In the distance, a boom shuddered through the ancient floor.
“High Lady of the Night Court,” one of the Ravens sang. “What sort of cage shall our king build for you?”
Fear would get me killed, fear would—
A soft voice whispered in my ear, You are the High Lady?
The voice was both young and old, hideous and beautiful. “Y-yes,” I whispered.
I could sense no body heat, detect no physical presence, but … I felt it behind me. Even with my back to the shelf, I felt the mass of it lurking behind me. Around me. Like a shroud.
“We can smell you,” the other Raven said. “How your mate shall rage when he’s found we’ve taken you.”
“Please,” I breathed to the thing crouched behind me, over me.
What shall you give me?
Such a dangerous question. Never make a bargain, Alis had once warned me before Under the Mountain. Even if the bargains I’d made … they’d saved us. And brought me to Rhys.
“What do you want?”
One of the Ravens snapped, “Who is she talking to?”
The stone and wind hear all, speak all. They whispered to me of your desire to wield the Carver. To trade.
My breath came hard and fast. “What of it?”
I knew him once—long ago. Before so many things crawled the earth.
The Ravens were close—far too close when one of them hissed, “What is she mumbling?”
“Does she know a spell, as the master did?”
I whispered to the lurking dark behind me, “What is your price?”
The Ravens’ footsteps sounded so nearby they couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away. “Who are you talking to?” one of them demanded.
Company. Send me company.
I opened my mouth, but then said, “To—eat?”
A laugh that made my skin crawl. To tell me of life.
The air ahead shifted—as the Hybern Ravens closed in. “There you are,” one seethed.
“It’s a bargain,” I breathed. The skin along my left forearm tingled. The thing behind me … I could have sworn I felt it smile.
Shall I kill them?
“P-please do.”
Light sputtered before me, and I blinked at the blinding ball of faelight.
I saw the twin Ravens first, that faelight at their shoulder—to illuminate me for their taking.
Their attention went to me. Then rose over my shoulder. My head.
Absolute, unfiltered terror filled their faces. At what stood behind me.
Close your eyes, the thing purred in my ear.
I obeyed, trembling.
Then all I heard was screaming.
High-pitched shrieking and pleading. Bones snapping, blood splattering like rain, cloth ripping, and screaming, screaming, screaming—
I squeezed my eyes shut so hard it hurt. Squeezed them shut so hard I was shaking.
Then there were warm, rough hands on me, dragging me away, and Cassian’s voice at my ear, saying, “Don’t look. Don’t look.”
I didn’t. I let him lead me away. Just as I felt Rhys arrive. Felt him land on the floor of the pit so hard the entire mountain shuddered.
I opened my eyes then. Found him storming toward us, night rippling off him, such fury on his face—
“Get them out.”
The order was given to Cassian.
The screaming was still erupting behind us.
I lurched toward Rhys, but he was already gone, a plume of darkness spreading from him.
To shield the view of what he walked into.
Knowing I would look.
The screaming stopped.
In the terrible silence, Cassian hauled me out—toward the dim center of the pit. Nesta was standing there, arms around herself, eyes wide.
Cassian only stretched out an arm for her. As if in a trance, she walked right to his side. His arms tightened around both of us, Siphons flaring, gilding the darkness with bloodred light.
Then we launched skyward.
Just as the screaming began anew.
CHAPTER
32
Cassian gave us both a glass of brandy. A tall glass.
Seated in an armchair in the family library high above, Nesta drank hers in one gulp.
I claimed the chair across from her, took a sip, shuddered at the taste, and made to set it down on the low-lying table between us.
“Keep drinking,” Cassian ordered. The wrath wasn’t toward me.
No—it was toward whatever was below. What had happened.
“Are you hurt?” Cassian asked me. Each word was clipped—brutal.
I shook my head.
That he didn’t ask Nesta … he must have found her first. Ascertained for himself.
I started, “Is the king—the city—”
“No sign of him.” A muscle twitched in his jaw.
We sat in silence. Until Rhys appeared between the open doors, shadows trailing in his wake.
Blood coated his hands—but nothing else.
So much blood, ruby-bright in the midmorning sun.
Like he’d clawed through them with his bare hands.
His eyes were wholly frozen with rage.
But they dipped to my left arm, the sleeve filthy but still rolled up—
Like a slim band of black iron around my forearm, a tattoo now lay there.
It’s custom in my court for bargains to be permanently marked upon flesh, Rhys had told me Under the Mountain.
“What did you give it.” I hadn’t heard that voice since that visit to the Court of Nightmares.
“It—it said it wanted company. Someone to tell it about life. I said yes.”
“Did you volunteer yourself.”
“No.” I drained the rest of the brandy at the tone, his frozen face. “It just said someone. And it didn’t specify when.” I grimaced at the solid black band, no thicker than the width of my finger, interrupted only by two slender gaps near the side of my forearm. I tried to stand, to go to him, to take those bloody hands. But my knees still wobbled enough that I couldn’t move. “Are the king’s Ravens dead?”
“They nearly were when I arrived. It left enough of their minds functioning for me to have a look. And finish them when I was done.”
