Page 62 of A Crown of Darkness
He belongs to the Aurum now, the Nox went on.It fills him. Oh, child, what have you done? He is lost to us.
That had been what he had always wanted, Wren reminded herself. He was a Knight of the Aurum, a Paladin, touched by its light. She had led him to the Nox and back onto a path he had fought against all his life.
You think the Aurum will treat him better than it has treated any other of its chosen? It will burn him until there is nothing left. It needs a champion. It needs a home. And you have given it both…
‘Wren?’ Finn’s voice was blurred with sleep, but he had opened his eyes and was gazing back at her now.
They were so bright, like the sky on a summer morning, like sunlight seen through deep water, aglow from within. The light in his skin may have faded, but it had coalesced in his eyes instead.
‘Yes,’ she managed. The word almost lodged in her throat.
What had she done? She never thought things through, that was what Elodie had always said. She acted on instinct and that led to disasters. It always had done.
Reach for the light, Elodie had always said that. But what if Elodie was wrong?
Finn brought a hand up to stroke her hair and he smiled. Like he hadn’t a care in the world.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked, and then gave his soft, self-deprecating laugh. ‘Magic, I know. Everything about you is magic. And every time I think I am lost, you’re there to save me, heart.’
He sounded so happy, so at peace.
This was what he had wanted, she reminded herself. This was what he had always wanted. To be safe in the light. To serve the Aurum.
And now it filled him. Spilled out of him. Suffused every part of him. She could feel it radiating through him.
A frown flickered over his brow as he watched her. ‘Are you all right? Is something wrong?’
‘Don’t you feel it?’ she asked.
‘Feel what?’
How could he not know?
They were two opposite powers, light and dark, Aurum and Nox. And there was nothing she could do now to keep him. She had given him up, given him everything he wanted to save him.
But she couldn’t tell him that. Not when she had to look right at him and see the love and the hope die in his beautiful blue eyes.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Just a dream. A bad dream.’
Finn smiled, his fingers playing with the strands of her hair. ‘Let me chase that away?’
CHAPTER 35
ROLAND
Roland had dreamed about Elodie the previous night, in the brief hours he tossed and turned in a guest bedroom of the College of Winter. She was lost in the darkness, heartbroken, and try as he might, he couldn’t reach her. He threw himself against invisible walls, like impregnable glass, but to no avail. The flames that danced around her guttered as if in a wind, and she looked so wan and helpless.
Elodie had never looked helpless. She was fierce and wonderful, his beloved queen.
But not in his nightmare. Here she was helpless and he was powerless, and they were eternally apart.
It was a relief to be on the road, after another brief conference with Vambray that morning.
The enchantments on the College seemed to have vanished with Alouette’s influence, and the relief among the inhabitants was palpable. Roland heard them talking, the people of the College, these witchkind who had never faced such danger, ascribing it by turns to the arrival of the knights and their Grandmaster, and some who even whispered that it was the princess. What Wren would make of that he didn’t know. She didn’t seem anything like the girl he had known in Pelias andRoland didn’t know how to even broach the subject of what she had endured in Sidonia. Or what changes had transformed her.
Because she was transformed. The dark power came off her in waves, so strong even Roland could feel it, and the effect she had on Finn was unsettling. More than unsettling. Her hair was long and rippling with shadows, her skin like moonlight and her eyes wide and dark, but ringed as if bruised. Previously, he had not seen the Nox in her, no matter how many times everyone had told him she was the dark goddess incarnate. She was a child, a girl, his daughter…
But he saw it now.
