Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aelin’s first flower is already marked on her skin when she’s born. 

That in and of itself isn’t unusual; everyone has their soulflower marked on their skin at birth, their destiny conveyed in some abstract way only the gods understand.

What gives the midwife pause is the flower itself, inked onto the skin above the infant’s tiny chest. She quickly shifts the squalling baby in her arms and wipes the blood from her face as the healers work desperately to save Princess Evalin’s life. 

The bedroom is a chaotic bustle of bodies and barked orders as the princess labours for breath, her husband at her side, hands clasped tightly as though he could keep her from death by sheer force of will. 

Carefully, the midwife cleans the baby with a damp cloth and wraps her in a white knit blanket, delicately embroidered with stags and leaves, the golden threads seeming like sunlight dancing through a forest canopy. 

She avoids the dark splotch of ink on the new princess’ skin. 

When Princess Evalin has been stabilized and most of the healers and midwives ushered out of the room, she eases the whimpering infant into her father’s arms and watches with amazement as she calms immediately, nuzzling her cheek into the soft fabric of his tunic. 

“Congratulations, Your Highnesses,” the midwife whispers before she bows and quickly leaves the room. 

She’s not quick enough, however, to avoid hearing the quiet sob that escapes the room when the Prince and Princess unwrap their daughter’s blanket and lay eyes on her soulflower for the first time. 

A tear traces its way down her own cheek as she closes the door behind her and tries not to think of that tiny chest stained black and white with blackthorn blossoms. 

Whatever fate the gods had in store for the baby, she would not be escaping it. 

oO0Oo

As she grows, a garden begins to blossom across her skin.

Angrec for royalty, received when an official announcement of her birth was made, appears on the small of her back. Ferns ink themselves onto her ribs when she first starts throwing sparks a few months later. 

Ivy blooms over her and Aedion’s fingers, affectionfriendshipfidelity in their every touch. Carnations full of her mother’s love appear on her ankles, a delicate sunflower on the inside of her left elbow for her father’s unwavering adoration.

Not all the flowers she gets are so lovely.

Volatile abecedary flares to life on her sides, twisting in between the ferns, when she sends the library in Orynth up in flames. Tiny sprigs of lavender appear when she overhears the whispers of the servants, wondering how a child with such a temper could ever be trusted with the throne. 

Sorrowful willow curls around her neck like a noose when she learns what the flowers mean.

oO0Oo

At eight, Aelin has a startling number of flowers inked on her skin for someone so young. 

The whispers, which had never been particularly quiet, begin to grow in number until she can’t help but hear them everywhere she goes.

She wakes the day the King of Adarlan and his delegation are set to come to a feeling like ice burning beneath the skin of her left thumb. She frowns and slips out of her bed to open the window so she can see her hand better. When the light hits the new flower, she bits down on her lip to muffle her yelp.

Inked there, with damning clarity, is a tiny pink and yellow yarrow flower.

War is coming.

oO0Oo

She runs as fast as she can, lungs burning with the frigid air as the thundering hoofbeats grow closer. 

Her heels flash through the mud, drenching her nightgown. She gasps as she blunders through the underbrush, hoping, praying, to stay ahead of the dark rider.

She can still hear the sound Lady Marion’s head made when it hit the ground.

With terror gripping her heart, she doesn’t stop to think before she’s rushing through the bridge posts and falling downdowndown, asphodel blooming on the soles of her feet.

oO0Oo

Arobynn wraps her in a dry towel and sets her in front of the roaring fireplace in his estate’s kitchen. He leaves her staring unseeingly into the flames, muttering something about finding her clothes.

Aelin hardly hears him. The logs pop and crack in the hearth, spraying showers of sparks into the air, and all she can think of is the lack of magic bubbling beneath her skin. The hollowness in her chest, the way the world seems duller now.

She doesn’t know if it’s from the loss of her magic or the fact that… that…

It hits her then, the realization of what she is. Great-Uncle Orlon is dead. Orynth has fallen. Her parents are also dead, throats slit as they slept, and she doesn’t even know what will happen to their bodies. There will be no one to sing them to ancient dirges of the Fae, to make sure their souls are at peace in the otherworld. 

She hasn’t yet heard of Aedion's fate. She’s not sure she wants to know.

She’s the last Galathynius, now the Queen of Terrasen by birthright and blood because there’s no one left.  

No one except her. 

She pulls her legs to her chest and cries, her tears turning to forget-me-nots as they hit her knees.

oO0Oo

The issue of the angrec on her back is one that cannot be erased with a mere change in identity. 

Arobynn solves the problem. 

He’s grim-faced as he approaches her, red-hot poker in hand. 

“Let this be your first lesson,” he says.

The iron touches her skin and the last shreds of Aelin burn away with her screams.

oO0Oo

Purple hyacinths bloom where the blood of her first kill splatters on her skin.

Please forgive me, the flowers whisper.

oO0Oo

She asks to see Arobynn’s flowers one day. 

“Why do you want to know?” he asks, a smile tugging at his lips.

She shrugs. “You’ve seen all of mine, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have. But don’t think that distracting me will get you out of doing your studies.”

It’s not until later that she realizes he’d changed the subject, deflecting the question as though he doesn’t want her to know the infallible truths he hides beneath paint and extravagant clothing.

(That should have been her first clue.)

oO0Oo

She lives in excess in Rifthold for years while her country suffers and pretends the wormwood that grows between her shoulder blades doesn’t matter. 

Time passes. She grows up, burying the little girl so deep down inside herself that some days, she forgets she had ever existed in the first place. 

That’s a lie. She can never completely forget, her shame inked on her skin for all to see. 

oO0Oo

By sixteen, she has dozens of flowers and a shiny mass of scar tissue where royalty had once been. 

Then Skull’s Bay happens, and everything changes.

oO0Oo

For days after their first kiss in the sewers, Celaena rides a high of bliss and pleasure. She and Sam lie curled in their bed in her apartment, fingers trailing lazily across each other’s scarred skin. 

They haven’t made the final step yet, haven’t explored every part of their bodies, but that’s okay. Only a few more days and they’ll have all the time in the world.

“What’s this one?” Sam asks, kissing the tiny yellow flower on her right shoulder.

“Coltsfoot,” she says. “It means ‘justice shall be done.’ Stupid for an assassin to have, I suppose.”

“I don’t think so.” Sam looks up at her, his brown eyes sparkling in the early morning light. “There’s justice in death, isn’t there?”

She shrugs. That’s not the reason she has it, but she’s not ready to tell him that story. She might never be.

“What about this?” He moves down her body, kissing the barberry where her tunic rides up, just over her hip.

“Bad temper.”

“That one definitely makes sense.”

“Shut up!” She wacks him with a pillow and he falls back, laughing. 

A moment passes. He traces the flowers that curl up over her shoulders. Most of the plants are hidden beneath her tunic, but she knows without looking what has caught his attention. She’s spent far too much time staring at them in a mirror, after all.

“Monkshood, rhododendron, and wormwood,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. He shifts to look at her, but she keeps her eyes focused up. She doesn’t think she could bear to look at him now. “‘Beware, a deadly foe is near,’ ‘I am dangerous,’ and ‘regret.’ They’re… not exactly things I’m proud of.”

The sheets rustle beside her, the only sound in the silent room. Sam rolls over, his tunic suddenly gone, and braces himself above her. He takes her hand and brings it to his ribs, right where a pure white gardenia flower blooms. 

“I know you have your secrets, Celaena,” he says, “things you won’t tell me, and that’s okay. I love you, always and forever.”

“I know,” she says, a lump forming in her throat. 

A tear slips down her cheek and he kisses it away, then drifts down to her neck, where a tiny pink flower pulses over her carotid artery in time with her heartbeat. He places a featherlight kiss over the zephyr flower that appeared when he’d first confessed his love for her. “This one’s my favourite.”

She thinks of the sincerity of his love, how it’s marked plainly on her skin for all to see, and smiles. “Mine too.”

oO0Oo

She curls in on herself in the dungeons, trying to keep warm. She’s not sure if the numbness she’s feeling is because of the cold or not. 

Sam is dead. Sam is dead and she will never get him back. His body still lies in the Assassin’s Keep, waiting for her to bury him.

It’s surprising, but she doesn’t cry. Not anymore. She supposes she has no tears left to shed.

Death is her constant companion, after all. She should have figured that everyone she loves dies in the end.

She traces the marigold on right forearm, her grief burrowing into her skin like it’s a part of her. It’s not the only marigold she has on her body, but this one stings like a fresh wound. Sometimes, she wonders what it would be like to press her blade over it and draw blood, giving her too-short, tragic life a fitting ending.

But she doesn’t. She could never face Sam in the otherworld if she took her life like that.

Besides, she wouldn’t given Farran the fucking satisfaction. And then there’s the other issue: the identity of whoever had sold her out. 

