Since it was Aelin’s birthday this past weekend…I figured I’d dig out an old piece and give it its day in the sun.
This is set post-Kingdom of Ash, and was born of my brainrot over the idea that we didn’t get to see Aelin Settle. (When I was first reading Throne of Glass, I was convinced that that would be how the series ended. And of course we all know now how much Sarah enjoys my tears of disappointment.)
It began as a slow, unavoidable churning in her brain; a headache like she had never known before. Aelin had not been prone to headaches, even when she spent sleepless nights in Endovier or at the Assassins’ Guild. It was not a fever, although the court healer prescribed her some cooling poultices to treat it. It was like someone had tied a band around her head, forcing her to pay more attention to her skull than she ever had before. It flashed across her vision when she was trying to concentrate, beat at her temples like its own pulse when she relaxed. It waxed and waned, sometimes many times over the course of her busy days as Queen, but never abated.
She slept fitfully. Even next to Rowan, wrapped firmly in his arms, whose warmth belied the ice of his magic, she couldn’t rest. Her dreams were one matter: they had been haunted for years, but now, even her wakefulness felt prickly, tense, electric. The moon seemed closer than before; the stars almost vibrated as they blazed and churned in the sky. Nothing ever felt hot to her — the dregs that remained of her fire magic saw to that — but the thin starlight burned where it touched her thigh, which had escaped from the blankets in restlessness earlier in the night.
Aelin gently extracted herself from Rowan’s arms and sat up slowly, careful not to disturb the mattress and wake him. She padded softly over to the massive green damask drapes by the window and laid her head against the frame, savoring the cool of the stone against her throbbing brow. Their great bedchamber faced the Staghorns, and the massive fields sweeping up to the mountains’ base had glowed with the kingsflame for weeks after her coronation; but now, all the flowers had gone to seed, the grasses were long, and the stalks rippled like the surface of the sea in the watery light of the moon.
And amid the murmuring whisper of the wind, the ripple of the flag against the highest turrets of the keep of Orynth, there was music.
Snatches of song that sounded so lilting and strange to her Fae ears. Aelin had never heard music like it. It was both familiar and foreign, like a tune she knew played on an instrument she’d never heard, or in a time signature she had never imagined. Where was it coming from?
She opened the door to her balcony and stepped barefoot out onto the white stone ledge. Cold. Blessedly cold, shocking, an icy plunge into a cold river…a cold river…tumbling through the rushing darkness, gasping for breath when her face broke the surface, caught from descending into the rapids by the lucky branch of a tree…the only blood now soaking her nightdress her own, from the cuts inflicted by the twigs and rocks of the riverbed…
“Aelin?” Rowan’s voice was thick, muddy with sleep. “Fireheart?”
She straightened, the band of pain tightening around her head again, and turned back to see him struggling upright. He had his own demons that visited him nightly. She would not punish him with hers too. Headaches and visions and skin too tight, too tight, crawling til she thought she might claw it off. He already helped her more than she deserved…his quiet, the wisdom of the ages that lived in his green gaze the way it did in the ancient pine forests of his homeland, his warm, beautiful body that she loved until her torn heart screamed with it, that she decorated with kisses and caresses, that kept her grounded and passionate and beating, breathing, living in a way she had never imagined. This was what it was to have a mate, she supposed. To come alive in a body not your own.
“I’m well,” she murmured. The stars and the moon sighed in response. Lies, sang the night sky. Lies.
He knew it, too. He stood, stumbling a bit as his body adjusted to wakefulness, and joined her on the balcony. “The Lyre is bright tonight,” he said after a moment, tilting his face up and closing his eyes. “In Doranelle the star-seekers would write pages and proclamations about that — an omen.”
“Omens sound ominous.” She smiled sourly at her own joke. “What does it signify?”
“Oh, the usual vague proscriptions. Death, birth, change. Forgetting that all of those are happening all the time, without any pauses.” He let out a slow breath that fogged in the air. “The Lyre, if I recall my childhood myths correctly, is the instrument of Taliesa, the daughter of the Moon and the patroness of wild things.”
“Like Temis,” Aelin mused.
He inclined his head. “Many of those gods were repurposed from ancient Fae stories. So who knows what it foretells. Chaos, most likely.”
