Empire of Storms

by Sarah J. Maas

  So they did. Rowan stepped to her side, a hand on her lower back. The only comfort he’d show—when he knew, they both knew, it hadn’t been his argument to win. He said to the Fae males, “How many arrows?”

  “Ten quivers, fully stocked,” Gavriel said, eyeing Aedion as he removed the Sword of Orynth from his back and rebuckled it at his side.

  Returned to her human form, Lysandra had drifted to the edge of the bank, back stiff as the ilken gathered on the horizon.

  Aelin left the males to sort out their positions and slipped up beside her friend. “You don’t have to fight. You can stay with Manon—guard the other direction.”

  Indeed, Manon was already scaling one of the ruin walls, a quiver with unnervingly few arrows slung over her back beside Wind-Cleaver. Aedion had ordered her to scout the other direction for any nasty surprises. The witch had looked ready to debate—until she seemed to realize that, on this battlefield at least, she was not the apex predator.

  Lysandra loosely braided her black hair, her golden skin sallow. “I don’t know how they have done this so many times. For centuries.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know, either,” Aelin said, glancing over a shoulder at the Fae males now analyzing the layout of the marshes, the flow of the wind, whatever else to use to their advantage.

  Lysandra rubbed at her face, then squared her shoulders. “The marsh beasts are easily enraged. Like someone I know.” Aelin jabbed the shifter with an elbow, and Lysandra snorted, even with the army ahead. “I can rile them up—threaten their nests. So that if the ilken land …”

  “They won’t just have us to deal with.” Aelin gave her a grim smile.

  But Lysandra’s skin was still pale, her breathing a bit shallow. Aelin threaded her fingers through the shifter’s and squeezed tightly.

  Lysandra squeezed back once before letting go to shift, murmuring, “I’ll signal when I’m done.”

  Aelin just nodded, lingering on the bank for a moment to watch the long-legged white bird flap across the marsh—toward that building darkness.

  She turned back to the others in time to see Rowan jerk his chin to Aedion, Gavriel, and Fenrys. “You three herd them—to us.”

  “And you lot?” Aedion said, sizing up her, Rowan, and Dorian.

  “I get the first shot,” Aelin said, flames dancing in her eyes.

  Rowan inclined his head. “My lady wants the first shot. She gets the first shot. And when they’re scattering in a blind panic, we come in.”

  Aedion gave her a long look. “Don’t miss this time.”

  “Asshole,” she snapped.

  Aedion’s smile didn’t reach his eyes as he strode to fetch extra weapons from their packs, grabbing a quiver of arrows in either hand, slinging one of the longbows across his broad back along with his shield. Manon had already stationed herself atop the wall behind them, grunting as she strung Aedion’s other bow.

  Rowan was saying to Dorian, “Short bursts. Find your targets—the center of groups—and use only what magic is necessary. Don’t waste it all at once. Aim for the heads, if you can.”

  “What about once they start landing?” Dorian asked, sizing up the terrain.

  “Shield yourself, attack when you can. Keep the wall to your back at all times.”

  “I won’t be his prisoner again.”

  Aelin tried to shut out what he’d meant by it.

  But Manon said from the wall above them, an arrow now nocked loosely in her bow, “If it comes to that, princeling, I’ll kill you before they can.”

  Aelin hissed, “You will do no such thing.”

  Both of them ignored her as Dorian said, “Thank you.”

  “None of you are being taken prisoner,” Aelin growled, and walked away.

  And there would be no second or third shots.

  Only the first shot. Only her shot.

  Perhaps it was time to see how deep that new well of power went. What lived inside it.

  Perhaps it was time for Morath to learn to scream.

  Aelin stepped up to the water’s edge, then leaped onto the next island of grass and stone. Rowan silently came up beside her, meeting her pace for pace. It wasn’t until they reached the next hill that he angled his face toward her, his golden skin stretched taut, his eyes as cold as her own.

