But the music was entrancing, the dancers mere shadows swirling around. Unlike in Adarlan, there were no guards monitoring the festivities, no villagers lurking to see who might cross the line into treason and earn a pretty coin for whoever they turned in. There was just the music and the dancing and the food and the fire—her fire.
She tapped a foot, bobbing her head, eyes on the three smokeless fires and the silhouettes dancing around them. She did want to dance. Not from joy, but because she felt her fire and the music meld and pulse against her bones. The music was a tapestry woven of light and dark and color, building delicate links in a chain that latched on to her heart and spread out into the world, binding her to it, connecting everything.
She understood then. The Wyrdmarks were—were a way of harnessing those threads, of weaving and binding the essence of things. Magic could do the same, and from her power, from her imagination and will and core, she could create and shape.
“Easy,” Rowan said, then added with a hint of surprise, “Music. That day on the ice, you were humming.” She registered another cool wind on her neck, but her skin was already pulsing in time with the drums. “Let the music steady you.”
Gods, to be free like this . . . The flames roiled and undulated with the melody.
“Easy.” She could barely hear him above the wave of sound filling her up, making her feel each tether binding her to the earth, each infinite thread. For a breath she wished for a shape-shifter’s heart so she could shed her skin and weave herself into something else, the music or the wind, and blow across the world. Her eyes were stinging, almost blurry from staring so long at the flames, and a muscle in her back twinged.
“Steady.” She didn’t know what he was talking about—the flames were calm, lovely. What would happen if she walked through them? The pulsing in her head seemed to say do it, do it, do it.
“That’s enough for now.” Rowan grabbed her arm, but hissed and let go. “That is enough.”
Slowly, too slowly, she looked at him. His eyes were wide, the light of the fire making them almost blaze. Fire—her fire. She returned to the flame, submitted to it. The music and the dancing continued, bright and merry.
“Look at me,” Rowan said, but didn’t touch her. “Look at me.”
She could hardly hear him, as if she were underwater. There was a pounding in her now—edged with pain. It was a knife that sliced into her mind and her body with each pulse. She couldn’t look at him—didn’t dare take her attention from the fire.
“Let the fires burn on their own,” Rowan ordered. She could have sworn she heard something like fear in his voice. It was an effort of will, and pain spiked down the tendons in her neck, but she looked at him. His nostrils flared. “Aelin, stop right now.”
She tried to speak, but her throat was raw, burning. She couldn’t move her body.
“Let go.” She tried to tell him she couldn’t, but it hurt. She was an anvil and the pain was a hammer, striking again and again. “If you don’t let go, you are going to burn out completely.”
Was this the end of her magic, then? A few hours tending fires? Such a relief—such a blessed relief, if it were true.
“You are on the verge of roasting yourself from the inside out,” Rowan snarled.
She blinked, and her eyes ached as if she had sand in them. Agony lashed down her spine, so hard she fell to the grass. Light flared—not from her or Rowan, but from the fires surging. People yelled, the music faltered. The grass hissed beneath her hands, smoking. She groaned, fumbling inside for the three tethers to the fires. But she was a maze, a labyrinth, the strings all tangled, and—
“I’m sorry,” Rowan hissed, swearing again, and the air vanished.
She tried to groan, to move, but she had no air. No air for that inner fire. Blackness swept in.
Oblivion.
Then she was gasping, arcing off the grass, the fires now crackling naturally and Rowan hovering over her. “Breathe. Breathe.”
Though he’d snapped her tethers to the fires, she was still burning.
Not burning on the outside, where even the grass had stopped smoldering.
She was burning up from within. Each breath sent fire down her lungs, her veins. She could not speak or move.
She had shoved herself over some boundary—hadn’t heard the warning signs to turn back—and she was burning alive beneath her skin.
She shook with tearless, panicked sobs. It hurt—it was endless and eternal and there was no dark part of her where she could flee to escape the flames. Death would be a mercy, a cold, black haven.
She didn’t know Rowan had left until he came sprinting back, two females in tow. One of them said, “Can you stand to carry her? There aren’t any water-wielders here, and we need to get her into cold water. Now.”
She didn’t hear what else was said, heard nothing but the pounding-pounding of that forge under her skin. There was a grunt and a hiss, and then she was in Rowan’s arms, bouncing against his chest as he hurtled through the woods. Every step sent splinters of red-hot pain through her. Though his arms were ice cold, a frigid wind pressing on her, she was adrift in a sea of fire.
Hell—this was what the dark god’s underworld felt like. This was what awaited her when she took her last breath.
It was the horror of that thought that made her focus on what she could grasp—namely the pine-and-snow smell of Rowan. She pulled that smell into her lungs, pulled it down deep and clung to it as though it were a lifeline tossed into a stormy sea. She didn’t know how long it took, but her grasp on him was weakening, each pulse of fiery pain fraying it.
But then it was darker than the woods, and the sounds echoed louder, and they took stairs, and then—“Get her into the water.”
She was lowered into the water in the sunken stone tub, then steam brushed her face. Someone swore. “Freeze it, Prince,” the second voice commanded. “Now.”
There was a moment of blissful cold, but then the fire surged, and—
“Get her out!” Strong hands yanked at her, and she had the vague sense of hearing bubbling.
She had boiled the water in that tub. Almost boiled herself. She was in another tub a moment later, the ice forming again—then melting. Melting, and— “Breathe,” Rowan said by her ear, kneeling at the head of the tub. “Let it go—let it get out of you.”