Rowan, apparently, mastered his annoyance enough to ask Ansel, “Were the ilken or Valg not in Melisande?”
“Are you implying my forces weren’t good enough to take the city if they had been?” Ansel swigged from her wine, laughter dancing in her eyes. Dorian sat at the table between Fenrys and Gavriel, the three of them wisely keeping quiet. Lorcan and Elide were on the deck—somewhere. “No, Prince,” Ansel went on. “I asked the Queen of Melisande about the lack of Morath-bred horrors, and, after some coaxing, she informed me that through whatever wiles and scheming, she managed to keep Erawan’s claws from her. And her soldiers.”
Aelin straightened a bit, wishing she’d had more wine than the third of a bottle she’d already consumed as Ansel added, “When this war is over, Melisande will not have the excuse of being in thrall to Erawan or the Valg. Everything she and her armies have done, their choice in allying with him, was a human choice.” A pointed glance to the darkest part of the galley, where Manon Blackbeak sat alone. “At least Melisande will have the Ironteeth to commiserate with.”
Manon’s iron teeth flashed in the dim light. Her wyvern hadn’t been spotted or heard from since he’d left, apparently. And she and Elide had talked for over an hour on the deck this afternoon.
Aelin decided to do them all a favor and cut in, “I need more men, Ansel. And I do not have the ability to be in so many places at once.” They were all watching now.
Ansel set down the bottle. “You want me to raise another army for you?”
“I want you to find me the lost Crochan witches.”
Manon jerked upright. “What.”
Aelin scratched at a mark on the table. “They are in hiding, but they’re still out there, if the Ironteeth hunt them. They might have significant numbers. Promise to share the Wastes with them. You control Briarcliff and half the coast. Give them inland and the South.”
Manon was prowling over, death in her eyes. “You do not have the right to promise such things.” Rowan’s and Aedion’s hands shot to their swords. But Lysandra opened a sleepy eye, stretched out a paw on the bench, and revealed the needle-sharp claws that now stood between Manon’s shins and Aelin.
Aelin said to Manon, “You cannot hold the land, not with the curse. Ansel won it, through blood and loss and her own wits.”
“It is my home, my people’s home—”
“That was the asking price, wasn’t it? The Ironteeth get their homeland returned, and Erawan probably promised to break the curse.” At Manon’s wide eyes, Aelin snorted. “Oh—the Ancients didn’t tell you that, did they? Too bad. That’s what Ansel’s spies picked up.” She looked the Wing Leader over. “If you and your people prove to be better than your Matrons, there will be a place for you in that land, too.”
Manon just stalked back to her seat and glared at the galley’s small brazier as if she could freeze it over.
Ansel murmured, “So touchy, these witches.”
Aelin clamped her lips together, but Lysandra let out another breathy cat laugh. Manon’s nails clicked against each other from across the room. Lysandra merely answered with her own.
Aelin said to Ansel, “Find the Crochans.”
“They’re all gone,” Manon cut in again. “We’ve hunted them to near-extinction.”
Aelin slowly looked over a shoulder. “What if their queen summoned them?”
“I am no more their queen than you are.”
They’d see about that. Aelin laid a hand flat on the table. “Send anything and anyone you find north,” she said to Ansel. “Sacking Melisande’s capital on the sly will at least piss off Erawan, but we don’t want to be stuck down here when Terrasen is attacked.”
“I think Erawan was probably born pissed.” Only Ansel, who had once laughed at death as she’d leaped a ravine and convinced Aelin to nearly die doing the same, would mock a Valg king. But Ansel added, “I’ll do it. I don’t know how effective it’ll be, but I have to go north anyway. Though I think Hisli will be heartbroken to say farewell to Kasida once again.”
It was no surprise at all that Ansel had managed to hold on to Hisli, the Asterion mare she’d stolen for herself. But Kasida—oh, Kasida was just as beautiful as Aelin remembered, even more so once she’d been led over a gangway onto the ship. Aelin had brushed the mare down when she’d led her into the cramped, wet stables, and bribed the horse to forgive her with an apple.
Ansel slugged from the bottle. “I heard, you know. When you went to Endovier. I was still fighting my way onto the throne, battling Lord Loch’s horde with the lords I’d banded together, but … even out in the Wastes, we heard when you were sent there.”
Aelin picked at the table some more, well aware the others were listening. “It wasn’t fun.”
Ansel nodded. “Once I’d killed Loch, I had to stay to defend my throne, to make it right again for my people. But I knew if anyone could survive Endovier, it’d be you. I set out last summer. I’d reached the Ruhnn Mountains when I got word you were gone. Taken to the capital by …” She glanced at Dorian, stone-faced across the table. “Him. But I couldn’t go to Rifthold. It was too far, and I had been gone too long. So I turned around. Went home.”
Aelin’s words were strangled. “You tried to get me out?”
The fire cast Ansel’s hair in ruby and gold. “There was not one hour that I did not think about what I did in the desert. How you fired that arrow after twenty-one minutes. You told me twenty, that you’d shoot even if I wasn’t out of range. I was counting; I knew how many it had been. You gave me an extra minute.”
Lysandra stretched out, nuzzling Ansel’s hand. She idly scratched the shifter.
Aelin said, “You were my mirror. That extra minute was as much for me as it was for you.” Aelin clinked her bottle against Ansel’s again. “Thank you.”
Ansel just said, “Don’t thank me yet.”
Aelin straightened. The others halted their eating, utensils discarded in their stew.
“The fires along the coast weren’t set by Erawan,” Ansel said, those red-brown eyes flickering in the lantern light. “We interrogated Melisande’s Queen and her lieutenants, but … it wasn’t an order from Morath.”
Aedion’s low growl told her they all knew the answer before Ansel replied.
“We got a report that Fae soldiers were spied starting them. Firing from ships.”
“Maeve,” Gavriel murmured. “But burning isn’t her style.”
“It’s mine,” Aelin said. They all looked at her. She let out a humorless laugh.
Ansel just nodded. “She’s been setting them, blaming you for it.”
“To what end?” Dorian asked, dragging a hand through his blue-black hair.
“To undermine Aelin,” Rowan said. “To make her look like a tyrant, not a savior. Like a threat worth banding against, rather than allying with.”
Aelin sucked on a tooth. “Maeve plays the game well, I’ll give her that.”
“So she’s reached these shores, then,” Aedion said. “But where the hell is she?”
A stone of fear plunked into Aelin’s stomach. She couldn’t bring herself to say north. To suggest that perhaps Maeve now sailed for undefended Terrasen. A glance at Fenrys and Gavriel revealed them already shaking their heads in silent answer to Rowan’s pointed look.
Aelin said, “We leave at first light.”
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.