  Only that anger was directed at her—perhaps more livid than she’d seen him since Mistward. She bared her teeth in a feral, grim smile. “I know, I know. Just add suggesting to use the Wyrdkey to that tally of all the horrible things I do and say.”

  Leathery, massive wings beat the air, and shrieking cries at last began to trickle toward them. Her knees quaked, but she clamped down on the fear, knowing he could scent it, knowing the others could, too.

  So she willed herself to take another step onto the sodden, reed-laden plain—toward that ilken army. They’d be upon them in minutes—less, maybe.

  And horrible, miserable Lorcan had bought them that extra time. Wherever the bastard was.

  Rowan didn’t object as she took another step, then another. She had to put distance between them all—had to make sure that every last ember was capable of reaching that army and that she didn’t waste her strength by traveling far to do so.

  Which meant striding out into the marshes alone. To wait for those things to be close enough to see their teeth. They had to know who now marched through the reeds toward them. What she’d do to them.

  But still the ilken charged.

  In the distance, far to the right, marsh creatures began to roar—no doubt in Lysandra’s wake. She prayed the beasts were hungry. And that they didn’t mind Morath-bred meat.

  “Aelin.” Rowan’s voice cut across water and plant and wind. She paused, looking over a shoulder at where he now stood on the sandbank, as if it’d been impossible not to follow her.

  The strong, unyielding bones of his face were set with that warrior’s brutality. But his pine-green eyes were bright—almost soft—as he said, “Remember who you are. Every step of the way down, and every step of the way back. Remember who you are. And that you’re mine.”

  She thought of the new, delicate scars on his back—marks from her own nails, that he’d refused to heal with his magic, and instead had set with seawater, the salt locking the scars into place before the immortal body could smooth it over. Her claiming marks, he’d breathed into her mouth the last time he’d been inside her. So he and anyone who saw them would know that he belonged to her. That he was hers, just as she was his.

  And because he was hers, because they were all hers …

  Aelin turned away from him and sprinted across the plain.

  With every step toward the army whose wings she could just make out, she watched for those beasts Lysandra riled, even as she began a swift, deadly descent into the core of her magic.

  She had been hovering around the middle ledge of her power for days now, one eye on the churning, molten abyss far below. Rowan knew. Fenrys and Gavriel, definitely. Shielding them, drying their clothes, killing the insects that plagued them … all little ways to relieve the strain, to keep herself steady, to grow accustomed to its depth and pressure.

  For the deeper she went into her power, the more her body, her mind, squeezed under the pressure of it. That was the burnout—when that pressure won, when the magic was drained too fast or too greedily, when it was spent and still the bearer tried to claw deeper than it should.

  Aelin slammed to a stop in the heart of the plain. The ilken had spied her sprinting and now flapped toward her.

  Unaware of the three males who crept far out, bows at the ready to push Erawan’s soldiers onto her flames.

  If she could burn through their defenses. She’d have to drag up every bit of her power to incinerate them all. The true might of Aelin Fire-Bringer. Not an ember less.

  So Aelin abandoned every trapping of civilization, of conscience and rules and humanity, and plummeted into her fire.

  She flew for that flaming abyss, only distantly aware of the humidity l
ying thick on her skin, of the pressure building in her head.

  She’d shoot straight down—and push off the bottom, bringing all that power with her to the surface. The drag would be enormous. And it would be the test, the true test, of control and strength. Easy—so easy to spear into the heart of fire and ash. The hard part was bringing it up; that was when the cracking would occur.

  Deeper and deeper, Aelin shot into her power. Through distant, mortal eyes, she noted the ilken sweeping closer. A mercy—if they had once been human, perhaps obliterating them would be a mercy.

  Aelin knew she’d reached the former edge of her power thanks to warning bells in her blood that pealed in her wake. That pealed as she launched herself into the burning depths of hell.

  The Queen of Flame and Shadow, the Heir of Fire, Aelin of the Wildfire, Fireheart …

  She burned through each title, even as she became them, became what those foreign ambassadors had hissed when they reported on a child-queen’s growing, unstable power in Terrasen. A promise that had been whispered into the blackness.

