Chapter Text
Cassian
Nesta trips again on the fourth day. Cassian’s first thought is one of annoyance. Have they not already discussed that she needs to be drinking water? He’s slow to turn. Later he will think back to this moment and wonder how he could have been so unbothered. Did he not realize they were so close to the edge of the bluff? Was he so used to living with wings that he forgot how dangerous heights were to those without them? She slides down the slope on her side, pulled by the weight of the pack. By the time Cassian sees her she is at the cliff’s edge. There is a moment where time slows. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are cracked. She looks almost at peace. And then she vanishes.
Cassian launches into the air. He beats his wings as hard as he is capable but it’s not enough. Of course it’s not enough. Down is faster than up and forward and down. The cliff is sheer, four hundred feet of vertical stone until it turns again into rocky scree. Beyond the scree is a lush valley floor with a clear, winding river. It is beautiful country. Cassian will think that later, too. How could something so bad happen in such beautiful country? For a long moment he doesn’t see her, and he wonders if by some miracle she has winnowed away. That wouldn’t be unheard of. The fae have strong survival instincts. Some perform feats of magic they can never achieve again in the face of death. Nobody knows if Nesta or Elain can winnow. It is highly possible—
And then Cassian spots a cloud of dust and a tiny, crumpled white shape. It is the canvas pack, resting partway down the scree field. Just below it is a darker shape. It is barely recognizable as a person, so twisted and contorted are the limbs. Cassian lands softly just downfield of the body. He comes up to her in halting, scrambling steps. Below him little rocks are wheeling and pinging down the slope. The sounds are far away. Much closer is his heartbeat, pounding in his ears.
"Nesta?" he says.
There is no answer.
She is facedown. With shaking fingers Cassian grabs her shoulder and turns her. She is still warm. When he sees her face he pulls back, horrified. Her skull has been caved in, the entire right half of her forehead a bloody, concave mess.
"No," he whispers. "No, no, Nes, no, Nes, why did you…no, no no."
Nesta says nothing. She stares at him with unseeing blue eyes. He lets go of her shoulder and she rolls back the way he found her.
"Rhys," Cassian whispers. There is no point in calling him. It is a fatal injury. Cassian, who has caved in a hundred heads with axes and swords and shields, knows this. But he tries anyways. "Rhys," he calls, getting louder, "Rhys! RHYS!!!!"
The connection between their minds is a well-paved road after so many centuries. Rhysand hears him.
What, he says irritably in Cassian’s mind. I’m with Feyre. If it’s about Nesta it can fucking wait.
Cassian doesn’t have words. He sends the image of Nesta’s bloodied, broken skull.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Is she breathing?
No.
Is her heart—
She’s dead, Rhys.
Fuck. Okay, don’t move, Az and I will be there as soon as we can.
When Rhysand is gone from his mind Cassian sits on the ground beside Nesta’s body. He cannot bear to look at her but he also cannot bear to turn away. He closes his eyes. He tries to remember what was so important that he forced her up here. Where was he trying to get? What was he trying to do? His mind replays his chummy conversation with Feyre and Rhys just after they arrived.
Tell him that Nesta and I are going to hike, and she’s going to hate it, but she comes home when I decide she’s ready to come home.
He’s secretly delighted.
Feyre’s laughter. His own.
Cassian surges forward to his hands and knees and vomits on the stones, again and again, until all that remains is bile. He lets it happen, lets his body twist and heave and wring itself out. What the fuck was he thinking? How could he have brought her here? She didn’t know the dangers of the mountains. She was just a child, just an angry, hurting child—
But it’s not just the horror at what he’s done. There is something wrong with him. He is sweating now, his muscles trembling, and there is a growing pain in the center of his chest. He manages to sit upright and then rips open his shirt. He looks down and almost vomits again.
There is a black mark blooming on the skin just under his ribs. It sizzles as it spreads and Cassian smells his own cauterizing flesh.
