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Rhys barely remembered what happened after the red flush overtook his vision.
He remembered what came before it. Remembered snapping at Azriel that his presence on his mission was non-negotiable, remembered the barest clench of the jaw which was the only sign of frustration on Az’s otherwise perfectly stoic face. Remembered Az’s icy but unfailingly polite retort.
“I’m perfectly capable of completing a simple reconnaissance job on my own, if the past five centuries have anything to say about it.”
Rhys loosed a breath, pausing to consider his response. “Az, I’m not doubting you. You’re the finest spymaster in the history of this court.” Rhys held Azriel’s gaze, hazel that managed to be both warm and icy at the same time. “But this isn’t an ordinary mission. Koschei isn’t like anybody we’ve ever dealt with before, and we can barely get a read on him. You’ve been trying for months.” Az’s jaw again ticked with irritation, but he said nothing. “Cas is dealing with the Illyrian dissenters, Mor is monitoring Vallahan. Amren is trying to figure out a way to use the Trove. And frankly, she’s not particularly inclined to stealth. This isn’t something I’m letting you do alone.” He leaned into his inherent dominance at that last sentence. He knew it grated on Cassian and Azriel to do so, but sometimes Illyrians were too hard-headed for their own good.
“Fine. I’m going to get ready. We ought to leave at twilight.”
Rhys had barely nodded his assent before Azriel took off to his room to prepare. Possibly throw some knives around to relieve tension. Azriel’s mask of calm didn’t falter, but Rhys had known him long enough to see the annoyance flickering in his eyes. So be it. Better annoyed and alive than triumphant in a fight with his brother but dead at the hands of an evil god. Or whatever Koschei was.
Bile rose in his throat at the irony. Damn the Cauldron.
It had taken only half a thought to vaporize the legion that had arrived to apprehend them, fury painting his vision red, but that only weighed on him more heavily. Had he been a moment faster, they wouldn’t be in this damned mess at all. Azriel, his brother, his friend through countless dangers, wouldn’t be impaled against a wall, wheezing softly as ruby red droplets trickled out from his lips.
Even in mortal peril, his quiet never left him.
Rhys didn’t waste any time cursing his carelessness, a task that he estimated would take centuries. Now was for getting Az out of this mess.
But the task was proving more difficult than he had hoped. Normally, if someone was injured, they could be winnowed out, preferably directly to a healer. Even if they had been impaled, bringing them to a healer would at least minimize the chances of fatal blood loss. But the wards in Koschei’s palace, set precisely with the intention of stranding intruders, made this impossible. Even if there had been no wards though, Rhys thought faintly as he haplessly pressed a hand around Az’s wound, winnowing wouldn’t have been a good option. Az had been impaled against a wall. The blade had gone clean through his sternum and planted itself into the wall behind him. Winnowing him out would pull the blade out of him or right through him, tearing him open and effectively unsealing the tentative plug the blade had effected against the bleeding.
Not that it’s doing much, Rhys thought hollowly as he stared at the sickening wetness that gleamed against the scales of Azriel’s armor, pooling a deathly scarlet at his feet. The discordant drip quickened slightly as Az trembled, his hands braced weakly against the blade plunged into his body. His eyes were wide and glassy, for once dropping his stoic mask to reveal his raw shock. Blood dribbled down his chin as he gasped weakly.
Blinking away his own fear, Rhys leapt into action and grabbed Azriel’s jaw, tilting his head upwards and away from the wound. He made himself stare into Az’s eyes, even as his heart stuttered at the fear there, the pain he bore silently. “Listen to me, shadowsinger.” He adopted his High Lord air, his voice thickening with authority. “You are not dying here, in this shithole. Keep breathing. We’re getting you out of this, getting you to Madja who’s going to fix you up good as new, and then you are going to take a damned vacation, Az. Keep breathing. That’s an order.” He threw dominance into his words, even though in his bones he knew it was pointless. Az was putting all his effort into every breath, every blink.
Rhys was scanning the point where the blade hit the wall, searching with clammy hands for a way to remove it that wouldn’t immediately exsanguinate his brother, when he heard a feeble rasp. “R-Rhys… Rhys.”
Rhys’s head snapped up. “Az. Az, I’m here, okay? I’m here, I’m going to get you out.”
But Az’s head listed from side to side. Rhys felt his throat sealing shut, his stomach dropping at the thought that he had run out of time so soon. But…
Az’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, eyes clenching shut in pain. He was doing it on purpose. Shaking his head.
“G… g-go. Go.”
Rhys blinked.
“G-go now. Leave.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Rhys didn’t try to keep the gravity, the unadulterated power from his words. “I’m not fucking leaving you behind, Az.”
