“They fought like them, too,” Cassian said. “No intelligence—just a desire to kill.”
Rhys extended a hand toward the one with the brownish hair, the male bleeding from places Azriel knew would hurt but not kill. Az knew where to slice up a male without letting him bleed out. Knew how to make this last for days.
“If they’re under a spell from Briallyn or Koschei,” Feyre asked, “then is it right to harm them like this?”
The question echoed through the chamber, over the snarling of the hungry beasts.
Rhys said after a moment, “No. It isn’t.”
Amren said to Feyre, “The fog around their minds and the fact that they endured Azriel’s ministrations without showing an understanding of anything beyond basic pain at least confirms our suspicions.”
“If that’s how you wish to justify it,” Feyre said a tad coldly, “then fine.”
All of them, Feyre included, had been tortured at one point or another.
Feyre turned to Rhys. “We need to ask Helion to visit. Not for the—you know,” she said, glancing to the two soldiers, who might very well still be aware of everything, even trapped within their heads, “but to break the spell upon them.”
“Yes,” Rhys said, eyes shining with something like guilt and shame. Some silent conversation passed between him and his mate, and Cassian knew Rhys was asking about the torture—apologizing for making Feyre witness even the ten minutes Azriel had worked.
But Feyre, Cassian knew, had been aware of what she’d see before entering. And well aware that these ten minutes had only been the opening movements in a symphony of pain that Azriel could conduct with brutal efficiency.
Feyre’s face softened after a moment, and she offered Rhys a slight smile that made his eyes brighten. Rhys declared, “They stay here, under guard. I’ll contact Helion immediately.”
Cassian asked, “And Eris? When do we tell him we found his soldiers? Or what we did to most of them?”
“You acted in self-defense,” Feyre said, arms crossing. “As far as I’m concerned, whoever was controlling the soldiers is to blame for their deaths, not you.”
Amren added, “We’ll tell Eris once we verify everything. There’s still a possibility that he’s somehow behind this.”
Feyre nodded her approval, but her mouth tightened. “These two males have families who are surely worried about them. We should be as quick as possible.”
Cassian shut out the thought of all the males whom he hadn’t left standing—who all had worried families as well. Every death had a weight, sent a ripple into the world, into time. It was too easy to forget that. He glanced to Az, but his brother’s face was stone-cold. If Az regretted what they’d done, he revealed no hint of it. Cassian tucked in his wings. “We’ll be as fast as we can.”
They left the males in the room, blood still trickling down to the writhing beasts.
Up they walked, out of the dungeons of the Hewn City, out of the wretched place itself, until they stood amongst the moonstone pillars of the beautiful palace above it. Rhys aimed for the room with the Mask. He opened the door and went stiff.
Nesta sat at the table, staring at the cloth-covered Mask.
“How did you get in here?” Rhys asked, night swirling at his fingertips. Cassian knew his brother had made the wards on the door impenetrable. Or they should have been.
“The door was open,” Nesta said numbly, and scanned their faces as if looking for someone. Cassian stepped into the room, and her eyes settled on him.
He offered her a grim smile.
“The Mask opened the door for you?” Amren demanded.
“I found myself beckoned here,” Nesta said, even as she looked Cassian over.
Checking for injuries, he realized. She was looking to see if he was harmed. As if he were the one with a brutalized mouth, neck marked by claws, calves and shins lacerated. Her wounds had stopped bleeding, already scabbing, but—Cauldron damn him, he couldn’t stand the sight of one bruise on her.
“Does it speak to you?” Feyre asked, angling her head.
Cassian had told them everything—as far as he’d been able to gather. Nesta had been attacked by a kelpie, dragged under the water, and had somehow found the Mask. Summoned the dead of Oorid to her to slay the kelpie. And emerged triumphant.
“Only a desperate fool would don that Mask,” Amren said, keeping well away from the table. Whether it was to put distance between herself and Nesta or to avoid the Mask, he had no idea. “You’re lucky to have been able to pry it from your face. Most of those who have worn it could never remove it. In order to sever it, they had to be beheaded. It’s the cost of the power: you can raise an army of the dead to conquer the world, but you can never be free of the Mask.”
