The portrait he has been painting is too bizarre for her to visualize. Though it also occurs to her that anyone who writes knows the cliché “Truth is stranger than fiction” contains a great deal of wisdom. The image of the hate-filled nun with the maimed hand is intriguing.
Sometimes I think everyone is a stranger to me, that I’m doomed to never really understand another living soul.
She did it
The Wyrdmarks faded into the rocky ground as the sun rose over
Endovier.
Rowan was on his knees before Aelin, readying for her last breaths,
for the end that he hoped would somehow take him, too.
He’d make it his end. When she went, he’d go.
But then he’d felt it. As the sun rose, he’d felt it, that surge down the
frayed mating bond.
A blast of heat and light that welded the broken strands.
He didn’t dare to breathe. To hope.
Even as Aelin collapsed to her knees where the Wyrdmarks had been.
Rowan was instantly there, reaching for her limp body.
A heartbeat echoed in his ears, into his own soul.
And that was her chest, rising and falling. And those were her eyes,
opening slowly.
The scent of Dorian’s and Chaol’s tears replaced the salt of Endovier
as Aelin stared up at Rowan and smiled.
Rowan held her to his chest and wept in the light of the rising sun.
A weak hand landed on his back, running over the tattoo he’d inked.
As if tracing the symbols he’d hidden there, in a desperate, wild hope. “I
came back,” she rasped.
She was warm, but … cold, somehow. A stranger in her own body.
Aelin sat up, groaning at the ache along her bones.
“What happened?” Dorian asked, held upright by the arm Chaol had
around his waist.
Aelin cupped her palms before her. A small lick of flame appeared
within them.
Nothing more.
She looked at Rowan, then Chaol, and Dorian, their faces so haggard
in the rising light of day.
“It’s gone,” she said quietly. “The power.” She turned her hands, the
See you next book
Fight it, he willed her, sending the words down the bond—the mating
bond, which perhaps had settled into place that first moment they’d become
carranam, hidden beneath flame and ice and hope for a better future. Fight
her. I am coming for you. Even if it takes me a thousand years. I will find
you, I will find you, I will find you.
Only salt and wind and water answered him.
Rowan rose to his feet. And slowly turned to face them.
But their attention snagged on the ships now sailing out of the west—
from the battle site. His cousins’ ships, with what remained of the fleet
Ansel of Briarcliff had won for them, and Rolfe’s three ships.
But it was not those boats that made him pause.
It was the one that rounded the eastern tip of the land—a longboat. It
swept closer on a phantom wind, too fast to be natural.
Rowan braced himself. The boat’s shape didn’t belong to any of the
fleets assembled. But its style nagged at his memory.
From their own fleet, Ansel of Briarcliff and Enda were soaring over the
waves in a longboat, aiming for this beach.
But Rowan and the others watched in silence as the foreign boat crested
through the surf and slid onto the sand.
Watched the olive-skinned sailors haul it up the beach. A broadshouldered young man nimbly leaped out, his slightly curling dark hair
tossed in the sea breeze.
He did not emit a whiff of fear as he stalked for them—didn’t even go
for the comforting touch of the fine sword at his side.
“Where is Aelin Galathynius?” the stranger asked a bit breathlessly as
he scanned them.
And his accent …
“Who are you,” Rowan ground out.
But the young man was now close enough that Rowan could see the
color of his eyes. Turquoise—with a core of gold.
Aedion breathed as if in a trance, “Galan.”
I assure you that I am the book of fate.
Questions are my enemies. For my questions explode! Answers leap up like a frightened flock, blackening the sky of my inescapable memories. Not one answer, not one suffices.
What prisms flash when I enter the terrible field of my past. I am a chip of shattered flint enclosed in a box. The box gyrates and quakes. I am tossed about in a storm of mysteries. And when the box opens, I return to this presence like a stranger in a primitive land.
Slowly (slowly, I say) I relearn my name.
But that is not to know myself!
I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Inly the words "yesterday" and "tomorrow" still had any meaning for me.
