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—
’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.”
Steam rose, but she took a breath. “Good,” Rowan panted. Ice formed again. Melted.
She was sweating, heat pulsing against her skin like a drum. She did not want to die like this. She took another breath.
Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the bath froze, then melted, froze, then melted, slower each time. And each time, the cold soaked into her a bit more, numbing her, urging her body to relax.
Ice and fire. Frost and embers. Locked in a battle, pushing and pulling. Beneath it, she could almost taste Rowan’s steel will slamming against her magic—a will that refused to let the fire burn her into nothing.
Her body ached, but now the pain was mortal. Her cheeks were still aflame, but the water went cold, then lukewarm, then warm and—stayed that way. Warm, not hot.
“We need to get those clothes off her,” one of the females said. Celaena lost track of time as two small sets of hands eased up her head and then stripped off her sodden clothes. Without them, she was almost weightless in the water. She didn’t care if Rowan saw—didn’t think there was an inch of a woman’s body he hadn’t already explored anyway. She lay there, eyes shut, face tilted toward the ceiling.
After a while, Rowan said, “Just answer yes or no. That’s all you have to do.” She managed a slight nod, though she winced as pain shot down her neck and shoulders. “Are you in danger of flaring up again?”
She was breathing as evenly as she could, the heat pounding in her cheeks, her legs, her core, but it was steadily diminishing. “No,” she whispered, a brush of hot air from her tongue.
“Are you in pain?” Not a sympathetic question, but a commander assessing his soldier’s condition to sort out the best course of action.
“Yes.” A hiss of steam.
A woman said, “We will prepare a tonic. Just keep her cool.” Soft feet padded on the stone floors on their way out, then came the snick of the door to the baths closing. There was a slosh of water in a bucket, then—
Celaena sighed, or tried to, as an ice-cold cloth was laid on her forehead. More sloshing, then another cloth dripped freezing water onto her hair, her neck.
“The burnout,” Rowan said quietly. “You should have told me you were at your limit.”
Speaking was too hard, but she opened her eyes to find him kneeling at the head of the bath, a bucket of water beside him and a cloth in his hands. He wrung it again over her brow, the water so wonderful she would have moaned. The bath cooled further, but was still warm—too warm.
“If you’d gone on any longer, the burnout would have destroyed you. You must learn to recognize the signs—and how to pull back before it’s too late.” Not a statement, but a command. “It will rip you apart inside. Make this . . .” He shook his head again. “Make this look like nothing. You don’t touch your magic until you’ve rested for a while. Understand?”
She tilted her head up, beckoning for more cold water on her face, but he refused to wring the cloth until she nodded her agreement. He cooled her off for another few moments, then slung the cloth over the side of the bucket and stood. “I’m going to check on the tonic. I’ll be back soon.” He left once she’d nodded again. If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought he was fussing. Worried, even.
She hadn’t been old enough in Terrasen to have anyone teach her about the deadly side to her power—and no one had explained, since her lessons had been so limited. She hadn’t felt like she was burning out. It had come on so quickly. Maybe that was all there was to her magic. Maybe her well didn’t go as deep as everyone had thought. It would be a relief if that were true.
She lifted her legs, groaning at the aches along her muscles, and leaned forward far enough to hug her knees. Above the lip of the sunken tub, there were a few candles burning on the stones, and she glared at the flames. Hated the flames. Though she supposed they needed light in here.
She rested her forehead on her scarred knees, her skin nearly scorching. She shut her eyes, piecing her splintered consciousness together.
The door opened. Rowan. She kept herself in that cool darkness, savoring the growing chill in the water, the quieting pulse under her skin. He sounded about halfway across the room when his footsteps halted.
His breath caught, harsh enough that she looked over her shoulder.
But his eyes weren’t on her face. Or the water. They were on her bare back.
Curled as she was against her knees, he could see the whole expanse of ruined flesh, each scar from the lashings. “Who did that do you?”
It would have been easy to lie, but she was so tired, and he had saved her useless hide. So she said, “A lot of people. I spent some time in the Salt Mines of Endovier.”
He was so still that she wondered if he’d stopped breathing. “How long?” he asked after a moment. She braced herself for the pity, but his face was so carefully blank—no, not blank. Calm with lethal rage.
“A year. I was there a year before . . . it’s a long story.” She was too exhausted, her throat too raw, to say the rest of it. She noticed then that his arms were bandaged, and more bandages across his broad chest peeked up from beneath his shirt. She’d burned him again. And yet he had held on to her—had run all the way here and not let go once.
“You were a slave.”
She gave him a slow nod. He opened his mouth, but shut it and swallowed, that lethal rage winking out. As if he remembered who he was talking to and that it was the least punishment she deserved.
He turned on his heel and shut the door behind him. She wished he’d slammed it—wished he’d shattered it. But he closed it with barely more than a click and did not return.