Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass #3)(141)

Her cheek against the moss, the young princess she had been—­Aelin Galathynius—­reached a hand for her. “Get up,” she said softly.

Celaena shook her head.

Aelin strained for her, bridging that rift in the foundation of the world. “Get up.” A promise—­a promise for a better life, a better world.

The Valg princes paused.

She had wasted her life, wasted Marion’s sacrifice. Those slaves had been butchered because she had failed—­because she had not been there in time.

“Get up,” someone said beyond the young princess. Sam. Sam, standing just beyond where she could see, smiling faintly.

“Get up,” said another voice—­a woman’s. Nehemia.

“Get up.” Two voices together—­her mother and father, faces grave but eyes bright. Her uncle was beside them, the crown of Terrasen on his silver hair. “Get up,” he told her gently.

One by one, like shadows emerging from the mist, they appeared. The faces of the people she had loved with her heart of wildfire.

And then there was Lady Marion, smiling beside her husband. “Get up,” she whispered, her voice full of that hope for the world, and for the daughter she would never seen again.

A tremor in the darkness.

Aelin still lay before her, hand still reaching. The Valg princes turned.

As the demon princes moved, her mother stepped toward her, face and hair and build so like her own. “You are a disappointment,” she hissed.

Her father crossed his muscular arms. “You are everything I hated about the world.”

Her uncle, still wearing the antler crown long since burned to ash: “Better that you had died with us than shame us, degrade our memory, betray our people.”

Their voices swirled together. “Traitor. Murderer. Liar. Thief. Coward.” Again and again, worming in just as the King of Adarlan’s power had wriggled in her mind like a maggot.

The king hadn’t done it merely to cause a disruption and hurt her. He had also done it to separate her family, to get them out of the castle—to take the blame away from Adarlan and make it look like an outside attack.

She had blamed herself for dragging them to the manor ­house to be butchered. But the king had planned it all, every minute detail. Except for the mistake of leaving her alive—­perhaps because the power of the amulet did indeed save her.

“Come with us,” her family whispered. “Come with us into the ageless dark.”

They reached for her, faces shadowed and twisted. Yet—­yet even those faces, so warped with hatred . . . she still loved them—­even if they loathed her, even if it ached; loved them until their hissing faded, until they vanished like smoke, leaving only Aelin lying beside her, as she had been all along.

She looked at Aelin’s face—­the face she’d once worn—­and at her still outstretched hand, so small and unscarred. The darkness of the Valg princes flickered.

There was solid ground beneath her. Moss and grass. Not hell—earth. The earth on which her kingdom lay, green and mountainous and as unyielding as its people. Her people.

Her people, waiting for ten years, but no longer.

She could see the snow-­capped Staghorns, the wild tangle of Oakwald at their feet, and . . . and Orynth, that city of light and learning, once a pillar of strength—­and her home.

It would be both again.

She would not let that light go out.

She would fill the world with it, with her light—­her gift. She would light up the darkness, so brightly that all who ­were lost or wounded or broken would find their way to it, a beacon for those who still dwelled in that abyss. It would not take a monster to destroy a monster—­but light, light to drive out darkness.

She was not afraid.

She would remake the world—­remake it for them, those she had loved with this glorious, burning heart; a world so brilliant and prosperous that when she saw them again in the Afterworld, she would not be ashamed. She would build it for her people, who had survived this long, and whom she would not abandon. She would make for them a kingdom such as there had never been, even if it took until her last breath.

She was their queen, and she could offer them nothing less.

Aelin Galathynius smiled at her, hand still outreached. “Get up,” the princess said.

Celaena reached across the earth between them and brushed her fingers against Aelin’s.

And arose.

55

The barrier fell.

But the darkness did not advance over the ward-­stones, and Rowan, who had been restrained by Gavriel and Lorcan in the grass outside the fortress, knew why.

The creatures and Narrok had captured a prize far greater than the demi-­Fae. The joy of feeding on her was something they planned to relish for a long, long while. Everything ­else was secondary—­as if they’d forgotten to continue advancing, swept up in the frenzy of feasting.

Behind them, the fighting continued, as it had for the past twenty minutes. Wind and ice ­were of no use against the darkness, though Rowan had hurled both against it the moment the barrier fell. Again and again, anything to pierce that eternal black and see what was left of the princess. Even as he started hearing a soft, warm female voice, beckoning to him from the darkness—­that voice he had spent centuries forgetting, which now tore him to shreds.