Continuing Tales

A Court of Starlight and Poppies

A A Court of Thorns and Roses Story
by Turtle_Steed

Part 10 of 35

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ACOMAF: Rhys's POV

I pushed off the balcony and walked towards my fate with my hands shoved deep into the plush fabric of my pockets. The motion only seemed to sharpen Cassian’s grin. There was no going back now.

Feyre stayed behind, but Cassian was quick to chomp at the bit wasting absolutely no time. “Come on, Feyre,” he said, his voice all playful teasing, a wolf ready to pounce. “We don’t bite. Unless you ask us to.”

Feyre jolted forward. Her instant reaction to his commentary had me biting out, “The last I heard, Cassian, no one has ever taken you up on that offer.”

Azriel snorted as Feyre stepped within proper viewing of my brothers and took her first real look at them and... quietly surveyed with a hint of awe ghosting her face.

Cassian stood slightly taller than Azriel with a longer crop of hair that fell to his shoulders compared to Az’s blunter cut. They both had that deep, tanned skin that marked the Illyrian people - and the hazel eyes, but beyond that... Cassian was all muscle and brute force, fashioned from the ground up, while Azriel was folded into smoke and darkness itself, the shadows crafting his form from the hollows of secrets themselves.

Day and Night, my brothers. Fire and ice. Stone and sword. A match and an opposition in every way.

The two briefly did something of the same to Feyre, Azriel lingering on her form a tad longer as Cassian looked me up and down with disapproval. “So fancy tonight, brother,” he told me. “And you made poor Feyre dress up, too.” He gave Feyre a wink and I wanted to smack him into the mud upstairs.

It wasn’t flirting, but it was enough of that banter I’d been anticipating since Feyre arrived in Velaris that the insufferable itch I’d known was coming, the one that would determine how this night ended for better or for worse, tugged along my skin.

Mercifully, Feyre didn’t give Cassian much thought as she slid her gaze to Azriel first, deciding he was the easier of the two to get along with. She held herself upright, stiff, as though she sensed the darkness that prowled beneath his skin, but she wasn’t afraid.

“This is Azriel,” I said, by way of introduction. “My spymaster.”

“Welcome,” Azriel said and extended his hand, which Feyre took and shook carefully. Feyre’s eyes flitted briefly over the brutal scars twisting along Az’s hands like ivy growing along a wall of stone ruins that had been warped and aged with time and war. The brief glance escaped none of our notice, most especially Azriel’s I was sure, though he gave no indication he’d felt her brief curiosity.

Feyre released Azriel’s hand, but her eyes didn’t move from the leathers he wore, nor Cassian’s when she shifted her gaze back to him. They didn’t often wear anything other than fighting leathers, but I’d asked them all the same to wear them tonight rather than a more casual ensemble. If Feyre was to work with us, she needed to see everything and all up front, and that included the painful bloodshed we were always one breath away from at all times.

“You’re brothers?” Feyre asked glancing between us.

“Brothers in the sense that all bastards are brothers of a sort.”

She looked at Cassian, tone tight. “And - you?”

Cass gave a shrug, forcing his wings to constrict behind him. “I command Rhys’s armies.”

Feyre gave a start, one I should have expected given that any mention of the war to come narrowed her focus and heightened the intensity of her thoughts, her feelings.

And Cassian - Cassian was watching her with utter delight already imagining all the ways he might play with her. Her movements. Her reactions. How he might teach her, which had been another of my requests for the evening. With how much Feyre was holding herself back just then, I wondered if it had been a mistake. If this all had been one giant mistake.

I went utterly quiet, forcing myself to let this play out as it would and it was Azriel who dealt me the mercy of ending the torment having not missed a single second of the exchange going on. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he knew the tension it was wringing over me either.

“Cassian also excels at pissing everyone off. Especially amongst our friends. So, as a friend of Rhysand... good luck.”

Cassian shoved Azriel aside immediately, which Az didn’t look entirely thrilled with, but he stepped back all the same.

“How the hell did you make that bone ladder in the Middengard Wyrm’s lair when you look like your own bones can snap at any moment?”

My insides froze and waited to shatter, to see how Feyre would take it. The prick . Azriel waited too standing near assessing every move she made as if he could read the thoughts behind them, bond or no bond.

Cassian just stood back expectantly and I knew that while he wanted to see what Feyre was made of just as much as Az, there was a genuine part of him - the warrior who had survived years in the cold with little-to-nothing inside him - who was truly curious how this fellow survivor, this fellow victim, had made it.

Feyre wouldn’t give him even that much.

“How the hell did you manage to survive this long without anyone killing you?” she spat back, fire in her blood roaring at that beast in front of her. I half expected her to inform him that next time he’d have to say please if he wanted anything from her.

A brief flash of a bone cleaved in two, a javelin hurled at a red-headed queen, and Cassian’s laughter ringing in my ear - both then and now. And I breathed.

Feyre could take him.

Azriel snorted once before the shadows consumed him into darkness and Feyre drowned in that darkness looking for answers herself, my inquisitive, curious little -

Not your anything .

Mor’s breezy waltz to join us on the balcony interrupted Feyre’s silent searching of me. “If Cassian’s howling, I hope it means Feyre told him to shut his fat mouth.”

“I don’t know why I ever forget you two are related,” Cassian said between Mor and I as she approached. At that, I rolled my eyes. “You two and your clothes.”

Mor ambled right up to Cassian, who looked like he might attack her if she made one more comment about his fat mouth , and mocked him with a glowering bow as the skirts of her red dress flared out around her, the gold cuffs flashing a sort of wild, antagonizing grin at us all.

I stepped back, content to let my cousin take over from here and admittedly relieved that she did.

“I wanted to impress Feyre,” Mor said, flashing Feyre a gleaming look, all bright bubbling champagne for this woman she already spoke to me of like a sister. “You could have at least bothered to comb your hair.” I was half surprised she didn’t run her hands over Cass’s head and ruffle it up more.

“Unlike some people,” Cass said, his feet digging into the stone, Azriel’s gaze not far behind, “I have better things to do with my time than sit in front of the mirror for hours.”

Mor tossed her hair and I knew, one word and she would gladly go to war with Cassian if it meant winning this little game our family constantly played.

“Yes, since swaggering around Velaris-”

“We have company,” Azriel said at last, his long suffering patience and anxiety winning out over watching his friends snip at each other.

Cauldron, we hadn’t even gotten to Amren yet.

Azriel stretched his wings wide to herd us forward, and indeed the leathery membranes were enough to sweep us all up a few times over as together we made it inside. Mor alone darted out of that pen created by the great wings, marching straight up to Feyre, but not before she’d placed a hand on Az’s shoulder and murmured to the shadowsinger softly enough that it felt an intrusion to overhear, “Relax, Az - no fighting tonight. We promised Rhys.”

And then she was gone, grabbing Feyre by the hand and leading her inside while Azriel’s face softened, his shadows momentarily gone in that brief solace he found in the sun.

