Chapter Text
I had a dream last night about Feyre and the baby.
There was a big drip of ink on the paper, as if Elain had paused with the quill hovering in the air for too long.
You need to come help her. I know you and her and Rhysand have been fighting for a long time, but I think she would let you help if you could figure out a way.
Elain didn’t say what it was that she’d dreamed.
They don’t have a plan, at least not one they’ve told everyone else about. They’re both so angry all the time. Rhys doesn’t like anything anyone suggests to try. Please don’t tell them I’m writing you. I think the House will let you in.
Love,
Elain
-
Feyre came back from the woods with blood soaking her boots to the knee.
Nesta sniffed. “Can’t you clean up on the step?”
“It’s cold.”
“You didn’t catch anything.”
“I field-dressed them and sold them already. It was three rabbits.”
The fire popped. Their father sat like a corpse in his armchair, letting the fire play out in his unfocused eyes.
“There’s that much blood in three rabbits?”
“Fine.”
Feyre walked up to a dirty snowbank and grabbed handfuls with her stiff hands to scrub against the leather. The snow melted and turned pink. When they were mostly clean, she stomped back into the cottage.
“Where’s the money?”
Feyre mutely handed her a small purse. It was less than Nesta would expect for a brace of rabbits when she weighed it in her palm, but these were lean months. Feyre’s gaunt face accused her every time Nesta looked at it. Nesta had been avoiding mirrors, so that her own face would not do the same thing.
Still their father slumped in his seat. Feyre wanted them to live. Nesta wanted her cheap tombstone to condemn her idle father. Why shouldn’t she be like him? Feyre was a wildling their mother had neglected, and she had no pride to wound.
“Close the door,” Nesta ordered her. “Elain will catch a chill.”
That was what it had meant to be mortal. Cold and anger of one kind or another from the moment she was born. And what it meant to be Fae was silver fire, and this thread that something other than herself had bound her with.
-
When Nesta was eight years old, there was a girl from a neighboring family, about four years older, who was her playmate. When Nesta was twelve, the girl had a son. Her husband had carried the squalling infant, wriggling in his arms for its mother, out of their manor house and sat in the garden, not moving, until his wife followed him out wrapped in a white sheet.
The nurse came to take the baby from him, but it was no good. The child followed her soon after.
She had watched it all through the yellowing bushes that separated their manor house from the neighbors. She’d still had her dancing slippers on, and her mother had been furious with her for getting burrs and dirt stuck to the soft sole. When the groom came to find her, watching the pallbearers carry the white shape away toward the waiting carriage, he’d dragged her inside by the arm, where her mother had watched, arms folded, as their nurse made stripes with a switch across Nesta’s palms. Elain cried and tugged at their mother’s skirts, and Feyre watched, her face pressed between the railing of the grand stair, with her blue eyes wide as saucers. Nesta didn’t remember the soreness or the stripes. She remembered the white shape through brown trees, and the wailing from inside the distant house.
-
“The Cauldron could’ve given me something more useful,” Nesta said to Madge as she was helping her slice up bread for supper. The swiftly-growing fourth floor had a kitchen it had developed in its warren of rooms with a stone oven Madge had built up a fire in. Nesta still had a crust of sweat on her brow from their earlier training.
“Like a better attitude about manual labor,” Madge agreed. She didn’t look up from stirring the stew.
“Could you not, for once?” Nesta put down the knife.
“Whatever you say,” Madge shrugged.
The forest slope was dark outside the window. Madge and Nesta would have to carry supper downstairs to the first floor, where everybody would eat around the giant hearth. Madge had a stool pulled up to the cauldron so she could reach all the way in.
“Elain wrote.”
“Remind me who that is.”
“My youngest sister.”
“Right.”
Madge slurped loudly at the soup.
“Hand me the tarragon.”
She pulled the jar off the shelf. The tower had produced some seasonings of its own that appeared in the pantry, plus pots and pans and a good set of knives, but Madge had insisted on bringing up her favorite herbs and spices and said they tasted better if they’d grown in honest dirt instead of being made by magic.
“She had a dream about my other sister.”
“A bad one, I take it? What’s the point? I have bad dreams all the time. Especially after I have Orla’s cooking. Or Mistress Gwyn’s, Mother bless her.”
“My sister is a Seer.”
Madge gawked.
“No she isn’t.”
“I assure you she is.”
“Seers are rarer than rubies.”
“She’s Made, like me. Our sister Feyre is having a baby in five weeks. One that is probably going to kill her.”
“Ah, yes. They do that sometimes. All the screaming and squalling. And the scrubbing of poo stains out of the linens.”
“The baby is going to actually kill her. He’s Illyrian, like Emerie. She’s High Fae. He’s too big for her to deliver. And my hay-for-brains brother-in-law has come up with nothing to help her. She’s going to die. Elain had a dream she wouldn’t tell me any details about.” Nesta stared at the fire glowing under the cauldron bottom. “And I don’t know what to do.”
“Isn’t your brother-in-law— Lysander or whatever his name is— the Lord of Night?”
“He can’t daemati his way into saving Feyre. And my fire is just as useless.”
Madge went on stirring the soup. The long spoon, as tall as she was, tunked against the side of the pot. She flicked a little more salt in, then pinched her earlobe to think.
“The land looked after us for a long time,” she said. “No matter what happened, no matter what we needed, it was always there to keep us hale and safe, the three of us. Doesn’t mean there’s no work that has to be done on our end. Your friend Emerie has her wings back together, but it’s up to her to learn how to fly. I’m not good for much beyond poultices and willow bark for headaches. I can’t help your sister. But I’d reckon it’s not all finished yet. Keep your chin up. If you don’t, you’re only staring at your own boots, and you miss your chance when it comes.”
“You think the land is going to fix Feyre, from a thousand leagues away?” Asked Nesta, with a sharp bolt of helplessness that felt like an arrow through her.
“Not the land itself, maybe. But something. Taste this for me. It’s almost suppertime.”
-
They trained together. There was enough flat space on the bald where the tower was that they could all go through their exercises outside. Roslin and Ananke had kept up their drills, and although Ilana had only just joined, she was easily the best of the four of them. Dareen sat and watched them spar from the front step of the tower door, with her head leaned against the white stone.
Orla usually came up the hill in the mornings and helped them. Despite the fact that she wasn’t more than four feet tall and all of them had both reach and weight on her, only Nesta and Emerie ever lasted more than twenty seconds fencing against her. Once, Orla offered Gwyn her pipe to try, and Gwyn coughed the whole rest of their training session.
“Watch your left side, Mistress Berdara!” Orla shouted.
Gwyn breathed in so she could shout a reply, but it only sent her into another fit of coughing. Orla chuckled. The tower groaned and creaked in the wind.
“Do you want to go down to the ocean?” asked Gwyn after they were all done sharing water around. Nesta’s hair was cemented to her forehead. Roslin had hers flipped upside-down so that the wind could dry her sweaty neck. “The tide’s coming in.”
“The water’s still freezing,” Nesta wrinkled her nose.
“Saranir has a pond behind her tree that you could splash about in. You might find leeches in unpleasant places, though, so I wouldn’t,” said Orla.
“I don’t care. I’m so hot—” Gwyn’s voice pinched off, and she fell into another hacking fit. “Why do you enjoy this?” she wheezed.
“It takes many years and much wisdom to learn to enjoy a well-aged broadleaf for what it’s worth,” Orla answered, between pensive puffs of her pipe. “I wouldn’t expect a faerie of barely three decades to appreciate it.”
In the afternoons, and on days when they didn’t train, there were plenty of chores. They weeded gardens and carried water up to the tower, which Nesta was in the midst of convincing to grow spigots and drains, to no avail as yet. Nesta was worried that the others wouldn’t like the work— she mostly found it distasteful— but she never heard anyone complain.
Saranir started teaching Ananke how to crochet, and then how to weave charms into the yarn: just small charms for luck, for warmth, for comfort. Madge showed a few of the others how to spot the mushrooms growing in the glades around the elms and juneberry trees. Orla rolled a cask of apple whiskey up the hill to share around one evening; Nesta declined, but the others laughed and joked into the dark hours of the night. The thread around her ribs felt like a phantom limb. Would it always be like this, she thought, as Gwyn looked at the seven of them packed in around the hearth with her eyes like mirrors and the fire dancing in her hair— this keening for somebody whose mere presence was a comfort the way his words never could be?
