Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass) (79 page)

In the dim light of their private cabin an hour later, Rowan drew a line across the map spread in the center of the floor, then a second line beside it, then a third beside that. Three lines, roughly spaced apart, broad swaths of the continent between. Aelin, standing beside him, studied them.

Rowan drew an inward arrow from the leftmost line toward the one in the center, and said quietly so the others in the adjacent rooms or hall couldn’t hear, “Ansel and her army hammer from the western mountains.” Another arrow in an opposite direction—toward the line on the far right. “Rolfe, the Mycenians, and this armada strike from the eastern coast.” An arrow pointing down into the right section of his little drawing, where the two arrows would meet. “The Bane and the other half of Ansel’s army sweep down the center, from the Staghorns, to the heart of the continent—all converging on Morath.” Those eyes were like green fire. “You’ve been moving armies into position.”

“I need more,” she said. “And I need more time.”

His brows narrowed. “And what army will you be fighting in?” His mouth twitched up at a corner. “I assume I won’t be able to persuade you to stay behind the lines.”

“You know better than to even try.”

“Where would the fun be, anyway, if I got to win all the glory while you sat on your ass? I’d never let you hear the end of it.”

She snorted, and surveyed the other maps they’d spread across the floor of their cabin. Together, they formed a patchwork of their world—not just the continent, but the lands beyond. She stood, towering over it, as if she could spy those armies, both near and far.

Rowan, still kneeling, looked upon the world spread at her feet.

And she realized it indeed was—if she won this war, won the continent back.

Aelin scanned the sprawl of the world, which had once seemed so vast and now, at her feet, seemed so … fragile. So small and breakable.

“You could, you know,” Rowan said, his tattoo stark in the lantern light. “Take it for yourself. Take it all. Use Maeve’s bullshit maneuvers against her. Make good on that promise.”

There was no judgment. Only frank calculation and contemplation. “And would you join me if I did? If I turned conqueror?”

“You would unify, not pillage and burn. And yes—to whatever end.”

“That’s the threat, isn’t it?” she mused. “The other kingdoms and territories will spend the rest of their existence wondering if I will one day grow restless in Terrasen. They will do their best to ensure we stay happily within our borders, and find them to be more useful as allies and trade partners than potential conquests. Maeve attacked Eyllwe’s coast, posing as me, perhaps to turn those foreign lands against me—to hammer home the point I made with my power at Skull’s Bay … and use it against us.”

He nodded. “But if you could … would you?”

For a heartbeat, she could see it—see her face, carved into statues in kingdoms so far away they did not even know Terrasen existed. A living god—Mala’s heir and conqueror of the known world. She would bring music and books and culture, wipe out the corruption festering in corners of the earth …

She said softly, “Not now.”

“But later?”

“Perhaps if being queen bores me … I’ll think about making myself empress. To give my offspring not one kingdom to inherit, but as many as the stars.”

There was no harm in saying it, anyway. In thinking about it, stupid and useless as it was. Even if wondering about the possibilities … perhaps it made her no better than Maeve or Erawan.

Rowan jerked his chin toward the nearest map—toward the Wastes. “Why did you forgive Ansel? After what she did to you and the others in the desert?”

Aelin crouched again. “Because she made a bad choice, trying to heal a wound she couldn’t ever mend. Trying to avenge the people she loved.”

“And you really set all this in motion when we were in Rifthold? When you were fighting in those pits?”

She gave him a roguish wink. “I knew if I gave the name Ansel of Briarcliff, it’d somehow make its way to her that a red-haired young woman was using
her
name to slaughter trained soldiers in the Pits. And that she’d know it was me.”

“So the red hair back then—not just for Arobynn.”

“Not even close.” Aelin frowned at the maps, dissatisfied she hadn’t spotted any other armies hiding out around the world.

Rowan dragged a hand through his hair. “Sometimes I wish I knew every thought in that head, each scheme and plot. Then I remember how much it delights me when you reveal it—usually when it’s most likely to make my heart stop dead in my chest.”

“I knew you were a sadist.”

He kissed her mouth once, twice, then the tip of her nose, nipping it with his canines. She hissed and batted him away, and his deep chuckle rumbled against the wooden walls. “That’s for not telling me,” he said. “
Again
.”

But despite his words, despite everything, he looked so … happy. So perfectly content and happy to be there, kneeling among those maps, the lantern down to its last dregs, the world going to hell.

The joyless, cold male she’d first met, the one who had been waiting for an opponent good enough to bring him death … He now looked at her with happiness in his face.

She took his hand, gripping it hard. “Rowan.”

The spark died from his eyes.

She squeezed his fingers. “Rowan, I need you to do something for me.”

Manon lay curled on her side in her narrow bed, unable to sleep.

It was not from the piss-poor sleeping conditions—no, she’d slept in far worse, even considering the shoddily patched hole in the side of the wall.

She stared at that gap in the wall, at the moonlight leaking in on the salty summer breeze.

She would not go find the Crochans. No matter what the Terrasen Queen called her, admitting to her bloodline was different from … claiming it. She doubted the Crochans would be willing to serve anyway, given that she’d killed their princess. Her own half sister.

And even if the Crochans did choose to serve her, fight for her … Manon put a hand to the thick scar now across her belly. The Ironteeth would not share the Wastes.

But it was that mentality, she supposed as she twisted onto her back, peeling her hair from her sweat-sticky neck, that had sent them all into exile.

She again peered through the gaps in that hole to the sea beyond. Waiting to spot a shadow in the night sky, to hear the boom of mighty wings.

Abraxos should have been here already. She shut out the coiling dread in her stomach.

But instead of wings, footsteps creaked in the hall outside.