That sun that filtered through the entire room as I watched Mor lead Feyre further inside by the hand like a dear friend she hadn’t seen in ages. A rough force shoved into my shoulder.

“Get your hands out of your damned pockets,” Cass hissed at me and then nodded in Feyre’s direction. “And stop sulking. She’s fine . Fine is good, remember?”

My eyes went up with great care, but I would not let them roll as Cassian snorted at me and moved on. Azriel clapped me on the back. “Fine is great ,” he said and I shoved him off me.

“Okay - shit ,” I said low, glad Feyre had been distracted enough by Amren’s entrance not to see the exchange, and indeed Amren was quite the distraction.

Easily the shortest one in the room by a heavy margin, Amren stood the tallest of us all, her sweeping presence overshadowing the power surrounding her by miles. Those silver eyes looked ready to dance as she beheld Feyre, swirling with what seemed like the mists of the ancient realms that had birthed her one cursed morning into ours.

Mor sank into one of the chairs at the dining table with a simpering moan, undoubtedly disappointed her private time with Feyre was so short. She poured herself a glass of wine and tossed the bottle at Cassian who sat across from her at the table, the two of them content to spend an evening in such close proximity if there was enough liquor between them. Azriel alone stood with me.

“Your taste remains excellent, High Lord,” Amren announced to the room at large, flashing the beautiful silver-and-pearl broach I’d picked up for today with Feyre. She’d get to her in a moment.

I waved my hand as if it were nothing and truly, after centuries of plying Amren with gifts she didn’t really need to keep the firedrake happy, it was, and inclined my head. “It suits you, Amren.”

“Everything suits me,” she said with quiet, subtle precision. The entire room was silent. Finally, those dusty eyes alive with ancient wisdom fell on Feyre. And I was proud to see her stand tall and confident at Amren’s hard stare. I wondered if that was any indication of how she felt or if she was squirming as much as I was inside.

“So there are two of us now,” Amren said. Feyre gave a small flicker of confusion and Amren went on unfazed. “We who were born something else - and found ourselves trapped in new, strange bodies.”

Quick as lightning and equally as punishing, Amren directed Feyre to the chair beside Mor’s and took the seat opposite her. Azriel and I were left with no choice but to take the remaining seats which placed us next to them.

“Though there is a third,” Amren went on with the air of someone who shared a very great secret none else were privy to. “I don’t think you’ve heard from Miryam in... centuries. Interesting.” Amren’s cunning silver eyes slid to me, two swirling orbs ready to prophesy me a future in war and bloodshed.

“Please just get to the point, Amren,” Cassian said decidedly bored. “I’m hungry.”

The table went silent save for Mor choking on her wine. Feyre stiffened and I wondered if she recalled what I’d told her about interrupting Amren. Cassian wasn’t usually so testy.

But Amren shot my general a wry smile that was ready to cut him into pieces for her to feast on. “No one warming your bed right now, Cassian?” she asked slick as a serpent. “It must be so hard to be an Illyrian and have no thoughts in your head save for those about your favorite part.”

“You know I’m always happy to tangle in the sheets with you, Amren,” Cassian replied, leaning in closer to her and refusing to drop her stare. Amren looked ready to pounce and Cauldron boil me, I didn’t know who would move first - me or Azriel. “I know how much you enjoy Illyrian-”

“Miryam,” I said, cutting off exactly where I knew that sentence was heading, “and Drakon are doing well, as far as I’ve heard. And what, exactly, is interesting?”

But rather than return her focus to me, Amren’s eyes slid to Feyre and my mind buzzed in excitement all over again trying to ready for what was coming, what Amren would... assess, as I knew she inevitably would at some point during the course of the evening.

Amren studied Feyre for a long pause and this time, none interrupted her as we waited. “Only once before was a human Made into an immortal,” she said finally. Feyre sat straighter in her chair just as intrigued as the rest of us, seeing an equal of sorts before her. “Interesting that it should happen again right as all the ancient players have returned. But Miryam was gifted long life - not a new body. And you, girl...” I tried not to let the clipped girl grate on me as Amren tilted her chin up and sniffed the air coming off Feyre, and gave a start, that smokey gloss in her eyes clearing into surprise. Her head snapped to me and it felt as though my heart had leapt into my throat.

Mate.

Amren knew. Not just about what she announced to the room next, but about the bond. She questioned it in her stare. I merely nodded and averted my gaze where I caught Mor grinning into her wine glass, glancing at me out of the corner of her eyes.

I’d be hearing about this later.

“Your very blood,” Amren went on again addressing Feyre, “your veins, your bones were Made. A mortal soul in an immortal body.”

Amren and I had discussed this theory many times since I’d returned from the Mountain. In some ways, it had seemed more important to her than all the rest. Perhaps she saw something of herself in Feyre or at least the potential for it, if Feyre didn’t disappoint her as nearly all fae creatures did.

But we didn’t really have time to discuss it as a group. Mor snapped her fingers and announced in that chipper way she had of dismissing grim subjects, “I’m hungry.” And our table filled with food. She started piling her plate high prattling on as if Feyre were the only person in the world actually present. “Amren and Rhys can talk all night and bore us to tears, so don’t bother waiting for them to dig in. I asked Rhys if I could take you to dinner, just the two of us, and he said you wouldn’t want to.” I held back a groan. That hadn’t been quite how I’d phrased it. “But honestly - would you rather spend time with those two ancient bores, or me?”

“For someone who is the same age as me,” I said, “you seem to forget-”

“Everyone wants to talk-talk-talk,” Mor cut me off and stared pointedly at Cassian who had been ready to throw in with me. Anything to cut the queen down a notch and throw a tally up on his half of the scoreboard. “Can’t we eat-eat-eat and then talk?”

And it was Azriel - Azriel who laughed quietly at Morrigan and her incessant love of life and food and friends, and dissipated the subtle tension floating about the room. Mor’s lips quirked a quick smile at him before carrying over to Feyre, whom she filled a wine glass for and set in front of her plate. “Don’t let these old busybodies boss you around,” she said. The girls drank cheers to that.

“Pot. Kettle. Black.” Cassian pointed his fork at Mor with each word, but she didn’t deny it. Only started eating. Feyre had started eating herself and though the first few bites had been tentative, her plate rapidly diminished. I wondered with each bite how many would come running back up her stomach before the night was over, if the nightmares would chase her from sleep or if my friends would be enough to trap them down in merry conversation and pleasant meeting.

“I always forget how bizarre that is,” Cassian said grabbing Amren’s plate and dumping half of the food onto his own. Azriel immediately scowled, but... did not entirely hesitate from taking his half of the plate.

“I keep telling him to ask before he does that,” Az said quietly to Amren, half an apology.

Amren vanished the plate away with cold indifference. “If you haven’t been able to train him after all these centuries, boy, I don’t think you’ll make any progress now.”

Finally - that was what made Feyre speak. “You don’t - eat?”