All around them were creaks and shifts as the tree grew, as the spiral stair around its trunk and the white stones of its walls stretched ever higher. Dareen could hear it, as deep and resounding as Nesta could.
-
Madgeer— that was her name in its entirety, although nobody had called her that in centuries, except for Saranir, when she was furious— sent a message to the mainland on behalf of the shrubbery destroyer. She had a soft spot for mortals. She’d loved one once. She’d known for a long time there was something eating at Nesta— a whole hive of somethings, by her guess, since she acted like she had termites eating out the soft parts of her heart. Or like she’d had to dip herself in glass to keep from getting all scratched up. My mate, she’d said. And all this with her sister.
Well, Madge had been collecting strays for a long time. It wasn’t easy for Nesta to say anything about herself. Madge knew all about that. So she’d sent off for somebody secret.
She watched the north sea every day, waiting.
-
Nesta made her way down the row of books one step at a time. Her boot heels made slow, methodical clicks. She went slow because she was reading every title on the shelf from top to bottom. The library was completely silent aside from her.
Two of the titles had been promising so far. The first one, she’d sat down in a nearby chair, to peruse its table of contents, and then scanned the relevant chapters. It seemed like the most effective approach. It had taken her forty minutes to do one book. She couldn’t do the entire library in the same way, not even if she had years instead of weeks.
She stayed up past midnight. Roslin told her not to bother helping with the dishes because she hadn’t come down to eat, then offered her a bit of bread and cheese anyway, and she gratefully accepted. Gwyn came by and asked if she could help Nesta look for anything, and they did pull a few more titles off the shelves, but in the end it was Nesta alone in a wooden chair in the library with her candle dribbling all over the holder. She was sure— or she hoped— they’d scoured the library at the House of Wind from end to end. In the library within the white tree, there was nothing she could find.
-
A death god would not have to be afraid of her sister’s blood on the sheets of her childbed.
The strings of a harp plucked a discordant twang, like the snap of a hundred bowstrings in the volleys the archers had fired at each other over the war dead of Hybern. The strings climbed a chord that promised to resolve, but then fell apart into gut-twisting dissonance again.
Witch of Oorid, all your desires could be accomplished by the power in one of my strings. Channeled by a twitch in your little finger. A death god, a living sister, cold and merciless and clear as sapphire.
-
She wasn’t a Seer, like Elain. She wanted to believe that she was imagining things— but no, she did not quite believe that.
In the morning she went to look for Gwyn, whom she found dusting the altar downstairs with a cloth and walnut oil, singing quietly to herself.
Farewell, farewell, to the little one lost
And the wide-jawed wolf who bought her
Farewell, farewell, to the lover who crossed
Over stone and barrow and water
Farewell to name, farewell to fame
And ash in the place of power
It sounded like an Autumn tune. Gwyn took a candle-snuffer off the altar and scrubbed hard wax bits off the wood beneath.
Gwyn heard her footsteps and looked up from cleaning.
“Did you find anything?”
Nesta shook her head.
“Did you get to sleep at all?”
Nesta nodded.
“I think I’m going crazy,” she told Gwyn.
“I don’t.”
“I can’t do nothing,” she said, tucking back a strand of hair that had come loose from her coronet. She hadn’t rebraided it since the previous day.
“It’s not just you, Nesta,” said Gwyn with a patient voice that sounded not dissimilar from the one she used with Dareen. Dareen had been having nightmares, and Nesta or Gwyn would sometimes wake in the small hours of the night to sit with her until she was no longer afraid to be alone. “Azriel, Rhysand, Clotho and Merrill, they have more resources than we do. Feyre’s in good hands.”
Gwyn had found sanctuary, however temporary, in Night, that Nesta had repeatedly failed to find, so she didn’t say anything about her own lack of faith that the Inner Circle would succeed. Who knew? Maybe they would.
“You were in the library much longer than I ever was.”
“I don’t know,” said Gwyn, looking down at her shoes.
“In Day, would there be a way?”
Gwyn listened to her throw ideas at the wall for several more minutes, nearly ten, before she ran out of steam. Nesta had never been prone to thinking out loud before Gwyn and Emerie, and even now, it felt like baring a festering wound. She was fumbling around in the dark, which she knew, but it was about her sister, which Gwyn understood.
-
Nesta and Emerie were wordlessly sharing a pot of tea one morning in the library a week later. Emerie liked her tea extremely strong and Nesta was doing her best to enjoy it without needing too much cream and sugar to make it less bitter. Emerie was rubbing at the stiff muscles around her ribs that controlled her wings. She had spent the previous afternoon on the top of the tower, beneath the branch canopy, flapping as hard as she could and getting no more than an inch off the ground before she tumbled back down. Nesta had spent the week interrogating Orla and Saranir about ways to help Feyre, and writing Elain for more details, and writing Eris to meet her, but so far there was nothing. It was morning, before they trained, and they were both waiting for the tea to wake them up.
“Nesta,” said Emerie. “I don’t think that’s a whale.”
Nesta peered down at the emerald sea.
Emerie was right. It was not a whale.
“Mother,” Nesta swore. “Who got through the damned—”
She set her teacup down with a rattle.
“Get Gwyn. Get down to the beach as fast as you can. I have to get my sword.”
She stormed back up the stairs to her bedchamber, yanked the door open, and grabbed her borrowed sword.
A ship was approaching. A tiny craft with red sails. Nesta slung the sword belt over her shoulder, turned on her heel, and winnowed down to the beach in the span of a breath.
It was a blisteringly windy, brisk, bright, sunshine-glaring on the waves kind of day. Nesta straightened the dagger in her belt. She still hadn’t given it a name. Nesta watched the strange ship bob toward the shore with a furrowed brow and faint silver fire burning on the tips of her fingers
A brown shape tramped out of the woods to join her. Madge, holding her stick in one hand and holding her hat on her head with the other.
“Good morning, shrubbery destroyer! Can you feel it? Dawn magic on our shores. I smelled it when I woke up. That’s a Dawn junk!”
“How did they find us is what I want to know.” Nesta rolled up her sleeves so her fire wouldn’t singe them. “That banshee better not have talked.” And the ship had better be carrying the sort of person Gwyn had wanted to be able to get through their wards, or else Nesta would have to raise them again. She had been so sure she’d done it right.
“That piranha? She’d never. No, this is what I was telling you about. Come along.”
She noticed that Madge had a wicker basket full of blankets strapped to her back.
“Why do you have blankets?” Nesta asked. There was movement on the ship; she eased her blade a few inches from its scabbard.
“It’s freezing here, compared to back in Dawn! I always forget you’re no older than a sprout and from the other side of the wall to boot.”
Nesta didn’t know what Madge meant, but she rarely did.
The ship washed onto the black pebbles. There was a female trying and failing to tie a knot to steady the boom. Nesta backed up a few paces, hoping Gwyn and Emerie would be here soon. The red sail had made the ship seem larger from the tower than it was. It could hardly have carried more than six people.
The female onboard blanched and froze when she saw Nesta. Nesta marched up to the junk.
“I don’t mean you any harm!” said the female, a High Fae as far as Nesta could tell. Nesta narrowed her eyes.
“How did you find your way to this place?”
Madge tutted. “Six months here and you’re already so territorial. No, Nesta. She found her way here because I invited her. And how nicely you’ve aged, my friend, like a cask of rum.”
The female grinned. “Wish I could say the same for you, Madgeer. You’ve aged like a sinew in the sun.” She slipped over the gunwale, and her beat-up boots splashed in the surf. “How long has it been?”
“When you reach my age, you won’t remember either.” Madge laughed, showing all six of her real teeth and all eleven of her copper ones.
“You’ve shrunk.”
“How am I meant to keep track of such things? Have a blanket.” Madge shrugged her basket off her back. “You look like you’re going to fall over and break into frozen little pieces. Then old Madge will have to sweep you up, and Lady Archeron will complain about it.”
Madge reached up to pinch Nesta’s elbow. Nesta pressed her finger between her eyes.
“You know each other.”
“Obviously. I invited her. I already said.”
Their unexpected guest snatched up a blanket and drew it around her shoulders.
“How?”
“You think you’re the only one with magic ways of sending messages?”
Nesta glared at her. Madge threw up her hands.
“Fine, I asked Saranir to do it for me. Are you satisfied? Anyway, my lovely old friend, this is Nesta, who burned down my garden and ate all my eggs.”
“Nesta?” Asked the female. “Lady Nesta Archeron? Nesta Deathwitch?”
