Kingdom of Ash
: Part 1 – Chapter 3

The Staghorns were burning, and Oakwald with them.

The mighty, ancient trees were little more than charred husks, ash thick as snow raining down.

Embers drifted on the wind, a mockery of how they had once bobbed in her wake like fireflies while she’d run through the Beltane bonfires.

So much flame, the heat smothering, the air itself singeing her lungs.

You did this you did this you did this.

The crack of dying trees groaned the words, cried them.

The world was bathed in fire. Fire, not darkness.

Motion between the trees snared her attention.

The Lord of the North was frantic, mindless with agony, as he galloped toward her. As smoke streamed from his white coat, as fire devoured his mighty antlers—not the immortal flame held between them on her own sigil, the immortal flame of the sacred stags of Terrasen, and of Mala Fire-Bringer before that. But true, vicious flames.

The Lord of the North thundered past, burning, burning, burning.

She reached a hand toward him, invisible and inconsequential, but the proud stag plunged on, screams rising from his mouth.

Such horrible, relentless screams. As if the heart of the world were being shredded.

She could do nothing when the stag threw himself into a wall of flame spread like a net between two burning oaks.

He did not emerge.

The white wolf was watching her again.

Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius ran an ironclad finger over the rim of the stone altar on which she lay.

As much movement as she could manage.

Cairn had left her here this time. Had not bothered moving her to the iron box against the adjacent wall.

A rare reprieve. To wake not in darkness, but in flickering firelight.

The braziers were dying, beckoning in the damp cold that pressed to her skin. To whatever wasn’t covered by the iron.

She’d already tugged on the chains as quietly as she could. But they held firm.

They’d added more iron. On her. Starting with the metal gauntlets.

She did not remember when that was. Where that had been. There had only been the box then.

The smothering iron coffin.

She had tested it for weaknesses, over and over. Before they’d sent that sweet-smelling smoke to knock her unconscious. She didn’t know how long she’d slept after that.

When she’d awoken here, there had been no more smoke.

She’d tested it again, then. As much as the irons would allow. Pushing with her feet, her elbows, her hands against the unforgiving metal. She didn’t have enough room to turn over. To ease the pain of the chains digging into her. Chafing her.

The lash wounds etched deep into her back had vanished. The ones that had cleaved her skin to the bone. Or had that been a dream, too?

She had drifted into memory, into years of training in an assassin’s keep. Into lessons where she’d been left in chains, in her own waste, until she figured out how to remove them.

But she’d been bound with that training in mind. Nothing she tried in the cramped dark had worked.

The metal of the glove scraped against the dark stone, barely audible over the hissing braziers, the roaring river beyond them. Wherever they were.

Her, and the wolf.

Fenrys.

No chains bound him. None were needed.

Maeve had ordered him to stay, to stand down, and so he would.

For long minutes, they stared at each other.

Aelin did not reflect on the pain that had sent her into unconsciousness. Even as the memory of cracking bones set her foot twitching. The chains jangled.

But nothing flickered where agony should have been rampant. Not a whisper of discomfort in her feet. She shut out the image of how that male—Cairn—had taken them apart. How she’d screamed until her voice had failed.

It might have been a dream. One of the endless horde that hunted her in the blackness. A burning stag, fleeing through the trees. Hours on this altar, her feet shattered beneath ancient tools. A silver-haired prince whose very scent was that of home.

They blurred and bled, until even this moment, staring at the white wolf lying against the wall across from the altar, might be a fragment of an illusion.

Aelin’s finger scratched along the curved edge of the altar again.

The wolf blinked at her—thrice. In the early days, months, years of this, they had crafted a silent code between them. Using the few moments she’d been able to dredge up speech, whispering through the near-invisible holes in the iron coffin.

One blink for yes. Two for no. Three for Are you all right? Four for I am here, I am with you. Five for This is real, you are awake.

Fenrys again blinked three times. Are you all right?

Aelin swallowed against the thickness in her throat, her tongue peeling off the roof of her mouth. She blinked once. Yes.

She counted his blinks.

Six.

He’d made that one up. Liar, or something like it. She refused to acknowledge that particular code.

She blinked once again. Yes.

Dark eyes scanned her. He’d seen everything. Every moment of it. If he were permitted to shift, he could tell her what was fabricated and what was real. If any of it had been real.

No injuries ever remained when she awoke. No pain. Only the memory of it, of Cairn’s smiling face as he carved her up over and over.

He must have left her on the altar because he meant to return soon.

Aelin shifted enough to tug on the chains, the mask’s lock digging into the back of her head. The wind had not brushed her cheeks, or most of her skin, in … she did not know.

What wasn’t covered in iron was clad in a sleeveless white shift that fell to midthigh. Leaving her legs and arms bare for Cairn’s ministrations.

There were days, memories, of even that shift being gone, of knives scraping over her abdomen. But whenever she awoke, the shift remained intact. Untouched. Unstained.