Amren’s smile was all teeth and venom. “Not this sort of food.”

“Cauldron boil me. Can we not ?” Mor took a huge gulp of wine, her shoulders rising up to her chin in a shudder.

So much for merry conversation and pleasant meeting. And Feyre’s face - she looked like she’d just watched a cow sent to the slaughter and wasn’t sure how she felt about it yet. I stifled the chuckle I let out from bursting into a fuller, deeper laugh. “Remind me to have family dinners more often,” I said.

And at last, I felt settled. Tense as fuck, but still settled.

These were my friends - my family - and Feyre hadn’t looked at me once with so much as an inkling of flying straight back to the townhouse to give in to the solitude. The bantering, I could handle. Had handled for close to six centuries. But our brand of love layered in sharp jibes and wounded histories was unique to adjust to. Feyre continued eating, watching my companions in the longest stretch of silence we’d had yet, and Mother above I wanted her to find that adjustment tonight so badly .

But... if I could only have one night of this before she... said no, and resorted to the occasional dinner with Mor in the city while never seeing Cassian or Azriel or Amren again, then it was worth it. Because watching her sit there next to me in that dazzling blue dress that flowed around her body like water made from silk, looking to each of my companions and not flinching or backing down, it was something only my most bright and brilliant dreams were made of. And also, because it meant we were both pondering the same thing - what it would be like if she joined us. What it would be like if she called them family too.

And I realized they were waiting for her. That the silence around us as we ate was an open invitation for Feyre to choose where this started. I’d asked them to let me have this one night. Not all of them knew flat out the depth of the importance of it to me, but then again they really did know, didn’t need to be told what Feyre... being here meant. And not only had they given me that, they gave it to her too, yielded the choice and the comfort and the terms to my mate to figure out where this went.

And I don’t think I had ever loved them more than I did right in that moment.

Azriel, as it turned out, was where it started. Feyre’s gaze turned to the shadowsinger bathed wholly in smoke as though it were sunlight, and halted on the cobalt stones atop his hands that mirrored the ruby colored ones atop Cassian’s.

“They’re called Siphons,” Azriel said, lifting his hands to afford Feyre a better view. “They concentrate and focus our power in battle.”

“The power of stronger Illyrians tends toward ‘incinerate now, ask questions later,’“ I explained. “They have little magical gifts beyond that - the killing power.”

“The gift of a violent, warmongering people,” Amren concluded.

And though he agreed, the shadows constricted around Azriel to the point that they could have been physical roping binding him down. Cassian’s eyes narrowed at our brother who dismissed him at once. Always dutiful, always self-sacrificing, was Azriel.

“The Illyrians,” I pressed on, trying to give Az some space as we headed into meatier discussion on less savory topics for dinner, “bred the power to give them advantage in battle, yes. The Siphons filter that raw power and allow Cassian and Azriel to transform it into something more subtle and varied - into shields and weapons, arrows and spears. Imagine the difference between hurling a bucket of paint against the wall and using a brush. The Siphons allow for the magic to be nimble, precise on the battlefield - when its natural state lends itself toward something far messier and unrefined, and potentially dangerous when you’re fighting in tight quarters.”

Azriel’s shadows lessened considerably, especially once Cassian jutted his hands out, Siphons on full display, and flexed like a peacock strutting about. “Doesn’t hurt that they also look damn good.”

“Illyrians,” Amren muttered. Mor gave silent agreement that fell away in disgust as Cassian grinned ear to ear, damned proud.

I looked at Feyre and found her lips quivering slightly, her brow knitted together.

Adjust, please adjust. Please be okay , I silently begged the Cauldron.

When she spoke, it was all at once in a great rush that she kept trained on Azriel, the easiest to approach by far. “How did you - I mean, how do you and Lord Cassian-”

She was cut off by a howling cackle from Cassian that masked my own snort. A cackle that sent wine spewing all over Mor’s dress.

“Mother’s tits, Cassian - you ass!” Mor shot up out of her seat and glared at Cassian who didn’t give a shit that she was pissed, he kept right on laughing. And within seconds, Mor’s dress was clean and Cassian’s flying leathers decidedly dirty with the stains of wine.

Feyre blushed crimson, sitting as far back in her chair as she possibly could. I felt an instinct I’d never experienced before, one that had been locked away deep inside of myself waiting for her perhaps, incline me towards her chair to cup her face between my hands and kiss her cheek. To care for her, to share the joke in ways I’d never been intimate with anyone. Not like this.

I remained rooted to the spot instead knowing how she would recoil if I ever so much as moved one inch toward her.

“Cassian,” I said, “is not a lord. Though I’m sure he appreciates you thinking he is.” Sure enough, Cassian wiped tears from his eyes in affirmation. “While we’re on the subject, neither is Azriel. Nor Amren. Mor, believe it or not, is the only pure-blooded, titled person in this room.”

Feyre’s embarrassment shifted quickly into confusion as she examined me and perhaps just as she had when Amren had scented her earlier, I felt somewhat... exposed underneath that stare. “I’m half-Illyrian. As good as bastard where the thoroughbred High Fae are concerned.”

“So you - you three aren’t High Fae?”

“Illyrians,” Cassian said in between his remaining fits of laughter, “are certainly not High Fae. And glad of it.” He pulled his hair back so that the rounded tips of his ears showed. “And we’re not lesser faeries, though some try to call us that. We’re just - Illyrians. Considered expendable aerial cavalry for the Night Court at the best of times, mindless soldier grunts at the worst.”

“Which is most of the time,” Azriel chimed in.

There were a few lingering smiles and chuckles sent around the ring of us before Feyre cut us cold, her question silencing us deeper than the grave. “I didn’t see you Under the Mountain,” she said.

No one knew quite where to look, but the answer was apparently everywhere but to myself. Which was good because... I didn’t know what to say. Not when Feyre’s words from this afternoon when we’d fought still clanged through my consciousness, dragging me through hell and back.

“Because none of us were,” my savior of a cousin said at last.

Feyre’s gaze slid to me and I kept my face a mask. If I cracked, even a little bit... there might not be any coming back from this conversation. It was one thing to fall to pieces in front of her, and a part of me had started to want that in some twisted way. What a privilege it would be to become a trembling, shattering mess in her arms. But to do so in front of the others, to lay that burden at their feet... there might not be any coming back from that, not when I knew what my leaving and their staying had cost them too.

“Amarantha didn’t know they existed,” I said, willing myself forward into territory I knew would come up eventually between us. “And when someone tried to tell her, they usually found themselves without the mind to do so.”

Feyre shuddered and I resisted the impulse to do the same, knowing it meant she likely... despised me for what I’d done, what I had saved at the cost of so much else.

“You truly kept this city, and all these people, hidden from her for fifty years?”

“We will continue to keep this city and these people hidden from our enemies for a great many more.” Amren. Sharp. Shrewd. Resolute. Unyielding as stone.