“Yes, that’s me,” sighed Nesta. “And you are?”
“Cutter.”
“That’s your name.”
“It’s what they call me,” the faerie answered, lifting her chin. “Whether they mean it kindly or not. So it’s my name.”
“Once you get to know her you’ll find it’s a bit on the nose,” said Madge. “With a name like Cutter I don’t suppose you can whinge about being called Deathwitch. Anyway—”
“I would just like to know why—”
“I was halfway through explaining!” Madge protested.
“I’ll explain,” Cutter offered. “If you don’t mind.”
Madge made a have it your way noise in reply.
“Madge and I knew each other a long time ago,” Cutter began. “We’re both from Dawn, and some things, in Dawn, are forbidden. As much as it’s a haven from some of the cruelties of the other Courts.”
Cutter looked reproachfully at Nesta, her eyes in the shadow of her black hair. Nesta shook her head.
“You needn’t mince words about Night as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good. Dawn has its automata and its mechanical magic, but there are sciences that healers hate. Think they’re unnatural. Dawn magic’ll fix what’s broken, but only if the magic decides it’s broken,” Cutter explained. “I can heal, too, but I’ve learned there are more things than the gift.” Nesta noticed her teeth were unusually pointed for a High Fae, a bit like Eris’ were. Not shark teeth like the banshee’s, and not noticeable unless she really looked, but still. “I fix people, not just the bodies of people. And sometimes fixing means the knife.”
“Healers don’t carry knives in Dawn,” Madge murmured. “On pain of death. Cutter and I keep up with each other, you know. Write every ten years, give or take. So when you came to me with your predicament about your sister and this Wiseman fellow—”
“Rhysand,” Nesta corrected, suppressing a smirk.
“Whatever. I thought, we’re already running a guesthouse, why not send out an invitation?”
Nesta’s eyes snapped to Cutter’s.
“You can fix…?”
“An obstructed labor? Yes, I can. I’ve done it successfully twenty-four times, ” said Cutter, with a perk-up of pride. “Two weeks ago I got a message saying the High Lady of Night had a baby she couldn’t deliver. Took me a few days to get out of hiding and out to sea.”
“You said the land was going to help,” said Nesta to Madge.
“I did.” Madge pretended to be untangling the fringe on her shawl. “Land I was standing on, at the time.”
“Nesta!” Gwyn shouted, coming out from the trailhead. “What’s going on?”
“We might have a way to save Feyre,” said Nesta, sliding her blade back into its sheath.
-
“I’m not strong enough,” Emerie muttered.
They were at Orla’s croft again. The other priestesses and Gwyn were up at the tower, but Nesta, Emerie, and their new guest were down the hill, where Orla was smoking fish. Cutter had already butchered a doze of them. Orla had a charcoal fire going in a hole in the ground, and a drying rack over it that they were smoking the processed fish over. Emerie was out in the orchard with Nesta. Her wings made two dark shadows among the blooming apple trees, whose sweet fragrance covered up the smell of fish guts. Emerie accidentally broke off a branch while turning around, and apologized so much that Orla told her if she kept it up she would go get an axe and chop the whole orchard down so there’d be no more opportunity to say sorry.
“You will be,” said Nesta.
“Maybe I won’t, though. I got cut before I was big enough to fly more than a foot off the ground. Maybe since I missed out on learning when I was a kid I won’t be able to.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” said Nesta, who couldn’t prove it.
Emerie spread her leathery wings between the rows and tried again, flapping furiously, so hard that Nesta’s hair blew back, but when she jumped she was only airborne for half a second.
Emerie cursed. “It’s not that I mind having you here, but could I practice by myself?”
Nesta nodded, remembering how she’d felt trying to raise a ward with Eris watching, and left Emerie alone among the apple trees.
“I noticed your friend’s scars,” said Cutter to Nesta when she returned to the cottage. She flicked the boning knife; the pin bones popped out of the fascia of another fish.
Nesta pursed her lips.
“Nevermind,” Cutter shook her head. “Being in hiding for centuries sort of rots out your manners.”
“Maybe Emerie would tell you herself if you asked her.”
“Is one of your priestesses a healer?”
“None,” said Nesta.
“There’s severance of major sinew. It couldn’t…”
“It happened the night that the island became a Court and the tree sprung up.”
“Nesta’s work, in a way,” said Orla, leaning back in her chair. “Oh, don’t give me that look. What you did was quite singular.”
Orla studied Nesta. Nesta held her gaze coolly.
There was another gust of wind as Emerie tried again, and another groan of frustration.
Nesta turned back to Cutter. “Tell me more about what you can do for my sister.”
“If we can get there before the child starts to descend, it’s sleeping magic, and two incisions. It won’t take me longer than an hour if all goes as it should, and likely much less.”
They might not have that much time, Nesta thought. Feyre might let them help her, but there was no possible way that Rhys would. She would have to hold him back. She remembered his ranting eyes and bared teeth from the Inner Circle meeting, and the thought made her feel cold.
“What circumstances have you had to do it under before?”
“There’s always the risk of being discovered, if there’s too much noise, and being caught. I did it once on a female whose baby had already descended and was caught against the pelvis.”
“Trying it with an Illyrian baby in the past has always killed the mother.”
“I’ve never midwifed for an Illyrian before,” Cutter admitted. “I don’t know if they had a real healer, one with magic, doing it when it failed. Like I said, if we have the gift, we can’t learn the knife. I’ve lost mothers before. Babies, too. I’m not a Seer. There’s things in every body you can’t guess at, and things you can’t get under control in time. What I can tell you is I’ve never lost a mother over a mistake.” Cutter picked up another fish and cracked its spine so she could slice off the head. “I have good hands. I know what to do and I do it. Males made Dawn taboos, you know. They say the body knows what’s natural, what’s good for it, so you don’t have to break it, just have to encourage it to do what it does when it’s healthy. And a male would think that, you know. A male can’t have ten babies in a century and then ten more the next one. A male doesn’t have pains twice a year so bad he’d drink paralytic poison to make the hurt stop. A male doesn’t get shackled to a husband when he doesn’t want to have children that’ll trap him there forever. A male doesn’t have a baby with wings that his mother's body can’t deliver, but a female can. I know all about that. I’ve helped in secret for six hundred years, in the rare times I could without getting my head lopped off, and I’m good at it.”
Behind them, Emerie’s wings fanned so hard that a flight of birds flew up from the nearby fir trees. Cutter took in a breath. Nesta did too.
“Thank you for what you did during the war with Hybern,” said Cutter in a change of topic that made Nesta raise her eyebrows. “They tell stories about you, you know. They’re good stories, even if probably not all of them are true.”
“I can get us into the House of Wind,” said Nesta.
-
Dear Feyre,
I’m writing again to tell you that I have a way to help you and the baby. There’s a healer from Dawn who has helped females who couldn’t deliver normally before. I’m able to come to you, and when I do, you can look into both of our minds to confirm for yourself.
Nesta had never allowed Feyre into her head before, but if it could get Feyre to let them help her, she’d do it.
If Cutter was right about herself, Nesta owed Madge a debt she wasn’t sure she could repay. She set the thought aside for now. Everything else had to wait until Feyre got help.
If you want me, I’ll come. If you don’t answer, I’ll come. You don’t have to see me. I’ll wait for your reply.
Your sister,
Nesta Archeron
-
Elain,
I’m coming. What happened in your dream?
Love,
Nesta
-
Dear Nesta,
I’m not sure how to describe it. It was frightening. Feyre was in the sky over Velaris and there was silver fire everywhere I looked. There weren’t any stars. The wind was so fast over the mountain that I couldn’t hear anything, and it smelled like blood, and there was darkness reaching for her. It wasn’t like Azriel’s shadows. I don’t know if it wanted to help her or hurt her.
I miss you.
Love,
Elain
-
To Lady Death,
Winnow, if you please, to the house two hours before sundown in seven days. I have too many questions to write.
Eris Vanserra
-
Eris,
I always forget that the Autumn Court lacks etiquette tutors. I had one when I was young if you wanted to hire her. She was generous with the switch. Have a fire going when I come, please, it was cold last time.
Nesta Archeron
-
The High Lady of Night has no need of your help. Interfere at your own peril.
This letter had no greeting and no signature. It only has the seal of the High Lord and Lady on the front, stamped so deep in the wax that the paper was slightly torn.
-
Dear Nesta,
All Feyre and Rhys have been saying is that they hope the land’s magic will help them. I don’t think it’s going to work. All my dreams are dark. Please come.