Betrayal twists in her chest and a single black dahlia blooms in the hollow of her throat.

Chapter Text

“Do you bear many scars?” 

The handsome dark haired prince with brilliant sapphire eyes steps down from the dais to study her better. With every stride that closes the distance between them, she can feel something in her chest that draws her to him, something old and long-forgotten bringing them together.

The collar of his black doublet is unbuttoned and she can see a hint of warm bronze skin, can smell the sharp scent of steel and horses that lingers after weeks of travel. What catches her attention, however, is the single angrec petal that peeks out, no doubt continuing under the great expanse of fabric that masquerades as clothes. 

Something at the base of her spine burns, as though the scar there is remembering the press of the red-hot poker on her bare skin, the way her flesh had bubbled and blistered as she’d screamed and cried for Arobynn to stop.

But Celaena Sardothien isn’t royalty and Aelin Ashryver Galathynius is dead; Angrec has no place on her body. Not anymore.

Dorian Havilliard, the arrogant prick, the son of the man who destroyed her life and ruined everything she held dear, returns to his throne. He leans back, kicking one leg over the other, leering at her with something more than casual observation.

She could claw his eyes out for looking at her like that.

“I have a proposition for you,” he says, and for the first time in years, she feels a flare of something in her chest, followed by a prickling sensation beneath the skin of her left palm.

She clenches her fist to hide the blossoming flower and considers the two men standing before her. 

“I’m listening,” is all she says.  

oO0Oo

After being roughly bathed by brutish servants and having her wounds tended to, Captain Westfall leaves her alone in her grand room in the overseer’s building. Undoubtedly, there are dozens of guards posted at every window and door, but Celaena can hardly bring herself to care. There’s a bed in the room — an actual real bed — and her muscles ache for her to collapse into the feather duvet and sleep for a week.

But she can’t sleep. After a year of nothing more than a threadbare blanket huddled up with the other slaves at night, trying in vain to share their warmth when the cold earth floor beneath them leeched it from their bodies, the bed is uncomfortable. If anything, she feels more on edge when she lies down in it, as though the comfort is a trap, somehow more dangerous than the mines themselves.

She resigns herself to taking a single blanket, which is already far warmer than anything she can ever remember owning, and curls up on the floor. It’s more familiar to her now. She doesn’t want to think about what that says about her.

In the moonlight streaming through the window, she finally dares to look at her palm for the first time. A small daffodil blooms there, unbothered by the scars cutting through it from years of hard labour.

She presses the fingers of her other hand to the delicate flower and tries to remember what it was like to have hope.

oO0Oo

Freedom. 

The word echoes through her mind. 

Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. 

As they pass through the iron gates of Endovier, she tilts her head up to the sky and basks in the sunlight for the first time in a year. 

Milkweed wraps around her manacle scars like a promise. 

oO0Oo

She doesn’t dream the first night after Endovier, which is surely a blessing from the gods. It would have been mortifying to wake everyone up with her screams. 

Her eyes catch on the flowers left at the foot of her cot and for a moment, she forgets how to breathe. Terror grips her heart, twisting something painfully in her chest.

She should have known better than to speak of the Little Folk at the campfire the day before, should not have announced her presence and tempted fate in such a way.

They know who she is. They have not forgotten her.

The bouquet of white blackthorn blossoms feels at once like a gift and a silent accusation.

oO0Oo

Celaena stands in her closet, dressing gown pooling around her feet, and frowns at the emaciated, scarred girl looking back at her. 

After a year in Endovier, her body is a wreck. Her cheeks are hollow, her ribs jut out too far and the dips of her hip bones are too prominent. Despite swinging a pickaxe for hours on end and being forced into the long march to and from her section of the mines twice a day, there’s very little muscle left on her body. They had been the first to go, her starving body consuming what nutrients and energy it could at the expense of her once beautiful physique. She’d have to train doubly hard with Captain Westfall to get back in shape in time for the Competition.

But as concerning as that prospect is, it’s not the worst thing she sees in the mirror. Even the scars, gnarled and twisting and plentiful, aren’t her top priority. 

Rather, it’s the dozens of flowers that litter her skin — perhaps it’s even hundreds now. She knows she’d gotten several in Endovier, but she hadn’t bothered to count or catalogue them. Scars cut through most of them, the bright colours and delicate lines marred by the remnants of old wounds. Her back is the worst; in some spots it’s almost impossible to see the tangle of vines and flowers spilling down her shoulder blades, but honestly, she’s not too upset about that. 

The others, however? Even with the scars and the bruises from the trip to Rifthold, they stand out far too starkly against the unnatural pallor of her skin. She wonders if Captain Westfall and Prince Dorian had taken much notice of her flowers when they’d first met — she had been covered in dirt and grime at the time — but she doesn’t want to draw any more attention to them than necessary. They’d only invite dangerous and painful memories to surface, and she can’t afford those kinds of distractions.

The pot of body paint she’d discreetly asked Phillipa to get sits on the vanity beside her. Celaena trails her fingers down her sides, mapping out the curling ferns and abecedary, and shudders. 

Yes, these flowers are too dangerous. They have to go. No one can be allowed to see them.

So she dips her fingers into the paint and begins to cover all but a select few flowers. The paint is a pale cream, a few shades off her own skin tone but close enough that it’s unnoticeable from a distance. It’ll do for now.

After an hour of slathering paint across her body and blending it into her skin the best she can, Celaena finally admits that it’s about as good as she’s able to get it. She’ll have to ask Phillippa how often the paint has to be reapplied and whether it’ll flake or rub away when she’s training, but those are questions for later.

She stares at herself in the mirror again. Gone is the ivy at her fingertips, gone are the carnations and sunflower of her parents’ love. The ferns and abecedary have been painted over so nothing but smooth skin and scars show on her ribs. The barberry on her hip stays, as does the milkweed around her wrists and the multitude of lavender sprigs that are scattered across her body, but she covers up the daffodil on her palm, the coltsfoot on her shoulder, and, after a bit of debate, the yarrow on her thumb. 

She hides the blackthorn blossom on her chest — there are rumours that Adarlan’s Assassin is soulless, after all — and the purple hyacinths splashed up her arms, but doesn’t bother with the ruin of monkshood, rhododendron, and wormwood on her back. Captain Westfall and the Prince have already seen them — and besides, it adds to her reputation.

Selfishly, perhaps a bit foolishly, she leaves the tiny zephyr flower on her neck alone to pulse in time with her heart, visible for all to see. She misses Sam more than ever.

When she leaves her room, it’s with far fewer flowers than before, only the worst of them displayed, the rest hidden away where no one can pry their meaning from her flesh. When Captain Westfall collects her for training, he frowns at her unmarked skin where he could have sworn there were flowers, but he doesn’t say anything.

Neither he nor the prince ask any questions, and Celaena doesn’t offer any answers.

oO0Oo

Princess Nehemia’s fingers squeeze hers. They’re surprisingly strong, calloused in all the places the hilt of a sword or dagger might rest. Celaena meets her eyes and she quickly drops her hand.

“Will you keep me company while I’m here, Lady Lillian?” 

Celaena blinks. “Of course. When I’m available, I’ll gladly attend you.”

“I have attendants. I wish for someone to talk to.” The princess’ voice is sad, tinged with melancholy and perhaps a bit of homesickness. Celaena knows what it’s like to suddenly find oneself in the home of the man who’d destroyed their continent, knows the bitter twist of emotions that comes with realizing how utterly at his mercy they all are. She can’t offer much, but she can be someone Nehemia can confide in.

She smiles and watches as Nehemia and her retinue enter the council chambers, thinking of how nice it would be to have a friend. 

(She doesn’t notice the way Nehemia shifts her bracelets to hide the black mulberry blossoms that appear on her wrists.

I shall not survive you.

They are the first sign of what is to come.)

Chapter Text

How strange that only a few months can make her forget everything that came before.

Her whole life, she’s been alone. The other children in the castle were afraid of her, she was kept isolated by Arobynn’s training and manipulations, and even on those rare occasions she found someone she thought she might be able to befriend, they soon vanished from her life, too.

Aedion, Ansel, even Sam. All taken away from her, all for different reasons.

After a year in Endovier and a lifetime living in Adarlan’s shadow, she should have known better than to let her guard down for anything. But the prospect of friendship had been too tempting, something she so desperately craved even if she didn’t want to admit it, that she let herself fall over the edge anyways.

When she’d defeated Grave and Cain in the Competition and laurel leaves curled delicately across her temples, she’d dared to hope…  

Maybe, just maybe, she’d been holding onto the delusion that she might be able to complete her service quietly and fade into the shadows, no longer a kingmaker or a pawn or anyone of importance at all.