“What kind of chaos?” She tried to control her breathing, slow and deep, to diminish the pounding at her temples.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. I was not one for whom the stars made sense.” He turned and leaned against the marble rail, stretching his back out straight over the sheer drop. “I did always love their beauty though. Their fury, burning so bright from so far away. The other worlds that might circle them. For me, it meant less apprehension and more possibility.”
She loved that: that he could spend centuries fighting wars, bloodying himself across space and time, and still watch the stars with hope. But she looked sharply at him as he leaned backwards, brought back to earth by her very human worry. “Don’t fall over the edge. Even an old buzzard like you would end up broken-winged on the ground for the mountain cats to eat.”
He smiled then, a knife edge across his face, but did not open his eyes. “I think my hawk would catch me before I fell too far.”
“Don’t test it,” she said, lilting her voice into an amused cadence. Even if she wasn’t truly amused, it was good to be able to pretend. To will the good humor back like a recalcitrant donkey. “I might jump too, if this mating bond pulled hard enough, and then what would you do?”
He stood up at that, and opened his eyes; she saw his skin roughening with gooseflesh. “Don’t joke like that, Aelin.”
“Don’t make me,” she shot back. It was sharp at the edges, like pain. Her vision was, too…fracturing into little splinters of glass.
“Come to bed,” he said, stretching his hand out to her. “Come tell me what’s in your dreams.”
She shook her head. “They’re all the same,” she whispered. “Fire, and falling. And pain. Everywhere.”
He was close enough to touch her but didn’t, his arms flexing as he restrained himself. “About what happened in the iron coffin?”
“Some,” she said. “But some…they aren’t anything I remember from that time. I don’t know if those are…real. Or just my mind sitting in a groove, inventing fantasies from the fragments of the memories.” She breathed out, and fancied she could see her breath turning into tiny crystal stars before her. “I can’t go through that again.”
“You won’t, Fireheart,” he assured her. “This is real. You are queen, and you have work to do; the harvest came in, and we are preparing for winter, and hosting the envoys from across the sea. You are doing so well.”
“Am I?” She pressed her head against the stone, wishing she could sink into it. The cool rigidity of it would cope well with her queenly duties, she thought, a little wildly. Not this tired, tiresome creature whose body chilled and flamed by turns and by degrees, who couldn’t sleep, and whose very bones felt heavier than millstones.
“You are,” he said, and his voice was a bit overly loud, but firm. She stretched out her hand to him, suddenly wanting his strength and solidity. If she could not be strong, could he be strong for her?
“But I am only half now,” she murmured as he folded her in his arms like a lamb. “Half of what I was. And sometimes…I miss the other half. The human half. Maybe she…Celaena…could’ve done better at this.”
His thumbs stroked her rumpled golden locks away from her temples, pressed gently against her hairline. It felt good, like the pain had something to push against instead of wrapping around her brain like a python. “I met her, you know,” he said, studying her with seriousness darkening his eyes. “She would’ve murdered all her enemies without a second thought, but would she have died for her people?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. But she survived Endovier, and she would’ve fought for her friends at least. I feel like I might need that steel spine more than ever, now that it’s gone.” She had finally begun to feel cold, and she could hear the snatches of dark music clearer now, sweet and lilting and alien. “Maybe I would’ve died for my people, but they need me to live for them. And I…don’t know if I can.”
He pressed a fierce kiss against the top of her head. “Even if you don’t know that, Fireheart, I do. Will you accept my certainty if yours is cracking?”
Choose this. Choose warmth and love and to dig your heels into the work, the work we have to do. Choose stubbornness if you must.
They held each other tightly, as though touching could push everything else away. She hoped it could — the chill, the pain, the silvery eerie music.
It was a moment before her Fae ears detected another sound: the soft flump of a fluffy body jumping from the bed, the soft scrabble of nails on stone tile. The chill of a wet nose pushing at her thigh, the gentle animal question you hurts? I help. She smiled at last, even as the noose of pain tightened around her head, and reached down to scratch Fleetfoot’s silken ears. Standing between her mate and her furry friend, the cold receded ever so slightly. Enough for her to answer Rowan, and look directly into his worried eyes. “I will,” she said, leaning into his embrace. “For now.”
And Fleetfoot led them back into the warmth of the great bedchamber, where they lay down, awake and troubled, listening to the darkness sing over the Staghorns.
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