Love,
Elain
-
Nesta had promised that if Feyre said no, she would stay away. It turned out, as she clutched the letter written in silver ink on black paper in one hand, and Elain’s latest in the other, that she was going to break her promise.
-
“There is a fire inside,” Eris explained as soon as she arrived at the safe house. He was a little out of breath, and the top laces of his shirt were undone. “But Kour has been doing unusually well this afternoon. Would you run him with me?”
Nesta opened her mouth to say no thank you immediately and barge inside for the fire. It was late, and the shadows were long, and it wasn’t getting any warmer. But the smokehound, Kour, was panting and wagging his tail so fast that his ephemeral fur blew smoke in every direction at once, and she was still wearing her training leathers, so she knelt down to tighten her boots. It wouldn’t kill her to spend an evening a little cold.
She tied the knot, then said, “You don’t have to wait for me.”
Eris whistled sharply, and the hound exploded into motion, running away from the house and down the winding trail.
“Come on, Lady Archeron.”
He went loping after Kour through the sea of dry leaves. Nesta ran at his heels, and although Eris was half a foot taller than she was, all long, wiry grace, and his strides were ridiculously long, she’d been training hard for months and walking up and down a steep hill several times a day, so she kept his pace. Kour wove between trees, going this way and that way, until Nesta couldn’t see his shadowy shape, only hear the soft scatter of his feet on the forest floor.
“He’s learning to get someone to chase him without being caught,” said Eris. Over his shoulder he flashed her a smile more crooked and less sharp than the ones she’d seen on him before. He had excellent teeth.
They ran the trail down into rhododendron groves faster than she’d ever run on mortal legs. Down into the valley they chased the smokehound, until Nesta started to feel the pins holding her coronet in place coming loose.
“Hold on,” she called to Eris. She reached up to catch her braid as it fell. He stopped short; Kour kept running. This patch of trail was muddy, and Nesta didn’t want to get it on her new boots, so she stepped up onto a tree stump as she stuck silver pins between her teeth and tightened her loose hair.
“Enjoying the view?” He asked her. She was up a bit higher than him.
“Is this what it’s like being overgrown like you?” she asked.
“You’re incorrigible,” he said, without any irritation.
“I’ve been told,” she agreed, jamming in her hairpins so tight that they pulled on her scalp.
Eris smirked. Nesta stepped down and went off running after Kour again without any warning, her nose high in the air and her boot heels leaving sharp, square prints in the mud.
“Is it possible to catch a smokehound?” She asked over her shoulder. She ran faster, with a flush of approval at her own easy breathing and fresh-feeling legs.
“Does it matter, as long as he can convince them they can?”
They heard another patter of Kour’s feet, and just caught sight of his swishing tail.
“How do you use them in the field?”
“They scout for my soldiers. They can hunt for days without a hunter to direct them. They tail spies I suspect.” They dashed down a narrow, rocky set of switchbacks. “Mother, if you were less beautiful I’d keep my mouth shut more.”
Nesta rolled her eyes. “Eris. Pick a different angle. I know you’re never too distracted to think, I’m not stupid.”
“I’ve been running him all afternoon, my blood’s flowing. Can’t I ply you with my secrets before I demand yours?”
“What your dogs do is not an important secret.”
Eris bristled. “A smokehound is worth a hundred footsoldiers. And at least a dozen of the Illyrian sky rats you so wisely got away from.”
“Eris,” she said sharply, even though a slightly wicked part of her liked when he was cruel in her defense. “Did you want me here for politics or not?”
“Everything is politics,” he dismissed her. They ran down a steep embankment, almost slipping in deep leaves. An owl dove into a hollow in one of the red maples.
“Do you know your sister and her mate have a death pact?”
“If I could forget about it, I think I’d sleep more regularly.”
“And she’s due in three weeks. Probably earlier, given the size of your nephew, and the next in line is Keir.” Eris’ face darkened. They leapt over roots and swerved around branches. “I don’t want that to happen. Tell me what you’re going to do.”
She still hadn’t asked what really happened with him and Mor.
“How do you know I have a plan?”
He looked sidelong at her. “Tell me you have a plan.”
He whistled again, and the sound of Kour running stopped, then started again, the time coming in their direction. Nesta knew he’d probably caught that she was fishing to see if he still had eyes on the island aside from her own. They slowed to a brisk walk.
“You know the House of Wind will let you through its wards.”
“I know.”
“Good,” he said. “My banshee can only make her movements with particular magic of her own. Well done,” he said to Kour, who sprinted out of the forest in a blur on his misty feet. “Heel.” In an instant, the hound was no longer panting or wagging with glee, but trailing his master’s step like a ghost. “And the rest, after you’ve gotten inside?”
“I have Madge to thank for that.”
“Madge. Remind me.”
“You can’t have forgotten. Force-fed you and kept spying on us back when you were visiting.”
“The force-feeding was vicarious.”
“She had an old friend from before they came to the island who was a healer.”
“Just a healer?” Eris eyes narrowed. “That’s your plan?”
“She’s helped mothers with this problem before.”
“Dawn healers cannot— ah, you must mean a surgeon,” Eris corrected himself. “Really? I didn’t know there were any knife-carriers left. Thesan will be furious with you and with Rhysand if he finds out.”
“I haven’t seen the scars of anyone she’s helped,” Nesta admitted. “I don’t have more to go on than her word and Madge’s. I asked her questions about the procedure, but I’m not a daemati. Feyre is the only one who’ll be able to see for herself.”
“You could keep going after the Trove,” Eris suggested, with some hesitation. “Although I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“No,” Nesta replied, vehement. “Absolutely not.”
“You’re upset.”
“The Trove wants back what I took. My power. I don’t trust it.”
“It… wants things.”
“Is that hard to believe?”
“I guess not. But you trust Madge?”
“Yes,” said Nesta.
“Alright,” Eris answered, blowing out a long breath. The evening air was crisp and cool, and the way his exhale fogged reminded her of smoke. “If you’ve thought it through. I could keep an ear to the ground in Dawn for any confirmation, if you’d like.”
“You’ll do it whether or not I ask.”
“This is true,” Eris smirked. “I’ll get word to you when your sister goes into labor.”
“Thank you.”
Eris whistled again. This time it was a low sound that dissolved into rumbles at the end. Kour ran ahead of them, but after a few paces, he disappeared into pure, invisible shadow. Nesta couldn’t hear where he went.
“Do you have enough eyes and ears to know where Cassian will be when you send me the message?”
“I can tell you what I know,” said Eris. His eyes carefully scanned the twilight of the forest, and Nesta wondered if he could see Kour even when she could not. “But he’s not otherwise worth keeping close track of.”
Nesta followed where Eris’ gaze went. She was glad of the run, since the night had begun to get cold. Far away she heard the sound of water running over rocks. Up ahead there was a break in the dark trees. Eris’ eyes caught every faint gleam of light in their amber irises, and they seemed to almost glow in the dusk.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of him. He’s nothing compared to you.”
“You called him a bastard and now you’re calling him nothing,” Nesta snapped.
“I did call Cassian a bastard in the Steppes,” said Eris lightly. “He is one, and he should learn to be less affected by being told so. My brother Lucien is a bastard, but only in one sense of the word. Cassian is a bastard in all of them. He really has an incredible talent for being offended by facts. I’m telling you the truth that he’s not worth a single part of you.”
Nesta didn’t respond to this, even though the inside of her felt all hot and raw. The forest darkened further around them as they walked, diminishing the trees to dark shapes stretching their branches across the indigo sky. Eris tracked something with his eyes through the trees, and Nesta barely managed not to jump with surprise when Kour appeared a few feet from them, panting, and trotted back to his master.
The sounds of water grew louder still, and the air grew cooler, like they were close to the stream. She heard spray in the air and splashing on rocks.
“I won’t have much time,” she said quietly, “so it probably won’t matter. He’ll feel it as soon as I’m in the House.”
Eris looked at her strangely. “Having a mate seems unpleasant.”
“I’m told others enjoy it.” Feyre got lucky. She and Elain did not. “Do you have one?”
“I do not.”
“Lucky you.”
“Perhaps.”
There was another stretch of quiet. Eris murmured to Kour, “Go, boy, off form,” and Kour left his silent pacing at Eris’ heel to snuffle around the bases of trees at the shelf mushrooms and silver fish fungus springing up between rotting oak leaves. His smoky body was lighter than dark and deeper than shadow, and in the night, he looked like a trick of light, or its lack.
