Gwyn stopped at last, as if waiting for them to damn her.
But tears were running down Emerie’s face. They didn’t halt as Emerie took Gwyn’s hand and said, “You are not alone, Gwyn. Do you hear me? You are not alone.”
Nesta took Emerie’s other hand as her friend went on, “We have suffered differently, but … My father once beat me so badly he broke my back. He kept me in bed for weeks while I healed, telling people I was ill, but I wasn’t. It was … It was one of the lesser of his evils.” She paused. “He beat my mother before that. And she … I think she shielded me from him, because he never laid a hand on me until she was gone. Until he beat her so badly she couldn’t recover. He made me dig her grave on a night with a new moon, and told people she’d miscarried a babe and died from blood loss.”
She angrily wiped a tear away. “Everyone believed him. They always believed him—he was so charming to them, so smart. Whenever people told me how lucky I was to have such a good father, I wondered if I’d imagined all the bad parts. Only my scars, my wings reminded me of the truth. And when he died, I was so happy, yet they expected me to mourn him. I should have told them all what a monster he was, but I didn’t. They had turned a blind eye to my wing-clipping while he was alive; why should they bother to believe the truth now that he was among the honored dead?”
Emerie’s nose crinkled. “I still feel his fists on me. Still feel the impact of him slamming my head into a wall, or crunching my fingers in a door, or just railing on me until I blacked out.” She was shaking, and Nesta squeezed her hand tighter. “He never gave me any money or allowed me to earn my own, never let me eat more than he deemed appropriate, and wormed his way so far into my mind that I still hear him when I look in the mirror or make a mistake.”
She swallowed. “I came to training because I knew he’d have forbidden it. I came to training to get his voice out of my head. And to know how to stop a male if one ever puts another hand on me again. But none of it will ever bring my mother back, or the fact that I hid while my father took out his rage upon her. Nothing will ever make that right. But this mountain …” Emerie pointed to the small dirt path at the base of the peak. “I’ll climb it for my mother. For her, I’ll face the Breaking and go as far as I can.”
The two of them looked to Nesta. But her gaze remained upon the mountain. Its peak. That path leading up to it. The hardest of all the routes.
Finally Nesta said, “I was sent to the House of Wind because I had become such a wretch, drinking and fucking everything in sight. My … family couldn’t stand it. For more than a year, I abused their kindness and generosity, and I did it because …” She exhaled a shuddering breath. “My father died during the war. Before my eyes, but I did nothing to stop it.” And then it all came out. She told the two of them every horrible thing she had done and thought and savored. Told them of the Cauldron and its terror and pain and power. Told them the worst of her, so that if they decided to risk climbing that mountain with her, they’d go into it with their eyes open. So that they could choose to pull back now.
And when Nesta finished, she braced herself for the disappointment in their faces, the disgust.
Gwyn’s hand slid into hers, though. Emerie tightened her grip on Nesta’s other hand, too.
“Neither of you is to blame for what happened,” Nesta whispered. “Neither of you failed anyone.”
“Neither did you,” Emerie said softly.
Nesta gazed at her friends. And saw pain and sorrow in their tear-streaked faces, but also the openness of letting each other see the broken places deep inside. The understanding that they would not turn away.
Nesta’s eyes stung as Gwyn said, “So we climb Ramiel. We take the Breaking. We win to prove to everyone that something new can be as powerful and unbreakable as the old rules. That something no one has ever seen before, not entirely Valkyrie nor entirely Illyrian, can win the Blood Rite.”
“No,” Nesta said at last. “We win to prove to ourselves that it can be done.” She bared her teeth in a feral grin at the mountain. “We win the whole damn thing.”
CHAPTER
69
Eris and the small caravan rode eastward for three days, stopping only to eat and sleep. Their pace was leisurely, and from the glimpses Cassian and Azriel got through the clouds, it seemed Eris was unchained. Briallyn’s small, hunched figure rode at his side each day. But they caught no sign of the Crown on her—no glint of gold in the sun.