“I wished it to let go, and it did,” Nesta said, surveying Amren with cool disdain.
“Like calls to like,” Rhys said. “Others could not free themselves because the Mask did not recognize their power. The Mask rode them, not the other way around. Only one Made from the same dark source can wear the Mask and not be ruled by it.”
“So Queen Briallyn could use it,” Azriel said. “Perhaps that’s why the Autumn Court soldiers were in Oorid: she can’t yet risk setting foot here, but she found a unit to go in for her.”
The words rippled through the room.
Nesta again stared at the Mask. “It should be destroyed.”
“That’s not possible,” Amren said. “Perhaps if the Cauldron had been truly destroyed, the Mask might have been weakened enough for the High Lords and Feyre to join their power and do it.”
“If the Cauldron had been destroyed,” Feyre said with a shiver, “then life would have ceased to exist.”
“So the Mask remains,” Amren said wryly. “It can only be dealt with. Not eliminated.”
“We should dump it in the sea, then,” Nesta said.
“No taste for the living dead, girl?” Amren asked.
Nesta slid her eyes toward Amren in a way that had Cassian bracing for the worst. “No good can come of its power.”
“If we dump it in the sea,” Azriel said, “some wicked creature might find it. It’s safer to keep it locked up with us.”
“Even if it can open doors and undo spells?” Rhys asked.
“Like calls to like,” Feyre said into the puzzled quiet. “Perhaps Nesta could ward it and lock the room. Contain it.”
“I don’t know how to do those spells,” Nesta said. “I failed at the most basic of them while training with Amren, remember?”
Feyre’s head tilted to one side. “Is that what you think, Nesta? That you failed?”
Nesta straightened, and Cassian’s chest tightened at the wall that rose in her eyes, brick by brick. At the truth Nesta had let slip with that one word. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, her old self rearing its head as her chin lifted. “Tell me how to do the spells, and I’ll try.” She directed the last part to Amren, to Rhys.
“When Helion comes,” Rhys said gently, as if he, too, understood what Nesta had revealed, “I’ll have him show you. He knows spells for warding that even I don’t.”
The silence became tense enough that Cassian made himself grin. “Considering that Nesta brushed off Helion’s smoldering advances during the war, he might not be so inclined to help her.”
“He’ll help,” Rhys said, stars shimmering in his gaze. “If only for another shot at her.”
Nesta rolled her eyes, and the gesture was so normal that Cassian’s smile became more genuine, edged now with relief.
You wear your heart for all to see, brother, Rhys said without turning Cassian’s way.
Cassian only shrugged. He was past caring.
Feyre said to Nesta, “We should get Madja to tend to your wounds.”
“They’re already healing,” Nesta said, and Cassian wondered if she had any idea how awful she looked.
Indeed, Amren said, “You look like a cat tried to eat your face off.” She sniffed. “And you smell like a swamp.”
“Being dragged through a bog will do that to you,” Cassian said to Amren, earning a surprised look from Nesta. He asked her, “How did the kelpie snare you?”
Nesta’s scratched-up throat bobbed. “I grew … nervous when you—both of you—didn’t come back.” The silence in the room was palpable. “I went to find you.”
Cassian didn’t dare say that he’d only been gone thirty minutes. Thirty minutes, and she’d been in a panic like that? “We wouldn’t have left you,” he said carefully.
“I wasn’t afraid of being left. I was afraid both of you were dead.”
That she kept emphasizing both of you tightened his chest. He knew what she was carefully avoiding saying. She’d been worried enough that she’d ventured into Oorid’s perils for him.
Nesta turned from his stare. “I was about to go into the water when the kelpie appeared. It crawled onto the bank, spoke to me, and then dragged me in.”
“It spoke to you?” Rhys asked.
“Not in a language I knew.”
Rhys’s mouth quirked to the side. “Can you show me?”
