“I wished it to let go, and it did,” Nesta said, surveying Amren with cool disdain.
“Like calls to like,” Rhys said. “Others could not free themselves because the Mask did not recognize their power. The Mask rode them, not the other way around. Only one Made from the same dark source can wear the Mask and not be ruled by it.”
“So Queen Briallyn could use it,” Azriel said. “Perhaps that’s why the Autumn Court soldiers were in Oorid: she can’t yet risk setting foot here, but she found a unit to go in for her.”
The words rippled through the room.
Nesta again stared at the Mask. “It should be destroyed.”
“That’s not possible,” Amren said. “Perhaps if the Cauldron had been truly destroyed, the Mask might have been weakened enough for the High Lords and Feyre to join their power and do it.”
“If the Cauldron had been destroyed,” Feyre said with a shiver, “then life would have ceased to exist.”
“So the Mask remains,” Amren said wryly. “It can only be dealt with. Not eliminated.”
“We should dump it in the sea, then,” Nesta said.
“No taste for the living dead, girl?” Amren asked.
Nesta slid her eyes toward Amren in a way that had Cassian bracing for the worst. “No good can come of its power.”
“If we dump it in the sea,” Azriel said, “some wicked creature might find it. It’s safer to keep it locked up with us.”
“Even if it can open doors and undo spells?” Rhys asked.
“Like calls to like,” Feyre said into the puzzled quiet. “Perhaps Nesta could ward it and lock the room. Contain it.”
“I don’t know how to do those spells,” Nesta said. “I failed at the most basic of them while training with Amren, remember?”
Feyre’s head tilted to one side. “Is that what you think, Nesta? That you failed?”
Nesta straightened, and Cassian’s chest tightened at the wall that rose in her eyes, brick by brick. At the truth Nesta had let slip with that one word. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, her old self rearing its head as her chin lifted. “Tell me how to do the spells, and I’ll try.” She directed the last part to Amren, to Rhys.
“When Helion comes,” Rhys said gently, as if he, too, understood what Nesta had revealed, “I’ll have him show you. He knows spells for warding that even I don’t.”
The silence became tense enough that Cassian made himself grin. “Considering that Nesta brushed off Helion’s smoldering advances during the war, he might not be so inclined to help her.”
“He’ll help,” Rhys said, stars shimmering in his gaze. “If only for another shot at her.”
Nesta rolled her eyes, and the gesture was so normal that Cassian’s smile became more genuine, edged now with relief.
You wear your heart for all to see, brother, Rhys said without turning Cassian’s way.
Cassian only shrugged. He was past caring.
Feyre said to Nesta, “We should get Madja to tend to your wounds.”
“They’re already healing,” Nesta said, and Cassian wondered if she had any idea how awful she looked.
Indeed, Amren said, “You look like a cat tried to eat your face off.” She sniffed. “And you smell like a swamp.”
“Being dragged through a bog will do that to you,” Cassian said to Amren, earning a surprised look from Nesta. He asked her, “How did the kelpie snare you?”
Nesta’s scratched-up throat bobbed. “I grew … nervous when you—both of you—didn’t come back.” The silence in the room was palpable. “I went to find you.”
Cassian didn’t dare say that he’d only been gone thirty minutes. Thirty minutes, and she’d been in a panic like that? “We wouldn’t have left you,” he said carefully.
“I wasn’t afraid of being left. I was afraid both of you were dead.”
That she kept emphasizing both of you tightened his chest. He knew what she was carefully avoiding saying. She’d been worried enough that she’d ventured into Oorid’s perils for him.
Nesta turned from his stare. “I was about to go into the water when the kelpie appeared. It crawled onto the bank, spoke to me, and then dragged me in.”
“It spoke to you?” Rhys asked.
“Not in a language I knew.”
Rhys’s mouth quirked to the side. “Can you show me?”
Nesta frowned, as if unwilling to relive the memory, but nodded. Both of their gazes went vacant, and then Rhys pulled back.
“That thing …” He surveyed Nesta with blatant shock that she had survived. Rhys turned to Amren. “Have a listen.”
Their eyes became glazed, and none of them spoke as Rhys showed Amren.
Even Amren’s face paled at whatever Rhys showed her, and then she was shaking her head, her black bob of hair swaying. “That is a dialect of our tongue that has not been spoken in fifteen thousand years.”
“I could only pick up every other word,” Rhys said.
Feyre arched a brow. “You speak the language of the ancient Fae?”
Rhys shrugged. “My education was thorough.” He waved an idle, graceful hand. “For exactly these situations.”
Azriel asked, “What’d the kelpie say?”
Amren shot an alarmed glance at Nesta, then answered, “He said: Are you my sacrifice, sweet flesh? How pale and young you are. Tell me, are they resuming the sacrifices to the waters once more? And when she didn’t respond, the kelpie said, No gods can save you. I shall take you, little beauty, and you shall be my bride before you are my supper.”
Nesta’s hand drifted to the marks on her face, then recoiled.
Horror slid through Cassian—then molten rage.
“People used to sacrifice to kelpies?” Feyre asked, nose crinkling with disgust and dread.
“Yes,” Amren said, scowling. “The most ancient Fae and humans believed kelpies to be river and lake gods, though I always wondered if the sacrifices started as a way to prevent the kelpies from hunting them. Keep them fed and happy, control the deaths, and they wouldn’t crawl out of the water to snatch the children.” Her teeth flashed. “For this one to still be speaking that ancient dialect … He must have retreated to Oorid a long time ago.”
“Or been raised by parents who spoke that dialect,” Azriel countered.
“No,” Amren said. “The kelpies do not breed. They rape and torment, but they do not reproduce. They were made, legend says, by the hand of a cruel god—and deposited throughout the waters of this land. The kelpie you slew, girl, was perhaps one of the last.”
Nesta gazed at the Mask again.
Rhys said, “It flew to you. The Mask.” He must have seen it in her head.
“I was trying to reach for my power,” Nesta murmured, and they all stilled—she’d never spoken of her power so explicitly. “This answered instead.”
“Like calls to like,” Feyre repeated. “Your power and the Mask’s are similar enough that to reach for one was to reach for the other.”
“So you admit your powers remain, then,” Amren said drily.