Cassian was stone-faced, glancing between Rhys’s bloody hands and his ice-cold eyes.
But it was to my sister that my mate turned. “Hybern hunts you because of what you took from the Cauldron. The queens want you dead for vengeance—for robbing them of immortality.”
“I know.” Nesta’s voice was hoarse.
“What did you take.”
“I don’t know.” The words were barely more than a whisper. “Even Amren can’t figure it out.”
Rhys stared her down. But Nesta looked to me—and I could have sworn fear shone there, and guilt and … some other feeling. “You told me to run.”
“You’re my sister,” was all I said. She’d once tried to cross the wall to save me.
But she started. “Elain—”
“Elain is fine,” Rhys said. “Azriel was at the town house. Lucien is headed back, and Mor is nearly there. They know of the threat.”
Nesta leaned her head back against the armchair’s cushion, going a bit boneless.
I said to Rhys, “Hybern infiltrated our city. Again.”
“The prick held on to that fleeting spell until he really needed it.”
“Fleeting spell?”
“A spell of mighty power, able to be wielded only once—to great effect. One capable of cleaving wards … He must have been biding his time.”
“Are the wards here—”
“Amren is currently adapting them against such things. And will then begin combing through this city to find if the king also deposited any other cronies before he vanished.”
Beneath the cold rage, there was a sharpness—honed enough that I said, What’s wrong?
“What’s wrong?” he replied—verbally, as if he could no longer
distinguish between the two. “What’s wrong is that those pieces of shit got into my house and attacked my mate. What’s wrong is that my own damn wards worked against me, and you had to make a bargain with that thing to keep yourself from being taken. What’s wrong—”
“Calm down,” I said quietly, but not weakly.
His eyes glowed, like lightning had struck an ocean. But he inhaled deeply, blowing out the breath through his nose, and his shoulders loosened—barely.
“Did you see what it was—that thing down there?”
“I guessed enough about it to close my eyes,” he said. “I only opened them when it had stepped away from their bodies.”
Cassian’s skin had turned ashen. He’d seen it. He’d seen it again. But he said nothing.
“Yes, the king got past our defenses,” I said to Rhys. “Yes, things went badly. But we weren’t hurt. And the Ravens revealed some key pieces of information.”
Sloppy, I realized. Rhys had been sloppy in killing them. Normally, he would have kept them alive for Azriel to question. But he’d taken what he needed, quickly and brutally, and ended it. He’d shown more restraint about the Attor—
“We know why the Cauldron doesn’t work at its full strength now,” I went on. “We know that Nesta is more of a priority for the king than I am.”
Rhys mulled it over. “Hybern showed part of his hand, in bringing them here. He has to have a sliver of doubt of his conquest if he’d risk it.”
Nesta looked like she was going to be sick. Cassian wordlessly refilled her glass. But I asked, “How—how did you know that we were in trouble?”
“Clotho,” Rhys said. “There’s a spelled bell inside the library. She rang it, and it went out to all of us. Cassian got there first.”
I wondered what had happened in those initial moments, when he’d found my sister.
As if he’d read my thoughts, Rhys sent the image to me, no doubt courtesy of Cassian.
Panic—and rage. That was all he knew as he shot down into the heart of the pit, spearing for that ancient darkness that had once shaken him to his very marrow.
Nesta was there—and Feyre.
It was the former he saw first, stumbling out of the dark, wide-eyed, her fear a tang that whetted his rage into something so sharp he could barely think, barely breathe—
She let out a small, animal sound—like some wounded stag—as she saw him. As he landed so hard his knees popped.
He said nothing as Nesta launched herself toward him, her dress filthy and disheveled, her arms stretching for him. He opened his own for her, unable to stop his approach, his reaching—
She gripped his leathers instead. “ Feyre,” she rasped, pointing behind her with a free hand, shaking him solidly with the other. Strength—such untapped strength in that slim, beautiful body. “Hybern.”
That was all he needed to hear. He drew his sword—then Rhys was arrowing for them, his power like a gods-damned volcanic eruption. Cassian charged ahead into the gloom, following the screaming—
I pulled away, not wanting to see any further. See what Cassian had witnessed down there.
Rhys strode to me, and lifted a hand to brush my hair—but stopped upon seeing the blood crusting his fingers. He instead studied the tattoo now marring my left arm. “As long as we don’t have to invite it to solstice dinner, I can live with it.”
“You can live with it?” I lifted my brows.
A ghost of a smile, even with all that had happened, that now lay before us. “At least now if one of you misbehaves, I know the perfect punishment. Going down there to talk to that thing for an hour.”
Nesta scowled with distaste, but Cassian let out a dark laugh. “I’ll take scrubbing toilets, thank you.”
“Your second encounter seemed less harrowing than the first.”
“It wasn’t trying to eat me this time.” But shadows still darkened his eyes.
Rhys saw them, too. Saw them and said quietly, again with that High Lord’s voice, “Warn whoever needs to know to stay indoors tonight. Children off the streets at sundown, none of the Palaces will remain open past moonrise. Anyone on the streets faces the consequences.”
“Of what?” I asked, the liquor in my stomach now burning.