He knows what it is. Illyrians call it the steinhjert. The high fae call it something else, he cannot remember their words and at this moment he does not want to. He knows what it means, too. It means a magic inside him is dying.
It means the broken female beside him was his mate.
Azriel
Azriel is eating in the House of Wind when Rhysand lands on the balcony.
"Az!" Rhys bellows. He doesn’t bother to come inside. Azriel drops his fork and runs outside.
"What is it?" he asks. His mind is already sifting through a list of Night Court vulnerabilities. Is it Briallyn, finally making a move? Is it Eris, caught in some sort of trouble? Is it Feyre?
"It’s Nesta," Rhysand says as he grabs Azriel’s shoulder.
Azriel frowns. Isn’t she with Cassian, doing some sort of hiking penance? He wonders if she’s run away and finds himself hoping she has. It is obvious to him that this intervention, like the one before it, was an overstep. Whatever form the Cauldron gave her, Nesta is more like an Illyrian than anything else. And Illyrians recover from a war by drinking and dancing and fucking, all the things Nesta was doing before they shoved her into sobriety prison on a cliff.
Of course, Azriel also suspects the real reason why Cassian wants her up here. He has almost smelled it a few times, and his busybody shadows are sure it is there. A mating bond. Of course Cassian wants her alone up here, himself and Azriel the only males for company. There is something darkly amusing about watching Cassian justify his own actions, pretending Nesta was out of control, a danger to herself, when all he really wanted was for her to stop fucking other males. Or maybe it isn’t amusing at all. Because whatever Cassian might feel, he isn’t treating her like his mate.
"Is she alright?" Azriel asks as the darkness pulls them in.
"No," Rhysand says. "She is not."
Rhys follows the echoes of Cassian’s mind to a small but steep valley in the center of the range. It takes Azriel a moment to spot his brother. Cassian is sitting in a boulderfield at the bottom of a cliff. His dark wings blend into the dusty grey stone around him. Beside him is a white round blob. Azriel recognizes the pack he gave Cassian on his way out of town. Then he sees a darker shape beside it.
Rhysand has refused to say anything more as they’ve flown, but Azriel puts it together quickly.
Fuck, he thinks. And then, before he can help himself—she’s so fucking young.
They dive and pull up twenty feet short, banking their wings, trying to minimize the disturbance. Cassian doesn’t look up. When Azriel lands he walks over to the dark shape of Nesta’s body.
It is still and unmoving, the limbs at impossible angles. Azriel has seen five lifetimes of broken bodies—has broken them himself—but there is still something disquieting about seeing it on anyone who is not an enemy soldier. Nesta is wearing Illyrian leathers. There is a faint stench coming from them, above the tang of blood, like she hadn’t taken them off in several days. The pants on one leg have ripped open in the fall. Azriel can see her broken tibia, but also a ring of scabs and bruises along her shin where the boot ends. She is skinny. All the weight she had managed to put on is gone. Her hipbone juts horribly upward, as sharp a line as her fractured limbs.
"What the fuck were you doing to her?"
The rage in his own voice surprises him. Under both Illyrian and high fae custom, Nesta belongs to Cassian. Even if there had been no mating bond, the fact that they are fatherless mean that Nesta and Elain belong to Rhysand through his marriage with their sister. What happened here was not a crime against the social order. But it was wrong. Azriel stares at the shattered body beneath him and knows it was wrong.
"We were hiking," Cassian whispers. Rhysand has gone to stand by him. He puts one hand on Cassian’s bare shoulder and that’s when Azriel notices the steinhjert sprawled across his chest. He has seen a steinhjert only once before, on an old warrior who died in the first Hybernian war. He was a lonely male who sat apart from the others, and when he fell to an ash arrow, no one carried his body home. The one on Cassian’s chest is pulsing in its freshness. When a breeze picks up Azriel can smell the sizzling flesh. It is surely agonizing, but Cassian does not react. He stares at the valley below them.
