“It doesn’t matter to me.” Mor waved off the conversation with a flip of her hand. He could tell something else was eating at her. But she’d let him in when she was ready.
Cassian walked around the table and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Get some rest.” He shot skyward before she could answer.
Nesta woke to pure darkness.
Darkness that she had not witnessed in years now. Since that ramshackle cottage that had become a prison and a hell.
Jolting upright, hands clutching at her chest, she gasped for air. Had it been some fever dream on a winter’s night? She was still in that cottage, still starving and poor and desperate—
No. The air in the room was toasty, and she was the lone person in the bed, not clinging to her sisters for warmth, always squabbling over who got the coveted middle place in the bed on the coldest nights, or the edges on the hottest summer ones.
And though she’d become as bony as she’d been during those long winters … this body was new, too. Fae. Powerful. Or it had once been.
Scrubbing at her face, Nesta slid from the bed. The floors were warmed. Not the icy wooden planks in the cottage.
Padding to the window, she drew back the drapes and peered out at the darkened city below. Golden lights shone along the streets, dancing on the twining band of the Sidra. Beyond that, only starlight silvered the lowlands before the cold and empty sea.
A scan of the sky revealed nothing regarding how far off dawn might be, and a long moment of listening suggested the household remained asleep. All three of them who occupied it.
How long had she slept? They’d arrived by eleven in the morning, and she’d fallen asleep soon after that. She’d consumed absolutely nothing all day. Her stomach grumbled.
But she ignored it, leaning her brow against the cool glass of the window. She let the starlight gently brush her head, her face, her neck. Imagined it running its shimmering fingers down her cheek, as her mother had done for her and her alone.
My Nesta. Elain shall wed for love and beauty, but you, my cunning little queen … You shall wed for conquest.
Her mother would thrash in her grave to know that, years later, her Nesta had come dangerously close to marrying a weak-willed woodcutter’s son who had sat idly by while his father beat his mother. Who had put his hands on her when she called things off between them. Who had then attempted to take what she hadn’t offered.
Nesta had tried to forget Tomas. She often found herself wishing the Cauldron had ripped those memories away just as it had her humanity, but his face sometimes sullied her dreams. Her waking thoughts. Sometimes, she could still feel his rough hands pawing at her, bruising her. Sometimes, the coppery tang of his blood still coated her tongue.
Pulling back from the window, Nesta studied those distant stars again. Half-wondered if they might speak.
My Nesta, her mother had always called her, even on her deathbed, so wasted and pale from typhus. My little queen.
Nesta had once delighted in the title. Had done her best to fulfill its promise, indulging in a dazzling life that had melted away as soon as the debtors swept in and all her so-called friends had revealed themselves to be nothing more than envious cowards wearing smiling masks. Not one of them had offered to help save the Archeron family from poverty.
They had thrown them all, mere children and a crumbling man, to the wolves.
So Nesta had become a wolf. Armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. Had relished it. But when the time came to put away the wolf, she’d found it had devoured her, too.
The stars flickered above the city, as if blinking their agreement.
Nesta curled her hands into fists and climbed back into bed.
Cauldron damn him, maybe he shouldn’t have agreed to bring her here.
Cassian lay awake in his behemoth of a bed—large enough for three Illyrian warriors to sleep side by side, wings and all. Little in the room itself had changed in the past five hundred years. Mor occasionally groused about wanting to redecorate the House of Wind, but he liked this room how it was.
He’d awoken at the sound of a door shutting and been instantly alert, heart hammering as he pulled free the knife he kept on the nightstand. Two more were hidden under his mattress, another set above the doorway, and two swords lay beneath the bed and in a dresser drawer, respectively. That was just his collection. The Mother knew what Az had stored in his own room.
He supposed that between him, Az, Mor, and Rhys, in the five centuries they’d used the House of Wind, they had filled it with enough weapons to arm a small legion. They’d hidden and stashed and forgotten about so many of them that there was always a good chance of sitting on a couch and being poked in the ass by something. And a good chance that most of the weapons were now little more than rust in their sheaths.