“Bind them,” Cassian said to Azriel, who had already healed enough to summon his Siphons’ power. Blue light speared from his brother, wrapping around the two males’ wrists, their ankles, their mouths—and then chained them together.
Cassian had dealt with enough assassins and prisoners to know keeping two prisoners alive would allow him to confirm information, to play them off each other.
The soldiers had fought viciously with sword and flame, yet they hadn’t spoken to their opponents or to one another. These two seemed as unfocused and blank as their comrades.
“Something is wrong with them,” Azriel murmured as the two soldiers simply stared up at them with violence in their eyes. Violence, but no recognition or awareness that they were now at the mercy of the Night Court, and would soon learn how that court got answers out of their enemies.
Cassian sniffed. “They smell like they haven’t had a bath in weeks.”
Az sniffed as well, grimacing. “Do you think these are Eris’s missing soldiers? He said they’d been acting strange before they vanished. I’d certainly consider this strange behavior.”
“I don’t know.” Cassian wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.” He surveyed his brother from head to toe. “You all right?”
“Fine.” But Az’s voice was tight enough to indicate that his wing hurt like hell. “We need to get out of here. There might be more.”
Cassian stiffened. He’d left Nesta in a tree. A high tree, granted, but—
He launched skyward, not waiting to see if Az could follow before he was flapping toward that sprawl of land. Better than an island, he’d decided. On an island she’d have been trapped. But the swath of grass he’d left her in had looked as if it had once been a meadow, and the tree was so tall it would have taken a giant to reach. Or something else with wings.
The air parted, and Azriel appeared at his heels, unsteady and bobbing, but flying. Darkness rose behind them, confirmation that Az wielded his shadows to hide their captives.
Cassian tracked Nesta by scent back to that tree, the mist lightening only as its uppermost branches appeared. But Nesta wasn’t in it.
He hovered in place as he scanned the tree, the ground. “Nesta!” She wasn’t in the grass, or in the next tree. He dropped to the earth, tracking her scent all around the area, but it went no farther. Went right up to the water and vanished.
Azriel landed, whirling in place. “I don’t see her.”
The water remained still as black glass. Not a ripple. The island fifteen feet across the water—had she gone that way?
Cassian couldn’t breathe right, couldn’t think right—
“NESTA!”
Oorid devoured his roar before it could echo across the black water.
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There was no light, nothing but frigid water and clawed hands hauling her through it.
She had been here before. It was just like the Cauldron, being hurled into the icy dark—
This was how she would die, and there was nothing to do about it, no one to save her. She’d taken her last breath and hadn’t even made it a good one, so focused on her terror she had forgotten that she had weapons, and she had magic—
Weapons. Blind in the darkness, Nesta grabbed the dagger at her side. She’d fought back against the Cauldron. She’d do so now.
Her bones groaned where the kelpie clutched her, its grip informing her where to strike. Working against the rush of the water as it sped along, Nesta sliced her dagger down, praying she didn’t cut off her own leg.
Bone reverberated against the blade. The grip on her leg splayed, and she shoved the tip of her dagger in farther as the arm ripped away.
She flailed in spinning darkness. Up and down blurred and warped, and she was drowning—
Spindly hands slammed into her chest, one wrapping around her throat as her back hit something soft and silty. The bottom.
No, she wouldn’t end like this, helpless as she’d been that day against the Cauldron—
Lips and teeth collided with her mouth, and she screamed as the kelpie kissed her. His black tongue shoved into her mouth, tasting of foul meat.
For a heartbeat, she wasn’t beneath the water, but against a woodpile in the human lands, Tomas’s hard mouth crushing into hers, his hands pawing at her—
Nesta struggled to pull her head away, to free her mouth, but air filled her lungs. As if the kelpie had breathed it into her. As if he wanted her alive a little longer, to prolong her pain.
The kelpie withdrew, and Nesta had enough sense to shut her aching, brutalized mouth, to trap in that breath he had given her. To not question how such a thing was even possible.
The kelpie’s hands ripped at her body, tearing away every weapon with unerring aim, as if he did not need to see in this darkness, as if those large black eyes could pick up any trickle of light like some deep-sea creature. Her entire body went stiff and unmoving, each brutal touch entitled and furious and delighting in her fear.
When he had disarmed her, her lungs were burning again, and she felt that thin male body pushing her into the bottom once more as he shoved his mouth to hers.
She gagged, but opened for him, letting him fill her mouth with another life-giving breath that had nothing to do with kindness. His tongue wriggled like a worm against hers, and his spindly, too-large hands ran down her breasts, her waist, and when she gagged again, fighting against her sob, his laugh puffed through her lips.
He pulled away, rows of teeth ripping at her mouth as he did, and she shook when he lingered, stroking at her hair. His little prize—that was what the touch said. How he would make her suffer and beg before the end. She had escaped the monsters of the human realm only to find the same ones above the wall. Had escaped from Tomas only to wind up here, raging as she had then.
That pleading female voice had faded. As if whatever she was, whoever she was, she knew no hope existed now.
Nesta fumbled internally for her power while the kelpie began to swim again, a hand around her wrist, lugging her behind him.