"You didn’t notice her falling?"
"Too late," Cassian whispers. "I was too…"
"It was an accident," Rhysand says consolingly. There is a hint of magic in his voice. He is trying to calm Cassian, to draw him gently out of shock.
There is a risk that Cassian will die in the next few days. Losing a mate takes a tremendous toll on the body. The stronger the bond, the greater the risk. Azriel looks again at Nesta’s battered body and realizes he is not worried about Cassian. No one who truly loved their mate could punish them like this, and especially not for so light a transgression. Why were they out here again? Because Nesta had told Feyre that her labor would kill her? Amren had explained the situation to him and even then he’d found it ridiculous. Childishness on Rhysand’s part, to pretend that any truth Nesta shared was a tenth as bad as what he had done, fucking Feyre as an Illyrian. Feyre could not possibly have known the risks. Rhysand did. And why had Cassian gone along with the punishment? Azriel had assumed it was an excuse to take her out of town and fuck her for several days. He never imagined he was actually hurting her.
"She was your mate," Azriel says.
Cassian says nothing. Rhysand glares at him and a moment later is in his mind.
What are you doing? Rhysand asks. Can’t you see this is bad enough without rubbing his face in it?
Nesta is dead.
No shit, spymaster.
He killed his own mate.
He didn’t kill her. I checked his mind. She fell, he didn’t throw her over. Rhysand is kneeling beside Cassian now, anxiously searching his blank face.
"He is falt," Azriel says out loud. He says it quietly, but Cassian looks up. The pain in his eyes says he knows. That he agrees.
"We don’t need any fucking Illyrian bullshit right now!" Rhysand shouts, wheeling on Azriel. "What happened here was an accident! Cassian isn’t fucking fallen, he didn’t even know they were mates, shut the fuck up, Az."
Azriel ignores him. Rhysand has never been an Illyrian. Not truly. He doesn’t understand the gravity of what has happened here. Cassian has failed at his most sacred job. He has failed to protect his family. He was given a mate—Azriel nearly chokes on the bitterness and resentment at that thought, that it was Cassian and not him—and he let her die in front of him. Drove her to the brink of death. Was so uncaring that he made her walk when she was exhausted and hungry and thirsty, all to appease some high fae High Lord. The disgust he feels shocks him. He takes a step back.
"Can you fucking help?" Rhysand snaps. "Can you pick up the… pick her up."
"No," says Azriel. "Cassian will carry her home." Because that is how it is done in Illyria.
You carry the ones you fail.
Elain
Dinners at Feyre’s house are drawn-out events. The evenings start with drinks and laughs in front of the fire, then move to the dining room, where there are more drinks and laughs and at least three courses, and then return to the fire for a final round of—could it be?—drinks and laughs. If Elain had described her ideal life ten years ago, she might have described this. The rooms they sit in are beautiful, the ceilings high and gilded, lit by the sun in summer and glowing candles in winter. The fae around the table are beautiful, too. Mor, like a ray of sunshine come to life. Azriel, like an angel stepped out of the shadows. The food is made of the best produce and the freshest meat. There is no sniping over who gets the last bowlful of stew or whose turn it is to clean the dishes. The dinners are luxurious, they are plentiful.
Elain doesn’t know why she hates them so much.
This dinner is tenser than most. Rhysand, Cassian, and Azriel are all missing, and no one is talking about it. No one is talking about anything important, because the rule of the house is that no one upsets Feyre. It was always implied, but Rhysand stated it explicitly a few days ago. He had gathered everyone but Feyre into his study to tell them about the incident with Nesta, and why she would be spending the next few weeks in Illyria with Cassian.
That meeting had been the first that Elain had heard about the risk to Feyre’s life. She had never felt more human, more foreign than she did at that moment.
"A risk to Feyre’s life?" she’d said. "Then shapeshift."