Azriel slowly leaned his head back against the wall, eyes squeezing in agony as he swallowed again. The words were so soft that even Rhys’s Fae hearing struggled to pick them up. “Have to. Nyx… needs you. Can’t get captured. They’re… they’re coming.”
Rhys shook his head. “I’ll mist them before they can so much as blink at us, Az.”
“N-not Koschei. Not for certain. Don’t let him grow up… without…” Azriel wheezed in again, coughing immediately. Rhys winced as droplets of blood snaked out from his lips. “Without a father.”
“He won’t. And he’s not going to grow up without his uncle either. We’re getting out of here.” Rhys hated the quaver in his voice. Undetectable to the world but blisteringly obvious to him.
Az did his best to fix him with a knowing look, though the exhaustion and distress rippling through his eyes undermined the effort. It took an age before he could muster the strength to respond. “H-how?”
And that was the fucking problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to keep Azriel from bleeding out here, or how to get him out in a way that wouldn’t risk just killing him faster. He could heal broken bones, and illness to some extent, yes, but he wasn’t a healer, truly. He couldn’t just reverse fatal wounds with the snap of his fingers. His magical abilities lay elsewhere. And Koschei’s forces were coming, likely with the faebane weapons he knew they possessed. On his own, he wouldn’t be immensely worried about the forces—he knew what he could handle. But Azriel didn’t have time for him to deal with whatever came their way. He looked like he had been caught in the brunt of winter, his Illyrian complexion washed pale and body shivering faintly.
So the decision became a calculus. The odds were shitty in both directions, but which choice gave Azriel the best chance of surviving? Staying here was a guarantee that Azriel would die. Rhys could hear the clomping of boots in a nearby hallway. It was now or never.
“I’m sorry, brother.” And then he yanked the blade out of Azriel’s body.
He let himself register the shock on Az’s face, the soft whimper that escaped him, for only a half second before lunging to catch his brother as he slumped forward. Slinging Az over his shoulder as carefully as he could, Rhys still winced as pulses of his brother’s blood streaked down his own armor. Swallowing down the painful ball in his throat, he cast a glance around for the door. He needed to get them past Koschei’s wards, somewhere he could winnow. As he charged through the passageway in the hall, trying and failing to keep his gait as smooth as possible in order to keep from jarring Az’s wound, the choked gasp as a sickening bubble burst in his brother’s mouth would live in his nightmares for the rest of his immortal life. The hot, viscous blood that sank into the nooks and crannies of his armor crystallized into a ruby in his mind, a gem in the crown of his failures.
He winnowed them away.
Rhys refused to look at Cassian.
When Cas had arrived at Madja’s healing room, eyes blazing, he’d frozen at the sight of his brother, the armor of his torso stripped away to reveal skin painted in blood, pulsing from the gruesome hole in his sternum. Madja had ordered them out in order to give her assistants space to work, her voice firm and unforgiving as he pressed her hands over the wound. The scarlet lay stark against the pale canvas of Az’s skin, who lay unmoving against the cot as hands grabbed and pulled and sealed. Mercifully unconscious as his blood pooled beneath him.
That had been hours ago. Now, Rhys knew that if he looked up at Cas, who sat across from him at Az’s bedside, he would find hazel eyes brimming with compassion, a silent assurance that it wasn’t Rhys’s fault. Reminders that Madja was optimistic about Azriel’s recovery. And there was nothing Rhys wanted to hear less. Nothing that could possibly make him feel worse, nothing that could stoke the hot coals of guilt that burned every nerve in his body more.
His own eyes had been trained on Az’s scarred hands, laid carefully at his sides above the heavy blanket they had drawn over his body. The hem brushed against his ribs, concealing the lower half of the thick, white bandages that swathed his torso. The blood loss had prevented him from maintaining sufficient body heat on his own, Madja had explained, gently but clinically. In the corner of the room, a fire flickered in the hearth. Even the flames, it seemed, sought to maintain a steady quiet as they burned, as if an abrupt or loud noise might disrupt the precipice Az had teetered over. The shivering had horrified Rhys at first, before Madja noted with a brittle smile that shivering was an improvement over the stillness of near-death.
His hands remained motionless, not so much as a twitch as he slept. The pallor of his skin made his Illyrian tattoos stand out eerily, like runes blessing a warrior’s death. The only movement in his body was the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even his loyal shadows, the whispering eyes that Rhys had always regarded with curious admiration, lay dormant, as if they were watching their master’s recovery with nervous, bated breath.
Stillness wasn’t abnormal for Azriel. But it felt different when it wasn’t on purpose.
Rhys didn’t doubt that Cassian could feel the guilt rippling off his body, but he wisely said nothing. Instead, he placed a hand on Az’s knee, giving it a gentle squeeze.
