A Court of Mist and Fury (22 page)

“I’m hungry,” Mor said nudging me with a thigh. She snapped a finger, and plates piled high with roast chicken, greens, and bread appeared. Simple, but … elegant. Not formal at all. Perhaps the sweater and pants wouldn’t have been out of place for such a meal. “Amren and Rhys can talk all night and bore us to tears, so don’t bother waiting for them to dig in.” She picked up her fork, clicking her tongue. “I asked Rhys if
I
could take you to dinner, just the two of us, and he said you wouldn’t want to. But honestly—would you rather spend time with those two ancient bores, or me?”

“For someone who is the same age as me,” Rhys drawled, “you seem to forget—”

“Everyone wants to talk-talk-talk,” Mor said, giving a warning glare at Cassian, who had indeed opened his mouth. “Can’t we eat-eat-eat, and
then
talk?”

An interesting balance between Rhys’s terrifying Second and his disarmingly chipper Third. If Mor’s rank was higher than that of the two warriors at this table, then there had to be some other reason beyond that irreverent charm. Some power to allow her to get into the fight with Amren that Rhys had mentioned—and walk away from it.

Azriel chuckled softly at Mor, but picked up his fork. I followed suit, waiting until he’d taken a bite before doing so. Just in case—

Good. So good. And the wine—

I hadn’t even realized Mor had poured me a glass until I finished my first sip, and she clinked her own against mine. “Don’t let these old busybodies boss you around.”

Cassian said, “Pot. Kettle. Black.” Then he frowned at Amren, who had hardly touched her plate. “I always forget how bizarre that is.” He unceremoniously took her plate, dumping half the contents on his own before passing the rest to Azriel.

Azriel said to Amren as he slid the food onto his plate, “I keep telling him to ask before he does that.”

Amren flicked her fingers and the empty plate vanished from Azriel’s scarred hands. “If you haven’t been able to train him after all these centuries, boy, I don’t think you’ll make any progress now.” She straightened the silverware on the vacant place setting before her.

“You don’t—eat?” I said to her. The first words I’d spoken since sitting.

Amren’s teeth were unnervingly white. “Not this sort of food.”

“Cauldron boil me,” Mor said, gulping from her wine. “Can we
not
?”

I decided I didn’t want to know what Amren ate, either.

Rhys chuckled from my other side. “Remind me to have family dinners more often.”

Family dinners—not official court gatherings. And tonight … either they didn’t know that I was here to decide if I truly wished to work with Rhys, or they didn’t feel like pretending to be anything but what they
were. They’d no doubt worn whatever they felt like—I had the rising feeling that I could have shown up in my nightgown and they wouldn’t have cared. A unique group indeed. And against Hybern … who would they be, what could they do, as allies or opponents?

Across from me, a cocoon of silence seemed to pulse around Azriel, even as the others dug into their food. I again peered at that oval of blue stone on his gauntlet as he sipped from his glass of wine. Azriel noted the look, swift as it had been—as I had a feeling he’d been noticing and cataloging all of my movements, words, and breaths. He held up his hands, the backs to me so both jewels were on full display. “They’re called Siphons. They concentrate and focus our power in battle.”

Only he and Cassian wore them.

Rhys set down his fork, and clarified for me, “The power of stronger Illyrians tends toward ‘incinerate now, ask questions later.’ They have little magical gifts beyond that—the killing power.”

“The gift of a violent, warmongering people,” Amren added. Azriel nodded, shadows wreathing his neck, his wrists. Cassian gave him a sharp look, face tightening, but Azriel ignored him.

Rhys went on, though I knew he was aware of every glance between the spymaster and army commander, “The Illyrians 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.”

I wondered how much of that any of them had needed to do. If those scars on Azriel’s hands had come from it.

Cassian flexed his fingers, admiring the clear red stones adorning the
backs of his own broad hands. “Doesn’t hurt that they also look damn good.”

Amren muttered, “Illyrians.”

Cassian bared his teeth in feral amusement, and took a drink of his wine.

Get to know them, try to envision how I might work with them, rely on them, if this conflict with Hybern exploded … I scrambled for something to ask and said to Azriel, those shadows gone again, “How did you—I mean, how do you and Lord Cassian—”

Cassian spewed his wine across the table, causing Mor to leap up, swearing at him as she used a napkin to mop her dress.

But Cassian was howling, and Azriel had a faint, wary smile on his face as Mor waved a hand at her dress and the spots of wine appeared on Cassian’s fighting—or perhaps flying, I realized—leathers. My cheeks heated. Some court protocol that I’d unknowingly broken and—

“Cassian,” Rhys drawled, “is not a lord. Though I’m sure he appreciates you thinking he is.” He surveyed his Inner Circle. “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.” Not him? Rhys must have seen the question on my face because he said, “I’m half-Illyrian. As good as a bastard where the thoroughbred High Fae are concerned.”