This was it. I could feel it in the silence that reigned over us all. This was the moment where Feyre decided. This right here. It wouldn’t be the end of the night when she’d taken the full measure of every person at this table because just then, she saw everything she needed to make her decision.

Cassian’s hard stare at the plate in front of him, his anger raging across his skin, so palpable we could feel it.

Azriel’s cocoon of shadows storming over his person, wrestling with a desperate, icy rage even now months after my return that longed to go and slaughter every cretin creeping in the mountains who might have once held me to my prison and escaped detection when Tamlin ripped Amarantha’s throat out.

Amren’s cruel defiance, her refusal to bend law or deed to fit anyone else’s approval so long as her city and High Lord were held to the justice they deserved in this world.

And Morrigan.

Morrigan’s quiet, shattered heart that had flown at me when I came back, had waited patiently to cry buckets against me after my own grief was finished pouring out. Morrigan who had poked and prodded and kept to companionable joy at my side since we were kids. Morrigan who took every burden I had unjustly hurled at her and spun it into brilliant resilience so like her very own.

Morrigan, who now looked at Feyre with redness stinging her eyes, lips tight, and said, “There is not one person in this city who is unaware of what went on outside these borders. Or of the cost.”

Not one person - including these four, my Inner Circle. My blood. My family.

For them, I had sacrificed everything. For them, I would stay Under that Mountain. For them, Amarantha was a gift to delight in if it meant keeping them safe.

If it meant her hands on me, groping and teasing and testing until I was hard and cursing my own body and had no choice but to fuck her until she...

Feyre was so quiet, I missed the moment when she asked a question that must have been something to do with our meeting. She was staring at me. Cassian was too. It was his reply that made me understand what direction she’d shifted the conversation into.

“We all hated each other at first,” he said. I could hear a faint smile in his voice. It was not until Cassian had drawled on considerably that Feyre took her eyes off me. For the first time, I didn’t desire them back. “We are bastards, you know. Az and I. The Illyrians... We love our people, and our traditions, but they dwell in clans and camps deep in the mountains of the North, and do not like outsiders. Especially High Fae who try to tell them what to do. But they’re just as obsessed with lineage, and have their own princes and lords among them. Az,” and he pointed in our brother’s direction, “was the bastard of one of the local lords. And if you think the bastard son of a lord is hated, then you can’t imagine how hated the bastard is of a war-camp laundress and a warrior she couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. Az’s father sent him to our camp for training once he and his charming wife realized he was a shadowsinger.”

I cleared my throat, realizing Feyre still had no idea what a shadowsinger was and needing to... reclaim my part in the evening. I might remain lost otherwise if my thoughts were left to fester. “Like the daemati,” I said, “shadowsingers are rare - coveted by courts and territories across the world for their stealth and predisposition to hear and feel things others can’t.”

I had half a mind to assume Feyre would jump right in with that insatiable curiosity of hers to ask Azriel exactly what that meant, but one look at him wrapped in his shadows with stone cold silence bringing predatory stillness over his face and I was glad, for his sake, that she chose not to.

Though Azriel had grown more comfortable with his past over these many centuries, it was seldom a topic we ventured in to. Some demons come back too easily.

Which was why Cassian was the one who continued talking.

“The camp lord practically shit himself with excitement the day Az was dumped in our camp. But me... once my mother weaned me and I was able to walk, they flew me to a distant camp, and chucked me into the mud to see if I would live or die.”

Mor snorted. “They would have been smarter throwing you off a cliff.”

“Oh, definitely,” Cassian said, agreeing with her for once. There was a shared understanding that passed between them then, the torment of families gone terribly wrong. The common thread connecting us all together. “Especially because when I was old and strong enough to go back to the camp I’d been born in, I learned those pricks worked my mother until she died.”

The tension born of that admission unleashed an awful silence once more. The anxiety and scars flickering on Cassian’s face stirred some of that same icy vengeance Azriel carted around within myself.

“The Illyrians,” I said, taking Feyre’s attention away, “are unparalleled warriors, and are rich with stories and traditions. But they are also brutal and backward, particularly in regard to how they treat their females.”

“They’re barbarians,” Amren amended. “They cripple their females so they can keep them for breeding more flawless warriors.”

Mor’s incessant nodding to the left caught my eye, but she was staring straight at Azriel, worry creasing her brow as he wouldn’t meet her gaze, nor any of us. She bit her lip and waited for him to look up at her anyway.

What Amren had said was nothing short of true. My own mother... Cauldron, only earlier I’d thought of flying with her, of introducing her to Feyre. My mother and my mate...

“My mother was low-born,” I said, wanting Feyre to know her in some way where she couldn’t in real life. “And worked as a seamstress in one of their many mountain war-camps. When females come of age in the camps - when they have their first bleeding - their wings are... clipped. Just an incision in the right place, left to improperly heal, can cripple you forever. And my mother - she was gentle and wild and loved to fly. So she did everything in her power to keep herself from maturing. She starved herself, gathered illegal herbs - anything to halt the natural course of her body. She turned eighteen and hadn’t yet bled, to the mortification of her parents. But her bleeding finally arrived, and all it took was for her to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, before a male scented it on her and told the camp’s lord. She tried to flee- took right to the skies. But she was young, and the warriors were faster, and they dragged her back. They were about to tie her to the posts in the center of camp when my father winnowed in for a meeting with the camp’s lord about readying for the War. He saw my mother thrashing and fighting like a wildcat and...”

And...

“Be glad of your human heart, Feyre,” I said. “Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.” She simply nodded and with her mind locked, I didn’t know what she thought of me. It was agonizing not to know. “Well, good-bye for now,” I said hating that I had to go with this question mark left between us.

I bowed low for her, a gesture only Feyre could ever merit from me, and then began to fade away. But as my wings returned to my body and I rose back up, my eyes found hers and my entire body seized. My blood raced through my veins with the scent of her, of Feyre and everything that she was. Her mind, her body, her soul, I felt all of it and I wanted every ounce and then some. She was radiant, like hope and joy made manifest and my life felt complete just looking at her. It shocked me so thoroughly that I fell backwards, all of my usual grace utterly gone.

Feyre.

The name curled around my heart and I was lost. The entire world was her and she was me and if I didn’t have her now, I would go mad.

My mate. My mate. My mate.

Feyre had very clearly noticed my reaction even if she didn’t understand what it was due to. “What is-” she started to say, but the sound of her voice was a new frenzy, a war cry thrumming in my body to take her then and there, something I knew could not happen. And so I winnowed, without a word of explanation.

The recollection was clear as day, as if I had been there that day my father first saw my mother in all that grief and despair, and known precisely how he had felt. Like nothing else in the world mattered except saving that precious flesh and blood before him.

I swallowed.

“The mating bond between them clicked into place. One look at her, and he knew what she was. He misted the guards holding her.”

“Misted?” Feyre asked.

