Lucien remained pressed against that tree. And he watched in silence as Ianthe stooped to pick up a gray, rough rock about the size of an apple.
“Put your right hand on that boulder.”
She obeyed, though a tremor went down her spine.
Her mind thrashed and struggled against me, like a fish snared on a line. I dug my mental talons in deeper, and some inner voice of hers began screaming.
“Smash your hand with the rock as hard as you can until I tell you to stop.”
The hand she’d put on him, on so many others.
Ianthe brought the stone up. The first impact was a muffled, wet thud.
The second was an actual crack.
The third drew blood.
Her arm rose and fell, her body shuddering with the agony.
And I said to her very clearly, “You will never touch another person against their will. You will never convince yourself that they truly want your advances; that they’re playing games. You will never know another’s touch unless they initiate, unless it’s desired by both sides.”
Thwack; crack; thud.
“You will not remember what happened here. You will tell the others that you fell.”
Her ring finger had shifted in the wrong direction.
“You are allowed to see a healer to set the bones. But not to erase the scarring. And every time you look at that hand, you are going to remember that touching people against their will has consequences, and if you do it again, everything you are will cease to exist. You will live with that terror every day, and never know where it originates. Only the fear of something chasing you, hunting you, waiting for you the instant you let your guard down.”
Silent tears of pain flowed down her face.
“You can stop now.”
The bloodied rock tumbled onto the grass. Her hand was little more than cracked bones wrapped in shredded skin.
“Kneel here until someone finds you.”
Ianthe fell to her knees, her ruined hand leaking blood onto her pale robes.
“I debated slitting your throat this morning,” I told her. “I debated it all last night while you slept beside me. I’ve debated it every single day since I learned you sold out my sisters to Hybern.” I smiled a bit. “But I think this is a better punishment. And I hope you live a long, long life, Ianthe, and never know a moment’s peace.”
I stared down at her for a moment longer, tying off the tapestry of words and commands I’d woven into her mind, and turned to Lucien. He’d fixed his pants, his shirt.
His wide eyes slid from her to me, then to the bloodied stone.
“The word you’re looking for, Lucien,” crooned a deceptively light female voice, “is daemati.”
We whirled toward Brannagh and Dagdan as they stepped into the clearing, grinning like wolves.
CHAPTER
10
Brannagh ran her fingers through Ianthe’s golden hair, clicking her tongue at the bloodied pulp cradled in her lap. “Going somewhere, Feyre?”
I let my mask drop.
“I have places to be,” I told the Hybern royals, noting the flanking positions they were too casually establishing around me.
“What could be more important than assisting us? You are, after all, sworn to assist our king.”
Time—biding their time until Tamlin returned from hunting with Jurian.
Lucien shoved off the tree, but didn’t come to my side. Something like agony flickered across his face as he finally noted the stolen bandolier, the pack on my shoulders.
“I have no allegiance to you,” I told Brannagh, even as Dagdan began to edge past my line of sight. “I am a free person, allowed to go where and when I will it.”
“Are you?” Brannagh mused, sliding a hand to her sword at her hip. I pivoted slightly to keep Dagdan from slipping into my blind spot. “Such careful plotting these weeks, such skilled maneuvering. You didn’t seem to worry that we’d be doing the same.”
They weren’t letting Lucien leave this clearing alive. Or at least with his mind intact.
He seemed to realize it at the same moment I did, understanding that there was no way they’d reveal this without knowing they’d get away with it.
“Take the Spring Court,” I said, and meant it. “It’s going to fall one way or another.”
Lucien snarled. I ignored him.
“Oh, we intend to,” Brannagh said, sword inching free of its dark sheath. “But then there’s the matter of you.”
I thumbed free two of the Illyrian fighting knives.
“Haven’t you wondered at the headaches? How things seem a little muffled on certain mental bonds?”
My powers had tired so swiftly, had become weaker and weaker these weeks—
Dagdan snorted and finally observed to his sister, “I’d give her about ten minutes before the apple sets in.”
Brannagh chuckled, toeing the blue stone shackle. “We gave the priestess the powder at first. Crushed faebane stone, ground so fine you couldn’t see or scent or taste it in your food. She’d add a little at a time, nothing suspicious—not too much, lest it stifle all your powers at once.”
Unease began to clench my gut.
“We’ve been daemati for a thousand years, girl,” Dagdan sneered. “But we didn’t even need to slip into her mind to get her to do our bidding. But you … what a valiant effort you put up, trying to shield them all from us.”
Dagdan’s mind speared for Lucien’s, a dark arrow shot between them. I slammed up a shield between them. And my head—my very bones ached—
“What apple,” I bit out.
“The one you shoved down your throat an hour ago,” Brannagh said. “Grown and tended in the king’s personal garden, fed a steady diet of water laced with faebane. Enough to knock out your powers for a few days straight, no shackles required. And here you are, thinking no one had noticed you planned to vanish today.” She clicked her tongue again. “Our uncle would be most displeased if we allowed that to happen.”
I was running out of borrowed time. I could winnow, but then I’d abandon Lucien to them if he somehow couldn’t manage to himself with the faebane in his system from the food at the camp—
Leave him. I should and could leave him.
But to a fate perhaps worse than death—
His russet eye gleamed. “Go.”
I made my choice.
I exploded into night and smoke and shadow.
And even a thousand years wasn’t enough for Dagdan to adequately prepare as I winnowed in front of him and struck.
I sliced through the front of his leather armor, not deep enough to kill, and as steel snagged on its plates, he twisted expertly, forcing me to either expose my right side or lose the knife—
I winnowed again. This time, Dagdan went with me.
I was not fighting Hybern cronies unaware in the woods. I was not fighting the Attor and its ilk in the streets of Velaris. Dagdan was a Hybern prince—a commander.
He fought like one.
Winnow. Strike. Winnow. Strike.
We were a black whirlwind of steel and shadow through the clearing, and months of Cassian’s brutal training clicked into place as I kept my feet under me.
I had the vague sense of Lucien gaping, even Brannagh taken aback by my show of skill against her brother.
But Dagdan’s blows weren’t hard—no, they were precise and swift, but he didn’t throw himself into it wholly.
Buying time. Wearing me down until my body fully absorbed that apple and its power rendered me nearly mortal.
So I hit him where he was weakest.
Brannagh screamed as a wall of flame slammed into her.
Dagdan lost his focus for all of a heartbeat. His roar as I sliced deep into his abdomen shook the birds from the trees.
“You little bitch,” he spat, dancing back from my next blow as the fire cleared and Brannagh was revealed on her knees. Her physical shield had been sloppy—she’d expected me to attack her mind.
She was shuddering, gasping with agony. The reek of charred skin now drifted to us, directly from her right arm, her ribs, her thigh.
Dagdan lunged for me again, and I brought up both of my knives to meet his blade.
He didn’t pull the blow this time.
I felt its reverberation in every inch of my body.
Felt the rising, stifling silence, too. I’d felt it once before—that day in Hybern.
Brannagh surged to her feet with a sharp cry.
But Lucien was there.
Her focus wholly on me, on taking from me the beauty I’d burned from her, Brannagh did not see him winnow until it was too late.
Until Lucien’s sword refracted the light of the sun leaking through the canopy. And then met flesh and bone.
A tremor shuddered through the clearing—like some thread between the twins had been snipped as Brannagh’s dark head thudded onto the grass.