“The falls are up ahead,” said Eris. The gap in the trees was wider, and there was a paleness between them where the moonlight gathered. Kour followed them indirectly, mostly lost in the joy of his nose.
They came to a place where a long ravine split the ground. White water burst from the rock, tumbling down, and flowing in misty rapids down the narrow ravine floor between the dark rocks where floats of dead leaves had gathered. The moonlight was so bright after their run through the dark forest that it was almost overwhelming.
Eris shook himself out of some reverie.
“Is there music on your island?” He asked her, somewhat stilted, like his smooth manners were taking a while to return after their conversation.
“Only a little. Gwyn sings.”
“None of your hags or priestesses play an instrument? I’m surprised.”
“I hadn’t had much music before. I hadn’t danced for more than a year before the Winter Solstice.”
“I don’t believe you. You were magnificent that night. You couldn’t have been that good and rusty all at once.”
Nesta ignored the part of her that warmed at the praise. “I practiced a little with Mor.”
“A little.”
“Well, it’s true.” She cleared her throat. “You surprised me too.”
“You didn't think I’d know what I was doing?”
“Not like that.”
“That’s good,” he said with a crinkle of the corners of his eyes. She kept herself from copying the smile; she wanted to mirror him. “I’m glad I surprised you.”
“Did I surprise you?”
He chuckled, a private joke with himself. “Yes. I do respect you, Nesta,” said Eris. “Whether or not you believe it.”
“I am fairly spectacular,” she agreed.
“Try not to die in Velaris.”
She brushed him off. “Save your prayers for my sister.”
“Very well, I will,” he said. “Shall we walk back?”
On their return walk, they followed the trail where their run had churned up the leaves, exposing their condensation-damp undersides, by the red and silver light of the flames they each cupped in their hands, and when they talked, Nesta felt like the only people in the world were them and the moon.
-
On the eleventh spin, she had been free, her momentum so tremendous that she could spin on just the silk toe of her slipper, that the wind and terra firma were all one, that the Mother gave her legs and arms and ankle bones and eardrums just so she could be here, tonight, breathing and living and moving.
On the twelfth spin, she flowed out of the music and back into the oppressive ballroom in the Court of Nightmares. She’d come up short with a lurch, not unsteady on her feet, but very nearly. The song wound down. She stepped back, dutifully, into Eris’ arms, and he’d braced his hand gently around her ribs. He’d been clear-eyed enough to offer her a way out, even if it hadn’t been the right way out. That was something she had to find.
-
There was a quiet wind alive coming down the hill toward the sea that night, and Emerie was alone.
On the roof over the fourth floor, she crouched between two large branches, her wings outstretched, the phalanges on their undersides just scraping the white stone. Her legs dangled over the edge, and the wind was making a snarl of her hair. She hunched over with her palms pressed down beside her hips.
She had thought of doing this before, but she’d never come to sit on the edge. It was a long way down. All she’d ever actually figured out was hovering six inches or so above the ground for a few seconds, which was something an eight-year-old Illyrian boy could do all day long. But that few seconds of being in the air… she kept dreaming of flying. Gwyn would probably suggest something like ‘ancestral memory,’ if she’d ever brought it up, but Emerie knew she had to be imagining things. She hadn’t flown for almost a hundred years, not since she’d had no breasts and no courses to tell her father and uncles that she needed shackles to be useful.
It had been the day after she’d first bled. She had been eleven. The pain had been so bad that she hadn’t been able to uncurl enough to kick at her father or try to slap his hands away. He’d cut deep and blamed her for struggling. But even when they were just dead weight she dragged around all the time, like a little girl with a blanket, she’d never wished she’d been born without wings.
She lifted them higher so the outgoing wind could blow beneath, then stood, shakily, on training-sore legs. Nesta needed to tell the tree to grow Emerie a bathtub with hotter water. She stretched her arms out, and for a few minutes she just paid attention to the air, practicing the Valkyrie breathing exercises and listening to the wind stir the branches.
Finally, when she was about ready to take the stairs back down to her room, she spread her wings all the way and beat them as hard as she could. Everyone else was asleep; no one would hear. The muscles around her ribs and back cramped, but Emerie kept trying, and blew down golden needles that skittered off the edge of the tower roof.
Her feet left the ground. She only ever got a few seconds airborne, and she had to relish it. The stretch in her spine, the freedom in her limbs. The feeling of being strong that would flag and fail when her muscles gave out.
A gust of wind blew with sudden and unusual force. Emerie went sideways, flapping wildly to get air underneath herself, feet kicking uselessly, as the tip of her right wing went over the edge of the tower, and the rest of her went tumbling after into the open air over the bald. She beat at the wind, tumbling, the folds of her wings slipping together as she fell, blown up and down, in and out. She threw out her arms, like that was going to help, as the white wall and windows zoomed past, then lifted her right wing up and back to catch the breeze— and somehow that was the right thing to do.
All at once the wind wasn’t fighting her, and she wasn’t fighting it. They just fit together. All of a sudden Emerie was gliding on her huge silent wings over the edge of the forest.
Her body hung impossibly suspended. She held her breath. She wasn’t falling. She could look around and see the moon on the white tower. The air was cool, and it smelled like salt and hearthsmoke. It rose over the sea as the water shed its heat into the air, and it played in cross-breezes all around her.
She felt quiet. Emerie glided in long, looping circles around and around the spire for as long as she could, until she had to come down gently into the grass.
-
The next morning Gwyn could tell something was different. Emerie came down the stairs for breakfast looking ill-slept but sure of herself, and she kept surreptitiously rolling her shoulders.
She didn’t say anything the whole time they broke their fast on eggs that Ilana had boiled in the kitchen upstairs and slurped down tea strong enough to stick to the back of a spoon, and Gwyn was too busy talking to Nesta, who had been stormy-eyed lately as the time for Feyre to have her baby drew near, and to Dareen, who was starting to slowly come out of her shell.
When they were finally alone in the corridor that wound between their rooms, as everyone else was still busy putting on their training clothes, Nesta was the first one to speak.
“You’re hiding something,” she said to Emerie.
Emerie pinched her lips together.
“It worked.”
Gwyn squealed and threw her arms around her friend. Emerie hugged her with both her wings and her arms, which made Gwyn laugh.
“Mother bless us! Emerie! Oh my goodness! How did you do it? Last night?”
“I fell off the tower,” Emerie said casually.
“I actually hate you,” said Gwyn. “Tell me the real story.”
Emerie shrugged. It was the real story.
“You fell?” Nesta prompted. She’d sidled closer to them; Gwyn pulled her into the hug too, and Emerie moved her wing out of the way.
“Yes,” said Emerie. “Got turned the right way up on the way down. I glided for a really long time.”
Roslin pushed her door open, down the hall, stretching her wrists out and tipping her jaw to crack her neck.
“Is it alright if I don’t show you yet?” Emerie asked, looking the other direction down the hallway. “I wouldn’t want to fall. Or do something else embarrassing.”
“Take time,” said Nesta, slightly muffled by the bit of Gwyn’s hair that had gotten in her mouth.
After training, when the sun was almost at its zenith to the south, they were flopped down in the meadow with sword oil all over their hands as Cutter walked past them on her way from Madge’s cottage with a basket full of herbs. She disappeared in the shadow of the door.
“You know,” said Gwyn, who was looking at the smooth white walls of the tower, studded with tiny windows and chimney-branches. “‘The tower’ or ‘the tree’” aren’t the best names.”
Nesta turned her head sideways and watched Gwyn watch the tower.
“You’re thinking of something,” she announced.
“Yes,” said Gwyn, who was. She blinked hard against the glare. She was already a little dizzy from the exertion, and the sunlight wasn’t helping.
“What is it, Gwyn?” asked Emerie.
“Nesta, you’re High Lady.”
“You have a name in your head,” said Nesta.
“Yes,” Gwyn admitted.
“And?”
“I like the word ‘Spire,’” she said quietly. She’d thought of it that morning. “The Spire of the Valkyries, even though we aren’t Valkyries.”
“We will be.” Nesta told her. When she said it, it made Gwyn feel less like a girl with a fanciful dream and more like a faerie who had survived impossible things. The tree’s branches swayed when Nesta spoke, although maybe it was only the wind.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s perfect,” Nesta said.
Emerie spoke up. “I fell off the Spire of the Valkyries.”
“It’s not really falling if you catch yourself,” said Gwyn, with a fond wrinkle of her nose.
