Page 108 of Kingdom of Ash

Rowan offered his hand, his blood, again. The shackle around her other ankle yielded to the Wyrdmark.

Then the manacles around her wrists. Then the beautiful, horrible gauntlets thudded to the moss.

Aelin lifted her bare hands to her face, reaching for the lock behind the mask, but halted.

“I’ll do it,” Rowan said, his voice still soft, still full of that love. Hemoved behind her, and Elide stared at the horrible mask, the suns and flames carved and embossed along its ancient surface.

A flare of light, a click of metal, and then it slid free.

Her face was pale—so pale, all traces of the sun-kissed coloring gone.

And empty. Aware, and yet not.

Wary.

Elide kept still, letting the queen survey her. The males moved to face her, and Aelin looked upon them in turn. Gavriel, who bowed his head. Lorcan, who stared right back at her, his dark gaze unreadable.

And Rowan. Rowan, whose breathing became jagged, his swallow audible. “Aelin?”

The name, it seemed, was an unlocking, too.

Not of the queen she’d so briefly known, but the power inside her.

Elide flinched as flame, golden and blazing, erupted around the queen. The shift burned away into ashes.

Lorcan dragged Elide back, and she allowed it, even as the heat vanished. Even as the flare of power contracted into an aura around the queen, a shimmering second skin.

Aelin knelt there, burning, and did not speak.

The flames flickered around her, though the moss, the roots, did not burn. Didn’t so much as steam. And through the fire, Aelin’s now-long hair half hiding her nakedness, Elide got a good look at what had been done to her.

Aside from a bruise along her ribs, there was nothing.

Not a mark. Not a callus.

Not a single scar. The ones Elide had marked in those days before Aelin had been taken were gone.

As if someone had wiped them away.

CHAPTER 31

They had taken her scars.

Maeve had taken them all away.

It told Rowan enough about what had been done. When he’d seen her back, the smooth skin where the scars of Endovier and the scars from Cairn’s whipping should have been, he’d suspected.

But kneeling, burning in nothing but her skin … There were no scars where there should have been. The almost-necklace of them from Baba Yellowlegs: gone. The shackle marks from Endovier: gone. The scar where she’d been forced by Arobynn Hamel to break her own arm: gone. And on her palms …

It was upon her exposed palms that Aelin now gazed. As if realizing what was missing.

The scars across her palms, one from the moment they had becomecarranam, the other from her oath to Nehemia, had disappeared entirely.

Like they had never been.

Her flames burned brighter.

Healers could remove scars, yes, but the most likely reason for the lack of them on Aelin, on all the places where he’d once traced them with his hands, his mouth …

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