Cassian’s faint laughter was signal enough of his recovery that I enjoyed floating the lemon wedge off my plate to dance in front of Feyre before I clicked my fingers and barely registered feeling my power shred the lemon into a citrus-scented sheen in the air. There was something oddly satisfying about it and knowing how much I would have liked to have done that every day my mate had been forced to suffer Amarantha’s court, I could imagine my father had felt a similar satisfaction the day he met my mother.

“Through the blood-rain, my mother looked at him. And the bond fell into place for her. My father took her back to the Night Court that evening and made her his bride. She loved her people, and missed them, but never forgot what they had tried to do to her - what they did to the females among them. She tried for decades to get my father to ban it, but the War was coming, and he wouldn’t risk isolating the Illyrians when he needed them to lead his armies. And to die for him.”

“A real prize, your father.” Mor’s voice was low, but full of malice that I imagined was directed elsewhere just as much as it was my father’s memory.

“At least he liked you,” I offered. But when I looked at Feyre, she still seemed confused and I knew precisely why. And it was ironic, really, given what we were to each other that I should be here explaining it to her in a different way while she was unaware of the truth between us. I didn’t dare look at Mor, lest the guilt sink in fresh.

“My father and mother, despite being mates, were wrong for each other. My father was cold and calculating, and could be vicious, as he had been trained to be since birth. My mother was soft and fiery and beloved by everyone she met. She hated him after a time - but never stopped being grateful that he had saved her wings, that he allowed to fly whenever and wherever she wished. And when I was born, and could summon the Illyrian wings as I pleased... She wanted me to know her people’s culture.”

“She wanted to keep you out of your father’s claws,” Mor said. The sound of her voice seemed to snap the life back into Azriel who looked up from his silent reverie and trained his thoughtful gaze on Mor as she swirled her wine about testily in her glass.

“That, too,” I affirmed. “When I turned eight, my mother brought me to one of the Illyrian war-camps. To be trained, as all Illyrian males were trained. And like all Illyrian mothers, she shoved me toward the sparring ring on the first day, and walked away without looking back.”

“She abandoned you?” Feyre looked near outraged and I cringed at what memories of her own abandonment this might be conjuring up for her. If I ever met her father...

“No - never,” I said with a firmness that was resolute. My mother never - never abandoned me, nor my sister. “She was staying at the camp as well. But it is considered an embarrassment for a mother to coddle her son when he goes to train.”

Feyre didn’t seem any bit more appeased by this piece of information. It brought a snarky laugh hustling out of Cass. “Backward, like he said,” Cassian told her.

“I was scarred out of my mind,” I said. As if it had been yesterday, I felt the quick, sharp course of adrenaline that had flooded me that first day and every day afterwards for a long while. Thinking about it now was almost comical. “I’d been learning to wield my powers, but Illyrian magic was a mere fraction of it. And it’s rare amongst them - usually possessed only by the most powerful, pure-bred warriors.” Feyre’s eyes went right to the Siphons sitting on Cassian and Azriel’s hands, questioning. “I tried to use a Siphon during those years and shattered about a dozen before I realized it wasn’t compatible - the stones couldn’t hold it. My power flows and is honed in other ways.”

“So difficult, being such a powerful High Lord,” Mor crooned. Azriel looked rather smug.

I rolled my eyes, but on the whole ignored her. “The camp-lord banned me from using my magic. For all our sakes. But I had no idea how to fight when I set foot into that training ring that day. The other boys in my age group knew it, too. Especially one in particular, who took a look at me, and beat me into a bloody mess.”

Cassian .

The filthy prick shook his head with such smug arrogance. Had it not been for Feyre, I would have dragged his ass outside to settle the matter just for the sport of it, for the fun. Something I had not done since - since...

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a go just because we could.

“You were so clean ,” Cass said pulling me away from - whatever direction I’d been going. “The pretty half-breed son of the High Lord - how fancy you were in your new training clothes.”

“Cassian,” Azriel chimed in, now that the brutality of Illyrian origins had passed, “resorted to getting new clothes over the years by challenging other boys to fights, with the prize being the clothes off their backs.“

Cassian started chuckling, no hint of darkness lingering, but Feyre... Feyre stared at him hard, so hard that I don’t think she really noticed anyone looking at her, at how sharp the planes of her face had become. Cassian saw her, saw the honesty and agony written on her face not just for what he had done, but for the simple fact that he’d had to, to survive.

Just like her...

Fire ignited in Cassian’s eyes as together, he and Feyre shared blood and history without saying a word. But it was a fire of life and love and understanding, something none of the rest of were a part of even if we shared those pains in other ways.

When he spoke, it was with that same amusement, that same charm that brought an ease to the ache. The same way Morrigan so often righted wrongs into triumphs.

“I’d beaten every boy in our age group twice over already,” Cassian explained without it being a bragging comment in any way. “But then Rhys arrived, in his clean clothes, and he smelled... different. Like a true opponent. So I attacked. We both got three lashings apiece for the fight.”

Amren cut off the shock and horror of Feyre’s flinch. “They do worse, girl, in those camps. Three lashings is practically an encouragement to fight again. when they do something truly bad, bones are broken. Repeatedly. Over weeks.”

Feyre turned hotly to me, shifting in her seat, demanding answers. She was so outraged, the stillness in her voice was like an arrow darting through the night - quiet and deadly and full of lethal surprise you did not suspect was there until it struck you blind through the chest.

“Your mother willingly sent you into that?” Her fingers curled on the table.

“My mother didn’t want me to rely on my power,” I explained. “She knew from the moment she conceived me that I’d be hunted my entire life. Where one strength failed, she wanted others to save me.

“My education was another weapon - which was why she went with me: to tutor me after lessons were done for the day. And when she took me home that first night to our new house at the edge of the camp, she made me read by the window. It was there that I saw Cassian trudging through the mud - toward the few ramshackle tents outside of the camp. I asked her where he was going, and she told me that bastards are given nothing: they find their own shelter, own food. If they survive to be in a war-band, they’ll be bottom-ranking forever, but receive their own tents and supplies. But until then, he’d stay in the cold.”

Azriel leaned quietly across the table, but his manner conveyed that unending search for vengeance that he reserved only for when those he loved were hurt. “Those mountains,” he said, “offer some of the harshest conditions you can imagine.”

Feyre’s hand softened, but that ire was still lit in her eyes.

“After my lessons,” I said, “my mother cleaned my lashings, and as she did, I realized for the first time what it was to be warm, and safe, and cared for. And it didn’t sit well.”

“Apparently not,” Cassian said with that way he had of brushing off all too serious things as though they were inconsequential. There was a ghost of a smile on his face as he recalled the memory for Feyre, but his eyes were heavy - knowing. “Because in the dead of night, that little prick woke me up in my piss-poor tent and told me to keep my mouth shut and come with him. And maybe the cold made me stupid, but I did. His mother was livid .”

Cassian wasn’t wrong. I could still feel the phantom lump she gave me on the back of my head some nights when I went to sleep visiting in the camps and I thought of my time there. I don’t think she’d ever been more heated - not even at my father, so far as I’d seen up until then.