Except that’s not what happens, because nothing is ever so simple for her.

oO0Oo

“My father used to tell me stories of Terrasen’s court—of the warriors and lords who served King Orlon in his inner circle, of the unrivaled power and bravery and loyalty of his court.”

Celaena hardly hears Nehemia’s words, only managing a choked, “I know,” in the expectant silence that falls.

But there are things that Nehemia doesn’t know — things that Nehemia cannot know — about her life and the days preceding the fall of Terrasen. Things that still haunt her more than a decade later, things that mean she can never stop running from her past.

Ever since that fateful day when word came of Darrow’s official surrender of Terrasen to the king on behalf of the remaining court, there’s been a tiny thistle on her right thumb, opposite where the yarrow blooms on her left. 

Nobility and endurance, perhaps. But Celaena thinks it’s more prudent that the warning in the thistle’s meaning is the one that mirrors the war on her other hand.

oO0Oo

After Sam, she thought she’d never find love again, that the aching hole in her heart would never be filled. And maybe the Crown Prince and Captain of the Guard don’t fit exactly, but she wears the flowers she gains from them with affection.

From Dorian, a yellow rose on her thigh. Even though what she felt for him might not have been love, it had been something close enough to it that, had she not been who she was, she might have found peace and comfort in his embrace. 

As it is, however, the easy joy of his friendship, a foundation built on books and billiards and gift-wrapped puppies, is something she knows she will cherish to the end of her days.

But Chaol… Chaol is different. 

There had been a moment she’d thought she’d found true happiness, a scant handful of weeks in which she finds herself looking to the future with the sort of hope she hasn’t had since Sam’s death. The lily-of-the-valley that blooms on her stomach brings with it a sort of clarity she hasn’t felt in a long time, a feeling of purpose, of belonging, that she can hardly remember.

Of course, that makes it all the more painful when it comes crashing down around her.

oO0Oo

Nehemia clicks her tongue, that single sound somehow earth shattering. “I didn’t realize that you’re just a coward.”

Already halfway to the door with Fleetfoot at her heels, Celaena stops and looks over her shoulder. “Say that again.”

There’s a chill in her voice that terrifies the part of her that hasn’t already begun to slip into mind-numbing apathy, a necessity lest she rip this castle apart with her bare hands.

But if Nehemia senses her tone, she’s not deterred. “You’re a coward. You are nothing more than a coward.”

The back of her left hand burns and itches and Celaena knows, without having to look at it, what flower will have bloomed on her skin. A damningly white peony, laughably deceptive for its beauty, is the only sign of Nehemia’s words affecting her.

It’s fitting, somehow, that the hand that holds out the daffodil of hope is also the one marred by her deepest shame.

“When your people are lying dead around you,” Celaena hisses, voice trembling as she curls her fingers into fists, the new ink shimmering in the torchlight, “don’t come crying to me.”

oO0Oo

All those nights she’d lain in bed and traced the scilla flower inked on Chaol’s bare chest, she’d mistaken it as loyalty to her. 

She wishes it hadn’t taken the murder of her closest friend to make her realize the truth. 

oO0Oo

“Celaena.” 

Someone murmurs her name. She can hardly hear it past the roaring silence in her ears, the smell of blood and death hanging heavy in the room. 

There’s so much blood.

“Celaena.”

There’s so much blood, and Nehemia is gone. Her bodyguards lie collapsed on the floor, their throats slit, and Nehemia’s on the bed, her body bloody and brutalized and violated and there’s so much blood.

And for a moment, she’s not in the castle anymore but a river-side estate ten years ago, where blood had dried sticky on her skin and she’d woken up between the corpses of the two people she’d loved the most.

There’s so much blood.

“Celaena.”

Someone moves into her line of vision, a prince with dark hair and sapphire eyes tinged red with tears. She reaches out to touch them, his skin surprisingly warm beneath her freezing fingers.

The voice behind her says her name again, a warning this time. 

Her fingers trail down Dorian’s face to his neck. The white peony is just visible beneath the blood on her hand. 

Nehemia is dead. They’d done this. They’d killed her.

“Celaena.”

The voice is sharper now, and she turns slowly, as if in a trance, to the man standing behind her, sword in hand.

He had known. Chaol had known.

The last pieces of humanity within her shatter completely, and she launches herself at him. Her skin burns beneath her tunic and she knows there will be another black dahlia next to the lily-of-the-valley that she’d so foolishly thought meant something.

“Celaena, stop!”

She can’t hear them, refuses to hear them. They’d killed her friend, destroyed everything. They deserve nothing less than the same in return.

She forces the blade down further, straining against the invisible grip on her wrists, even as the man pleads with her. “Celaena, I’m your friend.”

That snaps something loose within her she hadn’t even known still existed. Fury and pain and sorrow fill her voice as she roars into the room that smells of rot and decay and betrayal. “You will never be my friend! You will always be my enemy!”

Her skin continues to burn, more flowers inking themselves onto her flesh in her grief.

(Later, in the dungeons, she sees them. Trefoil and wild tansy, wrapping themselves around the yellow rose and lily-of-the-valley. 

She doesn’t cry, only because she has no more tears left to shed, but it’s a near thing when she sees the revenge and declaration of war that overshadow the loves she thought she might once have had.) 

oO0Oo

She takes Grave apart in an alley in Rifthold’s slums and feels something within her break as well.

Whatever had kept her sane after her parents’ death, after the fall of her kingdom and the conquest of Erelia, whatever had led her through the grief of Sam’s death and the torture of Endovier, whatever had lent her the strength to win the competition — that part of her is gone.

She’s not sure she’ll ever get it back.

She’s not sure she wants to.

Her hands are stained crimson with blood and her boots squelch as she enters the council room and deposits the severed head in front of Minister Mullison. For the first time, she meets the king’s eyes willingly, and a smile that’s not entirely human splits her face in two.

Coltsfoot blooms again on her body, this time on the nape of her neck. Yes, there is justice to be done. 

Grave might have been the first, but he would certainly not be the last. 

Her smile widens, teeth a little too sharp, eyes smouldering with suppressed fire, and she wonders if the king knows she’s coming for him, too.

Chapter Text

“What was it like?” Her voice is quiet in the stillness of the tomb. 

“Painless,” Elena says, equally quiet, as though she dares not disturb the ghosts in the tomb. “Painless, and easy.”

Celaena stares at the newest marigold, this time marring her hand beside the peony, and wonders how it's possible that her body still has enough ink to keep up with her grief. Is it possible for a person to go through so much in their life that the gods simply give up tattooing it on their skin?

If it hasn’t happened yet, Celaena thinks she might be the first. Only eighteen and she’s already running out of space for more flowers.

She hardly registers that she keeps speaking with Elena until the queen sits beside her with hardly a rustle of her skirts. “No, she didn’t,” her ancestor says in response to whatever Celaena had whispered into the dank, still air. “But when her spirit left her body, there was no more pain — no more fear. She is safe now.”

And that’s the breaking point. For the first time in ten years, Celaena buries her face in her hands and weeps for everything she’s lost. 

Elena doesn’t say anything, just allows Celaena to lean into her warmth and keeps her company as she mourns for all the tragedies of a too-short life.

oO0Oo

Baba Yellowlegs’ nails rip into the willow collaring her neck, iron tearing through sorrow and heralding pain.

Even if she doesn’t know it yet, it’s an omen.

oO0Oo

She sits in Dorian’s tower room, legs tucked against her chest as he changes out of his filthy, sweaty clothes in his closet.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly when she finishes telling him one tiny part of the world-shattering truth she’s kept hidden for ten years. “So, what do we do now?”

“Eat a giant meal, see a healer, take a bath. In that order.”

He laughs, a soft exhale through his nose, but it’s more than she’s seen from him in a long time. His eyes dance with a fragile kind of playfulness, as though one wrong move could shatter it completely, and she wonders what he sees when he looks at her. 

She can’t stop thinking about the human heart inside the chest cavity of that creature. If she has more in common with that thing than with the prince before her.

(Its body had been covered in flowers, too.)

She wants to ask him about a million different things, tell him another truth about herself, but now’s not the time. Instead, she sighs and looks out the window of his tower room. “We wait. We keep an eye on that door to make sure no one tries to go in, and… just take it day by day.”

He reaches out and grasps one of her hands in his, following her gaze to the window and the world beyond. “Day by day,” he repeats softly.

The skin around the yellow rose prickles as a new flower appears on her body, another moment immortalized in ink so she can never forget. 

A little golden dandelion, unbearably fragile and looking as though one stiff wind could blow it away, curls around the stem of Dorian’s rose. It’s a delicate, new thing, so similar to all the others and yet as different as can be.

It’s a small step, but she wonders if this is how she’ll begin to heal.

oO0Oo

The passage through the portal is painful, the shift even more so. Her body burns as though her flowers are all inking themselves anew on her skin at once. 

