“M-majesty,” she stammered, inclining her head. She should really get up. Really stop lying on the ground like a worm. But the cloth and stone still lay in her hand.

Aelin wiped her damp face on a sleeve, then straightened. “Do you know what it is you carry, Elide?”

“Y-yes, Majesty.”

Turquoise eyes, haunted and weary, lifted to her own. Then slid to Lorcan. “Why didn’t you take it?” The voice was hollow and hard. Elide suspected she’d be lucky if it was never used on her.

Lorcan met her gaze without flinching. “It wasn’t mine to take.”

Aelin now glanced between them, seeing too much. And there was no warmth on the queen’s face, but she said to Lorcan, “Thank you—for bringing her to me.”

The others seemed to be trying not to look too shocked at the words.

But Aelin turned to Manon. “I lay claim to her. Witch-blood in her veins or no, she is Lady of Perranth, and she is mine.”

Gold eyes gleamed with the thrill of challenge. “And if I claim her for the Blackbeaks?”

“Blackbeaks—or the Crochans?” Aelin purred.

Elide blinked. Manon—and the Crochans? What was the Wing Leader doing here? Where was Abraxos? The witch said, “Careful, Majesty. With your power reduced to embers, you’ll have to fight me the old-fashioned way again.”

That dangerous grin returned. “You know, I’ve been hoping for round two.”

“Ladies,” the silver-haired prince said through clenched teeth.

They both turned, giving Rowan Whitethorn horrifyingly innocent smiles. The Fae Prince, to his credit, only winced after they looked away again.

Elide wished she could hide behind Lorcan as both women fixed that near-feral attention on her again. Manon reached forward, tipping Elide’s hand over—to where Aelin’s waited. “There you go, over and done with,” Manon said.

Aelin cringed slightly but pocketed the cloth and the key inside. A shadow instantly lifted from Elide’s heart, a whispering presence now silenced.

Manon ordered, “On your feet. We were in the middle of something.”

She reached to pull Elide up, but Lorcan stepped in and did it himself. He didn’t let go of Elide’s arm, and she tried not to lean into his warmth. Tried not to make it seem like she hadn’t just met her queen, her friend, her court, and … somehow now found Lorcan to be the safest of them all.

Manon smirked at Lorcan. “Your claim on her, male, is at the very bottom of the list.” Iron teeth slid out, turning that beautiful face petrifying. Lorcan didn’t let go. Manon crooned in that way that usually meant death, “Don’t. Touch. Her.”

“You don’t give me orders, witch,” Lorcan said. “And you have no say in what is between us.”

Elide frowned at him. “You’re making it worse.”

“We like to call it ‘territorial male nonsense,’” Aelin confided. “Or ‘territorial Fae bastard’ works just as nicely.”

The Fae Prince coughed pointedly behind her.

The queen looked over a shoulder, brows raised. “Am I forgetting another term of endearment?”

The warrior-prince’s eyes glowed, even as his face remained set with predatory intent. “I think you covered it.”

Aelin winked at Lorcan. “You hurt her, and I’ll melt your bones,” she merely said, and walked away.

Manon’s iron-clad smile grew, and she gave Lorcan a mocking incline of the head as she followed in the queen’s wake.

Aedion looked Lorcan over and snorted. “Aelin does whatever she wants, but I think she’d let me see how many of your bones I can break before she melts them.” Then he, too, was walking toward the two females. One silver, one gold.

Elide almost screamed as a ghost leopard appeared out of nowhere, twitched its whiskers in Lorcan’s direction, and then trotted after the women, its puffy tail swishing behind it.

Then the king left, then the Fae males. Until only Prince Rowan Whitethorn stood there. He gave Elide a Look.

Elide immediately shrugged out of Lorcan’s grip. Aelin and Aedion had stopped ahead, waiting for her. Smiling faintly—welcomingly.

So Elide headed for them, her court, and did not look back.

Rowan had kept quiet during the past few minutes, observing.

Lorcan had been willing to die for Elide. Had been willing to put aside his quest for Maeve in order for Elide to live. And had then acted territorial enough to make Rowan wonder if he seemed so ridiculous around Aelin all the time.

Now alone, Rowan said to Lorcan, “How did you find us?”

A cutting smile. “The dark god nudged me toward here. The ilken army did the rest.”

The same Lorcan he’d known for centuries, and yet … not. Some hard edge had been dulled—no, soothed.

Lorcan stared toward the source of that soothing, but his jaw clenched as his focus shifted to where Aelin walked beside her. “That power could just as easily destroy her, you know.”

“I know,” Rowan admitted. What she’d done minutes ago, the power she’d summoned and unleashed … It had been a song that had made his magic erupt in kind.

When the ilken’s resistance had finally yielded beneath flame and ice and wind, Rowan hadn’t been able to stifle the yearning to walk into the burning heart of that power and see her glowing with it.

Halfway across the plain, he’d realized it wasn’t just the allure of it that tugged at him. It was the woman inside it, who might need physical contact with another living being to remind herself that she had a body, and people who loved her, and to pull back from that killing calm that so mercilessly wiped the ilken from the skies. But then the flames had vanished, their enemies raining down as ash and ice and corpses, and she’d looked at him … Holy gods, when she’d looked at him, he’d almost fallen to his knees.

Queen, and lover, and friend—and more. He hadn’t cared that they had an audience. He had needed to touch her, to reassure himself that she was all right, to feel the woman who could do such great and terrible things and still look at him with that beckoning, vibrant life in her eyes.

You make me want to live, Rowan.

He wondered if Elide Lochan had somehow made Lorcan want to do the same.

He said to Lorcan, “And what about your mission?”

Any softness vanished from Lorcan’s granite-hewn features. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re in this shithole place, and then we’ll discuss my plans.”

“Aelin can decide what to tell you.”

“Such a good dog.”

Rowan gave him a lazy smile but refrained from commenting on the delicate, dark-haired young woman who now held Lorcan’s own leash.

58

Kaltain Rompier had just turned the tide in this war.

Dorian had never been more ashamed of himself.

He should have been better. Should have seen better. They all should have.

The thoughts swirled and eddied as Dorian kept back in the half-drowned temple complex, silently watching as Aelin studied the chest on the altar as if it were an opponent.

The queen was now flanked by Lady Elide, Manon on the dark-haired girl’s other side, Lysandra sprawled in ghost leopard form at the queen’s feet.