was all there was to her magic. Maybe her well didn’t go as deep as everyone had thought. It would be a relief if that ­were true.

She lifted her legs, groaning at the aches along her muscles, and leaned forward far enough to hug her knees. Above the lip of the sunken tub, there ­were a few candles burning on the stones, and she glared at the flames. Hated the flames. Though she supposed they needed light in ­here.

She rested her forehead on her scarred knees, her skin nearly scorching. She shut her eyes, piecing her splintered consciousness together.

The door opened. Rowan. She kept herself in that cool darkness, savoring the growing chill in the water, the quieting pulse under her skin. He sounded about halfway across the room when his footsteps halted.

His breath caught, harsh enough that she looked over her shoulder.

But his eyes ­weren’t on her face. Or the water. They ­were on her bare back.

Curled as she was against her knees, he could see the ­whole expanse of ruined flesh, each scar from the lashings. “Who did that do you?”

It would have been easy to lie, but she was so tired, and he had saved her useless hide. So she said, “A lot of people. I spent some time in the Salt Mines of Endovier.”

He was so still that she wondered if he’d stopped breathing. “How long?” he asked after a moment. She braced herself for the pity, but his face was so carefully blank—­no, not blank. Calm with lethal rage.

“A year. I was there a year before . . . it’s a long story.” She was too exhausted, her throat too raw, to say the rest of it. She noticed then that his arms ­were ban­daged, and more ban­dages across his broad chest peeked up from beneath his shirt. She’d burned him again. And yet he had held on to her—­had run all the way ­here and not let go once.

“You ­were a slave.”

She gave him a slow nod. He opened his mouth, but shut it and swallowed, that lethal rage winking out. As if he remembered who he was talking to and that it was the least punishment she deserved.

He turned on his heel and shut the door behind him. She wished he’d slammed it—­wished he’d shattered it. But he closed it with barely more than a click and did not return.

42

Her back.

Rowan soared over the trees, riding and shaping the winds to push him onward, faster, their roar negligible to the bellowing in his head. He took in the passing world out of instinct rather than interest, his eyes turned inward—­toward that slab of ruined flesh glistening in the candlelight.

The gods knew he’d seen plenty of harrowing injuries. He’d be­­stowed plenty of them on his enemies and friends alike. In the grand sense of things, her back ­wasn’t even close to some of those wounds. Yet when he’d seen it, his heart had clean stopped—­and for a moment, there had been an overwhelming silence in his mind.

He felt his magic and his warrior’s instincts honing into a lethal combination the longer he stared—­howling to rip apart the people who had done that with his bare hands. Then he’d just left, hardly making it out of the baths before he shifted and soared into the night.

Maeve had lied. Or lied by omission. But she knew. She knew what the girl had gone through—­knew she’d been a slave. That day—­that day early on, he’d threatened to whip the girl, gods above. And she had lost it. He’d been such a proud fool that he’d assumed she’d lashed out because she was nothing more than a child. He should have known better—­should have known that when she did react to something like that, it meant the scars went deep. And then there ­were the other things he’d said . . .

He was almost to the towering line of the Cambrian Mountains. She had barely been grown into her woman’s body when they hurt her like that. Why hadn’t she told him? Why hadn’t Maeve told him? His hawk loosed a piercing cry that echoed on the dark gray stones of the mountain wall before him. A chorus of unearthly howls ­rose in response—­Maeve’s wild wolves, guarding the passes. Even if he flew all the way to Doranelle, he’d reach his queen and demand answers and . . . she would not give them to him. With the blood oath, she could command he not go back to Mistward.

He gripped the winds with his magic, choking off their current. Aelin . . . Aelin had not trusted him—­had not wanted him to know.

And she’d almost burned out completely, gods be damned, leaving her currently defenseless. Primal anger sharpened in his gut, brimming with a territorial, possessive need. Not a need for her, but a need to protect—­a male’s duty and honor. He had not handled the news as he should have.

If she hadn’t wanted to tell him about being a slave, then she probably had done so assuming the worst about him—­just as she was probably assuming the worst about his leaving. The thought didn’t sit well.

So he veered back to the north and reined his magic to pull the winds with him, easing his flight back to the fortress.

He would get answers from his queen soon enough.

•

The healers gave her a tonic, and when Celaena reassured them that she ­wasn’t going to incinerate herself, she stayed in the bath until her teeth ­were chattering. It took three times as long as usual to get back to her rooms, and she was so frozen and drained that she didn’t change into clothes before she dropped into bed.