  The pressure began to build in her head, in her veins.

  Far behind, safely out of her range, she felt the flickers of Rowan’s and Dorian’s magic as they rallied the blasts that would answer her own.

  Aelin soared into the uncharted core of her power.

  The inferno went on and on.

  56

  Lorcan knew they were still too slow, warning signal or not.

  Elide was gasping for breath, weaving on her feet as Lorcan halted on the outskirts of a massive, flooded plain. She pushed back a stray strand of hair from her face, Athril’s ring glinting on her finger. She hadn’t questioned where it had come from or what it did when he’d slipped it onto her finger this morning. He’d only warned her to never take it off, that it might be the one thing to keep her safe from the ilken, from Morath.

  The force had swept northward and away from where Lorcan and Elide had hauled ass, no doubt to secure some better approach. And at the far end of the plain, too distant for Elide’s human eyes to clearly make out, Whitethorn’s silver hair glinted, the King of Adarlan at his side. Magic, bright and cold, swirling around them. And farther out—

  Gods above. Gavriel and Fenrys were in the reeds, bows drawn. And Gavriel’s son. Aimed at the army approaching. Waiting for—

  Lorcan tracked where they were all facing.

  Not the army closing in on them.

  But the queen standing alone in the heart of the flooded plain.

  Lorcan realized a moment too late that he and Elide were on the wrong side of the demarcation line—too far north of where Aelin’s companions stood safely behind her.

  Realized it the exact heartbeat that Elide’s eyes fell on the golden-haired woman facing that army.

  Her arms slackened at her sides. Her face drained of color.

  Elide staggered one step—one step toward Aelin, a small noise coming out of her.

  That’s when he felt it.

  Lorcan had sensed it once before, that day at Mistward. When the Queen of Terrasen had laid waste to the Valg princes, when her power had been a behemoth surging from the deep, setting the world trembling.

  That was nothing—nothing—compared to the power that now roared into the world.

  Elide stumbled, gaping at the spongy earth as the marsh water rippled.

  Five hundred ilken closed in around them. They had taken his warning—and set a trap.

  And that power … that power Aelin was now dragging up from whatever hellhole was inside her, from whatever fiery pit she’d been damned to endure … Its wake would wash over them.

  “What is … ,” Elide breathed, but Lorcan lunged for her, hurling them to the ground, covering her body with his. He threw a shield over them, plummeting hard and fast into his magic, the drop nearly uncontrolled. He didn’t have time to do anything but pour every ounce of power into his shield, into the one barrier that would keep them from being melted into nothing.

  He shouldn’t have wasted the effort warning them. Not when it was now likely to get him and Elide killed.

  Whitethorn knew—even at Mistward—that the queen hadn’t yet stepped into her birthright. Knew that this sort of power came around once in an eon, and to serve it, to serve her …

  A court that wouldn’t just change the world. It would start the world over.

  A court that could conquer this world—and any other it wished.

  If it wished. If that woman on the plain desired to. And that was the question, wasn’t it?

  “Lorcan,” Elide whispered, her voice breaking in longing for the queen, or terror of her, he didn’t know.

  Didn’t have time to guess, as a feral roar went up from the reeds. A command.

  And then a hail of arrows, precisely and brutally aimed, flew from the marshes to strike at the outer flanks of the ilken. He marked Fenrys’s shots by the black-tipped arrows that easily found their marks. Gavriel’s son didn’t miss, either. Ilken tumbled from the sky, and the others panicked, flapping into one another, careening inward.

  Right to where the Queen of Terrasen unleashed the full force of her magic upon them.

  The moment Lysandra roared to signal that the marsh beasts were riled and she was safely behind their lines again, the moment the ilken got so close Aedion could shoot them out of the sky like geese, his queen erupted.

  Even with Aelin’s aim away from them, even with Rowan’s shield, the heat of that fire burned. “Holy gods,” Aedion found himself saying as he stumbled back through the reeds, falling farther behind her line of attack. “Holy rutting gods.”

