Carefully, she pushed herself up, her arms tingling with the numbness of clenching tight for so long. Her legs buckled with relief, too, as she released their grip, letting them hang in the air. She scanned the general direction Cassian had gone. Nothing.
He’d fallen in battle before—she’d seen him gravely injured. The first time in Hybern, when he’d tried to crawl toward her as she went into the Cauldron. The second time against Hybern’s forces, when he’d been gutted and Azriel had held his entrails in with his bare hands. And the third time against the King of Hybern himself, when she had asked him, ordered him, to use her as bait, the distraction while she drew the king away from Feyre and the Cauldron.
After so many brushes with death, it was only a matter of time until it stuck.
Her mouth dried out. Azriel had been struck with an ash arrow. What if the soldiers had injured Cassian similarly? What if they were both in need of help?
She could do nothing against two dozen soldiers—against a single soldier, if she was being honest—but she couldn’t endure sitting in a tree like a coward. Not knowing if he lived. And she had magic. Had no idea how to use it, but … she had that, at least. Maybe it would help.
She told herself she was concerned for Azriel, too. Told herself she cared about the shadowsinger’s fate as much as Cassian’s. But it was Cassian’s dead face that she couldn’t bear to imagine.
Nesta didn’t let herself reconsider as she again laid herself out on the branch, wrapping her arms around it as she blindly lowered her leg, seeking the branch just beneath—
There. Her foot found purchase, but she didn’t let it bear her full weight. Still clinging to the branch, fingernails digging into the dead wood hard enough that splinters sliced beneath them, she lowered herself onto the one below. Panting, she knelt again, and once more lowered her foot, finding another branch. But it was too far. Grunting, she brought her leg back up and carefully placed her hands on either side of her knees, focusing upon her balance, just as Cassian had taught her, thinking through every motion of her body, her feet, her breathing.
Fingertips screaming at the splinters piercing the sensitive flesh beneath her nails, she dropped her legs until they hit the branch below. The branch under it was closer but thinner—wobblier. She had to lay herself flat on it to keep from teetering off.
Branch by branch, Nesta descended until her boots sank into the mossy ground, and the tree loomed like a giant above her.
The bog stretched all around, miles of black water and dead trees and grass.
She’d have to wade through the water to reach him. Nesta focused on her breathing—or tried to. Each inhale remained shallow, sharp.
Cassian could be hurt and dying. To sit idle wasn’t an option.
She scanned the shoreline five feet ahead for any hint of shallower water to wade through to the nearest mossy island, covered in flesh-shredding thorns, but the water was so black it was impossible to determine if it was shallow or if it dropped to a bottomless pit.
Nesta focused on her breathing again. She knew how to swim. Her mother had made sure of it, thanks to a cousin who had drowned in childhood. Murdered by faeries, her mother had claimed. I saw her dragged into the river.
Had it been a kelpie? Or her mother’s own fears warped into something monstrous?
Nesta made herself approach the edge of the black water.
Run, a small voice whispered. Run and run, and do not look back.
The voice was female, gentle. Wise and serene.
Run.
She couldn’t. If she were to run, it would be toward him, not away.
Nesta stepped to the water’s edge, where grass disappeared into blackness.
Her face stared back at her from the stillness. Pale and wide-eyed with terror.
Run. Was that voice merely all that remained of her human instincts, or something more? She gazed at her reflection as if it would tell her.
Something rustled in the thorns of the island, and she snapped up her head, heart thundering as she scanned for that familiar male face and wings. But there was no sign of Cassian. And whatever was in that bramble … She should find another island to head for.
Nesta surveyed her reflection again.
And found a pair of night-dark eyes looking back through it.
CHAPTER
34
Nesta stumbled away so fast she landed on her backside, the mossy ground cushioning the impact. A face broke through the black water where her reflection had been.
It was whiter than bone and humanoid. Male. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the head rose above the black water, obsidian hair drifting in the water around the creature, so silken it might as well have been the surface.