Nesta frowned, as if unwilling to relive the memory, but nodded. Both of their gazes went vacant, and then Rhys pulled back.
“That thing …” He surveyed Nesta with blatant shock that she had survived. Rhys turned to Amren. “Have a listen.”
Their eyes became glazed, and none of them spoke as Rhys showed Amren.
Even Amren’s face paled at whatever Rhys showed her, and then she was shaking her head, her black bob of hair swaying. “That is a dialect of our tongue that has not been spoken in fifteen thousand years.”
“I could only pick up every other word,” Rhys said.
Feyre arched a brow. “You speak the language of the ancient Fae?”
Rhys shrugged. “My education was thorough.” He waved an idle, graceful hand. “For exactly these situations.”
Azriel asked, “What’d the kelpie say?”
Amren shot an alarmed glance at Nesta, then answered, “He said: Are you my sacrifice, sweet flesh? How pale and young you are. Tell me, are they resuming the sacrifices to the waters once more? And when she didn’t respond, the kelpie said, No gods can save you. I shall take you, little beauty, and you shall be my bride before you are my supper.”
Nesta’s hand drifted to the marks on her face, then recoiled.
Horror slid through Cassian—then molten rage.
“People used to sacrifice to kelpies?” Feyre asked, nose crinkling with disgust and dread.
“Yes,” Amren said, scowling. “The most ancient Fae and humans believed kelpies to be river and lake gods, though I always wondered if the sacrifices started as a way to prevent the kelpies from hunting them. Keep them fed and happy, control the deaths, and they wouldn’t crawl out of the water to snatch the children.” Her teeth flashed. “For this one to still be speaking that ancient dialect … He must have retreated to Oorid a long time ago.”
“Or been raised by parents who spoke that dialect,” Azriel countered.
“No,” Amren said. “The kelpies do not breed. They rape and torment, but they do not reproduce. They were made, legend says, by the hand of a cruel god—and deposited throughout the waters of this land. The kelpie you slew, girl, was perhaps one of the last.”
Nesta gazed at the Mask again.
Rhys said, “It flew to you. The Mask.” He must have seen it in her head.
“I was trying to reach for my power,” Nesta murmured, and they all stilled—she’d never spoken of her power so explicitly. “This answered instead.”
“Like calls to like,” Feyre repeated. “Your power and the Mask’s are similar enough that to reach for one was to reach for the other.”
“So you admit your powers remain, then,” Amren said drily.
Nesta met her stare. “You already knew that.”
Cassian stepped in before things went south. “All right. Let Lady Death get some rest.”
“That’s not funny,” Nesta hissed.
Cassian winked, even as the others tensed. “I think it’s catchy.”
Nesta glowered, but it was a human expression, and he’d take that any day over that silver fire. Over the being who had walked on water and commanded a legion of the dead.
He wondered if Nesta would agree.
Nesta stayed at the moonstone palace atop the Hewn City. Feyre had suggested that the bright openness would be better than the dim, red halls of the House of Wind. At least for tonight.
Nesta had been too tired to disagree, to explain that the House was her friend, and would have pampered and fussed like an old nursemaid.
She barely noted the opulent bedroom—overhanging the side of the mountain, snowcapped peaks gleaming in the sunshine all around, a bed piled with glowingly white linens and pillows, and … Well, she did notice the sunken bathing pool, open to the air beyond, water spilling over the lip that projected above the drop and trickling into the endless fall below.
Ribbons of steam snaked along its surface, inviting and scented with lavender, and she had enough presence of mind to strip off her clothes and climb in before sullying the sheets again. They’d already been changed since she’d slept earlier—she knew because she’d left a great, muddy imprint on the bed when she’d arisen, and now it was pristine.
Nesta eased into the bath, grimacing as the water stung her wounds. Beyond the peaks, the sun shifted from white gold to yellow, sinking toward the earth’s embrace. Fat, fluffy clouds drifted by, filled with peach-colored light, lovely against the purpling sky. Her fingers rose to her hair, and as she dragged her hands through the tangled, still-sodden mess, she watched the sky transform itself into the most beautiful sunset she’d ever beheld. Bits of bog weed and mud cracked out of her hair, whisked away by the water over the edge of the pool.