She delves deep within herself, not giving it a second thought because Chaol and Fleetfoot are in danger, and surrenders to the terrible, horrible thing inside her.

“Run,” she snarls to Chaol, who crouches over her dog protectively, his sword snapped in two at his feet, and squeezes her eyes shut against the pain.

When she opens them again, it’s to a world swallowed by flame.

oO0Oo

Celaena kneels before Nehemia’s grave, an act of fealty to the only royal she will ever serve again. 

“I want you to know,” she whispers, “that you were right. You were right. I am a coward.” The peony on her hand burns. “And I have been running for so long that I’ve forgotten what it is to stand and fight.”

Her tears trace freezing tracks down her face in the wind. She can hardly bear to think about all the marigolds that haunt her skin, a testament to her grief. 

“But I promise,” she breathes as she bows lower, pressing her forehead against the cold soil where Nehemia is buried. “I promise that I will stop him. I promise that I will never forgive, never forget what they did to you. I promise that I will free Eyllwe. I promise that I will see your father’s crown restored to his head.”

The skin above her hip itches. She lifts her tunic up slightly, just enough to see the new flower, then lets it drop, sorrow and shame clogging her throat. Her newest coltsfoot blossom glistens far too brightly in the muted colours of this day.

She rises to her feet and draws a dagger from her pocket, one taken from the tomb of her ancestor, and slices a line through the daffodil on her left palm. This promise, this oath she will make, is more important than any hope she’d thought she might once have had.

The blood slides down her wrist and into the earth below.

Drip…

Drip…

Drip…

“I promise,” she whispers, even as the wind rips the stinging tears from her eyes and the coltsfoot on her hip burns like the poker Arobynn had pressed to her back a decade ago. “On my name, on my life, even if it takes until my last breath, I promise I will see Eyllwe freed.”

Never forgive, never forget.  

For herself, for Nehemia, for the little girls they’d been and the women they were forced to become, she will make the flowers on her skin mean something.

Chapter Text

She doesn’t have her paints with her when she arrives at Mistward. 

She doesn’t care.

Let them see her flowers, let them see her scars. Let them talk and speculate.

She hardly feels anything at all anymore.

oO0Oo

“Hello, Aelin Galathynius.”

Celaena stumbles back, right into the broad chest of the male behind her. “Aelin Galathynius is dead.” Her voice is too loud in the silent room for all that she’d barely whispered the words.

Maeve’s smile was more like a bearing of teeth. “Let us not bother with lies.”

She surveys Celaena with more than a casual glance. Celaena knows when she sees the scar-flecked hands, the flowers peeking through the flaking paint, because her eyes glitter with interest. 

She’d applied the paint for a final time before leaving Rifthold, covering up all her most conspicuous flowers and leaving only those that would help her blend in among the other refugee women on the boat. Now, after weeks spent baking in the hot Wendlyn sun and doing nothing but eating stale teggya and drinking sour wine by the jug-full, much of the paint was wearing off. It would take nothing more than a few baths or a strong rainstorm to wash it away completely. 

“I suppose that with a proper bath, you’ll look a good deal like your mother. Though…” Maeve eyes her critically, amusement and consideration flashing in those black depths. “She never had so many flowers.”

Celaena bites back the surge of rage and pain that comes with the memories. Her flowers are an anomaly, she knows. Most never get more than a few dozen flowers over the course of their lives; she has hundreds. Proof of all the ways she’s wasted her life, she supposes. Proof of all the people she’s failed.

“We didn’t come here to discuss my flowers,” she says quietly, well aware of the male behind her listening to their every word. 

“No, we didn’t,” Maeve agrees. “And yet I can’t help but wonder at how many more you’re still hiding. My eyes across the sea have brought me such strange, horrible stories of you. From your scars and steel and flowers, I wonder whether they are indeed true. Like the tale I heard over a year ago, that an assassin with Ashryver eyes and a kingdom’s death inked on her back was spotted by the horned Lord of the North in a wagon bound for—”

“Enough.” Her voice is hard but it’s impossible to miss the undercurrent of fear that runs through it. She knows the Fae in the room hear it, too. “I know my own history.”

Maeve tilts her head, indicating the milkweed on her wrists. “Yes, I suppose it would be rather hard to forget it.”

Celaena clenches her hands into fists. Her nails dig into the daffodil on her palm, drawing pinpricks of blood. “Isn’t that the whole purpose of the flowers?” she retorts. “A punishment from the gods to make it so we can’t forget?”

Maeve just smiles, dark eyes flashing, like she knows a secret Celaena doesn’t. 

oO0Oo

Emrys’ eyes linger on her hands. She can see the way he catalogues the scars, the callouses, the plethora of flowers and twisting vines. Instead of surprise or horror, however, sorrow flashes in his eyes.

“Someone must love you very much,” he says. “I haven’t seen so much ivy on anyone in… a long time.”

Her hands curl into fists. “Yes, he did.”

Over by the counter, a hesitant voice pipes up. “Is he… dead?” Luca asks.

Celaena shrugs. “As good as. I haven’t sought out information about him in a very long time.” She focuses again on Emrys. “Give me whatever work you want. Any work.”

Emrys swallows, glancing at her flowers again. “Just finish the onions,” he says in a voice a little quieter than it had been before.

So Celaena picks up the knife and gets to work slicing the onions with perfect strokes that nobody, except perhaps Emrys with his eagle eyes, notices.

She tries not to think about how the simple wooden handle fits perfectly against the callouses on her hands. 

oO0Oo

“You would probably have been more useful to the world if you’d actually died ten years ago.”

The words are stinging but no new flowers appear on her skin. 

That doesn’t surprise her.

He isn’t telling her anything she doesn’t already know.

oO0Oo

“Because she is dead!” Celaena screams, shoving the palm with the mutilated daffodil on it in Rowan’s face. “ Because she is dead and I am left with my worthless life!”

Other flowers have appeared in the days and weeks since she’d left Adarlan. Part of her wonders if whatever hold the king had on magic had also somehow suppressed the growth of her flowers, because suddenly her body is awash with colour in a way it hadn’t been before.

(Perhaps it is simply that she is letting herself mourn uninhibited for the first time in ten years.)

Green arbor vitae climbs up her calves, melding with vibrant orange and yellow helichrysums when they reach her knees, unchanging friendship growing in tandem with unceasing remembrance. And she knows, just knows, that the message written there — live for me — is a final gift from Nehemia.

Other flowers have appeared, too. Rosemary for more remembrance, rue for repentance, an iris for her flames nestled in with the ferns and abecedary on her right side. Zinnia for thoughts of absent friends blooms across her chest, a quiet taunt for the fate inked over her heart. Aspen, cyprus, and adonis flowers entwine together on her arms in a message of sorrow and despair and death. 

She doesn’t know who they’re for, if they’re for any one person at all, and that’s perhaps what upsets her most.

Rowan stares at her, body completely still and eyes blank. She wonders what in her words had affected him so much.

It doesn’t matter. When she walks away, he doesn’t come after her.

Exhaustion and numbness drag down at her shoulders. 

She’s only eighteen. She shouldn’t feel this old.

oO0Oo

“Who did that to you?”

His voice is so quiet, deadly calm and deceptively soft.

Celaena curls herself tighter around her knees. “The scars or the flowers?” Silence. She sighs. “A lot of people. I spent some time in the Salt Mines of Endovier.”

“How long?” She’s not even sure he’s still breathing.

“A year. I was there a year before… It's a long story.”

“You were a slave.”

She swallows. Of course he’d remark on the ruined flesh of her back, the scars that tell of a punishment earned, and not the tangle of monkshood, rhododendron, and wormwood that reveal the deepest secrets of her soul — that she is a broken, selfish wreck of a woman foolishly trying to pretend she is still whole.

But she only nods, confession and absolution and damnation all in one gesture, and he goes absolutely still.

Then he turns silently and closes the door behind him with barely a click. She wishes he’d slammed it.

She rests her chin on the forget-me-nots on her knees, the reminder of the burden she will always carry with her, and tries not to think of that little girl who’d loved Beltane with her heart of wildfire.

That girl is long gone and the flowers on her skin are just a reminder that she will never get her back.

oO0Oo

Holding back the growing tide of darkness is impossible. She’s so tired, in body and in spirit, limbs heavy and vision growing dim.

When the cloying void comes for her again, she doesn’t have the strength to stop it. It snuffs out her flames, killing any hope for light in this ruined world, and devours her whole.

oO0Oo

The memories flash past her, almost too quick to see. The Valg eagerly search her mind for the most painful moments, the parts that had shaped her into the woman she is today.

They find no shortage of them. Her mind has always been her greatest enemy.

Congratulations, Your Highnesses. The blackthorn over her heart burns.

