Kingdom of Ash

Maeve’s dark blood leaked onto the snow as she fell to her knees, fingers scrabbling at the burning sword stuck through her chest.

Fenrys stepped around her, leaving the sword where he’d impaled her as he walked to Aelin’s side.

Embers swirling around her and Rowan, Aelin approached the queen.

Baring her teeth, Maeve hissed as she tried and failed to pry free the blade. “Take it out.”

Aelin only looked to Lorcan. “Anything to say?”

Lorcan smiled grimly, surveying the Fae and wolf-riders wreaking havoc on the spiders. “Long live the queen.” The Faerie Queen of the West.

Maeve snarled, and it was not the sound of a Fae or human. But Valg. Pure, undiluted Valg.

“Well, look who stopped pretending,” Aelin said.

“I will go anywhere you choose to banish me to,” Maeve seethed. “Just take it out.”

“Anywhere?” Aelin asked, and let go of Rowan’s hand.

The lack of his magic, his strength, hit her like plunging into an ice-cold lake.

But she had plenty of her own.

Not magic, never again as it had been, but a strength greater, deeper than that.

Fireheart, her mother had called her.

Not for her power. The name had never once been about her power.

Maeve hissed again, clawing at the blade.

Wreathing her fingers in flame, Aelin offered her hand to Maeve. “You came here to escape a husband you did not love. A world you did not love.”

Maeve paused, studying Aelin’s hand. The new calluses on it. She winced—winced in pain at the blade shredding her heart but not killing her. “Yes,” Maeve breathed.

“And you love this world. You love Erilea.”

Maeve’s dark eyes scanned Aelin, then Rowan and Lorcan, before she answered. “Yes. In the way that I can love anything.”

Aelin kept her hand outstretched. The unspoken offer in it. “And if I choose to banish you, you will go wherever it is we decide. And never bother us again, or any other.”

“Yes,” Maeve snapped, grimacing at the immortal blade piercing her heart. The queen bowed her head, panting, and took Aelin’s outstretched hand.

Aelin drew close. Just as she slid something onto Maeve’s finger.

And whispered in Maeve’s ear, “Then go to hell.”

Maeve reared back, but too late.

Too late, as the golden ring—Silba’s ring, Athril’s ring—shone on her pale hand.

Aelin backed to Rowan’s side as Maeve began to scream.

Screaming and screaming toward the dark sky, toward the stars.

Maeve had wanted the ring not for protection against Valg. No, she was Valg. She’d wanted it so that no other might have it.

Yet when Elide had given it to Aelin, it had not been to destroy a Valg queen. But to keep Aelin safe. And Maeve would never know it—that gift and power: friendship.

What Aelin knew had kept the queen before her from becoming a mirror. What had saved her, and this kingdom.

Maeve thrashed, Goldryn burning, twin to the light on her finger.

Immunity from the Valg. And poison to them.

Maeve shrieked, the sound loud enough to shake the world.

They only stood amongst the falling snow, faces unmoved, and watched her.

Witnessed this death for all those she had destroyed.

Maeve contorted, clawing at herself. Her pale skin began to flake away like old paint.

Revealing bits of the creature beneath the glamour. The skin she’d created for herself.

Aelin only looked to Rowan, to Lorcan and Fenrys, a silent question in her eyes.

Rowan and Lorcan nodded. Fenrys blinked once, his mauled face still bleeding.

So Aelin approached the screaming queen, the creature beneath. Walked behind her and yanked out Goldryn.

Maeve sagged to the snow and mud, but the ring continued to rip her apart from within.

Maeve lifted dark, hateful eyes as Aelin raised Goldryn.

Aelin only smiled down at her. “We’ll pretend my last words to you were something worthy of a song.”

She swung the burning sword.

Maeve’s mouth was still open in a scream as her head tumbled to the snow.

Black blood sprayed, and Aelin moved again, stabbing Goldryn through Maeve’s skull. Into the earth beneath.

“Burn her,” Lorcan rasped.

Rowan’s hand, warm and strong, found Aelin’s again.

And when she looked up at him, there were tears on his face.

Not at the dead Valg queen before them. Or even at what Aelin had done.

No, her prince, her husband, her mate, gazed to the south. To the battlefield.

Even as their power melded, and she burned Maeve into ash and memory, Rowan stared toward the battlefield.

Where line after line after line of Valg soldiers fell to their knees mid-fight with the Fae and wolves and Darghan cavalry.

Where the ruks flapped in amazement as ilken tumbled from the skies, like they had been struck dead.

Far out, several shrill screams rent the air—then fell silent.

An entire army, midbattle, midblow, collapsing.

It rippled outward, that collapsing, the stillness. Until all of Morath’s host lay unmoving. Until the Ironteeth fighting above realized what was happening and veered southward, fleeing from the rukhin and witches who now gave chase.

Until the dark shadow surrounding that fallen army drifted away on the wind, too.

Aelin knew for certain then. Where Erawan had gone.

Who had brought him down at last.

So Aelin wrenched her sword free of the pile of ashes that had been Maeve. She lifted it high to the night sky, to the stars, and let her cry of victory fill the world. Let the name she shouted ring out, the soldiers on the field, in the city, taking up the call until all of Orynth was singing with it. Until it reached the shining stars of the Lord of the North gleaming above them, no longer needed to guide her way home.

Yrene.

Yrene.

Yrene.