She spat, “And how long can you do?”
“Five minutes.”
Nesta pushed herself onto her elbows. “I’m sorry if I haven’t had five hundred years of core work.”
“I asked you to hold that plank for thirty seconds.”
She shoved onto her knees, stomach aching. He’d had her doing curls upward, then leg extensions while lying on her back, and then lifting a smooth five-pound rock over her head while she’d tried to raise herself from lying prone into a sitting position using only her stomach muscles. She hadn’t been able to do more than one or two of any of them before her body gave out. No amount of will or grit could make it move.
“This is torture.” Bracing her hands on her knees, Nesta pointed to the ring. “If you’re so perfect, do everything you just ordered me to do.”
Cassian snorted. “A ten-year-old Illyrian boy could do it in the span of a few minutes.”
“Then do your big, tough male routine.”
He smirked. “All right. You want to mouth off, then I’ll show you my big, tough male routine.”
He slung his shirt off. Tied back his hair.
And this was a different sort of torture. To watch him go through the same exercises, only harder, heavier, faster. To watch the muscles of his stomach ripple, muscles everywhere ripple. To watch sweat glisten and then run down his golden body, over his tattoos, along the eight-pointed star of their bargain on his spine before sliding into the waist of his pants.
But he’d been professional during their lesson. Utterly professional and distant, as if this training ring was sacred to him.
Nesta couldn’t tear her eyes away as he completed his exercises, panting softly. She tried not to wonder if that panting was how he’d sounded last night when he’d pleasured himself.
But Cassian’s hazel eyes were clear. Triumphant.
In another age, another world, he might have been deemed a warrior-god by mortals. After what he’d told her about the monsters he’d put in the Prison, he might very well be considered a great hero in this age. The kind that would one day be whispered about around a fire. People would name their children after him. Warriors would want to be him. A fine warrior would be known as Cassian reborn.
She’d called him a brute.
“What?” Cassian wiped the sweat from his face.
She asked, to distract herself from her thoughts, “Are there truly no female fighting units amongst the Illyrians?” She hadn’t seen any during the war.
His smile faded. “We tried once and it failed spectacularly. So, no. There aren’t.”
“Because Illyrians are backward and horrible.”
He winced. “Have you been talking to Az?”
“Just my observations.”
He untied his hair, the thick, straight locks falling around his face. “The Illyrians … I told you. Progress is slow. It’s an ongoing goal of ours—me and Rhys, I mean.”
“It’s that hard for the females to become warriors?”
“It’s not just the training. It’s running the social gauntlet, too. And then there’s the Blood Rite, which they’d also have to complete.”
“What’s the Blood Rite?”
“What it sounds like.” He rubbed his neck. “When an Illyrian warrior comes into his full power, usually in his twenties, he has to go through the Blood Rite before he can qualify as a full warrior and adult. Would-be warriors from every clan and village get sent in, usually three or four from each—all of them scattered across an area in the Illyrian Mountains. We’re left there for a week with two goals: survival, and making it to Ramiel.”
“What’s Ramiel?” She felt like a child with these questions, but her curiosity got the better of her.
“Our sacred mountain.” He drew a familiar symbol in the dirt: an upward-pointing triangle with three dots above it. A mountain, she realized. And three stars. “It’s the symbol of the Night Court. The Blood Rite always takes place when Arktos, Carynth, and Oristes, our three holy stars, shine above it for one week a year. On the final day of the Rite, they’re directly above its peak.”
“So you hike to the mountain?”
“We kill our way to the mountain.” His eyes had turned hard. “We’re drugged and dumped into the wilderness, with nothing but our clothes.”
“And you have to participate?”
“Once you’re in, you can’t leave. At least until the Rite is over, or you reach the peak of Ramiel. If anyone breaks into the Rite to extract or save you, the law declares that both of you will be hunted down and killed for the transgression. Even Rhys isn’t exempt from those laws.”