Kingdom of Ash
Page 52

It didn’t so much as move.
Elide glanced to Lorcan. He was frozen, eyes wide as Aelin knelt in the moss, as her breathing became edged with sobs.
He had done this. Led them to this.
Elide stepped toward Aelin.
The queen’s gauntlets drew blood where they scraped into her neck, her jaw, as she heaved against the mask. “Take it off!” The plea turned into a scream. “Take it off!”
Over and over, the queen screamed it. “Take it off, take it off, take it off!”
She was sobbing amid her screaming, the sounds shattering through the ancient forest. She said no other words. Pleaded to no gods, no ancestors.
Only those words, again and again and again.
Take it off, take it off, take it off.
Movement broke through the trees behind them, and the fact that Lorcan did not go for his weapons told Elide who it was. But any relief was short-lived as Rowan and Gavriel emerged, a massive white wolf hauled between them. The wolf whose jaws had clamped around Elide’s arm, tearing flesh to the bone. Fenrys.
He was unconscious, tongue lagging from his bloodied maw. Rowan had barely entered the clearing before he set down the wolf and stalked for Aelin.
The prince was covered in blood. From his unhindered steps, Elide knew it wasn’t his.
From the blood coating his chin, his neck … She didn’t want to know.
Aelin ripped at the immovable mask, either unaware or uncaring of the prince before her. Her consort, husband, and mate.
“Aelin.”
Take it off, take it off, take it off.
Her screams were unbearable. Worse than those that day on the beach in Eyllwe.
Gavriel came to stand beside Elide, his golden skin pale as he took in the frantic queen.
Slowly, Rowan knelt before her. “Aelin.”
She only tipped her head up to the forest canopy and sobbed.
Blood ran down her neck from the scratches she’d dug into her skin, mingling with what already coated her.
Rowan reached out a trembling hand, the only sign of the agony Elide had little doubt was coursing through him. Gently, he laid his hands on her wrists; gently, he closed his fingers around them. Halting the brutal clawing and digging.
Aelin sobbed, her body shuddering with the force of it. “Take it off. ”
Rowan’s eyes flickered, panic and heartbreak and longing shining there. “I will. But you have to be still, Fireheart. Just for a few moments.”
“Take it off. ” The sobs ebbed, tricking into something broken and raw. Rowan ran his thumbs over her wrists, over those iron shackles. As if it were nothing but her skin. Slowly, her shaking eased.
No, not eased, Elide realized as Rowan rose to his feet and stalked behind the queen. But contained, turned inward. Tremors rippled through Aelin’s tense body, but she kept still as Rowan examined the lock.
Yet something like shock, then horror and sorrow, flashed over his face, as he surveyed her back. It was gone as soon as it appeared.
A glance, and Gavriel and Lorcan drifted to his side, their steps slow. Unthreatening.
Across the small clearing, Fenrys remained out, his white coat soaked with blood.
Elide only walked to Aelin and took up the spot where Rowan had been.
The queen’s eyes were closed, as if it took all her concentration to remain still for another heartbeat, to allow them to look, to not claw at the irons.
So Elide said nothing, demanded nothing from her, save for a companion if she needed one.
Behind Aelin, Rowan’s blood-splattered face was grim while he studied the lock fastening the mask’s chains to the back of her head. His nostrils flared slightly. Rage—frustration.
“I’ve never seen a lock like this,” Gavriel murmured.
Aelin began shaking again.
Elide put a hand on her knee. Aelin had scraped it raw, mud and grass stuck in her blood-crusted skin.
She waited for the queen to shove her hand away, but Aelin didn’t move. Kept her eyes shut, her ragged breathing holding steady.
Rowan gripped one of the chains binding the mask and nodded to Lorcan. “The other one.”
Silently, Lorcan grasped the opposite end. They’d sever the iron if they had to.
Elide held her breath as both males strained, arms shaking.
Nothing.
They tried again. Aelin’s breathing hitched. Elide tightened her hand on the queen’s knee.
“She managed to snap the chains on her ankles and hands,” Gavriel observed. “They’re not indestructible.”
But with the chains on the mask so close to her head, a swipe of a sword was impossible. Or perhaps the mask had been made from far stronger iron.
Rowan and Lorcan grunted as they heaved against the chains. It was of little use.
Panting softly, they paused. Red welts shone on their hands.
They’d tried to use their magic to break the iron.
Silence fell through the clearing. They couldn’t linger here—not for much longer. But to take Aelin in the chains, when she was so frantic to be free of them …
Aelin’s eyes opened.
They were empty. Wholly drained. A warrior accepting defeat.
Elide blurted, scrambling for anything to banish that emptiness, “Was there ever a key? Did you see them using a key?”
Two blinks. As if that meant something.
Rowan and Lorcan yanked again, straining.
But Aelin’s stare fell to the moss, the stones. Narrowed slightly, as if the question had settled. Through the small hole in her mask, Elide could barely see her mouth the words. A key.
“I don’t have it—we don’t have them,” Elide said, sensing the direction of Aelin’s thoughts. “Manon and Dorian do.”
“Quiet,” Lorcan hissed. Not at the level of her voice, but the deadly information Elide revealed.
Aelin again blinked twice with that strange intentionality.
Rowan snarled at the chains, heaving again.
But Aelin stretched out a hand to the moss and traced a shape.
“What is that?” Elide leaned forward as the queen did it again, her hollow face unreadable.
The Fae males paused at her question, and watched Aelin’s finger move through the green.
“A Wyrdmark,” Rowan said softly. “To open.”
Aelin traced it again, mute and still. As if none of them stood there.
“They work on iron?” Gavriel asked, tracking Aelin’s finger.
“She unlocked iron doors in Adarlan’s royal library with that symbol,” Rowan murmured. “But she needed …”
He let his words hang unfinished as he picked up the broken knife Aelin had discarded in the moss nearby and sliced it across his palm.
Kneeling before her, he extended his bloodied hand. “Show me, Fireheart. Show me again.” He tapped her ankle—the shackle there.
Silently, her movements stiff, Aelin leaned forward. She sniffed at the blood pooling in his hand, her nostrils flaring. Her eyes lifted to his, like the scent of his blood posed some question.
“I am your mate,” Rowan whispered, as if it was the answer she sought. And the love in his eyes, in the way his voice broke, his bloodied hand trembling … Elide’s throat tightened.
Aelin only looked at the blood pooling in his cupped palm. Her fingers curled, the gauntlet clicking. As if it were another answer, too.
“She can’t do it with the iron,” Elide said. “If it’s on her hands. It interferes with the magic in the blood.”
A blink from her, in that silent language.
“It’s why she put them on you, isn’t it,” Elide said, her chest straining. “To be sure you couldn’t use your own blood with the Wyrdmarks to free yourself.” As if all the other iron wasn’t already enough.
Another blink, her face still so hollow and cold. Tired.
Rowan’s jaw clenched. But he just dipped his finger into the blood in his palm and offered his hand to her. “Show me, Fireheart,” he said again.
Elide could have sworn he shuddered, and not from fear, as Aelin’s metal-crusted hand closed around his.
In halting, small movements, she guided his finger to trace the symbol onto the shackle around her ankle.
A soft flare of greenish light, then—
The hiss and sigh of the lock filled the clearing. The shackle tumbled to the moss.