Let this be your first lesson. The scar at the base of her spine throbs like a new wound.

This one’s my favourite. The ghost of her beloved’s lips linger over the zephyr flower on her neck.

You are nothing more than a coward. The peony throbs.

Coward.

Coward.

Coward.

“Yes,” she gasps, tilting her head up to the ink-black ceiling. Blood slides from her nose down her throat until she’s choking on it. “Yes, I’m a coward. I know. I can never forget it.”

All the flowers on her body, the price of her cowardice and shame, the beautiful colours paid for in blood that was not her own.

When your people are lying dead around you, don’t come crying to me.

She cries, tears mingling with the blood dripping down her chin. She’s not sure if it’s from her bloody nose or if she’s bitten through her lip in an effort to muffle her screams. She’s not sure it matters anymore.

All she can think of are the thousands of slaves in Endovier and Calaculla, slaughtered because of her mistakes. Because they’d dared to stand against the injustices of Adarlan while she ran like a coward.

A whip cracks against her flesh, tearing into her scars and flowers.

It’s Nehemia, her voice damning her and her hand holding the whip. Sam soon joins her, an iron-tipped whip unfurling onto Endovier’s rocky earth.

Celaena laughs. There’s no humour in it, no shred of anything that might be considered human.

Monsters don’t get to be humans.

“Again,” she gasps through the pain. A line of people forms behind Nehemia and Sam — all those she’s failed in the course of her miserable life. “Again.”

The world blurs and distorts until she can no longer tell what’s real and what’s just her conscience punishing her for her sins. 

Then, through the cracking of whips and the voices that haunt her memories, a tiny voice says, “Get up.”

Celaena looks up, no longer tied on the whipping posts in front of the mines but kneeling on the moss and grass before Mistward. The images of her family vanish like smoke in a breeze, taking their poisonous words with them, until only a girl is left. The girl whose face Celaena had once worn.

“Get up,” Aelin says again, her small, unscarred hand extended.

Do not let that light go out.

So Celaena reaches across the earth and brushes her fingers against Aelin’s, a single lotus blossom blooming on her right knee, and is reborn again from the darkness.

Chapter Text

Aelin lies in bed in her apartment, in the bed she’d last shared with Sam, and traces the hydrangea on her right palm.

My city is made of stone.

Your people aren’t.

She doesn’t want to know what she might have done if Maeve had called her bluff, if she’d been pushed just a bit too far. The hydrangea on her hand is proof of her heartlessness, after all.

It doesn’t take much for heartless to become monster.

Chaol’s scathing words echo in her mind. Maybe she already is a monster. Maybe her humanity abandoned her long ago.

She thinks of the creature she and Dorian had trapped in the library, of the dozens of flowers that littered its skin, of the too-human heart in its chest and the moment of relief in its animal-bright eyes when she’d killed it.

It’d had so many flowers. Proof of what was done to it down in the forgotten dungeons, proof of the monster it’d become.

But she has more flowers than it and she’s still living, still breathing.

She wonders what that says about her.

oO0Oo

Lysandra nods at the letter, lying unopened on the table between them. “It’s all in there. Everything Arobynn did, everything he planned. What he asked Farran to do to Sam, and what he ordered done to you.”

The rest of her words are static in Aelin’s mind. She can’t process them right now, can’t even think about Arobynn and Sam and how Wesley had tried to warn her—

It’s all just a —

Trap.

He’d never liked her and yet he’d risked everything to warn her, had gone after Arobynn in vengeance for her and Sam, and had paid the ultimate price.

She hardly realizes her hand has come up to her throat to clutch at the place where a black dahlia lies behind a thin coat of body paint, the betrayal hidden from the world, until Lysandra says, “Celaena?”

She starts, blinking, and refocuses on the real threat in the room. She still has no idea of Lysandra’s true motivations for being here, won’t put it past Arobynn to use the courtesan to manipulate her in such a way, and she should prioritize the things she can deal with. 

Her hand slides down from her throat to land inconspicuously in her lap. 

Arobynn’s days are numbered — they have been for years now. She can delay his death a little while longer. 

A few more weeks won’t change anything.

oO0Oo

It’s just the two of them in the apartment when Lysandra confesses everything.

Aelin pauses at the kitchen table, where she has a pastry raised halfway to her mouth. She slowly lowers it back to her plate. “The other day, you didn’t just come to warn me about Arobynn.” It isn’t a question.

When Lysandra meets her gaze, her eyes are cold and hard. Strangely, they remind her of Rowan’s predatory gaze, that animalistic focus he always got when hunting in his hawk form. “No,” the courtesan agrees, and her voice is like steel. “I came to help you destroy him.”

“You must trust me a great deal to have said that.”

Lysandra’s throat bobs as she swallows. “You wrecked the Vaults. It was for Sam wasn’t it? Because those people — they all worked for Rourke Farran, and were there when…” She shakes her head and stands from the table, walking towards the kitchen sink. Aelin watches her every move even as she continues speaking. “It’s all for Sam, whatever you have planned for Arobynn. And I — I understand.”

Water runs. Aelin watches as Lysandra runs her left hand under the tap, scrubbing at the skin there, removing layers of body paint, and already has a good idea of what she’ll find when Lysandra returns.

“This appeared the night Wesley died,” Lysandra says, sitting back down and brandishing her wrist across the space between them. “When I had to… After I attended Arobynn, I laid in bed for a long time, just thinking.”

“About?”

“Killing him. And Clarisse. I was just a girl, just like you were, and we never should have been put in those kinds of positions.”

“No, we shouldn’t have,” Aelin agrees quietly.

Shining brilliantly against Lysandra’s milky pale skin, curving around the brothel tattoo that marks her indenture, coltsfoot stains her wrist yellow.

oO0Oo

Kneeling at the headstone engraved with only three words, she traces the marigold on her arm. 

Sam Cortland. 

Beloved. 

Part of her is surprised that the flower is so small, as though her grief for Sam had not been all-consuming. Part of her knows that her grief for him had just been one manifestation of an endless, inevitable cycle.

Just like with her parents, just like with her uncle, just like with her cousin and her kingdom, she had grieved for Sam. Perhaps the grief is such a part of her now that the flowers are unnecessary.

Perhaps she simply has no more tears left to shed.

“I think you would have been a wonderful king,” she whispers to Sam’s grave, the green sleeves of her tunic sighing in the breeze.

She places three pebbles on his headstone and takes a step back. When her skin itches, it’s second nature to tug at her clothes to find the offending flower. This time, however, she only has to turn her head slightly to see it.

On her shoulder, just below where the zephyr flower still pulses in time with her heartbeat, another little pink flower blooms. A single lathyrus blossom, delicate and new.

She knows of two meanings associated with this flower. Thank you for a wonderful time, and goodbye.

As Rowan reaches over to place a pebble of his own on Sam’s grave, she thinks, with no small amount of sadness and melancholy, that this is just another part in the cycle of grief.

Out of everything, she knows moving on will be the hardest and easiest thing she’s ever done. 

oO0Oo

“I told Lysandra she could do it.” Even facing the glowing cityscape of Rifthold, she can feel Rowan’s eyes on her.

She knows the question he wants to ask without even hearing it. Do you regret it?

She lets out a quiet breath. “No. I don’t.” And it’s the truth. After seeing the coltsfoot on Lysandra’s skin, the only such mark she knows of the courtesan having whereas Aelin already has at least half-a-dozen of them on her body, it had been a simple decision to make.

“She deserves it,” she says, turning to face Rowan. “After all, what is vengeance but justice long overdue?”

oO0Oo

There had been another mark inked on her skin the day she was born, something that had always been there but she had never given much thought to before. 

So small it was easily hidden by the ivy of Aedion’s love, a rowan leaf entwined with amaranth curls around the fourth finger of her left hand.

As a child it had made her mildly curious, wondering who she’d gotten protection and courage from and why it was so closely tied with immortal, everlasting love.

(It never occurs to her to take it so literally. Not until Rowan is shot and her scream shatters the world.)

oO0Oo

She watches the midwife at the Faliq estate work carefully, daring her to sell them out or make even one comment about Rowan’s heritage. 

But the midwife — she’d probably given her name but Aelin didn’t hear it, her entire focus on Rowan — only sniffs in distaste at the amount of blood and keeps muttering, “Lucky. So lucky it didn’t hit anything vital.”

Finally, when she's sure Rowan is out of the woods, she turns to Aelin. “You have two choices: you can either go wash up in the spigot outside, or you can sit with the pigs all night. You’re dirty enough that one touch could infect his wounds.”

Her temper flares so fast, it’s a good thing they’re in Adarlan, where magic is still shackled. She might otherwise have turned the midwife to cinders for even suggesting separating her and Rowan. Feral protectiveness surges within her and she has to clench her bloodied hands into fists to stop from reaching for her daggers.