They settled in to wait.
Az woke up a day later.
He had blinked in exhausted confusion, seeming not to hear Rhys’s and Cassian’s rush to his side, nor their quiet assurances that he was alright. Instead, eyes half-closed, he had blearily rolled his head to the side, scanning for an explanation of why he had woken up with no memory of what had happened.
“Az? Az. Hey, hey. Az, you’re in Madja’s healing wing. You’re alright. Everything’s alright. It’s Rhys. Look at me. It’s Rhys.” At that, Az sluggishly lifted his gaze to Rhys’s own and blinked slowly, as if he was registering everything Rhys said at half the speed. At Az’s other side, Cassian gripped his forearm gently, as if to ground him before he could float away again.
Az’s lips parted, preparing to speak, but the intake of air into his parched throat sent him into a coughing fit that had his eyes squeezing shut in discomfort. At his side, Rhys winced in sympathy. Once the coughing had subsided, he carefully lifted Az’s head as Cassian lifted a glass of water to his lips, murmuring encouragingly as Az gingerly drank. Eventually, he drained the glass and let out a soft exhale of protest as Rhys set his head back against the pillow, locking eyes with him in a dazed plea.
“We’ll bring you more, Az. Not too much at once, hmm?” Indeed, Cassian was refilling the glass, eyes locked on Azriel’s face
as he did so. He glanced up at Rhys, and nodded at him before returning to Az and sliding his own hand under Az’s head to lift it. Madja had warned them that Azriel would be parched from the blood loss, needing to thoroughly rehydrate once he awoke. As Azriel drank, Cassian softly cautioning him to slow down, Rhys allowed himself a moment to close his eyes and flush out the panic and desperation that had sat on his skin for hours and hours. Allowed himself to take the barest trembling breath, choked with unreleased tears.
They had almost lost this.
Madja and her team had worked on Azriel for hours, working desperately to restore the massive quantity of blood he had lost, all while trying to stifle the wound and prevent the problem from worsening. When she had wearily emerged from the room at last, spattered in red, Rhys had wanted to collapse with anxiety. He hadn’t dared interrupt her work, even with his daemati abilities.
She had tentatively predicted that Az would wake in a day or two. All of the energy in his body was going towards survival, recovering what it had lost, she explained. He would need time to recover enough to return to consciousness. There was no end to the amount of faith he had in Madja’s healing, but he needed to see Azriel wake up before he could truly believe that he was alright.
Impatiently, he blinked away the tears that had lined his eyes as Cassian pulled the glass away from Az’s lips. Azriel swallowed gingerly as his head was lain back against the cot, as if unsatisfied, but he didn’t seem to have the energy to ask for more water. His heart pinched at the discomfort on his brother’s face, but Rhys knew that he needed to be hydrated carefully, over time, so as to not overwhelm his body. He settled back into the seat next to Az, the wooden stool creaking underneath him. On the other side, Cassian mirrored him.
Az’s eyes were shut, as if returning to the waking world had been overwhelming. His chest rose and fell slowly, a management tactic Rhys recognized from centuries of maintaining his composure during the many instances he’d been injured, distressed, or confused. He and Cassian waited patiently for Azriel to return to them when he was ready. Slowly, he blinked at the ceiling, hazel eyes glazed over with pain and sleep, before blearily looking at his brothers seated beside him. Without delay, Cassian began tearing into Azriel, the panic and relief that had been sitting in his chest needing release. Az closed his eyes against the barrage.
As Cas’s refrains of “Mother’s tits” and “you were right on the fucking edge” and “you stupid prick” rang around hollowly in his head, something burning hot and ice cold rose from underneath, ballooning in Rhys’s chest. All the relief that weighed heavy and overflowing in his chest molted into anger. He just barely suppressed the urge to roar at the top of his lungs, to plunge the world into endless night. To punish someone for what had happened. To punish Azriel for his self-sacrificing bullshit, for insisting he be left behind.
No, not really. He didn’t truly want to yell at Azriel. He knew the direction of his anger. Knew it was at himself, for letting his brother come to harm. At Koschei’s men for proverbially laying a fucking finger on him. At the world, for the relentless trove of pain it had asked Azriel to bear over the course of his centuries of life. And, Rhys admitted to himself, just a little bit at Azriel for accepting it as though he deserved it.
But that was not a conversation to have with him now, not while he was prone, hazy, weak from blood loss. Not when he had barely one foot out of death. As Cassian finally ran out of air and huffily sat back down after the passion of his rant had called him to rise, Rhys let Az absorb his brother’s fury before steadying himself and doing his best to affect a drawl. “You’re taking a vacation, Az. That’s an order.”
Slowly, slowly, the corner of Azriel’s mouth lifted in the barest hint of a smile.