He didn’t blame her. Knew it would take time, time and distance, to heal the internal wounds. If they could ever really heal at all.
But he’d work with her, help in whatever way he could. And if she never returned to who she had been before this, he would not love her any less.
Aelin dunked her head, and when she emerged, she said, “Maeve was about to put a Valg collar around my neck. She left to retrieve it.” The scent of her lingering fear drifted toward him, and Rowan lurched a step closer to the water’s edge. “It’s why I—why I got away. She had me moved to the army camp for safekeeping, and I …” Her voice stalled, yet she met his stare. Let him read the words she could not say, in that silent way they’d always been able to communicate. Escape wasn’t my intention.
“No, Fireheart,” he breathed, shaking his head, horror creeping over him. “There … there was no collar.”
She blinked, head angling. “That was a dream, too?”
His heart cracked as he struggled for the words. Made himself voice them. “No—it was real. Or Maeve thought it was. But the collars, the Valg presence … It was a lie that we crafted. To draw Maeve out, hopefully away from you and Doranelle.”
Only the faint lapping of water sounded. “There was no collar?”
Rowan lowered himself to his knees and shook his head. “I—Aelin, if I’d known what she’d do with the knowledge, what you’d decide to do—”
He might have lost her. Not from Maeve or the gods or the Lock, but from his own damned choices. The lie he’d spun.
Aelin drifted beneath the surface again. So deep that when the flare happened, it was little more than a flutter.
The light burst from her, rippling across the lake, illumining the stones, the slick ceiling above. A silent eruption.
His breathing turned ragged. But she swam toward the surface again, light streaming off her body like tendrils of clouds. It had nearly vanished when she emerged.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to say.
Again, that angle of the head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He did, though. He’d added to her terror, her desperation. He’d—
“If you had not planted that lie for Maeve, if she had not told me, I don’t think we’d be here right now,” she said.
He tried to rein in the twisting in his gut, the urge to reach for her, to beg for her forgiveness. Tried and tried.
She only asked, “What of the others?”
She didn’t know—couldn’t know how and why and where they’d all parted ways. So Rowan told her, as succinctly and calmly as he could.
When he finished, Aelin was quiet for long minutes.
She stared out into the blackness, the rippling of her treading water the only sound. Her body had nearly lost that freshly forged glow.
Then she pivoted back toward him. “Maeve said you and the others were in the North. That you’d been spotted by her spies there. Did you plant that deception for her, too?”
He shook his head. “Lysandra has been thorough, it seems.”
Aelin’s throat bobbed. “I believed her.”
It sounded like a confession, somehow.
So Rowan found himself saying, “I told you once that even if death separated us, I would rip apart every world until I found you.” He gave her a slash of a smile. “Did you really believe this would stop me?”
She pursed her mouth, and at last, those agonizing emotions began to surface in her eyes. “You were supposed to save Terrasen.”
“Considering that the sun shines, I’d say Erawan hasn’t won yet. So we’ll save it together.”
He didn’t let himself think of the final cost of destroying Erawan. And Aelin seemed in no hurry to discuss it, either, as she said, “You should have gone to Terrasen. It needs you.”
“I need you more.” He didn’t balk from the stark honesty roughening his voice. “And Terrasen will need you, too. Not Lysandra masquerading as you, but you.”
A shallow nod. “Maeve raised her army. I doubt it was only to guard me while she was away.”
He’d put the thought aside, to consider later. “It might just be to shore up her defenses, should Erawan win across the sea.”
“Do you truly think that’s what she plans to do with it?”
“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”
And if Maeve meant to bring that army to Terrasen, to either unite with Erawan or simply be another force battering their kingdom, to strike when they were weakest, they had to hurry. Had to get back. Immediately. His mate’s eyes shone with the same understanding and dread.
Aelin’s throat bobbed as she whispered, “I’m so tired, Rowan.”
His heart strained again. “I know, Fireheart.”
He opened his mouth to say more, to coax her onto land so he might at least hold her if words couldn’t ease her burden, but that’s when he saw it.
A boat, ancient and every inch of it carved, drifted out of the gloom.
“Get back to shore.” The boat wasn’t drifting—it was being tugged. He could just barely make out two dark forms slithering beneath the surface.
Aelin didn’t hesitate, yet her strokes remained steady as she swam for him. She didn’t balk at the hand he extended, and he wrapped his cloak around her while the boat ambled past.
Black, eel-like creatures about the size of a mortal man pulled it. Their fins drifted behind them like ebony veils, and with each propelling sweep of their long tails, he glimpsed milky-white eyes. Blind.
They led the flat-bottomed vessel large enough for fifteen Fae males right to the edge of the lake. A flash of short, spindly bodies through the dimness and the Little Folk had it moored to a nearby stalagmite.
The others must have heard his order to Aelin, because they emerged, swords out. A foot behind them, Elide lingered with Fenrys, the male still in wolf form.
“They can’t mean for us to take that into the caves,” Lorcan murmured.
But Aelin turned toward them, hair dripping onto the stone at her bare feet. Half a thought from her could have had her dry, yet she made no move to do so. “We’re being hunted.”
“We know that,” Lorcan shot back, and were it not for the fact that Aelin was currently allowing him to rest a hand upon her shoulder, Rowan would have thrown the male into the lake.
But Aelin’s features didn’t shift from that graveness, that unruffled calm. “The only way to the sea is through these caves.”
It was an outrageous claim. They were a hundred miles inland, and there was no record of these mountains ever connecting to any cave system that flowed to the ocean itself. To do so, they’d have to go northward through this range, then veer westward at the Cambrian Mountains, and sail beneath them right to the coast.
“And I suppose they told you that?” Lorcan’s face was hard as granite.
“Watch it,” Rowan snarled. Fenrys indeed bared his teeth at the dark-haired warrior, fur bristling.
But Aelin said simply, “Yes.” Her chin didn’t dip an inch. “The land above is crawling with soldiers and spies. Going beneath them is the only way.”
Elide stepped forward. “I will go.” She cut a cold glance toward Lorcan. “You can take your chances above, if you’re so disbelieving.”
Lorcan’s jaw tightened, and a small part of Rowan relished seeing the delicate Lady of Perranth fillet the centuries-hardened warrior with a few words. “Considering the potential pitfalls of the situation is wise.”
“We don’t have time to consider,” Rowan cut in before Elide could voice the retort on her tongue. “We need to keep moving.”
Gavriel stalked forward to study the moored boat and what seemed to be bundles of supplies on its sturdy planks. “How will we navigate our way, though?”
“We’ll be escorted,” Aelin answered.
“And if they abandon us?” Lorcan challenged.
Aelin leveled unfazed eyes upon him. “Then you’ll have to find a way out, I suppose.”
A hint—just a spark—of temper belied those calm words.
There was nothing else to debate after that. And they had little to pack. The others gave Aelin privacy to dress by the fire while they inspected the boat, and when his mate emerged again, clad in boots, pants, and various layers beneath her gray surcoat, the sight of her in clothes from Mistward was enough to make his gut clench.