But the midwife is right, she knows that. Rowan’s healing factor is compromised here, where he has no access to his powers. Back in Mistward, an infection would probably have only been a minor inconvenience; here, it could very well kill him.

She glances at Aedion. He gives her a silent confirmation. He’ll look after her — after Rowan until she returns.

So she turns on her heel without a word and goes to wash off the witch’s blood in the trough outside. She pumps freezing water into the basin, watching it gush out in waves, and scrubs her hands until the water runs purple with a mixture of red and blue blood and her fingers are so cold they ache. 

Her tunic’s pretty much a lost cause, torn in several places and stained with so much blood and dust that there's no salvaging it. Shame. It’s one of her favourites.

Letting out a shaky breath, she cups water in her hands and pours it over her hair, working out the dirt and blood as best she can. Gods, she misses her bath. The same bath where she’d washed Rowan’s hair—

Rowan. She braces her hands on the metal edge of the trough. Her mate. Holy gods, Rowan is her mate. 

She’d wondered for months now, her curiosity only satisfied somewhat by the carranam bond that formed between them during the battle at Mistward. There had been something else between them, something deeper, but she’d had Sam and he’d had Lyria and—

A sob breaks from her lips and she muffles it with her hand. Rowan already had a mate and she’d died centuries ago. Was it possible for a mating bond to be one-sided only? Maybe Rowan was her mate but she wasn’t his. 

The thought threatens to break her. 

She crumples to the ground, heedless of the damp earth she’s now sitting on, and cradles her left hand to her chest. Nearly lost among the daffodil and the peony and the twisting ivy, she runs the fingers of her other hand along the ring of amaranth and rowan leaves.

It didn’t stand for protection and courage — that had never been their meaning at all. The rowan leaves literally mean Rowan.

Another quiet sob escapes, her breath hitching with it. Here, alone by the spigot with everyone in the house and no one to hear her fall apart, she lets herself weep for their misfortune. She loves him — has loved him for a while now, even if she hasn’t admitted it — and the idea of losing him because of this — or worse, of him rejecting her because of Lyria’s memory — is too much.

She wipes the tears away and resolves to keep this secret. This is wartime, they can’t afford distractions. No obligations, no demands. If he decides to love her, it will be because he loves her even without the mating bond, because he loves her enough to move on from his mate and spend what few decades she has together.

With that final thought, she dries her tears and stands. A small blue rose blooms on the skin between her fourth and fifth finger, silently judging her for the unattainable love she still desires.

She resolutely ignores it.

Chapter Text

“Just once,” she breathes. “I want to kiss you just once.”

“That sounds like you’re expecting not to do it again.”

Sorrow and fear flickers in her eyes as she steps closer. “I know the odds.”

“You and I have always relished in damning the odds,” he says as he pulls her closer, wrapping a hand around her waist. He leans in, breath ghosting across her ear. “What are you waiting for?”

The raw tone of his voice sends a shiver down her spine. “Bastard,” she murmurs, and kisses him.

The feeling of his lips on hers is like coming home, the answer to every question she’s ever asked. If she hadn’t been so sure of it before, she’d have realize who he is to her at that moment. The ring of rowan leaves and amaranth encircling her finger heats pleasantly, a warmth that reminds her of how he’d never balked at her flames, at her temper, at her inheritance or her destiny. 

She’s kissing him now, her perfect match, her carranam and mate, and she thinks she’d burn the world to ash if he was ever taken from her.

The kiss is soft, barely a whisper of lips pressed together, but when she pulls away, Rowan looks like he’s been gutted, eyes half-lidded and mouth parted slightly. It’s a rather attractive look on him — and more than flattering, she thinks, to see the normally put-together and no-nonsense male reduced to looking like a schoolboy who’s just discovered what women are.

“Again,” he breathes, but she just slides out of his grip.

“If we live through tomorrow, you’ll get the rest,” she says with a grin. 

When they slip into bed together, Rowan holds her tightly and buries his face in her hair, just breathing her in. In the last of the candlelight, just before she blows out the flames and settles down to sleep, Aelin catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror she keeps on her night table.

She looks happy. It’s such a novel thing that she almost misses the newest flower that must have appeared when she kissed Rowan.

Just below her ear, a sprig of clove winds down her jawline. 

Undying love.

She’s still smiling as she falls asleep.

oO0Oo

The glass castle shatters around her and she falls, just like she had so many years before, with asphodel blossoms climbing up her ankles. 

oO0Oo

“Foooooooood!” Evangeline howls, echoed quickly by Fleetfoot. Lysandra snarls at them and puts her paws over her snout in a vain attempt to block out the noise.

Rowan laughs. “We should make breakfast before Evangeline and Fleetfoot ransack the whole site.”

Aelin chuckles and makes to follow him across the camp, only to stop when her left wrist itches. She glances down at her newest flower, carefully hidden among the milkweed that wraps around her manacle scars, and swallows down the rising tide of emotions.

A white queen of the night blossom grows among the pale pink flowers of freedom. 

Enjoy small moments because they do not last.

She closes her eyes, all the heat in her blood from kissing Rowan just a moment ago now gone, and only prays she can get through this war with her family and her kingdom intact.

oO0Oo

Find me allies.

You shall remain a princess by blood—but not queen.

I will have no use for you in Orynth.

What a waste of life that was. A princess actually dedicated to her people.

Aelin stares at the hawk disappearing in the night sky, off to save another friend she’d abandoned, and ignores the heavy gazes of her court on her back. She runs her fingers along the band of amaranth blossoms and rowan leaves on her finger.

Darrow’s words echoed in her ears, heavy and painful. The truth of it is all-consuming; with the signatures from the other lords of Terrasen, even with Murtaugh and Ren on her side, she cannot enter Orynth without declaring war on her people, and she won’t do that to them.

She’s Queen of Terrasen by birthright and blood, and the orange crown imperial flower that bloomed on her skin after her declaration following the destruction of the glass castle all but confirms it, but there are greater things at play here than her pride.

Her arm prickles, like something’s moving beneath the skin, and she pushes her sleeve above her elbow to reveal the white and pink rainflower that blooms to life on her bicep.

I must atone for my sins.

She lets out a long breath and pulls her sleeve back down. Fine. If that’s how it has to be.

She turns and walks away from the group. Darrow’s face is purple from rage and in any other situation, it might have been funny. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demands.

“To call in old debts and promises,” she says over her shoulder. “To raise an army of assassins and thieves and exiles and commoners. To finish what was started long, long ago.”

She doesn’t look back at him or Murtaugh and Ren as she mounts her horse and pretends the wetness on her face is from the rain.

oO0Oo

Celaena had kept the paint on, flowers covered and life hidden, even as she’d kissed Dorian and slept beside Chaol, never letting them see the truth. 

Aelin does no such thing when she falls into bed with Rowan. She lets him love her, scars and flowers and all.

She’s never had to hide anything from him. Many of the same flowers litter his skin, a garden of rhododendron, wormwood, monkshood, ferns and cyprus mirroring her own. Unlike with every other male she’s been with, she is free to be wholly and completely herself when she’s with him.

“You’re beautiful,” Rowan breathes as he gazes upon her. 

She stretches her arms above her head to deposit the Amulet of Orynth in the sand. She watches his eyes track the movement of her chest, of her arms, the delicate arch of her neck.

“I know,” she says, with a smirk and a silent taunt. 

Show me, Prince.

So he does.

oO0Oo

“Aelin?” Lysandra knocks once on the door to her cabin’s small bathing quarters, then enters. She wrinkles her nose at the smell of vomit and fear that hangs sour in the air. “Are you—”

She stops when she sees Aelin, sitting on the floor with her head in her hands, a bucket half-filled at her side, and takes in the bloodless tint of her lips, the sweat that beads on her brow.

“Oh gods,” she breathes. “You’re not—”

She can’t make herself say it — can’t even think about that possibility in the middle of a war — but Aelin shakes her head. “I’m not pregnant.”

“Then why did Rowan look like he’d just been punched when he came to get me?”

Aelin moans and scrubs what might be tears from her cheeks. “Lysandra,” she says and looks up. Her eyes are puffy and bloodshot, the only sign of colour on her face, and she looks absolutely terrified. “I need to ask you something.”

“Anything.” Lysandra steps farther into the bathing room and closes the door. She would open a porthole to help get rid of the smell, but judging from Aelin’s expression, this is a conversation she doesn’t want overheard by the many pairs of Fae-enhanced ears on this ship. 

Aelin swallows. She opens and closes her mouth several times, like she doesn’t know where to begin, before finally saying, “Your shifting — can you do flowers, too? Can you hide or create them the same way you can change your appearance?”