Her legs bumped into metallic objects and bones, somehow preserved within the bog.
Some of the bones still felt fleshy.
Please, she begged that power within her, slumbering and ancient and terrible. Please. Nesta cast for it, seeking it in the chasm inside herself.
She could see it glowing ahead, golden and shining. Her fingers strained for it.
The kelpie swam faster through the darkness, wending between the objects in the water as if they were the roots of a tree.
The golden thing drew nearer, and it was a round disk, her power, growing closer and closer and closer. As Nesta was dragged along, that golden disk rushed toward her splayed fingers. The kelpie didn’t seem to see it; he didn’t veer away as it shot toward her outstretched hand.
It was not her power that shone ahead.
The golden disk connected with her fingers, and Nesta knew what it was as she gripped it tight. Like called to like. Power to power.
The kelpie pulled her along, unaware. Nesta’s breath again became short. Her feet and legs sliced into dagger-sharp objects, ripping open on a few.
Power lay in her hand. Death gripped her by the other.
She knew what she had to do with the sort of clarity only pure desperation and terror could bring. Knew what she had to risk. Her fingers tightened on the thing in her hand.
The kelpie slowed, as if sensing her shift. But not fast enough.
He couldn’t stop her from slamming the Mask onto her face.
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Her lungs stopped hurting. Her body stopped aching.
She did not require air. She did not feel pain.
She could see dimly through the eyeholes of the Mask. The kelpie was a lean white thing—a creature of pure hate and hunger.
He dropped her, as if in shock and fear. As if he hesitated when he beheld what she now wore.
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It was all Nesta needed.
She could feel them around her. The dead.
Feel their long-rotted bodies, some mere bones and others preserved, half-eaten beneath their ancient armor. Their weapons lay nearby, discarded and ignored by the creatures of the bog, who had been more interested in feeding on decaying flesh, even long-rotted.
Thousands and thousands of bodies.
But she would not call thousands. Not yet.
Her blood was a cold song, the Mask a slithering echo to it, whispering of all she might do. Home, it seemed to sigh. Home.
Nesta did not refuse it. Only embraced it, letting its magic—colder than her own and as old—flow into her veins.
The kelpie mastered himself, and bared his twin sets of teeth before he sprang.
A skeletal hand wrapped around his ankle.
The kelpie whirled, peering downward. Just as another bony hand, covered in a gauntlet cracked with age, wrapped around the other ankle.
A hand with flesh falling from its fingers gripped his mane of black hair.
The kelpie twisted toward her again, black eyes wide.
Drifting in the water, the power of the Mask an icy song through her, Nesta summoned the dead. To do what her own body could not.
Though she had fought back against Tomas, against the Cauldron, against the King of Hybern, they had all happened to her. She had survived, but she had been helpless and afraid.
Not today.
Today, she would happen to him.
The kelpie thrashed, freeing himself from one skeletal hand as ten others, at the ends of long, bony arms, extended. Their bodies rose with them. He tried to swim out of their grip, but a towering skeleton half-clad in rusted armor appeared behind him. Wrapped its arms around him. A face that was only bone peered over the kelpie’s shoulder, jaws opening to reveal pointed teeth—not High Fae, then—that gleamed before they buried themselves in the kelpie’s white flesh.
He screamed, but it was soundless. Just as the dead were soundless, surging from the murky bottom, some in marching formation, and converging on him.
Nesta let the power flow through her, allowing the Mask to do as it wished, raising the honored dead who had once been buried here and had suffered the sacrilege of serving as an endless meal to the kelpie and his ilk.
The kelpie bucked against the dead, his eyes pleading now. But Nesta looked upon him without an ounce of mercy, still tasting his foulness in her mouth.
She knew he could see her teeth gleaming. Knew the kelpie could see her cold smile as she bade the dead to rip him to shreds.
“NESTA!”
Up to his waist in the black water, so inky he couldn’t see his own hips beneath it, Cassian roared her name as Az soared overhead, scanning, scanning—
He’d caught her scent at the water’s edge—her scent and urine, gods damn him to hell. She’d seen something, been attacked by something so awful she’d wet herself, and now she was gone, under this water—
“NESTA!”
He didn’t know where to start in this blackness. If he continued to make much more noise, other things would come looking, but he had to find her, or else he’d crumple up and die, he’d—
“NESTA!”
Azriel landed in the water beside him. “I don’t see anything,” he panted, eyes as frantic as Cassian knew his own were. “We need Rhys—”
“He’s not answering.”
As if the bog swallowed their messages the same way it swallowed sound.
Cassian waded up to his chest, hands blindly grappling for any sort of clue, a body—
He bellowed at the thought, and even Oorid couldn’t muffle the sound.
He hurled himself forward, and only Azriel’s hand at the collar of his armor halted him. Az snarled, “Look.”
Cassian gazed where Azriel pointed at the deeper water. The surface was rippling. Golden light shone beneath. Cassian splashed toward it, but Az halted him again, his Siphons flaring blue.
Then the spears broke the surface.
Like a forest rising from the water, spear after spear after spear appeared. Then the helmets, dripping water, some rusted, some shining as if freshly forged. And beneath those helmets: skulls.
