Page 130 of Kingdom of Ash

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 oneasked 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 justthere. 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.

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