Cass’s eyes glossed over, staring into the air above Feyre’s head. “But I’ll never forget the look on her beautiful face when she saw me and said, ‘There is a bathtub with hot running water. Get in it or you can go back into the cold.’ Being a smart lad, I obeyed. When I got out, she had clean nightclothes and ordered me into bed. I’d spent my life sleeping on the ground - and when I balked, she said she understood because she had felt the same once, and that it would feel as if I was being swallowed up, but the bed was mine for as long as I wanted it.”

My mother - who was kind and compassionate even in the midst of the tempest that are the camps - had granted me a friend, even if Cass and I had shot each other vulgar gestures before retiring to our rooms that first night. The following morning had been... a struggle to say the least. It made me want to laugh thinking about it now.

I glanced at Cassian and knew he was thinking the same thing. That enduring spark still glinted in his eyes - I can take you, you little shit .

Feyre’s shoulders had relaxed considerably, her hands resting back in her lap. “And you were friends after that?”

“No,” I said, nearly a snort. “Cauldron no. We hated each other, and only behaved because if one of us got into trouble or provoked the other, then neither of us ate that night. My mother started tutoring Cassian, but it wasn’t until Azriel arrived a year later that we decided to be allies.”

If Cassian’s eyes had sparked for me, then they were an inferno of warmth for Azriel as he reached around Amren to clap out the sigh Azriel let loose. Everyone save for Amren seemed to smile in one way or another. Amren, who was glaring through the back of her head at Cassian’s arm and deciding how best to remove it from the back of her chair.

“A new bastard in the camp,” Cassian said, with the air of giving a congratulatory speech. “And an untrained shadowsinger to boot. Not to mention he couldn’t even fly thanks to-”

“Stay on track, Cassian,” Mor said swiftly, and all of us save for Cass stilled. Even Feyre, though she couldn’t have known the implications.

Mor remained casual, but even before cutting in, the little bit of light there had been kindling in Azriel’s eyes died out. Cassian removed his arm with a shrug and plowed on, but Mor gave Azriel a hard stare he wouldn’t meet even while her hand twitched uncomfortably, as though trying to reach him across the many chairs and plates and people dividing them at this table, a division too large to properly separate the pair of them.

Her hand that reached for his - covered and mangled and brutalized in those wicked scars from the flames those filthy pricks he had for a family had given him. Not Cassian’s fire - warm and soft and steady. The fires of hell that burned and incinerated and stole.

“Rhys and I made his life a living hell, shadowsinger or no,” Cassian said, ignoring or simply not noticing the brief moment of pain lingering between my cousin and his brother. “But Rhys’s mother had known Az’s mother, and took him in. As we grew older, and the other males around us did, too, we realized everyone else hated us enough that we had better odds of survival sticking together.”

“Do you have any gifts?” Feyre asked. She inclined her head towards Azriel and myself. “Like - them?”

Cassian started to grin, but Mor chimed in first, “A volatile temper doesn’t count,” and that grin spread its wings and flew to the skies.

“No. I don’t,” he admitted, but then, “not beyond a heaping pile of the killing power. Bastard-born nobody, through and through.” A complete and utter lie, though I knew certainly Cassian would forever object the way Azriel would forever deny his self-worth. I leaned forward to tell the smug little prick off for being noble the one time he had every right not to be, but he met my brief stare and plowed ahead anyhow with a curt fuck you, Rhys in the dancing timbre of his voice.

“Even so, the other males knew that we were different. And not because we were two bastards and a half-breed. We were stronger, faster - like the Cauldron knew we’d been set apart and wanted us to find each other. Rhys’s mother saw it, too. Especially as we reached the age of maturity, and all we wanted to do was fuck and fight.”

“Males are horrible creatures, aren’t they?” Amren said, a fact, not a question.

“Repulsive,” Mor agreed. The click of her tongue had me fetching my wine glass to drown out the temptation of a smile and a groan.

All those years. So many memories. So many truths that had led us all here. I had spent more time buried in blood and sweat than I had oils and linens in those camps, but we had been happy. It was... the start of us.

And now Feyre was here too and looking from Amren’s non-attempt at disguising her genuine disgust to Mor’s mocking disdain, to the way Cassian shrugged it all and she looked... okay, with it.

Smile , I thought. Join us. Please.

“Rhys’s power grew every day,” Cassian continued. “And everyone, even the camp-lords, knew he could mist everyone if he felt like it. And the two of us... we weren’t far behind.” He held up his hand and flicked at his Siphon. It glowed with an iridescent red in reply. “A bastard Illyrian had never received one of these. Ever. For Az and me to both be appointed them, albeit begrudgingly, had every warrior in every camp across those mountains sizing us up. Only pure-blooded pricks get Siphons - born and bred for the killing power. It still keeps them up at night, puzzling over where the hell we got it from.”

There was no time for pride or celebration. Azriel brought the cold reality right to the forefront. “Then the War came,” he said solemnly. I felt Feyre stiffen - felt myself stiffen. Things got tricky from here. “And Rhys’s father visited our camp to see how his son had fared after twenty years.”

Something in my blood simmered at that causing my hold on my wine glass to tense as I swirled it about.

My father...

Mor was glowering.

“My father,” I said, “saw that his son had not only started to rival him for power, but had allied himself with perhaps the two deadliest Illyrians in history. He got it into his head that if we were given a legion in the War, we might very well turn it against him when we returned.”

He’s not going to kill me, mother.

No, but he’ll do the next best thing. You listen to me, Rhysand. You listen to me well and good. ..

It took many years after that for certain wounds to heal properly and even then... But where my bones were still brittle from the affair, Cassian found it amusing entertainment.

“So the prick separated us,” he said with a snicker and a shit-eating grin. “He gave Rhys command of a legion of Illyrians who hated him for being a half-breed, and threw me into a different legion to be a common foot soldier, even when my power outranked any of the war-leaders. Az, he kept for himself as his personal shadowsinger - mostly for spying and his dirty work.” The shadows around Az tightened. The stories he’d told me later, and those were just the ones he would talk about, never mind the ones he wouldn’t , save for... I glanced at Mor, but her face remained impassive. “We only saw each other on the battlefields for the seven years the War raged. They’d send around casualty lists among the Illyrians, and I read each one, wondering if I’d see their names on it. But then Rhys was captured-”

All thoughts of battles and missions and spying flew right out of my head at that, replaced by dread and a red-haired faced and venom snapping out quickly instead.

That is a story for another time,” I said. I felt a kernal of my power flash through me and reigned it in before the darkness could rupture out. Cassian sat back, albeit some what surprised, and was quiet.

And Feyre - Feyre alone seemed to feel that crack of power, that whip of adrenaline that had coursed through my muscles. She studied me, her innate curiosity molding into intuition that I couldn’t refuse answering somehow.

