Cassian froze. A prince—was that what Nesta wanted? His stomach clenched.
“What happened to the duke?” Azriel asked.
Elain grimaced. “He proposed marriage the next morning.”
Rhys choked on his wine. “She was fourteen.”
“I told you: Nesta is a very good dancer. But that was what my father said—she was too young. It was a graceful exit, since my father, despite his faults, knew Nesta well. He knew she had taunted that duke into making a marriage offer just to punish the heiress for her cruelty toward me. Nesta had no interest in him—knew she was far too young. Even if the duke seemed more interested in just … reserving her until she was old enough.” Elain shuddered with distaste. “But I think some part of Nesta believed she would indeed marry a prince one day. So the duke went home with no bride, and that heiress … Well, she was one of the people who delighted in our misfortunes.”
“I’d forgotten,” Feyre murmured. “About this, and about her dancing.”
“Nesta never spoke of it afterward,” Elain said. “I just observed.”
Nesta was wrong, Cassian realized, to think Elain as loyal and loving as a dog. Elain saw every single thing Nesta had done, and understood why.
Amren asked pointedly, “So your mother twisted Nesta’s creative joys into a social climber’s arsenal?”
Feyre cut in, “Our mother was not what one would call a pleasant person. Nesta has made her own choices, but our mother laid the groundwork.”
Elain nodded, folding her hands in her lap. “So I’m very pleased to hear of this Valkyrie business. I’m happy that Nesta finds interest in something again. And might channel all of … that into it.” That, Cassian knew, meant her rage, her fierce and unyielding loyalty to those she loved, her wolf’s instincts and ability to kill.
They moved on to far merrier subjects, but Cassian mulled it over throughout the evening. The fighting was only one part of it. The training would sustain her, funnel that rage, but there had to be more. There had to be joy.
There had to be music.
CHAPTER
45
“I think the Valkyries were even more sadistic than the Illyrians,” Gwyn grunted, and Nesta could see the priestess’s legs shaking as she held the pose that had been illustrated in one of her many research volumes. “No amount of Mind-Stilling will get me through these exercises. What was that phrase they used? I am the rock against which the surf crashes. A rock never had to hold a lunge, though.”
“This is outrageous,” Emerie agreed, teeth gritted.
Cassian idly flipped a long dagger in his hand. “I warned you that they were stone-cold warriors.”
Nesta panted through her teeth in a steady rhythm. “My legs might break.”
“You three still have … twenty seconds.” Cassian looked to the clock Azriel had dragged up from the House and left on the water station table. The shadowsinger was away today, but the priestesses he usually trained had been left with a strict lesson plan.
Nesta’s legs wobbled and burned, but she rooted her strength through her toes, focusing on her breathing, her breathing, her breathing, as the Mind-Stilling had bade her to do. She sought that place of calm, where she might be beyond her thoughts of pain and her shaking body, and it was so close, so near, if she could just concentrate, breathe more deeply—
“Time,” Cassian declared, and the three of them collapsed onto the dirt. He laughed again. “Pathetic.”
“You try it,” Gwyn panted, lying prone on the earth. “I don’t think even you could survive that.”
“Thanks to the passages you sent me last night, I was here at dawn doing the exercises myself,” he said. Nesta raised her brows. He hadn’t been at dinner, and hadn’t sought her out, but she’d been tired enough after a few nights of little sleep that she hadn’t minded. “I figured if I’m going to torture you three, I should at least be able to back it up.” He winked. “For exactly the moment when you groused that I should suffer alongside you.”
“No wonder you look like that,” Emerie muttered, turning over to lie on her back and gaze at the crisp autumn sky. The days had given up any attempt at being warm, though true cold had not yet set in. The sun offered a kernel of heat against the chill breeze, a buttery, bone-heating warmth that Nesta savored as she, too, lay on her back.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” His grin tightened something low in Nesta’s gut.