-
Nesta’s dream was interrupted by a float of orange flame and the smell of warm earth. She jerked awake, bleary-eyed, and the afterburn on her retinas told her that the orange flame was no dream, but something real. In her lap on top of the blanket, flecked with cinders, she found a letter. The seal on it hadn’t quite dried.
Your sister’s pains have begun. They started at the tenth hour of the night.
Nesta refolded the letter and stuffed it in her trouser pocket. She felt around for her boots, shoving her stocking feet into them, then grabbed her coat from where she’d left it lying over the chair with her novel. The corridor outside her room was dark, too, just ghosted by moonlight that guided her around the corner and up a few stairs to another small tucked-away room, where Cutter slept. She swallowed down the buzz of anxiety when she thought about seeing Feyre again, seeing all of them, at the thought that Feyre was probably curled up and talking over people and insisting she could do things she couldn’t. She knocked hard on the door until she heard stirring inside.
“Cutter,” Nesta called. “Cutter, wake up.”
Something inside the room banged, and a drawer slid open and shut. Then the door swung in.
“It’s time?”
Cutter’s long black hair hung loose to her waist. She had a red cord braided between her fingers.
“Yes.”
Cutter nodded, and went about as quiet as an insect, tying up her hair. She gathered her long black gloves, a leather roll that made steel sounds when she bound it up, a case of glass bottles carefully packed, a clean white apron. She had a white cloth that went over her mouth. She was ready in three minutes.
Nesta pursed her lips as she thought through the task of winnowing someone else. She should have practiced. She’d been too preoccupied with how she would deal with Rhys and Cassian and the Inner Circle, what she would say to Feyre, and how she would buy Cutter the time they needed if Feyre said yes, to think though the ins and outs of winnowing with Cutter.
“Do you think my sobriquet will frighten the High Lady?”
“Feyre isn’t afraid of anything,” said Nesta absentmindedly.
“Alright.” Cutter bobbed her head in something almost like a nervous curtsy. “I’m ready when you are, Lady Nesta.”
“Hold onto my arm.”
Cutter did. Nesta took a deep breath. She didn’t ask Cutter if she was afraid. When she reached for the spiderweb in space to winnow, she’d have to reach for both of them.
The House of Wind would be dark. The breeze would blow up on the heights of Velaris, and the air would be cool, and the stone would be heavy beneath their feet. Her heart pounded at the thought of the sound of wingbeats overhead. She felt the spiderweb flutter around them.
In her field of vision, the Spire turned to soft, undifferentiated dark. She shut her eyes and the shadows fell, heavy and black, as they tunneled a thousand leagues north to Night, and then there was a buzz of intermission, as they hovered neither quite in the Spire nor in the House, as its wards held them at bay.
EVEN THE LORDS OF THE EARTH DO NOT ENTER HERE. BEGONE BACK TO YOUR PLACE.
do you remember me?
THESE WALLS ARE NOT BREACHED. YOU WILL GO BACK.
do you remember me?
THESE WARDS KNOW NO ONE. RETURN.
i left six months ago. don’t you remember me?
THIS PLACE IS NOT
NESTA?
NESTA
NESTA
would you let me in?
NESTA
i need to help my sister. i need you to let me into the place where she is.
NESTA
is the High Lord in the room with her? i can only go in if he’s outside.
MEETING WITH OTHERS. COME HELP. COME HELP. COME. COME HELP.
The dark receded swiftly. Nesta smelled smoke, herbs, clean linen, and felt wooden floors beneath her feet.
In a whirlwind, the two of them appeared in Feyre’s bedchamber in the middle of the night.
“Nesta!” cried Elain.
“You!” Mor spat. She was sitting by Feyre’s bedside, with the red velvet of her long coat brushing the bed skirt. Her nails clawed into the covers as she stood to her full height, shoving her chair away hard enough to scrape the floor.
“Cauldron save us!” cried an attendant.
“Elain,” said Nesta.
“Nesta?” wondered Feyre. She was sitting up against the pillows with her hair loose, pink in the face from early contractions.
The bowstring of thread snapped on Nesta’s ribs, and she locked up to keep the others from seeing her flinch. She’d been right that Cassian would know she was here. Behind the grate, the fire popped, and Nesta ignored that too. “Feyre,” she started. “I know the letter you sent said that you—”
“How dare you.” Mor practically vibrated with rage. “How dare you come here, after refusing all of the help we offered you and disappearing, after what you did to Cassian—”
“What letter?” Feyre asked, confusion pinching her face. “The one you sent at the end of winter?”
“No, the one I wrote you two weeks ago about the healer.”
There was a squeak of leather as Cutter nervously twisted the handle of her toolcase.
“How did you get in here? Even High Lords can’t winnow into the House. How did you know we were in here? Do you have a spy?” Mor rounded on one of the attendants laying out linens and hot water. “Is it one of—”
“Morrigan,” snapped Nesta, recalling Mor’s burning eyes. “I am trying to talk to my sister. Please for the love of the Mother keep your forked tongue behind your teeth.”
“You,” Mor seethed, striding across the room as if she meant to bite out Nesta’s throat with her pearly teeth, but Feyre shouted over both of them—
“Mor! Stand down. Nesta, stop goading her. If you don’t explain why and how you came in here, I will get the guards to come throw you out. Start talking.”
Nesta flashed Elain a quick look she hoped was reassuring. Elain just gazed steadily at her with the mild surprise of somebody noticing an expected guest coming up the path. Nesta hoped she recognized this tableau from her good dreams and not her nightmares.
“I already wrote to explain.” Nesta’s brow furrowed. “Did you burn the letter?”
“Burn— I wouldn’t just burn your letters,” said Feyre, annoyed. “You never wrote to me. To any of us! We were so worried about you, and now you’re—”
“Yes, I did,” said Nesta, as she realized what had happened with a heavy feeling. “I sent it at night, when Rhys was in bed with you. Feyre, I wrote you because I—”
“No,” Feyre broke in, shaking her head. “No, you’re doing it again, thinking he’s always—”
“Did you think the High Lord would let you whisper your poison in the High Lady’s ear?” Mor spit. Her face was turning as scarlet as her robe.
There was a metal knock on the door.
“High Lady!” Called the voice of one of the guards. “Is everything well?”
“Everything is fine!” Feyre shouted back when the servants didn’t seem to know what to do. “I swear on the Mother if all of you don’t shut up right now. Ah—”
Feyre clutched her stomach. She quickly schooled her grimace and waved off an attendant who offered her some kind of tincture still steaming in a teacup. Elain’s warm eyes flickered between Cutter and Nesta. Feyre took a few steadying breaths, and they all waited in tense, unbearable silence while she rode out the contraction.
When it passed, she said, “Look.” She stared down her nose at Nesta, who remembered just how much more blue her transfiguration had made her little sister’s eyes. Her voice shook a little when she spoke. “I don’t care if you’re a High Lady or Death itself or whatever. Tell me right now what you told me in the letter, but if you’re just here to be selfish again, I’ll have them call Rhys to drag you out himself.”
Mor’s jaw snapped shut, but her black eyes fixed on Nesta like she wished a look could cut her bloody.
Nesta hurried through her explanation as quickly and clearly as she could. Cutter bowed deep when she was introduced. The stormcloud on Feyre’s face grew dark enough to thunder as Nesta explained what Cutter could do and how they’d met.
“Let me see,” said Feyre when Nesta finished.
“What would the High Lady wish to see?” asked Cutter, too formally for the circumstances.
“I’m going to look in your head,” Feyre announced. Nesta took a deep breath. This was good. If anything would convince Feyre that it was possible, it would be Cutter’s own memories.
“Nesta,” Cutter murmured. “What does she mean?”
“She’s a daemati. She wants to see into your mind. Don’t be afraid.”
Feyre shot Nesta a long, hard look, and Nesta could feel the soft fingers of Feyre’s mind brushing the edges of her own. She didn’t press for entry, just bumped up against her, like they were two fish in a narrow stream, and Nesta didn’t know if it was a threat or a greeting or something stranger.
Cutter made steady eye contact with Feyre. There was no twitch in her face to show as Feyre rifled through her mind, carding through her memories for proof.
Cutter’s breath caught. “There are some sights a High Lady might not want to see.”
“I’ve escaped the Weaver single-handedly. I promise you I will be fine,” said Feyre curtly.
Cutter nodded her consent, and Feyre sank back into her thoughts. Cutter’s hand was motionless on the handle of her potion case. Feyre shut her eyes, and when they flew open half a minute later, she was transformed. Her eyes shone with tears.