Rhys’s jaw tightened, and he surveyed the sparkling city beyond the windows. “Of Amren on the hunt.”
Elain was nestled beside a too-casual Mor on the sitting room couch when we arrived at the town house. Nesta strode past me, right to Elain, and took up a seat on her other side, before turning her attention to where we remained in the foyer. Waiting—somehow sensing the meeting that was about to unfold.
Lucien, stationed by the front window, turned from watching the street. Monitoring it. A sword and dagger hung from his belt. No humor, no warmth graced his face—only fierce, grim determination.
“Azriel’s coming down from the roof,” Rhys said to none of us in particular, leaning against the archway into the sitting room and crossing his arms.
And as if he’d summoned him, Azriel stepped out of a pocket of shadow by the stairs and scanned us from head to toe. His eyes lingered on the blood crusting Rhys’s hands.
I took up a spot at the opposite doorway post while Cassian and Azriel remained between us.
Rhys was quiet for a moment before he said, “The priestesses will keep silent about what happened today. And the people of this city won’t learn why Amren is now preparing to hunt. We can’t afford to let the other High Lords know. It would unnerve them—and destabilize the image we have worked so hard to create.”
“The attack on Velaris,” Mor countered from her place on the couch, “already showed we’re vulnerable.”
“That was a surprise attack, which we handled quickly,” Cassian said, Siphons flickering. “Az made sure the information came out portraying us as victors—able to defeat any challenge Hybern throws our way.”
“We did that today,” I said.
“It’s different,” Rhys said. “The first time, we had the element of their surprise to excuse us. This second time … it makes us look unprepared. Vulnerable. We can’t risk that getting out before the meeting in ten days. So for all appearances, we will remain unruffled as we prepare for war.”
Mor sagged against the couch cushions. “A war where we have no allies beyond Keir, either in Prythian or beyond it.”
Rhys gave her a sharp look. But Elain said quietly, “The queen might come.”
Silence.
Elain was staring at the unlit fireplace, eyes lost to that vague murkiness.
“What queen,” Nesta said, more tightly than she usually spoke to our sister.
“The one who was cursed.”
“Cursed by the Cauldron,” I clarified to Nesta, pushing off the archway. “When it threw its tantrum after you … left.”
“No.” Elain studied me, then her. “Not that one. The other.”
Nesta took a steadying breath, opening her mouth to either whisk Elain upstairs or move on.
But Azriel asked softly, taking a single step over the threshold and into the sitting room, “What other?”
Elain’s brows twitched toward each other. “The queen—with the feathers of flame.”
The shadowsinger angled his head.
Lucien murmured to me, eye still fixed on Elain, “Should we—does she need …?”
“She doesn’t need anything,” Azriel answered without so much as looking at Lucien.
Elain was staring at the spymaster now—unblinkingly.
“We’re the ones who need …” Azriel trailed off. “A seer,” he said, more to himself than us. “The Cauldron made you a seer.”
CHAPTER
33
Seer.
The word clanged through me.
She’d known. She’d warned Nesta about the Ravens. And in the chaos of the attack, that little realization had slipped from me. Slipped from me as reality and dream slipped and entwined for Elain. Seer.
Elain turned to Mor, who was now gaping at m
y sister from her spot beside her on the couch. “Is that what this is?”
And the words, the tone … they were so normal-sounding that my chest tightened.
Mor’s gaze darted across my sister’s face, as if weighing the words, the question, the truth or lie within.
Mor at last blinked, mouth parting. Like that magic of hers had at last solved some puzzle. Slowly, clearly, she nodded. Lucien silently slid into one of the chairs, before the window, that metal eye whirring as it roved over my sister.
It made sense, I supposed, that Azriel alone had listened to her. The male who heard things others could not … Perhaps he, too, had suffered as Elain had before he understood what gift he possessed. He asked Elain, “There is another queen?”
Elain squinted, as if the question required some inner clarification, some … path into looking the right way at whatever had addled and plagued her. “Yes.”
“The sixth queen,” Mor breathed. “The queen who the golden one said wasn’t ill …”
“She said not to trust the other queens because of it,” I added.
And as soon as the words left my mouth … It was like stepping back from a painting to see the entire picture. Up close, the words had been muddled and messy. But from a distance …
“You stole from the Cauldron,” I said to Nesta, who seemed ready to jump between all of us and Elain. “But what if the Cauldron gave something to Elain?”
Nesta’s face drained of color. “What?”
Equally ashen, Lucien seemed inclined to echo Nesta’s hoarse question.
But Azriel nodded. “You knew,” he said to Elain. “About the young queen turning into a crone.”
Elain blinked and blinked, eyes clearing again. As if the understanding, our understanding … it freed her from whatever murky realm she’d been in.
“The sixth queen is alive?” Azriel asked, calm and steady, the voice of the High Lord’s spymaster, who had broken enemies and charmed allies.
Elain cocked her head, as if listening to some inner voice. “Yes.”
Lucien just stared and stared at my sister, as if he’d never seen her before.
I whipped my face to Rhys. A potential ally?
I don’t know, he answered. If the others cursed her …
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