The blackness of the subterranean river pressed in, wrapped its arms around her and squeezed.

Different from the blackness of the iron box. The darkness she’d found inside herself.

A place she might never escape, not really.

Her power stirred, awakening. Aelin swallowed, refusing to acknowledge it. Heed it.

She wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not yet. Until she was ready.

She had seen Rowan’s face when she spoke of what his deception with the collar had prompted her to do. Had noted the way her companions looked at her, pity and fear in their eyes. At what had been done to her, what she’d become.

A new body. A foreign, strange body, as if she’d been ripped from one and shoved into another. Different from moving between her forms, somehow. She hadn’t tried shifting into her human body yet. Didn’t see the point.

Sitting in silence as the boat was pulled through the gloom, she felt the weight of those stares. Their dread. Felt them wondering just how broken she was.

You do not yield.

She knew that had been true—that it had been her mother’s voice who had spoken and none other.

So she would not yield to this. What had been done. What remained.

For the companions around her, to lift their despair, their fear, she wouldn’t yield.

She’d fight for it, claw her way back to it, who she’d been before. Remember to swagger and grin and wink. She’d fight against that lingering stain on her soul, fight to ignore it. Would use this journey into the dark to piece herself back together—just enough to make it convincing.

Even if this fractured darkness now dwelled within her, even if speech was difficult, she would show them what they wished to see.

An unbroken Fire-Bringer. Aelin of the Wildfire.

She would show the world that lie as well. Make them believe it.

Maybe she’d one day believe it, too.

CHAPTER 37

Days of near-silent travel passed.

Three days, if whatever senses Rowan and Gavriel possessed proved true. Perhaps the latter carried a pocket watch. Aelin didn’t particularly care.

She used each of those days to consider what had been done, what lay before her. Sometimes, the roar of her magic drowned out her thoughts. Sometimes it slumbered. She never heeded it.

They sailed through the darkness, the river below so black that they might as well have been drifting through Hellas’s realm.

It was near the end of the fourth day through the dark and rock, their escorts hauling the boat tirelessly, that Rowan murmured, “We’re entering barrow-wight territory.”

Gavriel twisted from his spot by the prow. “How can you tell?”

Sprawled beside him, still in wolf form, Fenrys cocked his ears forward.

She hadn’t asked him why he remained in his wolf’s body. No one asked her why she remained in her Fae form, after all. But she supposed that if he donned his Fae form, he might feel inclined to talk. To answer questions that he was perhaps not yet ready to discuss. Might begin simply screaming and screaming at what had been done to them, to Connall.

Rowan pointed with a tattooed finger toward an alcove in the wall. Shadow veiled its recesses, but as the blue light of the lantern touched it, gold glittered along the rocky floor. Ancient gold.

“What’s a barrow-wight?” Elide whispered.

“Creatures of malice and thought,” Lorcan answered, scanning the passageway, a hand drifting to the hilt of his sword. “They covet gold and treasure, and infested the ancient tombs of kings and queens so they might dwell amongst it. They hate light of any kind. Hopefully, this will keep them away.”

Elide cringed, and Aelin felt inclined to do the same.

Instead, she dredged up enough speech to ask Rowan, “Are these the same ones beneath the burial mounds we visited?”

Rowan straightened, eyes sparking at her question—or at the fact that she’d spoken at all. He’d kept by her these days, a silent, steady presence. Even when they’d slept, he’d remained a few feet away, still not touching, but just there. Close enough that the pine-and-snow scent of him eased her into slumber.

Rowan braced a hand along the boat’s rim. “There are many barrow-wight mounds across Wendlyn, but no others between the Cambrians and Doranelle beyond those we went to. As far as we know,” he amended. “I didn’t realize their tombs had been carved so deep.”

“The wights needed some way in, with the tomb doors likely sealed above,” Gavriel observed, studying a larger alcove that appeared on the right ahead. Not an alcove, but a dry cave mouth that flowed to the edge of the river before rising out of sight.

“Stop the boat,” Aelin said.

Silence at the order, even from Rowan.

Aelin pointed to the lip of shore by the cave mouth. “Stop the boat,” she repeated.

“I don’t think we can,” Elide murmured. Indeed, the two of them had resorted to using a bucket to see to their needs these few days, the males engaging in whatever conversation they could to make the silence more bearable.