A heartbeat later, the door opened on near-silent hinges, then shut again. Locked.

Manon didn’t sit up as she said, “What are you doing here.”

The moonlight sifted through the king’s blue-black hair. “You don’t have chains anymore.”

She sat up at that, examining where the irons draped down the wall. “Is it more enticing for you if they’re on?”

Sapphire eyes seemed to glow in the dark as he leaned against the shut door. “Sometimes it is.”

She snorted, but found herself saying, “You never weighed in.”

“On what?” he asked, though he knew what she’d meant.

“What I am. Who I am.”

“Does my opinion matter to you, witchling?”

Manon stalked toward him, stopping a few feet away, aware of every inch of night between them. “You do not seem outraged that Aelin sacked Melisande without telling anyone, you do not seem to care that I am a Crochan—”

“Do not mistake my silence for lack of feeling. I have good reason to keep my thoughts to myself.”

Ice glittered at his fingertips. Manon tracked it. “Will it be you or the queen against Erawan in the end, I wonder.”

“Fire against darkness makes for a better story.”

“Yes, but so would ripping a demon king to shreds without using your hands.”

A half smile. “I can think of better uses for my hands—invisible and flesh.”

An invitation and a question. She held his gaze.

“Then finish what you started,” Manon breathed.

Dorian’s answering smile was soft—edged with that glimmer of cruelty that made her blood heat as if the Fire-Queen herself had breathed flame into it.

She let Dorian back her against the wall. Let him hold her gaze while he tugged the top laces of her white shirt free.

One. By. One.

Let him lean in to brush his mouth against her bare neck, right under her ear.

Manon arched slightly at that caress. At the tongue that flicked against where his lips had been. Then he pulled back. Away.

Even as those phantom hands continued to trail up her hips, over her waist. His mouth parted slightly, body trembling with restraint. Restraint, where most males took and took when she offered it, gorging themselves on her. But Dorian Havilliard said, “The Bloodhound was lying that night. What she said about your Second. I felt her lie—tasted it.”

Some tight part in her chest eased. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

He stepped closer again, and those phantom hands trailed under her breasts. She gritted her teeth. “And what do you want to talk about, Manon?”

She wasn’t sure he’d ever said her name before. And the way he’d said it …

“I don’t want to talk at all,” she countered. “And neither do you,” she added with a pointed glance.

Again, that dark, edged smile appeared. And when he stepped close once more, his hands replaced those phantom ones.

Tracing her hips, her waist, her breasts. Unhurried, indolent circles that she allowed him to make, simply because no one had ever dared. Each brush of his skin against hers left a wake of fire and ice. She found herself transfixed by it—by each coaxing, luxurious stroke. She did not even consider objecting as Dorian slid off her shirt and surveyed her bare, scar-flecked flesh.

His face turned ravenous as he took in her breasts, the plane of her stomach—the scar slicing across it.

That hunger shifted into something icy and vicious: “You once asked me where I stand on the line between killing to protect and killing for pleasure.” His fingers grazed the seam of the scar across her abdomen. “I’ll stand on the other side of the line when I find your grandmother.”

A chill ran down her body, peaking her breasts. He watched them, then circled a finger around one. Dorian bent, his mouth following the
path where that finger had been. Then his tongue. She bit her lip against the groan rising up her throat, her hands sliding into the silken locks of his hair.

His mouth was still around the tip of her breast as he again met her eyes, sapphire framed with ebony lashes, and said, “I want to taste every inch of you.”

Manon let go of all pretense of reason as the king lifted his head and claimed her mouth.

And for all his wanting to taste her, as she opened for him, Manon thought the king tasted like the sea, like a winter morning, something so foreign and yet familiar it at last dragged that moan from deep in her.

His fingers slid to her jaw, tipping her face to thoroughly take her mouth, every movement of his tongue a sensuous promise that had her arching into him. Had her meeting him stroke for stroke as he explored and teased until she could hardly think straight.

She had never contemplated what it would be like—to yield control. And not have it be weakness, but a freedom.

Dorian’s hands slid down her thighs, as if savoring the muscle there, then around—cupping her backside, grinding her into every hard inch of him. The small noise in her throat was cut off as he hoisted her from the wall in a smooth movement.

Manon wrapped her legs around his waist while he carried her to the bed, his mouth never leaving hers as he devoured and devoured her. As he spread her beneath him. As he freed her pants button by button, then slid them off.

But Dorian pulled back at last, leaving her panting as he surveyed her, utterly bare before him. He caressed a finger along the inside of her thigh. Higher. “I wanted you from the first moment I saw you in Oakwald,” he said, his voice low and rough.

Manon reached up to peel off his shirt, white fabric sliding away to reveal tan skin and sculpted muscle. “Yes,” was all she told him. She
unbuckled his belt, hands shaking. “Yes,” she said again, as Dorian brushed a knuckle over her core. He let out an approving growl at what he found.

His clothes joined hers on the floor. Manon let him raise her arms over her head, his magic gently pinning her wrists to the mattress as he touched her, first with those wicked hands. Then with his wicked mouth. And when Manon had to bite his shoulder to muffle her moaning as he brought her over the edge, Dorian Havilliard buried himself deep inside her.

She did not care who she was, who she had been, and what she had once promised to be as he moved. She dragged her hands through his thick hair, over the muscles of his back as it flexed and rippled with each thrust that drove her toward that shimmering edge again. Here, she was nothing but flesh and fire and iron; here, there was only this selfish need of her body, his body.

More. She wanted more—wanted
everything
.

She might have whispered it, might have pleaded for it. Because Darkness save her, Dorian gave it to her. To them both.