Light sputtered before me, and I blinked at the blinding ball of faelight.
I saw the twin Ravens first, that faelight at their shoulder—to illuminate me for their taking.
Their attention went to me. Then rose over my shoulder. My head.
Absolute, unfiltered terror filled their faces. At what stood behind me.
Close your eyes, the thing purred in my ear.
I obeyed, trembling.
Then all I heard was screaming.
High-pitched shrieking and pleading. Bones snapping, blood splattering like rain, cloth ripping, and screaming, screaming, screaming— I squeezed my eyes shut so hard it hurt. Squeezed them shut so hard I was shaking.
Then there were warm, rough hands on me, dragging me away, and Cassian’s voice at my ear, saying, “Don’t look. Don’t look.”
I didn’t. I let him lead me away. Just as I felt Rhys arrive. Felt him land on the floor of the pit so hard the entire mountain shuddered.
I opened my eyes then. Found him storming toward us, night rippling off him, such fury on his face— “Get them out.”
The order was given to Cassian.
The screaming was still erupting behind us.
I lurched toward Rhys, but he was already gone, a plume of darkness spreading from him.
To shield the view of what he walked into.
Knowing I would look.
The screaming stopped.
In the terrible silence, Cassian hauled me out—toward the dim center of the pit. Nesta was standing there, arms around herself, eyes wide.
Cassian only stretched out an arm for her. As if in a trance, she walked right to his side. His arms tightened around both of us, Siphons flaring, gilding the darkness with bloodred light.
Then we launched skyward.
Just as the screaming began anew.
CHAPTER
32
Cassian gave us both a glass of brandy. A tall glass.
Seated in an armchair in the family library high above, Nesta drank hers in one gulp.
I claimed the chair across from her, took a sip, shuddered at the taste, and made to set it down on the low-lying table between us.
“Keep drinking,” Cassian ordered. The wrath wasn’t toward me.
No—it was toward whatever was below. What had happened.
“Are you hurt?” Cassian asked me. Each word was clipped—brutal.
I shook my head.
That he didn’t ask Nesta … he must have found her first. Ascertained for himself.
I started, “Is the king—the city—”
“No sign of him.” A muscle twitched in his jaw.
We sat in silence. Until Rhys appeared between the open doors, shadows trailing in his wake.
Blood coated his hands—but nothing else.
So much blood, ruby-bright in the midmorning sun.
Like he’d clawed through them with his bare hands.
His eyes were wholly frozen with rage.
But they dipped to my left arm, the sleeve filthy but still rolled up—
Like a slim band of black iron around my forearm, a tattoo now lay there.
It’s custom in my court for bargains to be permanently marked upon flesh, Rhys had told me Under the Mountain.
“What did you give it.” I hadn’t heard that voice since that visit to the Court of Nightmares.
“It—it said it wanted company. Someone to tell it about life. I said yes.”
“Did you volunteer yourself.”
“No.” I drained the rest of the brandy at the tone, his frozen face. “It just said someone. And it didn’t specify when.” I grimaced at the solid black band, no thicker than the width of my finger, interrupted only by two slender gaps near the side of my forearm. I tried to stand, to go to him, to take those bloody hands. But my knees still wobbled enough that I couldn’t move. “Are the king’s Ravens dead?”
“They nearly were when I arrived. It left enough of their minds functioning for me to have a look. And finish them when I was done.”
Cassian was stone-faced, glancing between Rhys’s bloody hands and his ice-cold eyes.
But it was to my sister that my mate turned. “Hybern hunts you because of what you took from the Cauldron. The queens want you dead for vengeance—for robbing them of immortality.”
“I know.” Nesta’s voice was hoarse.
“What did you take.”
“I don’t know.” The words were barely more than a whisper. “Even Amren can’t figure it out.”
Rhys stared her down. But Nesta looked to me—and I could have sworn fear shone there, and guilt and … some other feeling. “You told me to run.”
“You’re my sister,” was all I said. She’d once tried to cross the wall to save me.
But she started. “Elain—”
“Elain is fine,” Rhys said. “Azriel was at the town house. Lucien is headed back, and Mor is nearly there. They know of the threat.”
Nesta leaned her head back against the armchair’s cushion, going a bit boneless.
I said to Rhys, “Hybern infiltrated our city. Again.”
“The prick held on to that fleeting spell until he really needed it.”
“Fleeting spell?”
“A spell of mighty power, able to be wielded only once—to great effect. One capable of cleaving wards … He must have been biding his time.”
“Are the wards here—”
“Amren is currently adapting them against such things. And will then begin combing through this city to find if the king also deposited any other cronies before he vanished.”
Beneath the cold rage, there was a sharpness—honed enough that I said, What’s wrong?
“What’s wrong?” he replied—verbally, as if he could no longer distinguish between the two. “What’s wrong is that those pieces of shit got into my house and attacked my mate. What’s wrong is that my own damn wards worked against me, and you had to make a bargain with that thing to keep yourself from being taken. What’s wrong—”
“Calm down,” I said quietly, but not weakly.
His eyes glowed, like lightning had struck an ocean. But he inhaled deeply, blowing out the breath through his nose, and his shoulders loosened—barely.
“Did you see what it was—that thing down there?”
“I guessed enough about it to close my eyes,” he said. “I only opened them when it had stepped away from their bodies.”
Cassian’s skin had turned ashen. He’d seen it. He’d seen it again. But he said nothing.
“Yes, the king got past our defenses,” I said to Rhys. “Yes, things went badly. But we weren’t hurt. And the Ravens revealed some key pieces of information.”
Sloppy, I realized. Rhys had been sloppy in killing them. Normally, he would have kept them alive for Azriel to question. But he’d taken what he needed, quickly and brutally, and ended it. He’d shown more restraint about the Attor—
“We know why the Cauldron doesn’t work at its full strength now,” I went on. “We know that Nesta is more of a priority for the king than I am.”
Rhys mulled it over. “Hybern showed part of his hand, in bringing them here. He has to have a sliver of doubt of his conquest if he’d risk it.”