But the boat headed for the alcove, its speed banking. Fenrys eased to his feet, sniffing the air as they neared the shore ledge. Rowan and Lorcan leaned out to brace their hands against the stone to keep them from colliding too hard.

Aelin didn’t wait for the boat to cease rocking before she grabbed a lantern and leaped onto the river-smooth ground.

Rowan swore, jumping after her. “Stay here,” he warned whoever remained on the boat.

Aelin didn’t bother to see who obeyed as she strode into the cave.

The queen had been reckless before Cairn and Maeve had worked on her for two months, but it seemed she’d had any bit of common sense flayed from her.

Lorcan refrained from saying that, though, as he found himself and Elide alone in the boat. Gavriel and Fenrys had gone after Rowan and Aelin, their path marked only by the fading gleam of blue light on the walls.

Not firelight. She hadn’t shown an ember since they’d entered the cave.

Elide remained sitting across from him on the left side of the boat, her back resting along the curved edge. She had been silent these past few minutes, watching the now-dark cave mouth.

“Barrow-wights are nothing to fear if you’re armed with magic,” Lorcan found himself saying.

Her dark eyes slid to him. “Well, I don’t have any, so forgive me if I remain alert.”

No, she’d once told him that while magic flowed in the Lochan bloodline, she had none to speak of. He’d never told her that he’d always considered her cleverness to be a mighty magic on its own, regardless of Anneith’s whisperings.

Elide went on, “It’s not the wights I’m worried about.”

Lorcan assessed the quiet river flowing by, the caves around them, before he said, “It will take time for her to readjust.”

She stared at him with those damning eyes.

He braced his forearms on his knees. “We got her back. She’s with us now. What more do you want?” From me, he didn’t need to add.

Elide straightened. “I don’t want anything.” From you.

He clenched his teeth. This was where they’d have it out, then. “How much longer am I supposed to atone?”

“Are you growing bored with it?”

He snarled.

She only glared at him. “I hadn’t realized you were even atoning.”

“I came here, didn’t I?”

“For whom, exactly? Rowan? Aelin?”

“For both of them. And for you.”

There. Let it be laid before them.

Despite the blue glow of the lantern, he could make out the pink that spread across her cheeks. Yet her mouth tightened. “I told you on that beach: I want nothing to do with you.”

“So one mistake and I am your eternal enemy?”

“She is my queen, and you summoned Maeve, then told her where the keys were, and you stood there while they did that to her.”

“You have no idea what the blood oath can do. None.”

“Fenrys broke the oath. He found a way.”

“And had Aelin not been there to offer him another, he would have died.” He let out a low, joyless laugh. “Perhaps that’s what you would have preferred.”

She ignored his last comment. “You didn’t even try.”

“I did,” he snarled. “I fought it with everything I had. And it was not enough. If she’d ordered me to slit your throat, I would have. And if I had found a way to break the oath, I would have died, and she might very well have killed you or taken you afterward. On that beach, my only thought was to get Maeve to forget about you, to let you go—”

“I don’t care about me! I didn’t care about me on that beach!”

“Well, I do.” His growled words echoed across the water and stone, and he lowered his voice. Worse things than wights might come sniffing down here. “I cared about you on that beach. And your queen did, too.”

Elide shook her head and looked away, looked anywhere, it seemed, but at him.

This was what came of opening that door to a place inside him that no one had ever breached. This mess, this hollowness in his chest that made him keep needing to make things right.

“Resent me all you like,” he said, damning the hoarseness of his words. “I’m sure I’ll survive.”

Hurt flashed in her eyes. “Fine,” she said, her voice brittle.

He hated that brittleness more than anything he’d ever encountered. Hated himself for causing it. But he had limits to how low he’d crawl.

He’d said his piece. If she wanted to wash her hands of him forever, then he would find a way to respect that. Live with it.

Somehow.

The cave ascended for a few feet, then leveled out and wended into the stone. A rough-hewn passage carved not by water or age, Rowan realized, but by mortal hands. Perhaps the long-dead kings and lords had taken the subterranean river to deposit their dead before sealing the tombs to sunlight and air above, the knowledge of the pathways dying off with their kingdoms.

A faint glow pulsed from the lantern Aelin held, bathing the cave walls in blue. He’d quickly caught up to her, and now strode at her side, Fenrys trotting at her heels and Gavriel taking up the rear.