Fine. That made sense. “Why haven’t we already contacted Vassa about this?”
Mor waved a hand, though her shadowed eyes belied her casual gesture. “Because we’re just now piecing it all together. But you should definitely speak with her, when you can. As soon as you can, actually.”
Cassian nodded. He didn’t dislike Vassa, though meeting her would also entail talking with Lucien and Jurian. The former he’d learned to live with, but the latter … It didn’t matter that it turned out that Jurian had been fighting on their side. That the human general who’d been Amarantha’s tortured prisoner for five centuries had played Hybern after being rebirthed by the Cauldron, and had helped Cassian and his family win the war. Cassian still didn’t like the man.
He rose, leaning to ruffle Mor’s shining hair. “I miss you these days.” She’d been away frequently lately, and each time she returned, a shadow he couldn’t place dimmed her eyes. “You know we’d warn you if Keir ever came here.” Her asshole of a father still hadn’t called in his favor with Rhys: to visit Velaris.
“Eris bought me time.” Her words were laced with acid.
Cassian had tried not to believe it, but he knew Eris had done it as a gesture of good faith. He’d invited Rhysand into his mind to see exactly why he’d convinced Keir to indefinitely delay his visit to Velaris. Only Eris had that sort of sway with the power-hungry Keir, and whatever Eris had offered Keir in exchange for not coming here was still a mystery. At least to Cassian. Rhys probably knew. From Mor’s pale face, he wondered if she knew, too. Eris must have sacrificed something big to spare Mor from her father’s visit, which would have likely been timed for a moment that would maximize tormenting her.
“It doesn’t matter to me.” Mor waved off the conversation with a flip of her hand. He could tell something else was eating at her. But she’d let him in when she was ready.
Cassian walked around the table and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Get some rest.” He shot skyward before she could answer.
Nesta woke to pure darkness.
Darkness that she had not witnessed in years now. Since that ramshackle cottage that had become a prison and a hell.
Jolting upright, hands clutching at her chest, she gasped for air. Had it been some fever dream on a winter’s night? She was still in that cottage, still starving and poor and desperate—
No. The air in the room was toasty, and she was the lone person in the bed, not clinging to her sisters for warmth, always squabbling over who got the coveted middle place in the bed on the coldest nights, or the edges on the hottest summer ones.
And though she’d become as bony as she’d been during those long winters … this body was new, too. Fae. Powerful. Or it had once been.
Scrubbing at her face, Nesta slid from the bed. The floors were warmed. Not the icy wooden planks in the cottage.
Padding to the window, she drew back the drapes and peered out at the darkened city below. Golden lights shone along the streets, dancing on the twining band of the Sidra. Beyond that, only starlight silvered the lowlands before the cold and empty sea.
A scan of the sky revealed nothing regarding how far off dawn might be, and a long moment of listening suggested the household remained asleep. All three of them who occupied it.
How long had she slept? They’d arrived by eleven in the morning, and she’d fallen asleep soon after that. She’d consumed absolutely nothing all day. Her stomach grumbled.
But she ignored it, leaning her brow against the cool glass of the window. She let the starlight gently brush her head, her face, her neck. Imagined it running its shimmering fingers down her cheek, as her mother had done for her and her alone.
My Nesta. Elain shall wed for love and beauty, but you, my cunning little queen … You shall wed for conquest.
Her mother would thrash in her grave to know that, years later, her Nesta had come dangerously close to marrying a weak-willed woodcutter’s son who had sat idly by while his father beat his mother. Who had put his hands on her when she called things off between them. Who had then attempted to take what she hadn’t offered.
Nesta had tried to forget Tomas. She often found herself wishing the Cauldron had ripped those memories away just as it had her humanity, but his face sometimes sullied her dreams. Her waking thoughts. Sometimes, she could still feel his rough hands pawing at her, bruising her. Sometimes, the coppery tang of his blood still coated her tongue.
Pulling back from the window, Nesta studied those distant stars again. Half-wondered if they might speak.
My Nesta, her mother had always called her, even on her deathbed, so wasted and pale from typhus. My little queen.
Nesta had once delighted in the title. Had done her best to fulfill its promise, indulging in a dazzling life that had melted away as soon as the debtors swept in and all her so-called friends had revealed themselves to be nothing more than envious cowards wearing smiling masks. Not one of them had offered to help save the Archeron family from poverty.
They had thrown them all, mere children and a crumbling man, to the wolves.
So Nesta had become a wolf. Armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. Had relished it. But when the time came to put away the wolf, she’d found it had devoured her, too.
The stars flickered above the city, as if blinking their agreement.
Nesta curled her hands into fists and climbed back into bed.
Cauldron damn him, maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to bring her here.
Cassian lay awake in his behemoth of a bed—large enough for three Illyrian warriors to sleep side by side, wings and all. Little in the room itself had changed in the past five hundred years. Mor occasionally groused about wanting to redecorate the House of Wind, but he liked this room how it was.
He’d awoken at the sound of a door shutting and been instantly alert, heart hammering as he pulled free the knife he kept on the nightstand. Two more were hidden under his mattress, another set above the doorway, and two swords lay beneath the bed and in a dresser drawer, respectively. That was just his collection. The Mother knew what Az had stored in his own room.
He supposed that between him, Az, Mor, and Rhys, in the five centuries they’d used the House of Wind, they had filled it with enough weapons to arm a small legion. They’d hidden and stashed and forgotten about so many of them that there was always a good chance of sitting on a couch and being poked in the ass by something. And a good chance that most of the weapons were now little more than rust in their sheaths.
But the ones in this bedroom, those he kept oiled and clean. Ready.
The knife gleamed in the starlight, his Siphons fluttering with red light as his power scanned the hall beyond the door.
But no threat emerged, no enemy breaching the new wards. Hybern’s soldiers had broken through more than a year ago, nearly getting their hands on Feyre and Nesta in the library. He hadn’t forgotten it—that terror on Nesta’s face as she’d raced for him, arms outstretched.
But the sound in the hall … Azriel, he’d realized a heartbeat later.
That he’d heard the door at all told him Az wanted him aware of his return. Hadn’t wanted to talk, but had wanted Cassian to know that he was around.
Which had left Cassian here, staring at the ceiling, his Siphons slumbering once more and knife again sheathed and set on the nightstand. From the stars’ position, he knew it was past three—dawn was still far off. He should get some sleep. Tomorrow would be hard enough.