Lysandra shakes her head. “No. They’re connected to our souls, not our physical appearances, so I can’t do anything about them. They’re like my tattoo,” she says mournfully. “I can’t get rid of them no matter how hard I try.”

“How many do you have?” Aelin asks, tilting her head in curiosity.

“A few. Definitely not as many as you. I hide them using paints.”

Aelin nods, like she’d expected that. “And your… training… under Clarisse? What did you do with the flowers then?”

“I hid them,” Lysandra says. “Sometimes we had clients who wanted a… particular type of girl, so we’d paint false flowers on our skin.” She shrugs, “It’s really not so different from applying kohl or blush. We learned to get by.”

Aelin’s throat bobs. “How good are you at it?”

It finally hits Lysandra what she’s asking. “I could probably replicate yours well enough to pass scrutiny. Most of them are hidden by clothes, right?” Aelin nods. “So I’d only have to paint on the ones that show above your tunic, or on the rare occasions when you have to wear something more revealing, I could do more. Why do you ask?”

Aelin closes her eyes. A single tear slides down her cheek. “I realized something, when Manon spoke about Baba Yellowlegs and when Fenrys — Nameless is my price. It was—” she laughs, a touch hysterically. “It was there the whole time. The answer.”

“Aelin.” Lysandra sits down beside her on the cold wooden floor and takes her hand. “Aelin, what’s going on?”

She looks up, eyes shining silver, and whispers, “I need you to do something for me.” 

oO0Oo

“By the power vested in me by, uh, you,” the captain glances hastily at Aelin, “as master and captain of this vessel, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

He wisely steps away as Rowan pulls her against him, his hands cradling her jaw and his lips slanting over hers.

They kiss in the dawning light, Aedion and Lysandra as their witnesses and a very bewildered ship's captain standing off to the side. Rowan kisses her like a male starved, like her lips are his salvation and his damnation all at once. 

She presses her hand to his chest, right over the scar from where Asterin’s arrow had nearly killed him. That had been when she’d realized what — who — he is to her, though she should have known long before then. 

She hasn’t told him yet, isn’t sure if she’ll ever tell him, but the amaranth and iris that bloom over the scar betray his own emotions. Everlasting love and her own flames, all twisted and twined together until nothing can separate them.

Rowan breaks the kiss and rests his forehead against hers. “Aelin,” he murmurs, like her name is the answer to every question he’s ever asked.

“Rowan Whitethorn,” she says, laughing. “If I’d known that all it took to get you to kiss me like that was to marry you, I would have done this a long time ago.”

“Galathynius. Rowan Whitethorn Galathynius.” He kisses her again, fiercely and thoroughly, but not possessively. Not possessive, never possessive. At least, not in any way she doesn’t want him to be. “You’re not the last one, not anymore. You’re not alone.”

Something twists in her gut, just thinking about the impossible task set for her a millenia ago, but she smiles. It’s a happy day, for all that their days can be happy in wartime, and she won’t ruin it.

“King Rowan Whitethorn Galathynius,” she says against his mouth, kissing him again. “I like the sound of that.”

She stands on her tiptoes to kiss him deeper, his hands still cradling her face, and for a moment, they’re lost in each other. No war, no flowers, no looming fate, not even the three spectators standing awkwardly on the sidelines.

Just them. Just Rowan and Aelin. Just as it was always meant to be.

oO0Oo

Cairn circles her body, cataloguing all the scars and flowers that litter her flesh. He snorts when he sees the tattoos that Rowan so lovingly inked onto her skin above the lash marks from Endovier, above the tangle of death and danger that cascades down her shoulders.

“What’s this?” The butt of the whip raps sharply against the burn scar on her lower back.

Aelin clenches her jaw, but says nothing.

“Answer him,” Maeve purrs. “Tell them all about how you abandoned your people to die.”

“Royalty,” Aelin bites out. “It used to be royalty, before Arobynn Hamel burned it away.”

Somewhere behind her, Elide gives a choked cry. Aelin closes her eyes. She can’t bear to see the disappointment and condemnation in everyone’s eyes, can’t bear their pity either. She can only hope that Manon understands the unspoken message she’d given when she slipped the Amulet of Orynth into her pocket and will know to get Elide to safety.  

She thinks of the messages she’d sent across the continent in the past weeks, of Chaol in the court of the khaganate across the sea, hopefully working out an alliance with them. She thinks of Ansel’s troops and Rolfe’s fleet, of the numerous debts and promises she’s called in.

She doesn’t know how many of them will answer her call. Right now, kneeling before this bitch of a queen and her sadistic pet Fae, she’s not sure she wants to know. 

She thinks of the plan she’d worked through with Lysandra, of the snapdragon that had bloomed on her ankle, the only outward sign of the deception Aelin had made her promise to live. 

The sharp sound of a whip cracking in the air threatens to make her start screaming, but she refuses to give them the satisfaction. Endovier had taught her how to pace herself, how to weather the worst of the pain, and she’ll hold out as long as she can, even if she knows it will be futile.

She kisses the tiny band of rowan leaves and amaranth on her finger. She’s just grateful for Elena’s sacrifice, for the time she’d spent with Rowan, for learning to love and to dance and to be utterly wonderful.

She’s just grateful she’d had time.

Chapter Text

In the coffin, she dreams.

Flashes of memories, of moments she’s not sure ever existed, race behind her eyelids. They’re all stories she tells herself, about music and dancing and watching the sun rise over Rifthold’s emerald rooftops.

She tells the stories of her flowers most of all. 

How edelweiss for courage had appeared when she’d defied Arobynn and Rolfe and freed those slaves in Skull’s Bay, how milkweed had wrapped around her wrists when she’d left Endovier, how the lathyrus on her on her shoulder was Sam’s final goodbye, a whisper of forgiveness and love. 

Sometimes she can’t remember if the stories are real or not, but they help to pass the time between bouts of agony, help keep her tethered as she plunges into her magic.

Other times, she wonders about Elena, about the impossible choice she’d made and the unforgivable future she’d damned them to.

She wonders if, in Elena’s position, she might have done the same thing. 

But she also thinks about the memories the witch mirror had shown her, Manon standing silently at her side, and understands her ancestor a little more.

The Aelin who’d fallen into the Florrine had been so young, so precious and innocent despite the burden placed upon her long before her birth, and Elena had given up everything to keep that fragile heart beating a little while longer.

Above her navel, where the Amulet of Orynth had rested on the chain around her tiny neck, a hyssop blossom has been there for nearly as long as she can remember, discovered that night in Arobynn’s kitchen as she changed out of her freezing clothes. She hadn’t understood what sacrifice the flower had been representing back then, but she thinks she might now.

Maybe it’s Elena’s. Maybe it’s the one Aelin is fated to make. Maybe it’s both.

It doesn’t matter.

Above her, chains rattle. Footsteps crunch the earthen floor, metal clattering on trays nearby.

A single tear drips down her cheek, tracing the mistletoe that had appeared on the beach that day. 

I surmount all obstacles.

Cairn is returning, and the flowers have never felt more like a lie.

oO0Oo

The trip through the underground caverns of Wendlyn is painfully slow, the boat far too small for the enormity of the situation.

She knows they’re trying. They’re giving her and Fenrys space and silence to process what happened, even though Rowan hovers and tries not to fuss.

Territorial Fae bastard.

The thought is almost enough to make her lips twitch in a smile. 

Almost, but not quite. 

She suspects she won’t smile again for a very long time.

She’s still not sure how many days, weeks, or months passed while she was held captive by Maeve. Her companions might have told her, but she doesn’t remember.

Both she and Fenrys remain at the back of the boat, as far away from Lorcan as possible. Fenrys refuses to leave his wolf form. She doesn’t speak a word after her hysteric mantra in the woods.

Get it off! Get it off!

Without the irons caging her, it’s hard to remember who she is, that she is human and not whatever it is the magic tries to convince her to be. All her concentration is focused on continuing that deep, endless descent into her power, a final death blow to take out Maeve and Erawan at the same time. 

If the resulting blast kills her too, then so be it.

With every day she surpresses her magic, doesn’t let a single spark escape her iron will, she feels the ferns creep further up her sides.

Her powers are using her body as a battleground, destroying her in the process. Still she continues following the well of magic down, down, down, and doesn’t think about what will happen when she reaches the bottom.

Sooner or later, something will break. Something has to break.

She’s just not sure she’ll survive the cataclysm.

oO0Oo

She studies her hands in the flickering light of their campfire. She’s never seen her flowers so starkly before, not hidden or mutilated by scars and paints.

The colours are far too vibrant against her pale skin. They remind her of the poisonous lizards in the Red Desert, the ones whose bright colours belies the dangers within. 

Her skin is a tapestry of twisting flowers and vines, each one bearing witness to the tragedy of her life. Two too-short decades, all about to come to an abrupt end.

