“What am I supposed to be watching for, exactly?”

Sitting knee to knee in their tiny tent, the wind howling outside, Manon’s golden eyes narrowed as she peered into Dorian’s face. “My eyes,” he said. “Just tell me if they change color.”

She growled. “This shape-shifting is really a pressing thing to learn?”

“Indulge me,” he purred, and reached inward, his magic flaring.

Brown. You will change from blue to brown.

Liar—he supposed he was a liar for keeping his true reasons from her. He didn’t need Damaris to confirm it.

She might forbid him from going to Morath, but there was another possibility, even worse than that.

That she would insist on going with him.

Manon gave him a look that might have sent a lesser man running. “They’re still blue.”

Gods above, she was beautiful. He wondered when it would stop feeling like a betrayal to think so.

Dorian took a long breath, concentrating again. Ignoring the whispering presence of the two keys in his jacket pocket. “Tell me if it changes at all.”

“It’s that different from your magic?”

Dorian sat back, bracing his arms behind him as he sought the words to explain. “It’s not like other sorts of magic, where it flows through my veins, and half a thought has it changing from ice to flame to water.”

She studied him, head angled in a way he’d witnessed the wyverns doing. Right before they devoured a goat whole. “Which do you like the best?”

An unusually personal question. Even though this past week, thanks to the tent’s relative warmth and privacy, they’d spent hours tangling in the blankets now beneath them.

He’d never had anything like her. He sometimes wondered if she’d never had anything like him, either. He’d seen how often she found her pleasure when he took the reins, when her body writhed beneath his and she lost control entirely.

But the hours in this tent hadn’t yielded any sort of intimacy. Only blessed distraction. For both of them. He was glad of it, he told himself. None of this could end well. For either of them.

“I like the ice best,” Dorian admitted at last, realizing he’d let the silence drip on. “It was the first element that came out of me—I don’t know why.”

“You’re not a cold person.”

He arched a brow. “Is that your professional opinion?”

Manon studied him. “You can descend to those levels when you are angry, when your friends are threatened. But you are not cold, not at heart. I’ve seen men who are, and you are not.”

“Neither are you,” he said a bit quietly.

The wrong thing to say.

Manon stiffened, her chin lifting. “I am one hundred seventeen years old,” she said flatly. “I have spent the majority of that time killing. Don’t convince yourself that the events of the past few months have erased that.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” He doubted anyone had ever spoken to her that baldly—relished that he now did, and kept his throat intact.

She snarled in his face. “You’re a fool if you believe the fact that I am their queen wipes away the truth that I have killed scores of Crochans.”

“That fact will always remain. It’s how you make it count now that matters.”

Make it count. Aelin had said as much back in those initial days after he’d been freed of the collar. He tried not to wonder whether the icy bite of Wyrdstone would soon clamp around his neck once more.

“I am not a softhearted Crochan. I will never be, even if I wear their crown of stars.”

He’d heard the whispers about that crown amongst the Crochans this week—about whether it would be found at last. Rhiannon Crochan’s crown of stars, stolen from her dying body by Baba Yellowlegs herself. Where it had gone after Aelin had killed the Matron, Dorian had not the faintest idea. If it had stayed with that strange carnival she’d traveled with, it could be anywhere. Could have been sold for quick coin.

Manon went on, “If that is what the Crochans expect me to become before they join in this war, then I will let them venture to Eyllwe tomorrow alone.”

“Is it so bad, to care?” The gods knew he’d been struggling to do so himself.

“I don’t know how to,” she growled.

Ridiculous. An outright lie. Perhaps it was because of the high likelihood that he’d be collared again at Morath, perhaps it was because he was a king who’d left his kingdom in an enemy’s grip, but Dorian found himself saying, “You do care. You know it, too. It’s what makes you so damn scared of all this.”

Her golden eyes raged, but she said nothing.

“Caring doesn’t make you weak,” he offered.

“Then why don’t you heed your own advice?”

“I care.” His temper rose to meet hers. And he decided to hell with it—decided to let go of that leash he’d put on himself. Let go of that restraint. “I care about more than I should. I even care about you.”

Another wrong thing to say.

Manon stood—as high as the tent would allow. “Then you’re a fool.” She shoved on her boots and stomped into the frigid night.