  The heart of the legion didn’t have the chance to scream as they were washed away in a sea of flame.

  Aelin was no savior to rally behind, but a cataclysm to be weathered.

  The fire grew hotter, his bones groaning as sweat beaded on his brow. But Aedion took up a new spot, glancing to ensure his father and Fenrys had done the same across the drowned plain, and aimed for the ilken veering out of the flame’s path. He made his arrows count.

  Ashes fell to the earth in a slow, steady snow.

  Not fast enough. As if sensing Aelin’s dragging pace, ice and wind erupted overhead.

  Where gold-and-red flame did not melt Erawan’s legion, Dorian and Rowan ripped them apart.

  The ilken still held out, as if they were a stain of darkness, harder to wash away.

  Still Aelin kept burning. Aedion couldn’t even see her in the heart of that power.

  There was a cost—there had to be a cost to such power.

  She had been born knowing the weight of her crown, her magic. Had felt its isolation long before she’d reached adolescence. And that seemed like punishment enough, but … there had to be a price.

  Nameless is my price. That was what the witch had said.

  Understanding glimmered at the edge of Aedion’s mind, just out of grasp. He fired his second-to-last arrow, straight between the eyes of a frantic ilken.

  One by one, their own foul-bred resistance to magic yielded to those bursts of ice, and wind, and flame.

  And then Whitethorn began walking into the firestorm fifty feet ahead. Toward Aelin.

  Lorcan pinned Elide to the earth, throwing every last shadow and pocket of darkness into that shield. The flames were so hot that sweat dripped down his brow, right into her silken hair, spread on the green moss. The marsh water around them boiled.

  Boiled. Fish floated belly-up. The grasses dried out and caught fire. The entire world was a hell-realm, with no end and no beginning.

  Lorcan’s shredded, dark soul tipped its head back and roared in unison to her power’s burning song.

  Elide was cringing, fists balled in his shirt, face buried against his neck as he gritted his teeth and weathered the firestorm. Not just fire, he realized. But wind and ice. Two other, mighty magics had joined her—shredding the ilken. And his own shield.

  Wave after wave, the magic battered his power. A lesser gift might have been brok
en against it—a lesser magic might have tried to fight back, and not just let the power wash over them.

  If Erawan got a collar around Aelin Galathynius’s neck … it would be over.

  To leash that woman, that power … Would a collar even be able to contain that?

  There was movement through the flames.

  Whitethorn was prowling across the boiling marshes, his steps unhurried.

  The flame swirled around the dome of Rowan’s shield, eddying with his icy wind.

  Only a male who’d lost his damn mind would wander into that storm.

  The ilken died and died and died, slowly and not at all cleanly, as their dark magic failed them. Those that tried to flee the flame or ice or wind were felled by arrows. Those that managed to land were shredded apart by ambushes of claws and fangs and snapping, scaled tails.

  They’d made every minute of his warning count. Had easily set a trap for the ilken. That they’d fallen for it so swiftly—

  But Rowan reached the queen in the heart of the marshes as her flames winked out. As his own wind died out, and plumes of unforgiving ice shattered the few ilken flapping in the skies.

  Ash and glittering ice rained down, thick and swirling as snow, embers dancing between the clumps that had once been the ilken. There were no survivors. Not one.

  Lorcan didn’t dare lift his shield.

  Not as the prince stepped onto the small island where the queen was standing. Not as Aelin turned toward Rowan, and the only flame that remained was a crown of fire atop her head.

  Lorcan watched in silence as Rowan slid a hand over her waist, the other cupping the side of her face, and kissed his queen.

  Embers stirred her unbound hair as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed close. A golden crown of flame flickered to life atop Rowan’s head—the twin to the one Lorcan had seen burning that day at Mistward.

  He knew Whitethorn. He knew the prince wasn’t ambitious—not in the way that immortals could be. He likely would have loved the woman if she’d been ordinary. But this power …