“I saw it,” she choked out. “Mother.”
“Feyre?” asked Mor, her gaze darting between Feyre and Cutter.
“The scar. The healed scar. You can really—?” This time when Feyre looked at Nesta there was no threat and no imperiousness.
“Dawn will be angry,” Mor muttered.
Feyre said, “I don’t care.”
“It’s your choice,” Nesta told her. “You are the High Lady of Night.”
“Yes,” said Feyre quietly. “Do it.”
Nesta felt something like a shard of ice in her side. He felt her. They’d be coming.
Cutter straightened her gloves as she directed her attention to the servants. “I will need your help setting up a sterile field. I need clean linens and as much hot water as you can get me. Bring that side table over to the bedside— no, the other one, please. And if you have a tea tray, I’ll need that as well. Silver or copper make is best.”
“The High Lord should know about this,” said Mor.
“It would mean a lot to me if you would stay,” said Feyre instead.
“As you wish,” said Mor, trying to hide the fact that she was giving in.
Elain kept her place in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Mor as another contraction came on. Feyre leaned her head back against the headboard and hummed as the pain cramped her back and stomach. Cutter set her case of potions on the side table the servants had brought over; there was a bottle of clear liquid she set on the tray with her roll of knives, and then a thin cut-glass vial holding a draught so maroon it was almost purple.
Nesta took another deep breath. They’d gotten over the first part. Now was the second part, the harder part for all of them. When Feyre’s contraction ended, Nesta cleared her throat to speak again.
“I can watch the door.”
Feyre shook her head. “He’ll listen to me.”
“You’ll be asleep soon,” Nesta pointed out.
“Then I’ll start now,” Feyre fired back.
“Okay,” said Nesta. “I’m still going to watch the door.”
“Fine,” said Feyre. And she closed her eyes. What was it like, Nesta wondered, having a bond that sang for her? She wasn’t envious of what Feyre had with Rhys, but neither could she fathom the easy way they sank into each other’s minds, the way the bond made them trust each other, the way they flowed in and out of one another. Feyre’s eyes squeezed together briefly, as if she was already in an unquiet dream. In her own world with Rhysand in the country of their thoughts.
Nesta had to be in this world. Elain squeezed Feyre’s hand. Cutter nudged the sleeping potion into the other. Feyre took it, and Nesta stepped toward the door as she began to drink.
Cassian knew. Rhys knew. They were coming. Mor smoothed the hair away from Feyre’s sweat-slick forehead. Feyre pushed Cutter’s gloved hand away and undid the laces of her own nightgown.
Nesta turned the pewter latchbolt and opened the door.
The guards clutched at their halberds in surprise when they saw who it was, and then one of them lowered the spear-tip of his polearm to point under Nesta’s chin.
Her eyes already shone silver. She told them, “At ease, boys. I won’t hurt you if you don’t give me a reason.”
They looked at each other, each clearly wanting the other one to make the decision of what they’d do. She had disappeared for six months and reappeared in the High Lady’s chambers. She was a war hero and Feyre’s sister, and she could kill each of them with a wave of her hand. It was a complicated decision. She pitied them. A little bit.
She rested the heel of her hand on the ice-flame hilt of her long knife.
They made their decision. The blade was withdrawn from her throat. Nesta stepped across the threshold into the private sitting room and pulled the door shut behind her.
“What’s happening to the High Lady?”
“She’s safe,” Nesta reassured them. “She and the babe will both be safe. Now, suppose I threatened both of you with a slow and horrible death, and that you were so terrified you ran for your lives and barely escaped being incinerated by silver fire?”
They both looked deer-eyed at her.
“And suppose you went and found the High Lord, who is already on his way as we speak, to inform him I’m here, how grateful he’d be. And then you could run off to the garrison chambers, instead of being here when the High Lord and the General arrive.”
When they still didn’t get the point, she continued, “I could provide you with some injuries for the sake of believability if you wanted to stick around.”
They got the hint. Both of them hurried off toward the main corridor. When they were gone, Nesta felt her heart tremoring behind her ribs. I am the rock against which the surf crashes. Things had gone well so far. Behind her was her sister, in an enchanted sleep, and Madge’s godsend with her roll of knives. Ahead of her was a reckoning. She had not cut the ribbon. It was not even hung up from the rafters in the Court she made to be her home. She had only her knife and herself, and the twisting rusty wire that must have left a permanent mark on the white of her bones by now, tethering her to Cassian, and she had a way of distracting Rhys, but only one.
The drapes of the sitting room were shut and the fire was out, leaving only a few rounds of bone-white tapers in tall iron stands with their flickering flames to light the chamber. Outside there were the billion stars of Velaris in their glory, but their light didn't pierce through into the House.
Then there were bootsteps. Then the turn of the doorknob, and the burst of the door, and the complaint of the hinges.
“Hello, Cassian,” said Nesta, disappointed by the quaver in her own voice.
She was surprised that it was him who came first. He was dressed in his leathers, sword on his back, siphons glowing red very faintly in the half-dark room, as if he needed to be dressed for battle in order for Feyre to survive her childbed.
“Nes,” he said, caught in the doorway like he’d forgotten how to move.
It was Rhys who broke the breathless standstill between them. Cassian leapt aside to let him through. Rhys’ bruise-colored eyes bored into Nesta as if he could make her rot to dust just from the weight of his contempt.
“Good evening,” she found herself saying.
“Move aside,” Rhys snarled. “Or I will make you.”
“She chose this of her own free will. You had no better plan. She told you herself—”
Nesta felt Rhys’ iron fingers claw into her mind, trying to throw her body away from the door. Her mind snapped shut, a dog’s mouth around the throat of a wolf, and Rhys actually shrieked from the pain.
“What did you do?” Cassian shouted.
“—she told you herself,” Nesta finished.
“She’s gone from the other end,” said Rhysand, livid and panicked, shoving the furniture out of the way as he strode toward Nesta with his hand outstretched, inky darkness clouding toward her. “I can’t hear her!”
Silver fire erupted in a circle around Nesta’s feet. The darkness disintegrated. The cold flames burned as high as her waist, filling the chamber with light as white as bone, and Rhys came no further.
“She’s taken a sleeping draught.”
“This has never worked,” Rhys growled. “Cassian told you! You knew it had been tried, and the mother died!”
“Feyre said yes when she saw the healer’s own memories.”
“You are gambling with Feyre’s life!” Cassian cried. He stood behind Rhys’ shoulder at the edge of her circle of flames.
“You saw them,” Nesta accused Rhys. “You know what you saw down the bond. The healed scar, that’s what changed her mind!”
“I don’t know what you’re capable of, witch,” Rhys’ fists were bloodless as clay. “Let me through to see my mate.”
There was a sudden smell in the air. It wasn’t a flood of scent, but they all knew it. Blood; Feyre’s blood. Cutter had made the first incision.
Rhys made it two steps into the silver fire before the death magic was too much for him. He barely stumbled back out; Cassian caught him by the shoulder. His boots had holes eaten into them. She scented ice-burnt flesh.
“Nes, stand down!” Cassian shouted. She felt ripped in half when she looked at him. The part of her the Cauldron made that yearned to press her face into the warmth of his chest, and the part of her that she stole back from it recoiled.
“No. I’m not going to let you interrupt the healer while she works.”
“First you disappear in the mountains, then you’re gone for half a year, then you shut me out, and now—” Cassian gestured to the door and the fire. “Now all of this?”
“You lied to me.”
“This can’t still be about the weapons. Really, Nesta, all this over a sword and a couple of knives?”
“You and I are mates.”
It hung over all of them. Rhys stared like he was trying to see through her and into the room beyond. The air still smelled of Feyre’s blood.
“It wasn’t the right time to tell you. You had so much to work through still…”
“That was never for you to decide,” said Nesta. Would she have said something like that to him before? She wouldn’t have held her ground. He would’ve bent the words back on her like a blade of grass.
“We looked for you!” He accused her. “Everyone has been looking for you, ever since you ran off and did this. Do you know how many mountains I’ve combed over? You stole priestesses from the library, you ran off!”
“They wanted to. I wanted to.”
“You were protected.”
“Not from you.”
Rhys lifted his hand again, and this time she could feel a different kind of magic sinking needle-thin teeth into her.