She has long since accepted that she is a walking contradiction. She has hope on one palm, heartlessness on the other. Sorrow curls around her neck but joy is inked onto her thigh. Royalty was burned away long ago but that hadn’t stopped majesty from appearing anyway.

Except the angrec on her back has reappeared. Cairn had taken great amusement in ripping away the scars at the base of her spine and watching the healers regrow her skin, the white petals bleeding through the red that caked her body, only to destroy it all again.

After every session, after she surfaced from dreams into nightmares she wasn’t sure were real, every inch of exposed skin was stained with colour, every petal and leaf intact.

That’s what finally convinces her that this isn’t an illusion. 

Her flowers hadn’t been the same in the other worlds Maeve had created, mere shadows of themselves if they even existed at all. Maybe Maeve couldn’t replicate them or maybe she hadn’t understood the nature of the flowers, had sought to break her mind by creating a perfect world, a reality in which years of pain and betrayal were swept away, but she’d forgotten one thing.

They are Aelin’s flowers. They are just as much a part of her as her magic and her mating bond with Rowan are. They cannot be changed or hidden away because they are hers. They stand as silent sentinels to the passage of time, reminding Aelin of who she was, who she is, and who she will be. 

Maeve cannot take them away because they were never hers to take in the first place.

oO0Oo

She picks through the treasure even after everyone but Rowan has returned to the boat, even after her pockets have been filled to bursting with stolen gold from a forgotten king’s tomb. 

Finally, she finds what she’s been looking for. Two gleaming rings, untouched by the centuries buried beneath Wendlyn’s rolling hills. One ruby, one emerald, clearly fashioned for monarchs long since turned to dust.

“I don’t know the Fae customs,” she says when she stops in front of Rowan and opens her hand. Her voice is hoarse from months of screaming, vocal cords blown out from the strain, and she doesn’t dare attempt more than a whisper. “But when humans wed, rings are exchanged.”

Rowan’s throat bobs as he looks at the two golden bands, silver gleaming in his eyes. Her breath is tight in her chest, a terrifying last thought of what if this isn’t real what if he doesn’t want this—

But then he’s putting on a brave smile. “I assume the sparkly emerald is for me.”

For all his bravado, his eyes are full of concern.

She lets out a sharp breath that might be considered a laugh and takes his hand, slipping the ruby ring onto his finger.

Rowan looks up sharply at the sound, unbridled hope and joy brimming across his face, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him how broken she is, how little of the arrogant, swaggering queen is left. 

She lets him slide the emerald ring onto her finger, the cool metal resting snugly in the same place where the band of rowan leaves and amaranth flowers have been her entire life.

“To whatever end,” Rowan whispers.

Wetness clings to her eyelashes. “To whatever end,” she agrees.

For the first time in months, perhaps even years, for just a moment, everything feels right.  

oO0Oo

“I was Maeve’s captive for two months.” Her voice is flat, not a hint of emotion wavering there. She knows her eyes are dead, nothing but painful emptiness behind them.

Just the thought of what Maeve had done to them all, to her, to the world… She’d ripped through the minds of gods and fabricated a reality so convincing no one had been able to tell for millenia.

Who’s to say this isn’t also a lie?

She silences that thought quickly. If she goes down that road again, she’s not sure she’ll be able to come back this time.

Her power flares and bucks against the iron chains she’s wrapped around it. She pushes the numbing cold down farther, smothering the flames that try to escape their confines.

“What?” Chaol says, the word a strangled thing breaking the silence.

She doesn’t look at him, gaze pinned on the war map. Only the weight of Rowan’s hands on her shoulders keep her from bolting out of the tent. She leans further into his touch. “She wanted to break me to her will, to make me into… some sort of weapon, I thought. But now…”

“Aelin, what did she do to you?” Chaol says as he takes in her state, the smoothness of her skin, the abundance of unblemished flowers, and the complete and utter lack of magic.

She does look up then, meets his eyes and sees him recoil at the emptiness in her gaze. She wonders how long she can keep pretending, how long she can hide the love-lies-bleeding that has been in bloom on her skin since they’d locked her in that coffin, how long she can hide the utter hopelessness of it all.

Hasar hisses, as though she can hear the answer in the silence that falls over them. “We’ll make the bitch pay for that, too, won’t we?”

Aelin turns her dead gaze to meet the princess. She doesn’t like the instinctive recoil she has to force down at the dark eyes that meet her own.

“Yes,” she agrees. “We will.”

oO0Oo

The pain of the needle is sharp but Rowan’s hands are gentle on her skin as he tattoos her back, beautiful black ink sprawling over the death that now spills unimpeded down her shoulders.

He tattoos the stories of her loved ones where they had once been, no longer over ridges of scar tissue but the same in spirit. 

He also tattoos a new design on her back, a new story for a new age.

The story of them, of Rowan and Aelin, twisting whorls and swirls forming spread wings across her shoulder blades, outlined in amaranth blossoms.

It’s their story, one that had begun in rage and sorrow and become something else entirely, but above all else, held in undying love.

When this is all over, she hopes he remembers that.

oO0Oo

They say a person’s soulflower dictates their destiny, foretells their future long before they live it. 

But this is what they forget: destinies can be altered. The future is never set in stone. 

Perhaps the big picture can’t be changed, perhaps fate or the gods or the universe conspires to make it so, but the little things? The tiny, seemingly-insignificant moments that unfold throughout a person’s life? 

It’s there, in those brief snippets of time, that the future is altered, constantly and forever. 

Maybe the ending won’t be different, maybe some things will always happen, but the journey is never something so simple as predetermined. Nothing is ever that easy.

Her soulflower is fate, but blackthorn also means hope against adversity, is a symbol of protection and good fortune. 

Perhaps those are not so different after all.

She watches them approach the portal, those beings Erelia thought of as gods, and fury kindles within her as she summons her magic.

They’ve been watching her her whole life. They really should’ve expected this.

oO0Oo

Perhaps it’s the lack of scars adorning new flesh, a blank tapestry disguising months of agony and despair. 

Perhaps it’s the flowers peeking out from beneath her clothes, a veritable garden inked on her body.

Perhaps it’s her youth or the way she’d bargained for Elena’s freedom from her millenia-old oath.

Perhaps a spark of humanity returns to Mala in that moment, looking between her daughter and her heir.

Whatever the case, the goddess reaches within herself and pulls out a fist-sized chunk of magic. It’s a glowing, pulsing orb of pure sunlight and fire, not the tiny kernel it might have been in another life.

One last gift, the goddess seems to say, for the Queen Who Was Promised.

It’s as though Mala, removed from the world as she is and forever yearning to return home, knows how much Aelin’s magic means to her after having sacrificed so much in her life. 

When she forges the Lock, Aelin burns through the goddess’ gift even as she traps them in another world, retribution for their lies and manipulations and broken promises, but her own gift of magic, the last trace of Mala Light-Bringer’s love for her family, remains untouched. Even falling through portals to dozens of different worlds, her own fire and the single drop of her mother’s water are tucked away in her heart, safe and protected.

When she hits the ground in the mortal world, body steaming and glowing with power, she holds out her hand and watches flames flicker at her fingertips. She’s drained beyond belief, teetering at the edge of a very final burnout that she knows will take weeks to recover from, but it’s still there. 

Her gift is intact. She is a Fire-Bringer still.

oO0Oo

Darkness pools in Maeve’s outstretched hand, face twisted in a cruel sneer. “There are no gods left to watch, I’m afraid. And there are no gods left to help you now, Aelin Galathynius.”

Of course there aren’t, because she got rid of them. But she only smiles, body burning and Goldryn wreathed in flames. 

“I am a god.”

She unleashes herself upon them, pink and white daphnes searing themselves into her skin.

Immortality. Victory.

There will only be one immortal left standing on the battlefield, and it will be her.

oO0Oo

She never thought she’d be here. After almost twelve years, she’s finally home. 

Her coronation gown is beautiful, flowing fabric of green and silver, a mirror to the tunic Rowan wears, but it’s the throne room, filled to bursting with Fae and witches, humans from a dozen different kingdoms and those who belong to no kingdom at all, that brings tears to her eyes.

As is traditional for the rulers of Terrasen, she wears no body paint, her flowers on full display, all her subjects seeing her for who she is, wholly and completely.

She ascends the steps of the dais, each step a lifetime in the making, and as she says her vows in the Old Language, she swears she feels more presences than there are bodies in the room. A tear glistens on her cheek at the thought that her loved ones, those both dead and alive, are with her today.

She rises, holding the sceptre and orb in hand as Darrow pronounces her Queen Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius of Terrasen, first of her name, Faerie Queen of the West and the Queen Who Walked Between Worlds.

The halls bursts into cheers and applause as she faces them as their eternal monarch for the first time.

And on her forehead, as in the fields below, the kingsflame blooms.