Rhysand’s impatient dismissal: "It might harm the baby."
"But surely Feyre’s life is more important than the baby’s, especially if the baby wouldn’t survive the birth anyways…?"
The angry and horrified looks around her had shut Elain up. She didn’t fully understand. In their village, if a pregnancy was likely to hurt a woman, she took herbs to get rid of it. Why was this not being offered to Feyre? Why was everyone acting like there was a death sentence hanging over her head when that death was a choice?
It still has not been explained, and so Elain is quiet at dinner. Mor chatters on about some Winter Court drama she heard from Viviane, and Feyre listens with a smile. Elain’s sister has leapt with a full heart and closed eyes into Rhysand’s world. She believes that staying cheerful will help the baby and that only a miracle can save her. Perhaps she also believes such a miracle will come. Elain doesn’t know. She spears a potato and wishes that Lucien were here, so at least she could have an excuse for being so withdrawn.
There is a clatter on the roof. The conversation stops. Elain looks up, where the chandelier is tinkling with the vibration of footsteps above. There are at least two people up there. Someone is shouting.
"Mor," Feyre says, "will you go see what’s going on? Make sure Rhysand is alright." She rests her hand against her stomach, as if to explain why she cannot go herself, as if she is nine months pregnant instead of four. It’s an uncharitable thought and Elain regrets it, sort of, but she also can’t bring herself to take it back. Ever since she found out she was pregnant, Feyre has been acting like a helpless waif, battered by the winds of fate. Unable to help herself or her sisters, reliant entirely on Rhysand and his family.
Mor gets up. She is gone a minute, then two. Elain eats in silence.
"Gosh," says Feyre, "I hope everyone is alright."
"I’m sure it’s fine," says Amren. "These children are getting themselves into trouble all the time."
Feyre laughs. "I’m sure we all do seem like children to you."
Amren is about to respond when Mor appears in the doorway. Her face is white and her eyes are wild.
"There’s been an accident," Mor whispers. Immediately Feyre is on her feet, clutching the table. Elain stares at her warily.
"Is it Rhys?" Feyre asks. Her voice is trembling.
"No, no," Mor says, rushing inside to reassure her. She kneels down beside Feyre and takes her hand. "It’s Nesta," she says. "Fey, I’m so sorry, she… she didn’t make it."
Elain is sure she has misheard. "What?" she asks. Her voice sounds very far away.
"Oh," says Mor, turning to Elain with pity in her eyes. "Elain, I’m so sorry, I’d forgotten—it’s Nesta. She and Cassian were in the mountains and it seems she… well it’s hard to say exactly what happened. It looks like she was trying to hike some terrain that was too difficult for her, off on her own. She fell. Cassian didn’t reach her in time."
The room falls quickly into chaos. Feyre has started wailing, clutching her stomach and curling in on herself. Amren and Mor are saying soothing words, petting her arms, calming her like she is a widow of war.
"How could she?" Feyre screams, "How could she do this? Did she want to die? Did she want to leave me so badly?"
There is more shouting from upstairs. Rhysand appears in the door, his eyes frantic. He rushes to his wife and picks her up, takes her in his arms. He murmurs to her, holds her as she sobs and screams.
Like a piece of theater, Elain thinks. Everyone ignores her, and in this she is not surprised. They have both lost a sister but Feyre is High Lady, and grief, like most things, belongs first to the most important. Elain stands. Mor sends a pitying look her way and then turns back to Feyre, says something about the baby. About Feyre needing to stay strong for him. Elain walks out the door.
The hallway is quieter at first. Feyre is still wailing and Elain grabs the heavy door, pulls it shut behind her. There is a soft click. She takes a deep breath. She wonders if she is supposed to feel something. She feels nothing at all. Not happy, not sad, not whatever despair Feyre was showing. Just blankness. She’s not even sure that what’s happening is real. She looks down the long hallway of the river estate, at its parquet floors and perfectly wainscotted walls. It wavers in front of her, expands and contracts. There is something happening at the end, on the side balcony. Elain walks towards the door slowly. She is wearing a long, formal dress and it drags on the floor behind her, muffling the click of her footsteps.