“Mother save us,” Azriel whispered, and it was undiluted terror, not awe, hushing his voice as the dead rose from Oorid’s depths.
A line of them; a legion. Some mere collections of upright bones, jaws hanging and eyes unseeing. Some half-preserved, decaying flesh flapping over exposed ribs. Judging by their fine armor, they were warriors and kings and princes and lords.
They rose from the water, standing in the shallows near the thorny island. And as that golden light broke the surface before them, the dead knelt.
Every word emptied from Cassian’s head as Nesta, too, emerged from the water, as if lifted on a pillar from beneath. A golden mask sat upon her face, primitive but embossed with whorls and patterns so ancient they’d lost all meaning.
Water sluiced down her clothes, her hair had been ripped from its braid, and in her hand, clenched there …
A kelpie’s head dangled by its sheet of black hair, torn-up face frozen in a scream. Exactly as the King of Hybern’s head had hung from her hand.
Only silver fire burned behind the eyes of the Mask.
“Holy gods,” Azriel breathed.The dead stood motionless, a legion poised to strike. Her will was their will; her command their only reason for being. They had no self left—only her, only Nesta, flowing through them.
“Nesta,” Cassian whispered.
Nesta released the kelpie’s head. The black water at her feet swallowed it whole.
Cold power rippled toward them, and as it hit, Cassian let it surge past him, around him, yielded himself to it. Because to stand against it would be to provoke the Mask’s wrath. To stand against it would be to stand against Death itself.
Death herself.
Azriel shook, weathering that primal power.
But they were both Illyrian, whether Az liked it or not. And so they did what their people had always done before Death’s beautiful face. They bowed.
Chest-deep in the water, they couldn’t bow far, but they lowered their heads until their faces nearly touched the surface. Cassian lifted his eyes as he held the position, and watched the gold of the Mask’s reflection dance upon the water. Then that gold shifted.
He raised his head in time to see Nesta peel away the Mask.
The dead collapsed. Fell under the black surface in splashes and ripples and vanished entirely. Not one spear remained.
Nesta sank as if dropped, too. Cassian lunged for her, icy water biting at his face. He grabbed her just as she went under.
She was nearly boneless as he hauled her back to Az, who had his sword out against anything that might come crawling from that water. When they reached the shore and the grass and the tree, Cassian surveyed her pale face, ripped and scratched around her mouth and jaw—
Nesta blinked, and her eyes were again blue-gray, and then she was clutching the Mask to her chest like a child with a doll and shaking, shaking, shaking.
It was all Cassian could do to put his arms around her and hold her close, until the trembling stopped and unconsciousness offered her the mercy of oblivion.
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37
There was a place in the Court of Nightmares where even Keir and his elite squadron of Darkbringers did not dare tread.
Once the Night Court’s enemies entered that place, they did not come out. Not alive, anyway.
Most of what remained of their bodies didn’t leave, either. Those went through the hatch in the center of the circular room—and into the pit of writhing beasts below. To their scales and claws and merciless hunger. The beasts did not feed often; they could receive a body every ten years and make it last, going into hibernation between meals.
The trickling blood of the two Autumn Court males through the black stone floor’s grate woke them.
Their snarls and hisses, their s
napping tails and scraping claws should have incentivized the males chained to the chairs to talk.
Azriel leaned against the wall by the lone door, Truth-Teller bloody in his hand. Cassian, a step beside him, and Feyre, on Az’s other side, watched as Rhys and Amren approached the two males.
“Are you feeling more inclined to explain yourselves?” Rhys said, hands sliding into his pockets.
Only the knowledge that Nesta slept safely in a bedroom in Rhys’s palace above this mountain, warded by his High Lord’s power, allowed Cassian to remain in this room. The Mask, covered with a black velvet cloth, lay on a table in another room of the palace, equally warded and bespelled. Azriel had winnowed them away from the bog moments after Nesta had passed out, and had brought them to Rhys’s residence atop the Hewn City. Cassian knew, when Rhys had vanished a heartbeat later, that he’d gone to the bog for the Autumn Court soldiers, and would bring them here.
Nesta had been unconscious ever since.
The two males were similar-looking, in the way that people from individual courts tended to share characteristics: the Autumn Court skewed toward hair of varying shades of red, brown or gold eyes—sometimes green, and mostly pale skin. The male on the left had auburn hair that was browner; the hair of the one on the right shone like bright copper. Both remained vacant-faced.
“They must be under some sort of an enchantment,” Amren observed, circling the males. “Their only drive seems to be to harm without reason, without context.”
“Why did you attack members of my court in the Bog of Oorid?” Rhys asked with that same mild calm that so many had heard right before being ripped to bloody ribbons.
Rhys had agreed that the soldiers who attacked were likely the Autumn Court soldiers who had gone missing, but how they had ended up in the Bog of Oorid … Well, that was what they intended to uncover. Rhys had tried to get into their heads, but found nothing but fog and mist.
The males only stared toward Cassian, toward Azriel, and bristled with violence.
Feyre observed from the wall, “They’re like rabid dogs, lost to sanity.”
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