“Once I became High Lord,” I said, skipping far too many details for which I could feel guilty over later , “I appointed these four to my Inner Circle, and told the rest of my father’s old court that if they had a problem with my friends, they could leave. They all did. Turns out, having a half-breed High Lord was made worse by his appointment of two females and two Illyrian bastards.”

Something deep inside Feyre shivered then. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there all the same. “What - what happened to them, then?”

Fuck all if I cared .

Except, given what had come next and how the War had ended, I had been obligated to care a great deal at the time.

“The nobility of the Night Court fall into one of three categories: those who hated me enough that when Amarantha took over, they joined her court and later found themselves dead.” A task I had very much savored for fifty years and five months thus far. “Those who hated me enough to try to overthrow me and faced the consequences.” A task I had very much savored for several centuries . “And those who hated me, but not enough to be stupid and have since tolerated a half-breed’s rule, especially when it so rarely interferes with their miserable lives.” A task I waited anxiously to deal with every damned day. As did Mor.

“Are they - are they the ones who live beneath the mountain?”

I didn’t dare let my surprise show that she’d mentioned that place aloud. It wasn’t the mountain, but I knew it was close enough in Feyre’s mind. I merely nodded. “In the Hewn City, yes. I gave it to them, for not being fools. They’re happy to stay there, rarely leaving, ruling themselves and being as wicked as they please, for all eternity.”

And for all eternity I would wait in dread for the days Mor might winnow home and tell me who’s blood would stain my hands next. It was one thing to tear about the filthy cretins who had defected, who had chosen to let their prejudices and bigotry blind them to what my court could have offered and instead sought after the miserable chains of Amarantha’s court.

Those kills had been easier to make. Those kills had a justification on their side.

But the ones who had settled now, who stared my cousin and I in the face every time we entered that mountain and lied to us as they contemplated the risks and the benefits... those were the kills I didn’t want to make because they were broken promises that stood in the way of so, so much more.

Mor was likely thinking the same thing. Her face had turned dark. “The Court of Nightmares,” she said to no one in particular.

And thinking of how her light had so soothed my darkness that first day I came back, I wanted to tear apart the mountain she came from until her father and all the bastards who made her sit here now looking like this were shredded in never ending night and pain.

Azriel alone of us looked like he could imagine an infinitely worse fate for them as he stared at Mor, stared in precisely the same manner she had looked at him earlier.

Sometimes I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that back and forth, even after five centuries, the little shits.

Feyre pointed blandly at the five of us. “And what is this court?” she asked.

“The Court of Dreams,” Cassian said. And in that moment, he was not the fierce warrior who led my armies, but the eight-year-old handed food and drink and a home and love at my mother’s wish.

Finally, Feyre looked to Mor and Amren, her eyes ending on the firedrake. “And you?”

Amren bothered to look Feyre in the eye, but sounded so decidedly bored, “Rhys offered to make me his Second. No one had ever asked me before, so I said yes, to see what it might be like. I found I enjoyed it.”

And that was that.

The second Mor leaned back in her seat, Azriel leaned forward in his for reply.

“I was a dreamer born into the Court of Nightmares,” she said with vicious ease. Her curls were suddenly very interesting for one moment - too long a moment - before she looked at Feyre and mustered all her usual grace and charm to say, “So I got out.”

The table was not quiet long enough for any of us to dare prompt her when Cassian nodded at Feyre and my attention snapped on her. “What’s your story, then?”

A brief flicker of surprise down the bond, but nothing more.

She looked at me and it took everything I’d learned in nearly six centuries not to beg Feyre to spill her truth to me, to us, to hear it from her own lips as I’d never been able to before.

I shrugged.

Your choice.

She straightened, and much to my soul’s sweet relief, she spoke.

“I was born to a wealthy merchant family, with two older sisters and parents who only cared about their money and social standing. My mother died when I was eight; my father lost his fortune three years later. He sold everything to pay off his debts, moved us into a hovel, and didn’t bother to find work while he let us slowly starve for years.”

A fire capable of rivaling Cassian’s and destroying the world crackled in my skull with every word she said. I’d never heard... I’d never known... Feyre ...

When I’d see those brief visions of her Under the Mountain, hunting through the forest or painting quietly by a dim fire... She’d been starving.

My mate. How - how she’d suffered. How she’d survived .

And I realized just then what I’d known all along, since the second I saw her fall into that pit with the Middengard Wyrm and hurl herself out again, arm broken and bleeding right down to the bone, what a miracle this human woman was.

“I was fourteen when the last of the money ran out, along with the food. He wouldn’t work - couldn’t, because the debtors came and shattered his leg in front of us. So I went into the forest and taught myself to hunt. And I kept us alive, if not near starvation at times, for five years. Until...” her voice grew heavy and she looked down at her lap before resolving herself to the truth. “Everything happened.”

Until Tamlin happened.

I wanted to swear. To unleash the darkness and send it hurtling across fields and skies until it found her father and demanded answers.

No one except Cassian had any idea what to say to Feyre. “You taught yourself to hunt,” he said. “What about to fight?” Feyre shook her head no and Cassian sat up straighter, leaning on the table. “Lucky for you, you’ve just found yourself a teacher.”

Feyre’s mouth fell open, but then she paused staring at Cassian like she wasn’t quite sure she was still sitting here, had ever gotten to this point in the first place.

I don’t think a single one of us - not Mor, not Cassian, nor even myself, though if I’d reflected well enough on the conversations we’d been having these past weeks, I should have at least been prepared - could have expected the words that next tumbled out of Feyre’s mouth and sent us all reeling in our seats with sorrow and bitter, bitter rage.

Not at Feyre.

But at them .

“You don’t think it sends a bad message if people see me learning to fight - using weapons?” Feyre asked.

Her face shattered into... grief? Guilt? Regret? I couldn’t tell. But whatever it was, I wanted to clean it up, wrap it in a box, and send it to Tamlin’s door for him to stare at before he descended into the bowels of his worst nightmares night after night.

But mostly, I just wanted to see what that beautiful face of Feyre’s might look like when the grief was stripped away and the warrior underneath shone through. The warrior I was pretty sure would claim a post here by the end of the night.

It was quiet for a long moment. I was not the least bit surprised when I heard Mor speak, her own warrior showing through the shadows.

“Let me tell you two things,” Mor said, “as someone who has perhaps been in your shoes before.” And there was no mistaking the resolution in her voice, the resilience or the need for Feyre to understand what it is to exist and live properly in this new world. And Feyre - Feyre was going to listen, was willing it with the way she was clinging to every word coming off Mor’s tongue. I really did hope they went to dinner together soon.

“One, you have left the Spring Court,” Mor explained. “If that does not send a message, for good or bad, then your training will not, either.” Mor stretched her hand flat on the table - a silent proclamation all its own. “Two, I once lived in a place where the opinion of others mattered. It suffocated me, nearly broke me. So you’ll understand me, Feyre, when I say that I know what you feel, and I know what they tried to do to you, and that with enough courage, you can say to hell with a reputation.”

