Heir of Fire

He had to look away for a moment, and even Ren stayed quiet. At last, Aedion said, “Send out feelers to Ravi and Sol, but hold off on the others. Ignore the minor lords for now. Small steps.”

To his surprise, Ren said, “Agreed.” For a heartbeat, their eyes met, and he knew that Ren felt what he often did—­what he tried to keep buried. They had survived, when so many had not. And no one ­else could understand what it was like to bear it, unless they had lost as much.

Ren had escaped at the cost of his parents’ lives—­and had lost his home, his title, his friends, and his kingdom. He had hidden and trained and never lost sight of his cause.

They ­were not friends now; they never really had been. Ren’s father hadn’t particularly liked that Aedion, not Ren, was favored to take the blood oath to Aelin. The oath of pure submission—­the oath that would have sealed Aedion as her lifelong protector, the one person in whom she could have absolute trust. Everything he possessed, everything he was, should have belonged to her.

Yet the prize now was not just a blood oath but a kingdom—­a shot at vengeance and rebuilding their world. Aedion made to walk away, but looked back. Just two cloaked figures, one hunched, the other tall and armed. The first shred of Aelin’s court. The court he’d raise for her to shatter Adarlan’s chains. He could keep playing the game—­for a little longer.

“When she returns,” Aedion said quietly, “what she will do to the King of Adarlan will make the slaughtering ten years ago look merciful.” And in his heart, Aedion hoped he spoke true.

25

A week passed without any further attempts to skin Celaena alive, so even though she made absolutely no progress with Rowan, she considered it to be a success. Rowan lived up to his word about her pulling double duty in the kitchens—­the only upside of which was that she was so exhausted when she tumbled into bed that she did not remember dreaming. Another benefit, she supposed, was that while she was scrubbing the eve­ning dishes, she could listen to Emrys’s stories—­which Luca begged for every night, regardless of rain.

Despite what had happened with the skinwalkers, Celaena was no closer to mastering her shift. Even though Rowan had offered his cloak that night beside the river, the next morning had brought them back to their usual vitriolic dislike. Hatred felt like a strong word, as she ­couldn’t quite hate someone who had saved her, but dislike fit pretty damn well. She didn’t particularly care what side of the hatred-­dislike line Rowan was on. But gaining his approval to enter Doranelle was undoubtedly a long, long way off.

Every day, he brought her to the temple ruins—­far enough away that if she did manage to shift and lost control of her magic in the pro­cess, she ­wouldn’t incinerate anyone. Everything—everything—depended on that command: shift. But the memory of what the magic had felt like as it seared out of her, when it threatened to swallow her and the ­whole world, plagued her, waking and asleep. It was almost as bad as the endless sitting.

Now, after two miserable hours of it, she groaned and stood, stalking around the ruins. It was unusually sunny that day, making the pale stones seem to glow. In fact, she could have sworn that the whispered prayers of long-­gone worshippers still resonated. Her magic had been flickering oddly in response—­strange, in her human form, where it was normally so bolted down.

As she studied the ruins, she braced her hands on her hips: anything to keep from ripping out her hair. “What was this place, anyway?” Only slabs of broken stone remained to show where the temple had stood. A few oblong stones—­pillars—were tossed about as if a hand had scattered them, and several stones grouped together indicated what had once been a road.

Rowan dogged her steps, a thundercloud closing in around her as she examined a cluster of white stones. “The Sun Goddess’s temple.”

Mala, Lady of Light, Learning, and Fire. “You’ve been bringing me ­here because you think it might help with mastering my powers—­my shifting?”

A vague nod. She put a hand on one of the massive stones. If she felt like admitting it, she could almost sense the echoes of the power that had dwelled ­here long ago, a delicious heat kissing its way up her neck, down her spine, as if some piece of that goddess were still curled up in the corner. It explained why today, in the sun, the temple felt different. Why her magic was jumpy. Mala, Sun Goddess and Light-­Bringer, was sister and eternal rival to Deanna, Keeper of the Moon.

“Mab was immortalized into godhood thanks to Maeve,” Celaena mused as she ran a hand down the jagged block. “But that was over five hundred years ago. Mala had a sister in the moon long before Mab took her place.”

“Deanna was the original sister’s name. But you humans gave her some of Mab’s traits. The hunting, the hounds.”

“Perhaps Deanna and Mala ­weren’t always rivals.”

“What are you getting at?”

She shrugged and kept running her hands along the stone, feeling, breathing, smelling. “Did you ever know Mab?”

Rowan was quiet for a long moment—­contemplating the usefulness of telling her, no doubt. “No,” he said at last. “I am old, but not that old.”

Fine—if he didn’t want to give her an actual number . . . “Do you feel old?”

He gazed into the distance. “I am still considered young by the standards of my kind.”

It ­wasn’t an answer. “You said that you once campaigned in a kingdom that no longer exists. You’ve been off to war several times, it seems, and seen the world. That would leave its mark. Age you on the inside.”

“Do you feel old?” His gaze was unflinching. A child—­a girl, he’d called her.

She was a girl to him. Even when she became an old woman—­if she lived that long—­she’d still be a child in comparison to his life span. Her mission depended upon his seeing her otherwise, but she still said, “These days, I am very glad to be a mortal, and to only have to endure this life once. These days, I don’t envy you at all.”

“And before?”

It was her turn to stare toward the horizon. “I used to wish I had a chance to see it all—­and hated that I never would.”

She could feel him forming a question, but she started moving again, examining the stones. As she dusted the block off, an image emerged of a stag with a glowing star between its antlers, so like the one in Terrasen. She’d heard Emrys tell the story of the sun stags, who held an immortal flame between their massive antlers and who had once been stolen from a temple in this land . . . “Is this where the stags ­were kept—­before this place was destroyed?”