He was trying to mist her, blow her out like a candle flame into nothing but red dust. Her body was Made, and didn’t answer the call of dissolution, but she could feel the pull at every particle. The fire’s cold burnt into her very bones as she stood between the Lord and Lady of Night.
A squalling cry broke the deadlock. Feyre’s child took his first breath of air.
“Swear to me you will not harm the healer or keep her from doing her work,” said Nesta quickly.
“My child is behind those doors!” Rhys roared.
“And so is Feyre, and she needs the healer to close the incisions. Swear it!”
Rhys’ presence was as cold as Nesta’s fire, but he bit out, “I swear it.”
A broken sword appeared on the column of his throat. Nesta’s flames went dark. She stepped away from the door.
Rhys charged through the second she was out of his way, not bothering with the knob, or the bits of splintered door that went everywhere. Golden light flooded in through the threshold, and the sharp smell of herbs, the metallic scent of blood. Cutter had drapes up, so they couldn't see anything, except for the Lord of Night snatching his vernix-pale son from the servant bathing him, and the baby’s soft brown wings.
“Feyre? Feyre? Her blood’s all over you.”
“My lord, please…” Cutter quailed. She had a silver needle and thread in her raised hands.
Nesta felt a heavy hand drop onto her shoulder and drag her away from the door before she could go in to help. She stumbled over her boots.
“You have to explain this to me.”
“Let go of me.”
He tugged her farther away into the middle of the room so they could speak without disturbing Feyre and Rhys. She pushed his familiar hand off of her.
“Do I not get any answer after all this time?” He sounded aggrieved, like he’d lost a comrade or a friend, and she hated it.
“My sister’s womb is cut open in that room, so no.”
“You went to all the trouble to find a way to save her, and you couldn’t tell us anything?”
Nesta could have explained that she had, actually, written, and that Rhys knew she’d written, but she didn’t want to, because she was tired, and because she was borne up by the relief of the baby being delivered and Feyre still being alive.
“At least I went to the trouble,” she countered.
“Thank you,” said Cassian quietly, catching her more off her guard than she could’ve imagined. The urge to reach for him nearly overwhelmed her. “I thought we were going to lose them both. I’m glad you did it.”
The baby’s cries had turned into squirming sounds of distress as he settled in. Nesta wanted to go see Cutter and Feyre when she’s awake, but Cassian drew her in again.
“You should stay here,” he told her.
“We both know I’m not going to do that.”
The softness turned to frustration in an instant. “You belong here.”
“At the end of a leash no one will untie? I never belonged here.”
“Feyre needs you. I—” his voice broke. “I need you to stay.”
“And the next time they tell you to carry out my punishment, will I have to wipe away your guilty tears when you’re done?”
“When he went into your mind I defended you! I told him to stop thinking you were cruel to everybody all the time— I tried to stop them from sending you after the Trove if they thought it was so dangerous! You were safe here, Nesta, with me.”
“Stop shouting. She’s stitching Feyre up.”
Cassian spoke more quietly, but the bitter accusation didn't diminish.
“All I ever wanted was to be there for you, and you disappeared.”
Nesta shook her head. “You wanted to stand up for me as long as I didn’t stand up for myself first. I’m going back to see my sister.”
The words didn’t feel true. The bond screamed at her that she was denying herself something essential.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Suddenly they heard the door to the bedroom click shut again at the same time as the door to the hallway flooded with Illyrian and High Fae retainers. Their black armor shone like broken glass. Rhys had come back into the sitting room, leaving the baby behind with his mother.
“Is she awake?” asked Nesta.
“I can’t let you leave,” he told her.
The anger bloomed into clarity inside her. Nesta was so incandescently furious that she was suddenly calm; that everything inside her was mirror-smooth, and she didn’t despise herself, not even the part of herself that wanted to come back.
“I am the High Lady of the Spire of the Valkyries. I haven’t done anything to you.”
The room was curtained by leathery wings and siphons that look like insect eyes.
“This doesn’t have to be hard,” said Cassian.
“How nice if that were true,” said Nesta.
“Indeed,” said Rhys, “But I get the feeling you’re going to insist on making this difficult.” He paused. “It’s for Feyre’s sake. You’re not a prisoner. It’s to keep her safe.”
“Even after everything, you hid my letter,” hissed Nesta, fueled by crystalline fury. “She’s alive in that room with your child, and you’ve chosen to be out here instead, instead of in there with your mate”
“All I want is to keep my family safe.” He was so sincere. Several of his warriors drew their gleaming blades from their scabbards.
“You lied to my sister. Twice. About her own life and death. If she had died because you couldn’t get over your stupid pride to ask somebody other than yourself and your Circle for help— and Mother forbid you tell the female you love that you couldn’t save her yourself— I would have killed you.”
There were three swords pointed at her chest in a moment. Cassian’s wasn’t among them, but he’d drawn it, and he stared at her in disbelief that she would force him to choose between her and his lord again. Nesta held her chin high. From the other room she heard high, inquisitive voices and soft baby sounds.
Nesta couldn’t waste time. There was one more thing she had to do, and she had to be fast so the Illyrians wouldn’t get into the room and hurt Cutter.
“I hope you’re happier than this someday,” she said to Cassian, her mate, as she wrapped her magic around the thread between them and pulled.
It was the worst pain she had ever felt.
It mirrored from him to her and her to him and back and forth forever. Cassian fell to his knees; Nesta could barely stand. If cold didn’t numb, but just stung more and more until every nerve burned with it, it would feel like this. She heard his scream, or hers, or someone’s.
The warriors’ swords pointed at her melted like quicksilver and fell in silver drops to the floor, where Nesta’s magic made them fast-boil into white steam that left black scorch marks in the floorboards. Pain uncoiled the fibres of her body from her side to her spine and her head, and the thread threatened to slice through her magic like a razor through a neck. I renounce it, she said to herself feverishly in the corner of her mind that wasn’t dominated by the awful pain of the retaliating bond. Her vision was mostly white. I want out.
-
The Cauldron had not killed her. Hadn’t it? She broke the water first with the top of her head, and the cold air rushed in to dry the colder water dripping from her hair to the surface. It had run in her eyes. She breathed into lungs screaming from the way her body had been remade inside out. Her waterlogged ears could hear the breathless mortals watching her be remade for their entertainment. She could smell their rotten breath. She herself had smelled like a lightning strike on a dead tree. They’d been watching a thief, and they hadn’t known.
-
Cassian was with her when hundreds fell in a tide of silver flame. The air had been flesh and smoke. She’d stood between him and the King of Hybern, her palms slick with his blood, hearing his groaning breaths as he tried to cling to life. The echo of his kiss had still been on her own ash-covered mouth.
The King of Hybern’s head poured blood like wine from a broken glass when she severed it from his neck. Cassian was still alive, and her father was dead, and Elain was sobbing so hard she couldn’t breathe.
Nesta was grateful he’d been there. She was afraid that the gratitude would dampen her resolve, but it didn’t.
The room was awash with silver when the bond between them broke in two.
-
After that it was over quickly. Rhys, to his credit, worried more about helping Cassian up from his knees than about Nesta, so she winnowed herself back into Feyre’s bedchamber before the Illyrian warriors could grab hold of her.
There were clean sheets over Feyre’s stomach, and two buckets full of bloodied linens. She was coming out of sleep, aware enough to have her arm under her son where he lay on her chest. He was pink as morning and smaller than Nesta had been expecting. Feyre blinked up at her.
“I heard shouting.”
“Yes. Don’t worry; everything’s over, you’ll be okay.” And then she said, “He’s beautiful,” because he was, in the way babies were. “I have to go.”
“No,” Feyre protested, reaching out a hand for Nesta’s. Her fingers were cool and sticky with sweat.
“Nesta, what happened?” asked Elain, approaching on Nesta’s other side. Cutter, pale and exhausted, was cleaning the last of her tools.
“Nothing.” Nesta pressed a kiss to Elain’s curls and squeezed Feyre’s hand before letting it go. “Nothing at all.”
“Why?” asked Elain, more insistently.
“Because he could’ve gone mad,” Nesta murmured. “It’s better like this.”
The door swung open. The High Lord stepped into the chamber. Nesta rushed around the bed corner, threw her arms around Cutter, and vanished in a hush of shadow.
NESTA
we have to go home now.
HOME?
yes. i’ll miss you. but there’s a little boy back there with his mother who needs someone to look after him. I need you to do that for me.
NESTA.
listen. you belong to Nyx now, and you should do for him what you did for me. please.
GOODBYE, NESTA.
goodbye, house of wind.