“So if it goes badly, at least it will kill me, not anyone else?” Nesta couldn’t keep the sharpness from her tone. Rhys had winnowed them here, depositing them at the base of the mountain, as no magic could pierce its heavy wards. Nesta hadn’t been able to look him in the eye.
“You’re not going to be killed. Either by that blade or anything in there.” His jaw tightened as he surveyed the towering gates far above. He’d put many of the current inmates inside, and Nesta had heard Feyre’s harrowing tales of visiting the Prison on several occasions. Little frightened her sister—that Feyre found it to be petrifying didn’t help the twisting sensation in Nesta’s gut.
“You remember the rules?” Cassian asked as they neared the gates of bone, intricately carved with every manner of creature.
“Yes.” Hold Cassian’s hand the entire time, don’t speak of Amren, don’t speak of anything regarding the Trove or the court or Feyre’s pregnancy, don’t speak of the creatures he put in here, don’t do anything except walk and stay on high alert. And get that Harp out before it could unleash chaos.
The bone gates groaned open. Cassian tensed, but kept climbing upward. “Looks like we’re expected.”
Down into the darkness, into hell itself, they walked.
Nesta clutched Cassian’s hand, her rope to life in this lightless place. One of Cassian’s Siphons flared with red light, bloodying the black walls, the doors they sometimes passed.
Cassian moved with the fluidity of a trained warrior, but she noted his gaze darting around the path they walked, which plunged into the earth. The entrance to the hidden hall she’d seen in her scrying had been far, far below—between an iron door with a single rune upon it and a little alcove in the stone.
Soft noises whispered through the rock. She could have sworn nails scraped behind one door. When she glanced at Cassian, his face paled. He noticed her stare and patted his left pectoral—right above the thick scar there. Indication of who was imprisoned behind that door. Who ran their nails over it.
Her blood chilled. Blue Annis.
Cobalt skin and iron claws, he’d said. Annis savored eating her prey.
Nesta swallowed, squeezing Cassian’s hand, and they continued downward.
Minutes or hours passed, she didn’t know. In the gloom, the heavy, whispering air, time had ceased to matter.
Nausea roiled through her. Amren had been in this place for thousands of years, thrown in by fools who had feared her in her true form, that being of flame and light who had laid waste to Hybern’s army.
Nesta couldn’t imagine spending a day in this place. A year.
She didn’t know how Amren hadn’t gone mad. How she’d found the strength to survive.
She’d treated Amren badly. The small thought wedged into her mind. She had used her, exactly as Amren said, as a shield against everyone. And Amren, who had survived millennia in this awful place, alongside the worst monsters in the land … Amren found her abhorrent.
Misery burned like acid.
Something pounded through the rock to their left, and Nesta flinched. Cassian squeezed her hand. “Ignore it,” he murmured.
Down and down, into a place worse than hell. And then she spied an alcove burned into her memory, behind her eyelids. And—yes, beside it was that iron door with the sole rune on its surface.
“Here.” Nesta jerked her chin toward the bald stone. “Through the rock.”
When Cassian didn’t reply, she twisted to him.
His focus lay fixed on the iron door. His golden-brown skin had gone ashen.
His lips mouthed the name of the being behind it.
Lanthys.
“You’re sure …” Cassian swallowed. “You’re sure this is the place?”
“Yes.” Nesta didn’t grant them time to reconsider as she outstretched her free hand and stepped up to the stone.
Her fingers passed through the rock. As if it didn’t exist.
Cassian yanked her back, but she pushed forward, and her hand, then her wrist, then her arm vanished. And then they were through.
“I had no idea there was anything else in the Prison,” Cassian breathed as they continued down another hallway. No doors lined it, just smooth stone. “I thought there were only cells.”
“I told you,” she answered. “I saw a chamber here.”
The light of the Siphon atop Cassian’s hand revealed an archway and openness—and there it was. Raised symbols carved into the floor cast shadows against the crimson light. The entire round chamber was full of them. And in its center—the golden Harp, covered in intricate embossing, set with silver strings.
It didn’t sing, didn’t speak. It might as well have been an ordinary instrument.
Which was exactly why Nesta tugged Cassian into a halt beneath the archway, not daring to step onto the carved floor. “We need to be careful.” Nesta peered into the vast, empty chamber. “There are wards and spells here.”
Cassian rubbed his jaw with his free hand. “My magic doesn’t skew toward spells. I can blast apart magical shields and wards, but if it’s a trap like Feyre and Amren faced at the Summer Court, I can’t sense it.”
Nesta tapped her foot in a swift beat. “Rhysand’s wards on the Mask couldn’t keep me out. The Mask wished for me to come, so it allowed me through. Maybe the Harp will do the same. Like calls to like, as you all enjoy saying.”
“I’m not letting you go into that room alone. Not if that thing wants to play.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
He squeezed her hand, calluses rubbing against her own. “You lead, I’ll follow.”
“What if my presence would go unnoticed, but yours sets off a trap? We can’t risk that.”
His throat bobbed. “I can’t risk you.”
The words slammed into her heart. “I … You can. You have to.” Before he could further object, she said, “You are training me to be a warrior. Yet you’d keep me from danger? How is that any better than a caged animal?”
The words must have struck something in him. “All right.” Cassian unbuckled the great sword he’d carried for her. He looped it around her middle, its weight considerable. She adjusted her balance. “We try it your way. And at the first sign of something wrong, we leave.”
“Fine.” She swallowed the dryness in her mouth.
His eyes glittered, noting her hesitation. “Not too late to change your mind.”
Nesta bristled. “I’m not allowing anyone but us to get their hands on the Harp.”
With that, she stepped to the demarcation line between the hall and the chamber. Bracing herself, she pushed a foot forward.
It was like stepping through mud.
But the wards allowed her through. Nesta took another step, arm extended behind her to hold Cassian’s hand. The pressure of the spells pushed against her calves, her hips, her body, squeezing her lungs. “These are like no wards I’ve felt before,” she whispered, standing still as she waited for any hint of a triggered trap. “They feel old. Incredibly old.”
“They probably predate this place being used as a prison.”
“What was it before?”
“No one knows. It’s always been here. But this chamber …” He surveyed the space beyond her. “I didn’t know places like this existed here. Maybe …” He frowned. “Part of me wonders if the Prison was either built or stocked with its inmates to hide the Harp’s presence. There are so many terrible powers here, and the wards on the mountain itself … I wonder if someone hid the Harp knowing that it’d never be noticed with so much awful magic around it.”