“I don’t want one.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not hungry.”
It was true. Her appetite had been the first thing to go after that battle. Only instinct and the occasional social requirement to appear like she gave a shit about anything kept her eating.
“You won’t last through an hour of training tomorrow without food in your belly.”
“I’m not training at that horrible place.” She’d hated Windhaven from the first time she’d seen it, cold and bleak and full of humorless, harsh-faced people.
The Siphon strapped atop Cassian’s left hand gleamed, a red band of light twining from the stone to wrap around the door handle. It yanked the iron downward, the door swinging open with a creak, then vanished like smoke. “You were given an order, as well as the alternative to following it. You want to go back to the human lands, be my guest.”
Then go somewhere else.
He’d likely have that preening Morrigan dump her over the border like so much baggage.
And Nesta would have called the bluff, except … she knew what she’d face down south. The war had done little to warm human sentiments toward the Fae.
She had nowhere to go. Elain, mourn as she might for the life she would have had with Graysen, had found a place, a role here. Tending to the gardens of Feyre’s veritable palace on the river, helping other residents of Velaris restore their own destroyed gardens—she had purpose, and joy, and friends: those two half-wraiths who worked in Rhysand’s household. But those things had always come easily to her sister. Had always made Elain special.
Had made Nesta fight like hell to keep Elain safe at all costs.
The Cauldron had learned that. The King of Hybern had learned it, too.
An old, heavy weight tugged her down, oblivion beckoning. “I’m tired.” Her words came out mercifully flat.
“Take the day to rest, then,” Cassian said, his voice a shade quiet. “Mor or Rhys will winnow us up to Windhaven after breakfast tomorrow.”
She said nothing. He went on, “We’ll start easy: two hours of training, then lunch, then you’ll be brought back here to meet with Clotho.”
She didn’t have the energy to ask further about the training, or the work in the library with its high priestess. She didn’t really care. Let Rhysand and Feyre and Amren and Cassian make her do this bullshit. Let them think it could somehow make a lick of difference.
Nesta didn’t bother to reply before she strode through the archway and into her bedroom. But she felt his stare on her, assessing every step over the threshold, the way her hand gripped the side of the door, the way she flexed her fingers before she slammed it shut.
Nesta waited mere feet inside the bedroom, blinking at the glaring light through the wall of windows at its other end. A scuff of boots on stone informed her that he’d left.
It wasn’t until the sound faded completely that she took in the room before her, unchanged since she’d last been in it, the connecting door to Elain’s old suite now sealed shut.
The wide space easily accommodated a mammoth four-poster bed against the wall to her left, as well as a small sitting area to her right, complete with a sofa and two chairs. A carved marble fireplace occupied the wall before the sitting area, mercifully dark, and multiple rugs lay scattered throughout, offering reprieve from the chilly stone floors.
But that wasn’t what she’d liked about this room. No, it was what she now faced: the wall of windows that overlooked the city, the river, the flatlands and distant sparkle of sea beyond. All that land, all those people, so far away. As if this palace floated in the clouds. There had been some days up here when the mist had been thick enough to block the view below, swirling so close to the window that she’d been able to trail her fingers through it.
No tendrils of mist drifted by now, though. The windows revealed nothing but a clear early-autumn day, the sunlight near-blinding.
Seconds ticked by. Minutes.
A familiar roaring built in her ears. That heavy hollowness tugged her down, as surely as some faerie creature wrapping its bony hands around her ankle and yanking her beneath a dark surface. As surely as she had been shoved under that eternal, icy water in the Cauldron.
Nesta’s body became distant, foreign, as she shut the heavy gray velvet curtains against the light. Shrouding the room in darkness bit by bit. She ignored the three bags and two trunks set beside the dresser as she approached the bed.
She barely managed to toe off her shoes before she slid beneath the layers of white down blankets and quilts, closed her eyes, and breathed.
And breathed.
And breathed.
CHAPTER
4
Mor had already commandeered a table at the riverfront café, an arm slung across the back of a wrought-iron chair, the other elegantly draped over her crossed knees. Cassian halted a few feet from the maze of tables along the walkway, smiling to himself at the sight of her: head tipped toward the sun, unbound hair gleaming and rippling around her like liquid gold, her full lips curled upward, basking in the light.
She never stopped appreciating the sunshine. Even five hundred years after leaving that veritable prison she’d called home and the monsters who claimed her as kin, his friend—his sister, honestly—still savored every moment in the sun. As if the first seventeen years of her life, spent in the darkness of the Hewn City, still lurked around her like Az’s shadows.
Cassian cleared his throat as he approached the table, offering pleasant smiles to the other patrons and people along the walkway who either gawked or waved at him, and by the time he sat, Mor was already smirking, her brown eyes lit with amusement.
“Don’t start,” he warned, settling his wings around the chair’s back and motioning to the owner of the café, who knew him well enough to understand that meant he wanted water—no tea or sweets, both of which Mor had before her.
Mor grinned, so beautiful it took his breath away. “Can’t I enjoy the sight of my friend being fawned over by the public?”
He rolled his eyes, and murmured his thanks to the owner as a pitcher of water and a glass appeared before him.
Mor said when the owner had gone to tend to other tables, “I seem to remember a time when you enjoyed that sort of thing, too.”
“I was a young, arrogant idiot.” He cringed to recall how he’d strutted around after successful battles or missions, believing he deserved the praise of strangers. For too damn long, he’d indulged in that bullshit. It had taken walking these same streets after Rhys had been imprisoned by Amarantha—after Rhys sacrificed so much to shield this city, and seeing the disappointment and fear in so many faces—to make Cassian realize what a fool he’d been.
Mor cleared her throat, as if sensing the direction of his thoughts. She didn’t possess Rhys’s skill set, but having survived in the Court of Nightmares, she’d learned to read the subtlest of expressions. A mere blink, she’d once told him, might mean the difference between life and death in that miserable court. “She’s settled, then?”
Cassian knew who she meant. “Taking a nap.”
Mor snorted.
“Don’t.” His attention drifting to the glittering Sidra mere feet away. “Please don’t.”
Mor sipped her tea, the portrait of elegant innocence. “We’d be better off throwing Nesta into the Court of Nightmares. She’d thrive there.”