Elain’s head clears as she walks. Nesta is dead. The horror and the grief hang like a boulder above her head, but she doesn’t let it fall just yet. Because there is more to it than that.
What did Mor say? Off on her own… tried some terrain that was too difficult for her. This, Elain knows, is a lie. Nesta has always been sensible about her safety. Much more so than Feyre, who would go careening off into the woods as if wolves were an old wives’ tale. No, Nesta does not do dangerous things, and she certainly wouldn’t push herself beyond the limits of her own abilities. Cassian pushed her. Of this, Elain is certain. Is that not what has happened since they came to this Court? Feyre and Rhysand and Cassian, all conspiring to push Nesta. To scry, to use her powers, to train as a warrior. To be a weapon.
Elain has been growing more and more suspicious since the meeting in Rhysand’s study. If Rhysand is willing to lie to his wife, his mate, why would he not lie to her? Elain sometimes wonders how sick Nesta really was, if it was truly worth taking away her freedom to cure her. Feyre told Elain that Nesta was on the brink of killing herself when they sent her to the House of Wind, that Azriel had burst in just as she was about to slit her own wrists in the bathtub. Elain packed up her clothes because she thought that whatever indignities Nesta was about to suffer, it was better than death.
Now Nesta is dead anyways.
Elain reaches the glass doors at the end of the hall and opens them. It is a cold autumn evening and a bitter wind is blowing. The sun has set and the sky is almost dark. When Elain steps outside, the light from the hallway spills out into a golden rectangle on the tile floor. It lights up the faces of the two Illyrian warriors who are grappling with each other on the edge of the terrace.
"Just come inside," Azriel is saying. "We have to treat it before it spreads." He has one armed wrapped around Cassian’s back and he is trying to drag him inside.
Cassian pulls against Azriel. His movements are weak but he is still big, too big for Azriel to wrangle easily inside.
Elain walks up to them. Cassian stops moving when he sees her approach. Azriel watches her with cautious eyes.
There is a wound on Cassian’s chest. It looks like a still-smoldering burn. It starts from the center of his torso, just below his ribs, and radiates outwards, wrapping around his chest and up to his neck. The smell is terrible. Like burning flesh.
"What does it mean?" Elain asks. She stops a few feet away and gestures at the wound. She knows the spot. It is where she can feel the bond with Lucien on her own body.
"It means they were mates," Azriel says softly.
"Does it hurt?" Elain asks.
Cassian nods mutely. He is staring at her with regret and grief and sorrow. The enormity of what he has done is drowning him.
"Good."
Elain finds that the blankness is gone and she is hit like an avalanche by the feeling that was waiting behind it. Grief and shock and horror and confusion and regret—stinging, stinging regret, that she didn’t say anything sooner, that she let these old, foreign men take away her sister and kill her in the woods. And behind all that there is yet another feeling, burning as hot and insidious as the wound on Cassian’s chest. It takes Elain a moment to feel it, and when she does it nearly knocks her over.
Rage.
Behind it all, there is rage.
Azriel
It is 4am by the time they manage to get Cassian in bed. He does not go easy. Rhysand has to use sleeping magic on both him and Feyre, who was still wailing into the early hours of the morning. Mor and Amren are gone by the time Azriel and Rhysand come downstairs. Elain has slipped away hours ago. Azriel wonders if he should check on her, but decides not to. Surely that is Lucien’s job.
"This is the last thing we needed," Rhysand says when he and Azriel are finally alone. He sinks onto one of the couches in the great room and starts a fire with a flick of his wrist.