I even care about you.

Manon scowled as she turned in her sleep, wedged between Asterin and Sorrel. Only hours remained until they were to move out—to head to Eyllwe and whatever force might be waiting to ally with the Crochans. And in need of help.

Caring doesn’t make you weak.

The king was a fool. Little more than a boy. What did he know of anything?

Still the words burrowed under her skin, her bones. Is it so bad, to care?

She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

Dawn was not too far off when a warm body slid beside his.

Dorian said into the darkness, “Three to a tent isn’t too comfortable, is it?”

“I didn’t come back because I agree with you.” Manon yanked the blankets over herself.

Dorian smiled slightly, and fell asleep once more, letting his magic warm them both.

When they awoke, something sharp in his chest had dulled—just a fraction.

But Manon was frowning down at him. Dorian sat up, groaning as he stretched his arms as far as the tent would allow. “What is it?” he asked when her brow remained furrowed.

Manon pulled on her boots, then her cape. “Your eyes are brown.”

He lifted a hand to his face, but she was already gone.

Dorian stared after her, the camp already hurrying to be off.

Where that edge had dulled in his chest, his magic now flowed freer. As if it, too, had been freed from those inner restraints he’d loosened slightly last night. What he’d opened up, revealed to her. A sort of freedom, that letting go.

The sun was barely in the sky when they began the long flight to Eyllwe.

CHAPTER 25

Cairn had let her rot in the box for a while.

It was quieter here, no endless, droning roar of the river.

Nothing but that pressure, building and building and building under her skin, in her head. She could not outrun it, even in oblivion.

But still the irons dug in, chafing against her skin. Wetness pooled beneath her as time wheeled by. As Maeve undoubtedly brought that collar closer with each hour.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

She drifted down again, into a pocket of the dark, where she told herself that story—the story—over and over.

Who she was, what she was, what she stood to destroy should she yield to the near-airlessness of the box, to the rising strain.

It wouldn’t matter, though. Once that collar went around her neck, how long would it take until the Valg prince within pried from her everything Maeve wished to know? Violated and delved into every inner barrier to mine those vital secrets?

Cairn would begin again soon. It would be wretched. And then the healers would return with their sweet-smelling smoke, as they had come these months, these years, however long it had been.

But she’d seen beyond them, for an instant. Had seen canvas fabric draped overhead, rushes covered with woven rugs beneath their sandaled feet. Braziers smoldered all around.

A tent. She was in a tent. Murmuring sounded outside—not nearby, but close enough for her Fae hearing to pick up. People speaking in both her tongue and the Old Language, someone muttering about the cramped camp conditions.

An army camp, full of Fae.

A more secure location, Cairn had said. Maeve had wanted her here, to guard her from Morath. Until Maeve clamped the cold Wyrdstone collar around her neck.

But then oblivion swept in. When she awoke, cleaned and without an ache, she knew Cairn was soon to begin. His canvas had been wiped bare, ready for him to paint red. His terrible, grand finale, not to pry information from her, not with Maeve’s triumph at hand, but for his own pleasure.

Aelin was ready, too.

They hadn’t chained her to an altar this time. But to a metal table, set within the center of the large tent. He’d had them bring in the comforts of home—or whatever Cairn might consider home.

A tall chest of drawers stood by one canvas wall. She doubted it held clothes.

Fenrys lay beside it, head on his front paws, sleeping. For once, sleeping. Grief laid heavy on him, dulling his coat, dimming his bright eyes.

Another table had been placed near the one on which she lay. A cloth covered three humped objects on it. Beside the one closest, a patch of black velvet also had been left out. For the instruments he’d use on her. The way a merchant might display his finest jewels.

Two chairs sat facing each other on the other side of the second table, before the large brazier full to the brim with crackling logs. The smoke curled upward, up, up—

A small hole had been cut into the tent’s ceiling. And through it …

Aelin couldn’t fight the trembling in her mouth at the night sky, at the pinpricks of light shining in it.

Stars. Just two, but there were stars overhead. The sky itself … it was not the heaviness of full night, but rather a murky, graying black.

Dawn. Likely an hour or so away, if the stars remained out. Perhaps she would last long enough to see sunlight.

Fenrys’s eyes shot open, and he lifted his head, ears twitching.