A Court of Mist and Fury (23 page)

“She wanted to keep you out of your father’s claws,” Mor said, swirling her wine, her shoulders loosening as Azriel at last blinked, and seemed to shake off whatever memory had frozen him.

“That, too,” Rhys added drily. “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?” I found myself saying.

“No—never,” Rhys said with a ferocity I’d heard only a few times, one of them being this afternoon. “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.”

My brows lifted and Cassian laughed. “Backward, like he said,” the warrior told me.

“I was scared out of my mind,” Rhys admitted, not a shade of shame to be found. “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.” Again, I looked at the slumbering Siphons atop the warriors’ hands. “I tried to use a Siphon during those years,” Rhys said. “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 teased.

Rhys rolled his eyes. “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.”

“You were so
clean
,” Cassian said, shaking his head. “The pretty half-breed son of the High Lord—how fancy you were in your new training clothes.”

“Cassian,” Azriel told me with that voice like darkness given sound, “resorted to getting new clothes over the years by challenging other boys to fights, with the prize being the clothes off their backs.” There was no pride in the words—not for his people’s brutality. I didn’t blame the shadowsinger, though. To treat
anyone
that way …

Cassian, however, chuckled. But I was now taking in the broad, strong shoulders, the light in his eyes.

I’d never met anyone else in Prythian who had ever been hungry, desperate—not like I’d been.

Cassian blinked, and the way he looked at me shifted—more assessing, more … sincere. I could have sworn I saw the words in his eyes:
You know what it is like. You know the mark it leaves
.

“I’d beaten every boy in our age group twice over already,” Cassian went on. “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.”

I flinched. Hitting children—

“They do worse, girl,” Amren cut in, “in those camps. Three lashings is practically an encouragement to fight again. When they do something truly bad, bones are broken. Repeatedly. Over weeks.”

I said to Rhys, “Your mother willingly sent you into that?” Soft fire indeed.

“My mother didn’t want me to rely on my power,” Rhysand said. “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
and get picked 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.”

“Those mountains,” Azriel added, his face hard as ice, “offer some of the harshest conditions you can imagine.”

I’d spent enough time in frozen woods to get it.

“After my lessons,” Rhys went on, “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. “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
. 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.”

“And you were friends after that?”

“No—Cauldron no,” Rhysand said. “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.”

Cassian’s grin grew as he reached around Amren to clap his friend on the shoulder. Azriel sighed—the sound of the long-suffering. The warmest expression I’d seen him make. “A new bastard in the camp—and an untrained shadowsinger to boot. Not to mention he couldn’t even
fly
thanks to—”

Mor cut in lazily, “Stay on track, Cassian.”

Indeed, any warmth had vanished from Azriel’s face. But I quieted
my own curiosity as Cassian again shrugged, not even bothering to take note of the silence that seemed to leak from the shadowsinger. Mor saw, though—even if Azriel didn’t bother to acknowledge her concerned stare, the hand that she kept looking at as if she’d touch, but thought better of it.

Cassian went on, “Rhys and I made his life a living hell, shadowsinger or no. 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?” I asked him. “Like—them?” I jerked my chin to Azriel and Rhys.

“A volatile temper doesn’t count,” Mor said as Cassian opened his mouth.

He gave her that grin I realized likely meant trouble was coming, but said to me, “No. I don’t—not beyond a heaping pile of the killing power. Bastard-born nobody, through and through.” Rhys sat forward like he’d object, but Cassian forged ahead, “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.

“Repulsive,” Mor said, clicking her tongue.

Some surviving, small part of my heart wanted to … laugh at that.

Cassian shrugged. “Rhys’s power grew every day—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 tapped his crimson Siphon with a finger. “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-blood 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.”

“Then the War came,” Azriel took over. Just the way he said the words made me sit up. Listen. “And Rhys’s father visited our camp to see how his son had fared after twenty years.”

“My father,” Rhys said, swirling his wine once—twice, “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.”

Cassian snickered. “So the prick separated us. 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. We only saw each other on battlefields for the seven years the War raged. They’d send around casualty lists amongst the Illyrians, and I read each one, wondering if I’d see their names on it. But then Rhys was captured—”

“
That
is a story for another time,” Rhys said, sharply enough that Cassian lifted his brows, but nodded. Rhys’s violet eyes met mine, and I wondered if it was true starlight that flickered so intensely in them as he spoke. “Once I became High Lord, 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.”

As bad as humans, in some ways. “What—what happened to them, then?”

Rhys shrugged, those great wings shifting with the movement. “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; those who hated me enough to try to overthrow me and faced the consequences; 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.”

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

A nod. “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.”

That was the court he must have shown Amarantha when she first arrived—and its wickedness must have pleased her enough that she modeled her own after it.

“The Court of Nightmares,” Mor said, sucking on a tooth.

“And what is this court?” I asked, gesturing to them. The most important question.

It was Cassian, eyes clear and bright as his Siphon, who said, “The Court of Dreams.”

The Court of Dreams—the dreams of a half-breed High Lord, two bastard warriors, and … the two females. “And you?” I said to Mor and Amren.

Amren merely said, “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.”

Mor leaned back in her seat, Azriel now watching every movement she made with subtle, relentless focus.

“I was a dreamer born into the Court of Nightmares,” Mor said. She twirled a curl around a finger, and I wondered if her story might be the worst of all of them as she said simply, “So I got out.”

“What’s your story, then?” Cassian said to me with a jerk of his chin.

I’d assumed Rhysand had told them everything. Rhys merely shrugged at me.

So I straightened. “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. 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 all alive, if not near starvation at times, for five years. Until … everything happened.”

They fell quiet again, Azriel’s gaze now considering. He hadn’t told his story. Did it ever come up? Or did they never discuss those burns on his hands? And what did the shadows whisper to him—did they speak in a language at all?

But Cassian said, “You taught yourself to hunt. What about to fight?” I shook my head. Cassian braced his arms on the table. “Lucky for you, you’ve just found yourself a teacher.”

I opened my mouth, protesting, but— Rhysand’s mother had given him an arsenal of weapons to use if the other failed. What did I have in my own beyond a good shot with a bow and brute stubbornness? And if I had this new power—these
other
powers …

I would not be weak again. I would not be dependent on anyone else. I would never have to endure the touch of the Attor as it dragged me because I was too helpless to know where and how to hit. Never again.

But what Ianthe and Tamlin had said … “You don’t think it sends a bad message if people see me learning to fight—using weapons?”

The moment the words were out, I realized the stupidity of them. The stupidity of—of what had been shoved down my throat these past few months.

Silence. Then Mor said with a soft venom that made me understand the High Lord’s Third had received training of her own in that Court of Nightmares, “Let me tell you two things. As someone who has perhaps been in your shoes before.” Again, that shared bond of anger, of pain throbbed between them all, save for Amren, who was giving me a look
dripping with distaste. “One,” Mor said, “you have left the Spring Court.” I tried not to let the full weight of those words sink in. “If that does not send a message, for good or bad, then your training will not, either. Two,” she continued, laying her palm flat on the table, “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.” Her voice gentled, and the tension between them all faded with it. “You do what you love, what
you
need.”