Azriel pulls up a footstool and stares into the flames. He dosn’t disagree with Rhysand, but he doesn’t agree with him, either. There is something about the tone. As if what has happened today is an inconvenience, and not the end of the world as they know it.
"You know him best," Rhysand says. "When do you think he will be back to normal?"
The question surprises him in its stupidity. "What do you mean, back to normal? Nesta is dead, Rhys. Because of something he did. He will never be back to normal."
"I mean I know they were mates but it’s not like… come on, it’s not like…"
Azriel is silent. He waits for Rhysand to say it out loud. Rhysand sighs and does it.
"It’s not like they were in love. They were just fucking. I know physiologically that doesn’t help, but emotionally…"
"Cassian loved her."
"Come on. Had they ever even slept the night in the same bed?"
"He treated her like that because he didn’t know how else to treat her. He hadn’t figured it out himself. How to be in love with someone you hated. It was tearing him up."
"You say it like it’s my fault."
"Not at all. The fault was entirely his."
Rhysand stares at Azriel as if waiting for more. Azriel stares back, unbothered. "Are you going to explain?" Rhysand asks impatiently.
"I shouldn’t have to."
"Fucking hell," Rhysand snaps, "is this another conversation about how I’m not Illyrian enough? I don’t have time for that tonight. Tell me what you mean or shut up."
Azriel is unbothered by the raw aggression in his tone. But he explains. "A male’s priority should always be to his family, not another male. Certainly not a high fae lord."
This angers Rhysand. Azriel’s shadows note the change in temperature and whisper warnings in his ear. "Interesting," says Rhysand. "I never knew you had so much contempt for the Crown you serve."
"Nor did I. Until you told forced Cassian to discipline his own mate."
"I didn’t know—"
"You suspected."
Rhysand says nothing for a long time. He looks into the fire, lost in thought. He is always beautiful but tonight there is an edge to his beauty. A hardness in his mouth and eyes. He looks, Azriel thinks sadly, like his father.
"What happened today was deeply regrettable," Rhysand says at last. "And I feel bad about Nesta. Truly, I do. I may not have liked her, but she was my mate’s sister. Until Cassian claimed her, she was in my family. We both failed her."
Azriel nods. He doesn’t disagree.
"But I cannot let this drag us under, Az. I have to believe that Feyre will survive this birth, which means I have to believe I have a family worth fighting for. We have more threats against our court than ever before, and I need Cassian. I need my general."
Once again Azriel is shocked. "You truly don’t understand. He will never be your general again, Rhys."
"Surely if we give him enough support—"
"Not because he is incapable. The Illyrians will never serve him. He is falt, Rhysand. He has done something unforgivable in their eyes. Letting your mate die… there is no redemption from that."
"There has to be."
"If it was unavoidable, maybe. If he was across the continent and she was murdered by a harpy… maybe. But he was there. He made her hike, he made her carry the pack. You saw what she looked like. She was hungry and bruised, she hadn’t washed in days. I don’t know what happened between them on the hike but it doesn’t matter. No one would follow a male who did that to his mate. It is… æreløs."
"Fucking barbaric," Rhysand says, and Azriel bristles. The Illyrians might be stubborn. They might be rigid in their ideas of right and wrong and honor and dishonor, but they are not barbaric. "How will they know?" continues Rhys.
Azriel frowns. "They will know. They will see his sorrow, and they will see the steinhjert, and they will know."
Lucien
Lucien winnows to the edge of the temple, just around the corner from the high priestess’s house. He’d had a brief affair with her a few months’ back, after it became clear to him that his mate was uninterested but he was nonetheless trapped in Velaris for the time being. They’d ended things after the initial excitement faded. Lucien wasn’t upset about it. It was how most of his affairs ended, and Niamh was more understanding than most about his predicament. It is not often in Prythian that a fae male has a mate but is unattached anyways.
He is not going to Niamh’s now. In fact he is trying very hard to avoid her attention, or the attention of anyone in the area. After a furtive glance around, he darts across the moonlit temple grounds. The bundle in his arms isn’t too heavy but it is unwieldy, and would provoke serious questions if he were caught.
