Kingdom of Ash

as the stars overhead.
“I crawled ...” His throat bobbed. “I
crawled after Aelin.”
He shut out the bloody sand, the queen’s
screams, her final, pleading requests to Elide.
Shut them out and said, “When Maeve
severed the oath, I couldn’t move, could
barely breathe.”
Such agony that Lorcan couldn’t imagine
what it would be like to sever the oath on his
own, without bidding. It was not the sort of
pain one walked away from.
The oath could be stretched, drawn thin.
That Vaughan, the last of their cadre, still
undoubtedly roamed the wilds of the North in
his “hunt” for Lorcan was proof enough that
the blood oath’s restraints might be worked
around. But to break it outright of his own
will, to find some way to snap the tether,
would be to embrace death.