Mor paused and I didn’t think Feyre registered the way Mor had leaned closer towards her. “You do what you love, what you need,” Mor said. It wasn’t until those last, quiet, soft words were out that the air around us breathed again. I had but a moment to see the corners of Az’s mouth relax into a faint, soft smile before the shadows swirled at his ear and I averted meeting his gaze.

Feyre stared at Mor for a long time and it drove me to near insanity not to see her eyes, to attest to the color of them and how they turned more grey when she was determined and blue when she was feeling overwhelmed.

And her shields were so perfect, so damn near flawless now after so little practice that I felt... nothing. Nothing when I wanted to feel everything.

So silently, I was begging. Praying and pleading to the Mother above that she would turn to me and would be okay. That I would look in her eyes and see more grey than blue, see the steel and the iron and the dawn of the next day even if she wasn’t sure how she would get there. Just one day. It was all I wanted. One more day with her so that I could help her find the desire for one more after that.

Cassian got his answer first. Feyre turned toward him and my insides clenched waiting. “I’ll think about it,” Feyre said and then her head flew in a turn towards me, almost as if she knew what I felt, how pleased and proud of her I was that she would even consider strengthening herself with him.

But I still didn’t know my answer and for that, I kept my mask in place. For her .

Your choice.

“I accept your offer,” Feyre said, the words ringing out clear in the room, wrapping tightly around me so that each one could be engraved upon my bones for me to remember forever. “To work with you. To earn my keep. And help with Hybern in whatever way I can.”

If she hadn’t been looking at me - if they all hadn’t been looking at me - my mask would have been nothing more than torn strips of fabric lying on the floor.

“Good,” I said, keeping it to as few words as possible before the real storm descended. “Because we start tomorrow.”

Feyre’s jaw dropped and her brow shot about a mile high. “Where? And what?” she said in a flash.

And just like that, as I leaned forward bracing my arms on the table looking at my Inner Circle, Feyre was one of us. And the time for war was nigh.

Amren raised a wary brow as I opened my mouth and announced, “Because the King of Hybern is indeed about to launch a war, and he wants to resurrect Jurian to do it.”

“Bullshit.” Cassian sent his fork clattering against his plate as he fell back with a thud in his chair. “There’s no way to do that.”

“Why would the king want to resurrect Jurian ?” Mor moaned, her face undoubtedly scrunching up.  I was too busy to notice though, watching Azriel and Amren sit back stone-faced and still while I felt... only that quiet curiosity from Feyre. “He was so odious. All he liked to do was talk about himself.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“That’s what I want to find out,” I said. “And how the king plans to do it.” Even though in that I already had my suspicions as much as I did about the rest.

“Word will have reached him about Feyre’s Making,” Amren said. I was surprised it took her so long to chime in. “He knows it’s possible for the dead to be remade.”

“All seven High Lords would have to agree that,” Mor said. “There’s not a chance it happens. He’ll take another route.” And it was with a twinge of guilt, though it had all been necessary, that I felt Mor direct her attentions to me, and we six settled in to the conversation I’d been anticipating for weeks now, that none of the others, save Amren, could have entirely guessed at. “All the slaughtering,” Mor said, “the massacres at the temples. You think it’s tied to this?”

“I know it’s tied to this.” I braced myself from looking too hard at Az. “I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for certain. But Azriel confirmed that they’d raided the memorial in Sangravah three days ago.” Mor’s eyes widened, her lips pursing as she looked at Az. But it was nothing more than quiet surprise. “They’re looking for something - or found it.”

Only the sharp hitching of Feyre’s breath could have pulled me away from them then. “That,” she said, stumbling a beat, “that’s why the ring and the finger bone vanished after Amarantha died. For this. But who...” Her face froze. She wouldn’t look at me. At any of us. “They never caught the Attor, did they?”

The Attor flew. Tamlin’s teeth sank. Amarantha screamed... and was no more.

And in my wretched misery of Feyre’s death, my own it may as well been, I saw nothing and no one but her. The Attor walked out free as a bird. Stupid. Stupid and blind and stupid . That’s what I had been.

And now Feyre suffered for it. We all did.

“No,” I replied. “No, they didn’t.” And because she was the only one who would stomach telling me what I needed to hear, I asked Amren, “How does one take an eye and a finger bone and make it into a man again? And how do we stop it?”

“You already know how to find the answer,” she said. “Go to the prison. Talk to the Bone Carver.”

Mor and Cassian cursed in unison. Under any other circumstances, it would have been comical.

“Perhaps you would be more effective, Amren,” I said, a half-tease given that I already knew the answer to this dilemma too. But Amren’s face became positively wicked as she hissed at me.

“I will not set foot in the Prison, Rhysand, and you know it. So go yourself, or send one of these dogs to do it for you.”

The others were ready to go to war over who would go visit the Carver straight away, Azriel piping up first. But Amren and I simply continued to watch each other, Amren leaning out of that snarling rage she’d let forth and sipping her wine because she knew every move I’d planned. I’d told her barely anything about my suspicions over the course of the past five months and yet, that one word alone - Jurian - had told her everything.

“I’ll go,” Azriel said. I wasn’t the least bit surprised. “The Prison sentries know me - what I am.”

“If anyone’s going to the Prison,” I interrupted, before Mor could make her pleas for her Illyrian, “it’s me. And Feyre.”

“What?” Mor said. It was more than a request. It was a need , a demand for truth.

Still, I looked at Amren.

“He won’t talk to Rhys,” my Second explained, as I knew she would. “Or to Azriel. Or to any of us. We’ve got nothing to offer him. But an immortal with a mortal soul...” Our stare broke as she looked into Feyre’s heart, listened to it hum away with all that lovely humanity I yearned to seek out and feel. “The Bone Carver might be willing indeed to talk to her.”

The Bone Carver.

Shapeshifter. Knower. Seeker. Solidifier.

Demon.

Or close to it.

A man built of sharpened knives and needles enshrining an infinite number of coveted truths within, if one was willing to pay the price to listen.

Feyre, of course, had no way of knowing what a visit to the Carver meant. He wouldn’t hurt her. Feyre was in no form of physical danger going to meet him. But it was the emotional risk we all sat back and contemplated that could be an undoing, one I would make sure she was clear of before we left.

If she accepted.

Finally, I broke from Amren and found Feyre staring at me. Her eyes were grey.

“Your choice, Feyre,” I said.

She shrugged. “How bad can it be?”

“Bad,” Cassian said, and I could feel the axe already falling over my neck.

As we cleared the table and ended our evening, Feyre agreeing with less reluctance than before to climb back into my arms and charge the night sky for the townhouse, there was really only one thought in my mind beyond the haze of tomorrow.

I accept your offer - to work with you.

She had said that. Had said that to me clear as a cloudless sky, sure as a winter wind.

For tonight, perhaps, I would let that be enough.

A Court of Starlight and Poppies

A A Court of Thorns and Roses Story
by Turtle_Steed

Part 10 of 35

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