It didn’t sing, didn’t speak. It might as well have been an ordinary instrument.
Which was exactly why Nesta tugged Cassian into a halt beneath the archway, not daring to step onto the carved floor. “We need to be careful.” Nesta peered into the vast, empty chamber. “There are wards and spells here.”
Cassian rubbed his jaw with his free hand. “My magic doesn’t skew toward spells. I can blast apart magical shields and wards, but if it’s a trap like Feyre and Amren faced at the Summer Court, I can’t sense it.”
Nesta tapped her foot in a swift beat. “Rhysand’s wards on the Mask couldn’t keep me out. The Mask wished for me to come, so it allowed me through. Maybe the Harp will do the same. Like calls to like, as you all enjoy saying.”
“I’m not letting you go into that room alone. Not if that thing wants to play.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
He squeezed her hand, calluses rubbing against her own. “You lead, I’ll follow.”
“What if my presence would go unnoticed, but yours sets off a trap? We can’t risk that.”
His throat bobbed. “I can’t risk you.”
The words slammed into her heart. “I … You can. You have to.” Before he could further object, she said, “You are training me to be a warrior. Yet you’d keep me from danger? How is that any better than a caged animal?”
The words must have struck something in him. “All right.” Cassian unbuckled the great sword he’d carried for her. He looped it around her middle, its weight considerable. She adjusted her balance. “We try it your way. And at the first sign of something wrong, we leave.”
“Fine.” She swallowed the dryness in her mouth.
His eyes glittered, noting her hesitation. “Not too late to change your mind.”
Nesta bristled. “I’m not allowing anyone but us to get their hands on the Harp.”
With that, she stepped to the demarcation line between the hall and the chamber. Bracing herself, she pushed a foot forward.
It was like stepping through mud.
But the wards allowed her through. Nesta took another step, arm extended behind her to hold Cassian’s hand. The pressure of the spells pushed against her calves, her hips, her body, squeezing her lungs. “These are like no wards I’ve felt before,” she whispered, standing still as she waited for any hint of a triggered trap. “They feel old. Incredibly old.”
“They probably predate this place being used as a prison.”
“What was it before?”
“No one knows. It’s always been here. But this chamber …” He surveyed the space beyond her. “I didn’t know places like this existed here. Maybe …” He frowned. “Part of me wonders if the Prison was either built or stocked with its inmates to hide the Harp’s presence. There are so many terrible powers here, and the wards on the mountain itself … I wonder if someone hid the Harp knowing that it’d never be noticed with so much awful magic around it.”
Her mouth had dried again. “But who put it here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Someone who existed before the High Lords ruled. Rhys told me once that this island might have even been an eighth court.”
“You don’t recognize these markings on the ground?”
“Not at all.”
She loosed a long breath. “I don’t think any traps were triggered.”
He nodded. “Be quick.”
Their gazes held, and Nesta turned from the raw worry in his eyes as she pulled her hand from his and entered the chamber.
The wards lay heavy against Nesta’s skin with each step across the stone floor to the shining Harp.
“It looks newly polished,” she observed to Cassian, who watched from the archway. “How is that possible?”
“It exists outside the bindings of time, just as the Cauldron does.”
Nesta studied the carvings in the floor. They all seemed to spiral toward one point. “I think these are stars,” she breathed. “Constellations.” And like a golden sun, the Harp lay at the center of the system.
“This is the Night Court,” Cassian said drily.
But it felt … different from Night Court magic somehow. Nesta paused before the Harp, the wards pressing into her skin as she surveyed its golden frame and silver strings. The Harp sat atop a large rendering of an eight-pointed star. Its cardinal points stretched longer than the other four, with the Harp situated directly in the heart of the star.