There is a bell charm on the morgue door that Lucien spies with his metal eye and quickly dismantles. He slips silently inside and makes his way down the row of temporary tombs. A glance at the chalk wallchart by the door tells him that Nesta’s tomb is on the end. Nesta Night, it says. It strikes Lucien as strangely macabre that Rhysand has given Nesta the honor of his family name in death, when her failure to fit into that family is the reason she is dead.
Lucien finds the tomb easily. It is chilled marble with a lightweight glass lid. He pushes it aside and sees the body.
Lucien is old and has lived through many horrors, but seeing Nesta still gives him pause. Perhaps it is how much she looks like Elain. Perhaps it is simply how young she is—only 26—still considered a child in much of Prythian. The priestesses have washed off the blood and dressed her in a white robe for the funeral pyre, but there is little anyone can do to fix the broken bones or the caved-in forehead.
He works quickly, pulling Nesta out, unwrapping the body he brought. It was difficult to find one on such short notice, as only a handful of people die in the city every month. This one has been dead for a long time, kept from rotting with a preserving spell. Lucien bought it off an extremely unsavory dealer by the docks who claimed to have a freezerchest full of bodies if he wanted more. Lucien has been trying not to imagine what the male thought he was going to do with it. In as respectful a way as he can, he pulls the white dress off Nesta and wraps her in his tarp, then puts the dress on the bought body and replaces it in Nesta’s tomb. He slips a tiny pebble of charmed ivory in the body’s mouth, then conjures a glamour.
The glamour is good, because Lucien is generally good at magic. He is often overlooked in rooms full of High Lords with death magic crawling down their spines, but he is one of the best charm-weavers on the continent. When he steps back, the body looks like Nesta, down to the matted hair over the crushed skull. Most glamours disappear within a few hours of the caster leaving, but this will not. The charmed ivory extends its lifespan by weeks if needed. It is a technique of his own design. Lucien adds more layers to the spell—contingencies, the ability to disappear realistically when the body is thrown on the flames—and then he picks up Nesta’s body and makes his way outside.
There is a moment before he leaves when he questions what he is about to do. He is doing it for his mate, but—he shakes his head and thinks of Cassian. He is doing it for his mate, because he refuses to let the Night Court turn him into the kind of male who wouldn’t do something like this for his mate. Then he takes a deep breath and winnows away.
It takes him four jumps to get where he needs to go. He is surprised the wards still let him in. Perhaps they assumed he would have to be desperate to arrive directly. They are not wrong, these are extenuating circumstances.
The last stop takes him to a balcony overlooking a black expanse. He is in the deepest part of the Autumn Court, where the trees tower 300 feet tall or more. The night is soft and warmer than he remembered, though there is a brittle bite in the breeze. He cannot help himself. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply.
It is the scent of his childhood. Earth and pine and moss and decay. He had not realized how much he had missed it. A tear rolls down his cheek, but his arms are too full to wipe it away.
Lucien turns around and faces the house. It is still night, and he can barely make out its contours. But he knows them well. The family house of the Autumn Court, grown out of the largest of the giant trees. The trunk itself is over a hundred feet in circumference, and it swells out around the rooms and balconies. There are probably fifty rooms, spiraling up and down the trunk, connected by a single grand staircase in the center. It is, Lucien thinks, the most beautiful place in the world. Once again he allows himself the brief pleasure of being present, of being home.
And then the noise begins. There is another bell charm on the balcony that Lucien doesn’t bother disarming, because eventually they will know he is here. Sure enough, there is clattering inside and a few shouts and then Beron storms outside, flame balls hovering above his head. He stops when he sees Lucien.
"Fucking hell, what are you—"
Lucien smiles and takes a hesitant step forward. "Hey Dad," he says, "I’m home."