“Is such a thing even possible?” Something nagged at her, as if it might indeed be true, but perhaps that was one of her own mother’s tales, or even Marion’s, tugging on her memory.
Maeve nodded. “It was. Using the very language of existence itself, doors might be opened, however briefly, between worlds. It was forbidden, outlawed long before her husband and his brothers were born. Once the last of the ancient wayfarers had died out, the paths between realms were sealed, their methods of world-walking lost with them. Or so all had thought. But deep in her husband’s private library, she found the old spells. She began with small experiments. First, she opened a door to the realm of resting, to find one of those wayfarers and ask her how it was properly done.” A knowing smile. “The wayfarer refused to tell her. So the queen began to teach herself. Opening and closing doors long since forgotten or sealed. Peering deep into the workings of the cosmos. Her own world became a cage. She grew tired of her husband’s warring, his casual cruelty. And when he went away to war once again, the queen gathered her closest handmaidens, opened a door to a new world, and left the one she’d been born into.”
“She left?” Aelin blurted. “She—she just left her own world? Permanently?”
“It had never been her world, not really. She had been born to rule others.”
“Where did she go?”
That smile grew a bit. “To a fair, lovely world. Where there was no war, no darkness. Not like that in which she had been born. She was made a queen there, too. Was able to hide herself within a new body so that none could know what she was beneath, so that even her own husband would not recognize her.”
“Did he ever find her again?”
“No, though he looked. Found out all she’d learned, and taught it to himself and his brothers. They tore apart world after world to find her. And when they arrived at the world where she had made her new home, they did not know her. Even as they went to war, she did not reveal herself. She won, and two of the kings, her husband included, were banished back to their own world. The third remained trapped, his power nearly broken. He crawled off into the depths of the earth, and the victorious queen spent her long, long existence preparing for his return, preparing her people for it. For the three kings had gone beyond her methods of world-walking. They had found a way to permanently open a gate between worlds, and had made three keys to do so. To wield those keys was to control all worlds, to have the power of eternity in the palm of your hand. She wished to find them, only so she might possess the strength to banish any enemies, banish her husband’s youngest brother back to his realm. To protect her new, lovely world. It was all she ever wanted: to dwell in peace, without the shadow of her past hunting her.”
From far away, that ghost of memory pushed. As if she’d forgotten to douse a flame left burning in her room. “And did the queen find the keys?”
Maeve’s smile turned sad. “Do you think she did, Aelin?”
Aelin considered. So many of their chats, their lessons in this glen, held deeper puzzles, questions for her to work through, to help her when she one day took her throne, Rowan at her side.
As if she’d summoned him, the pine-and-snow scent of her mate filled the clearing. A rustle of wings, and there he was, perched in hawk form on one of the towering oaks. Her warrior-prince.
She smiled toward him, as she had for weeks now, when he’d come to escort her back to her rooms in the river palace. It was during those walks from forest to mist-shrouded city that she had come to know him, love him. More than she had ever loved anything.
Aelin again faced her aunt. “The queen was clever, and ambitious. I would think she could do anything, even find the keys.”
“So you would believe. And yet they eluded her.”
“Where did they go?”
Maeve’s dark stare unwaveringly held hers. “Where do you think they went?”
Aelin opened her mouth. “I think—”
She blinked. Paused.
Maeve’s smile returned, soft and kind. As her aunt had been to her from the start. “Where do you think the keys are, Aelin?”
She opened her mouth once more. And again halted.
Like an invisible chain yanked her back. Silenced her.
Chain—a chain. She glanced down at her hands, her wrists. As if expecting them to be there.
She had never felt a shackle’s bite in her life. And yet she stared at the empty place on her wrist where she could have sworn there was a scar. Only smooth, sun-kissed skin remained.
“If this world were at risk, if those three terrible kings threatened to destroy it, where would you go to find the keys?”
Aelin looked up at her aunt.
Another world. There was another world. Like a fragment of a dream, there was another world, and in it, she had a wrist with a scar on it. Had scars all over.
And her mate, perched overhead … He had a tattoo down his face and neck and arm in that world. A sad story—his tattoo told a sad, awful story. About loss. Loss caused by a dark queen—
“Where are the keys hidden, Aelin?”
That placid, loving smile remained on Maeve’s face. And yet …
And yet.
“No,” Aelin breathed.
Something slithered in the depths of her aunt’s stare. “No what?”
This wasn’t her existence, her life. This place, these blissful months learning in Doranelle, finding her mate—
Blood and sand and crashing waves.
“No.”
Her voice was a thunderclap through the peaceful glen.
Aelin bared her teeth, fingers curling in the moss.
Maeve let out a soft laugh. Rowan flapped from the branches to land on the queen’s upraised arm.
He didn’t so much as fight it when she wrapped her thin white hands around his neck. And snapped it.
Aelin screamed. Screamed, clutching at her chest, at the shredding mating bond—
Aelin arched off the altar, and every broken and torn part of her body screamed with her.
Above her, Maeve was smiling. “You liked that vision, didn’t you?”
Not real. That had not been real. Rowan was alive, he was alive—
She tried to move her arm. Red-hot lightning lashed her, and she screamed again.
Only a broken rasp came out. Broken, just as her arm now lay—
Now lay—
Bone gleamed, jutting upward along more places than she could count. Blood and twisted skin, and—
No shackle scars, even with the wreckage.
In this world, this place, she did not have scars, either.
Another illusion, another spun dreamscape—
She screamed again. Screamed at her ruined arm, the unscarred skin, screamed at the lingering echo of the severed mating bond.
“Do you know what pains me most, Aelin?” Maeve’s words were soft as a lover’s. “It’s that you believe I’m the villain in this.”
Aelin sobbed through her teeth as she tried and failed to move her arm. Both arms. She cast her gaze through the space, this real-yet-not room.
They’d repaired the box. Had welded a new slab of iron over the lid. Then over the sides. The bottom. Less air trickled in, the hours or days now spent inside in near-suffocating heat. It had been a relief when she’d finally been chained to the altar.
Whenever that had been. If it had even happened at all.
“I have no doubt that your mate or Elena or even Brannon himself filled your head with lies about what I’ll do with the keys.” Maeve ran a hand over the stone lip of the altar, right through her splattered blood and shards of bone. “I meant what I said. I like this world. I do not wish to destroy it. Only improve it. Imagine a realm where there is no hunger, no pain. Isn’t that what you and your cohorts are fighting for? A better world?”