Fenrys’s ears perked, twitching. All the alert Aelin needed.

She hated the trembling that began to coil around her bones as strolling footsteps scuffed beyond the square room and the iron door into it. The only way in. No windows. The stone hall she sometimes glimpsed beyond was equally sealed. Only the sound of water entered this place.

It surged louder as the iron door unlocked and groaned open.

She willed herself not to shake as the brown-haired male approached.

“Awake so soon? I must not have worked you hard enough.”

That voice. She hated that voice above all others. Crooning and cold.

He wore a warrior’s garb, but no warrior’s weapons hung from the belt at his slim waist.

Cairn noted where her eyes fell and patted the heavy hammer dangling from his hip. “So eager for more.”

There was no flame to rally to her. Not an ember.

He stalked to the small pile of logs by one brazier and fed a few to the dying fire. It swirled and crackled, leaping upon the wood with hungry fingers.

Her magic didn’t so much as flicker in answer. Everything she ate and drank through the small slot in the mask’s mouth was laced with iron.

She’d refused it at first. Had tasted the iron and spat it out.

She’d gone to the brink of dying from lack of water when they forced it down her throat. Then they’d let her starve—starve until she broke and devoured whatever they put in front of her, iron or no.

She did not often think about that time. That weakness. How excited Cairn had grown to see her eating, and how much he raged when it still did not yield what he wanted.

Cairn loaded the other brazier before snapping his fingers at Fenrys. “You may see to your needs in the hall and return here immediately.”

As if a ghost hoisted him up, the enormous wolf padded out.

Maeve had considered even that, granting Cairn power to order when Fenrys ate and drank, when he pissed. She knew Cairn deliberately forgot sometimes. The canine whines of pain had reached her, even in the box.

Real. That had been real.

The male before her, a trained warrior in everything but honor and spirit, surveyed her body. “How shall we play tonight, Aelin?”

She hated the sound of her name on his tongue.

Her lip curled back from her teeth.

Fast as an asp, Cairn gripped her throat hard enough to bruise. “Such rage, even now.”

She would never let go of it—the rage. Even when she sank into that burning sea within her, even when she sang to the darkness and flame, the rage guided her.

Cairn’s fingers dug into her throat, and she couldn’t stop the choking noise that gasped from her. “This can all be over with a few little words, Princess,” he purred, dropping low enough that his breath brushed her mouth. “A few little words, and you and I will part ways forever.”

She’d never say them. Never swear the blood oath to Maeve.

Swear it, and hand over everything she knew, everything she was. Become slave eternal. And usher in the doom of the world.

Cairn’s grip on her neck loosened, and she inhaled deeply. But his fingers lingered at the right side of her throat.

She knew precisely what spot, what scar, he brushed his fingers over. The twin small markings in the space between her neck and shoulder.

“Interesting,” Cairn murmured.

Aelin jerked her head away, baring her teeth again.

Cairn struck her.

Not her face, clad in iron that would rip open his knuckles. But her unprotected stomach.

The breath slammed from her, and iron clanked as she tried and failed to curl onto her side.

On silent paws, Fenrys loped back in and took up his place against the wall. Concern and fury flared in the wolf’s dark eyes as she gasped for air, as her chained limbs still attempted to curl around her abdomen. But Fenrys could only lower himself onto the floor once more.

Four blinks. I am here, I am with you.

Cairn didn’t see it. Didn’t remark on her one blink in reply as he smirked at the tiny bites on her neck, sealed with the salt from the warm waters of Skull’s Bay.

Rowan’s marking. A mate’s marking.

She didn’t let herself think of him too long. Not as Cairn thumbed free that heavy-headed hammer and weighed it in his broad hands.

“If it wasn’t for Maeve’s gag order,” the male mused, surveying her body like a painter assessing an empty canvas, “I’d put my own teeth in you. See if Whitethorn’s marking holds up then.”

Dread coiled in her gut. She’d seen the evidence of what their long hours here summoned from him. Her fingers curled, scraping the stone as if it were Cairn’s face.

Cairn shifted the hammer to one hand. “This will have to do, I suppose.” He ran his other hand down the length of her torso, and she jerked against the chains at the proprietary touch. He smiled. “So responsive.” He gripped her bare knee, squeezing gently. “We started at the feet earlier. Let’s go higher this time.”

Aelin braced herself. Took plunging breaths that would bring her far away from here. From her body.

She’d never let them break her. Never swear that blood oath.

For Terrasen, for her people, whom she had left to endure their own torment for ten long years. She owed them this much.

Deep, deep, deep she went, as if she could outrun what was to come, as if she could hide from it.

The hammer glinted in the firelight as it rose over her knee, Cairn’s breath sucking in, anticipation and delight mingling on his face.

Fenrys blinked, over and over and over. I am here, I am with you.

It didn’t stop the hammer from falling.

Or the scream that shattered from her throat.