“So you—you three aren’t High Fae?” I said to him and the two males.

Cassian finished his laughing. “Illyrians are certainly not High Fae. And glad of it.” He hooked his black hair behind an ear—rounded; as mine had once been. “And we’re not lesser faeries, though some try to call us that. We’re just—Illyrians. Considered expendible aerial cavalry for the Night Court at the best of times, mindless soldier grunts at the worst.”

“Which is most of the time,” Azriel clarified. I didn’t dare ask if those shadows were a part of being Illyrian, too.

“I didn’t see you Under the Mountain,” I said instead. I had to know without a doubt—if they were there, if they’d seen me, if it’d impact how I interacted while working with—

Silence fell. None of them, even Amren, looked at Rhysand.

It was Mor who said, “Because none of us were.”

Rhys’s face was a mask of cold. “Amarantha didn’t know they existed. And when someone tried to tell her, they usually found themselves without the mind to do so.”

A shudder went down my spine. Not at the cold killer, but—but … “You truly kept this city, and all these people, hidden from her for fifty years?”

Cassian was staring hard at his plate, as if he might burst out of his skin.

Amren said, “We will continue to keep this city and these people hidden from our enemies for a great many more.”

Not an answer.

Rhys hadn’t expected to see them again when he’d been dragged Under the Mountain. Yet he had kept them safe, somehow.

And it killed them—the four people at this table. It killed them all that he’d done it, however he’d done it. Even Amren.

Perhaps not only for the fact that Rhys had endured Amarantha while they had been here. Perhaps it was also for those left outside of the city, too. Perhaps picking one city, one place, to shield was better than nothing. Perhaps … perhaps it was a comforting thing, to have a spot in Prythian that remained untouched. Unsullied.

Mor’s voice was a bit raw as she explained to me, her golden combs glinting in the light, “There is not one person in this city who is unaware of what went on outside these borders. Or of the cost.”

I didn’t want to ask what price had been demanded. The pain that laced the heavy silence told me enough.

Yet if they might all live through their pain, might still laugh … I cleared my throat, straightening, and said to Azriel, who, shadows or
no, seemed the safest and therefore was probably the least so, “How did you meet?” A harmless question to feel them out, learn who they were. Wasn’t it?

Azriel merely turned to Cassian, who was staring at Rhys with guilt and love on his face, so deep and agonized that some now-splintered instinct had me almost reaching across the table to grip his hand.

But Cassian seemed to process what I’d asked and his friend’s silent request that he tell the story instead, and a grin ghosted across his face. “We all hated each other at first.”

Beside me, the light had winked out of Rhys’s eyes. What I’d asked about Amarantha, what horrors I’d made him remember …

A confession for a confession—I thought he’d done it for my sake. Maybe he had things he needed to voice,
couldn’t
voice to these people, not without causing them more pain and guilt.

Cassian went on, drawing my attention from the silent High Lord at my right, “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,” he said, pointing a thumb in his direction, his red Siphon catching the light, “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.” His casual shrug didn’t match the vicious glint in his hazel eyes. “Az’s father sent him to our camp for training once he and his charming wife realized he was a shadowsinger.”

Shadowsinger. Yes—the title, whatever it meant, seemed to fit.

“Like the daemati,” Rhys said to me, “shadowsingers are rare—coveted by courts and territories across the world for their stealth and predisposition to hear and feel things others can’t.”

Perhaps those shadows were indeed whispering to him, then. Azriel’s cold face yielded nothing.

Cassian said, “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.”

“They would have been smarter throwing you off a cliff,” Mor said, snorting.

“Oh, definitely,” Cassian said, that grin going razor-sharp. “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.”

Again that silence fell—different this time. The tension and simmering anger of a unit who had endured so much, survived so much … and felt each other’s pain keenly.

“The Illyrians,” Rhys smoothly cut in, that light finally returning to his gaze, “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.”

Azriel’s eyes had gone near-vacant as he stared at the wall of windows behind me.

“They’re barbarians,” Amren said, and neither Illyrian male objected. Mor nodded emphatically, even as she noted Azriel’s posture and bit her lip. “They cripple their females so they can keep them for breeding more flawless warriors.”

Rhys cringed. “My mother was low-born,” he told me, “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 …” He 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.”

My brows narrowed. “Misted?”

Cassian let out a wicked chuckle as Rhys floated a lemon wedge that had been garnishing his chicken into the air above the table. With a flick of his finger, it turned to citrus-scented mist.

“Through the blood-rain,” Rhys went on as I shut out the image of what it’d do to a body, what
he
could do, “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 grumbled.

“At least he liked you,” Rhys countered, then clarified for me, “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 her 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.”