Sighing, Nesta slid under, her face stinging, and scrubbed at her scalp. She emerged, her hair still thick and gritty, and scanned the wall next to the pool—there. Vials of what had to be concoctions for washing one’s body and hair.
She poured a dollop into her hands, her nose filling with the scent of mint and rosemary, and scrubbed it through her hair. She let the heady scent pull the tension from her as much as it could, and lathered her heavy locks. Another dunk under the water had her rinsing out the bubbles. When she emerged, she reached for the bar of soap that smelled of sweet almonds.
Nesta washed every part of herself twice. And only when she finished did she let herself take in the view again. The sunset was at its peak, the sky ablaze with pink and blue and gold and purple, and she willed it to fill her, to clear away any lingering trace of Oorid’s darkness.
She had never experienced anything like the Mask’s power. The kelpie, at least, had felt real—her terror and anger and desperation had all been human, ordinary feelings. As soon as she’d donned the Mask, those feelings had vanished. She had become more, had become something that did not need air to breathe, something that did not understand hate or love or fear or grief.
It had scared her more than anything else. That utter lack of feeling. How good it had felt, to be so removed.
Nesta swallowed. She hadn’t confessed it to any of them. She’d been contemplating the Mask when they’d found her in its room, contemplating that void. Wondering whether anyone had ever donned the Mask not to raise the dead, but to simply stop being inside their own minds.
She had been aware, yes. Had killed the kelpie because she wished it dead. But all the weight, the echoing thoughts, the hatred and guilt that sliced her like knives—they had vanished.
And it had been so seductive, so freeing and lovely, that she’d known the Mask had to be destroyed. If only to save herself from it.
But it could not be destroyed. And she was the sole person who might contain it.
Never mind that, for the same reason, she’d be the sole person with access to it. Everyone else would be safe from its temptation and power—except for her. The one who most needed to be barred from it.
A knock sounded on her door, and Nesta dropped below the dark surface of the pool, letting her long hair cover her breasts, before she said, “Yes?”
Cassian strode in, a tray of food in hand, and halted when he didn’t see her on the bed. His eyes shot to the sunken pool, and she could have sworn he almost dropped the tray onto the white carpet. “I … You.”
His loss of words was enough to pull her from her thoughts, to curve the corners of her mouth upward. “Me?”
He shook his head like a wet dog. “I brought some food. I assumed you’d want dinner.”
“There’s no dining room?”
“There is, but I thought you might need to unwind.”
She surveyed him, surprised that he knew her well enough to guess that the thought of speaking to everyone again, of dressing in suitable clothes, was draining—miserable. Knew her well enough to grasp that she’d rather eat in her room and piece herself together.
Cassian cleared his throat. “I’ll put it over there.” He jerked his chin to the desk next to the bathtub’s far edge, where the water tumbled off the mountain.
Nesta pivoted as he strode a shade stiffly to the desk and set down the tray.
“Right.” He cleared his throat again. “Enjoy your bath. And the meal.”
Seeing Cassian so flustered pushed away the shadows in her heart. Thoughts of the Mask became a distant rumble. “Do you want to get in?”
He sucked in a breath, but something like pain washed over his features. “You’re hurt.”
Nesta stood, water sluicing off her, her hair plastering to her breasts and doing nothing to hide her peaked nipples beneath. “Do I look injured to you?”
He nodded toward the scabbed cuts all over her body, her face. “Yes?”
She snorted. “It looks worse than it feels by now.”
Cassian didn’t reply, his chest rising and falling in a sharp rhythm. With each uneven lift, she began to throb between her legs, as if her body answered his own.
Yes, her body seemed to say. This—him. Life to drive away the Mask; life to drive away the horror of Oorid. The need to touch him, feel his warmth and strength, pounded through her.
If he wouldn’t climb into the bath, then she’d have to go to him.
A Court of Silver Flames Page 35