Maeve’s smile turned sad. “Do you think she did, Aelin?”

Aelin considered. So many of their chats, their lessons in this glen, held deeper puzzles, questions for her to work through, to help her when she one day took her throne, Rowan at her side.

As if she’d summoned him, the pine-and-snow scent of her mate filled the clearing. A rustle of wings, and there he was, perched in hawk form on one of the towering oaks. Her warrior-prince.

She smiled toward him, as she had for weeks now, when he’d come to escort her back to her rooms in the river palace. It was during those walks from forest to mist-shrouded city that she had come to know him, love him. More than she had ever loved anything.

Aelin again faced her aunt. “The queen was clever, and ambitious. I would think she could do anything, even find the keys.”

“So you would believe. And yet they eluded her.”

“Where did they go?”

Maeve’s dark stare unwaveringly held hers. “Where do you think they went?”

Aelin opened her mouth. “I think—”

She blinked. Paused.

Maeve’s smile returned, soft and kind. As her aunt had been to her from the start. “Where do you think the keys are, Aelin?”

She opened her mouth once more. And again halted.

Like an invisible chain yanked her back. Silenced her.

Chain—a chain. She glanced down at her hands, her wrists. As if expecting them to be there.

She had never felt a shackle’s bite in her life. And yet she stared at the empty place on her wrist where she could have sworn there was a scar. Only smooth, sun-kissed skin remained.

“If this world were at risk, if those three terrible kings threatened to destroy it, where would you go to find the keys?”

Aelin looked up at her aunt.

Another world. There was another world. Like a fragment of a dream, there was another world, and in it, she had a wrist with a scar on it. Had scars all over.

And her mate, perched overhead … He had a tattoo down his face and neck and arm in that world. A sad story—his tattoo told a sad, awful story. About loss. Loss caused by a dark queen—

“Where are the keys hidden, Aelin?”

That placid, loving smile remained on Maeve’s face. And yet …

And yet.

“No,” Aelin breathed.

Something slithered in the depths of her aunt’s stare. “No what?”

This wasn’t her existence, her life. This place, these blissful months learning in Doranelle, finding her mate—

Blood and sand and crashing waves.

“No.”

Her voice was a thunderclap through the peaceful glen.

Aelin bared her teeth, fingers curling in the moss.

Maeve let out a soft laugh. Rowan flapped from the branches to land on the queen’s upraised arm.

He didn’t so much as fight it when she wrapped her thin white hands around his neck. And snapped it.

Aelin screamed. Screamed, clutching at her chest, at the shredding mating bond—

Aelin arched off the altar, and every broken and torn part of her body screamed with her.

Above her, Maeve was smiling. “You liked that vision, didn’t you?”

Not real. That had not been real. Rowan was alive, he was alive—

She tried to move her arm. Red-hot lightning lashed her, and she screamed again.

Only a broken rasp came out. Broken, just as her arm now lay—

Now lay—

Bone gleamed, jutting upward along more places than she could count. Blood and twisted skin, and—

No shackle scars, even with the wreckage.

In this world, this place, she did not have scars, either.

Another illusion, another spun dreamscape—

She screamed again. Screamed at her ruined arm, the unscarred skin, screamed at the lingering echo of the severed mating bond.

“Do you know what pains me most, Aelin?” Maeve’s words were soft as a lover’s. “It’s that you believe I’m the villain in this.”

Aelin sobbed through her teeth as she tried and failed to move her arm. Both arms. She cast her gaze through the space, this real-yet-not room.

They’d repaired the box. Had welded a new slab of iron over the lid. Then over the sides. The bottom. Less air trickled in, the hours or days now spent inside in near-suffocating heat. It had been a relief when she’d finally been chained to the altar.

Whenever that had been. If it had even happened at all.

“I have no doubt that your mate or Elena or even Brannon himself filled your head with lies about what I’ll do with the keys.” Maeve ran a hand over the stone lip of the altar, right through her splattered blood and shards of bone. “I meant what I said. I like this world. I do not wish to destroy it. Only improve it. Imagine a realm where there is no hunger, no pain. Isn’t that what you and your cohorts are fighting for? A better world?”

The words were a mockery. A mockery of what she’d promised so many. What she had promised Terrasen, and still owed it.

Aelin tried not to shift against the chains, against her broken arms, against the tight pressure pushing on her skin from the inside. A rising intensity along her bones, in her head. A little more, every day.

Maeve heaved a small sigh. “I know what you think of me, Fire-Bringer. What you assume. But there are some truths that cannot be shared. Even for the keys.”

Yet the growing strain cracking within her, smothering the pain … perhaps worse.

Maeve cupped her cheek over the mask. “The Queen Who Was Promised. I wish to save you from that sacrifice, offered up by a headstrong girl.” A soft laugh. “I’d even let you have Rowan. The two of you here, together. While you and I work to save this world.”

The words were lies. She knew it, though she couldn’t quite remember where one truth ended and the lie began. If her mate had belonged to another before her. Been given away. Or had that been the nightmare?

Gods, the pressure in her body. Her blood.

You do not yield.

“You can feel it, even now,” Maeve went on. “The urge of your body to say yes.” Aelin opened her eyes, and confusion must have glittered there, because Maeve smiled. “Do you know what being encased in iron does to a magic-wielder? You wouldn’t feel it immediately, but as time goes on … your magic needs release, Aelin. That pressure is your magic screaming it wants you to come free of these chains and release the strain. Your very blood tells you to heed me.”

Truth. Not the submission part, but the deepening pressure she knew would be worse than any pain from burnout. She’d felt it once, when plunging as far into her power as she’d ever gone.

That would be nothing compared to this.

“I am leaving for a few days,” Maeve said.

Aelin stilled.

Maeve shook her head in a mockery of disappointment. “You are not progressing as quickly as I wished, Aelin.”

Across the room, Fenrys let out a warning snarl. Maeve didn’t so much as glance at him.

“It has come to my attention that our mutual enemy has been spotted again on these shores. One of them, a Valg prince, was contained a few days’ journey from here, near the southern border. It brought with it several collars, no doubt to use on my own people. Perhaps even on me.”

No. No—

Maeve brushed a hand over Aelin’s neck, as if tracing a line where the collar would go. “So I will go myself to retrieve that collar, to see what Erawan’s minion might say for itself. I ripped apart the Valg princes who encountered me in the first war,” she said quietly. “It shall be rather easy, I suppose, to instead bend them to my will. Well, bend one to my will and wrest it from Erawan’s control, once I put its collar around your neck.”

No.

The word was a steady chant, a rising shriek within her.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” Maeve mused.

No.

Maeve poked Aelin’s shattered wrist, and Aelin swallowed her scream. “Think on it. And when I return, let’s discuss my proposition again. Maybe all that growing strain will make you see more clearly, too.”

A collar. Maeve was going to retrieve a Wyrdstone collar—

Maeve turned, black gown swirling with her. She crossed the threshold, and her owl swooped from its perch atop the open door to land upon her shoulder. “I’m sure Cairn will find ways to entertain you while I’m away.”