Five days later, Cassian sat before the desk of the library’s high priestess and watched her enchanted pen move. He’d met Clotho a few times over the centuries—found she had a dry, wicked sense of humor and a soothing presence. He’d made a point not to stare at her hands, or at the face he’d only seen once, when Mor had brought her in so long ago. It had been so battered and bloody it hadn’t looked like a face at all.
He had no idea how it had healed beneath the hood. If Madja had been able to save it in a way she hadn’t been able to save Clotho’s hands. He supposed it didn’t matter what she looked like, not when she had accomplished and built so much with Rhys and Mor within this library. A sanctuary for females who’d endured such unspeakable horrors that he was always happy to carry out justice on their behalf.
His mother had needed a place like this. But Rhys had established it long after she’d left this world. He wondered if Azriel’s mother had ever considered coming here, or if he’d ever pushed her to.
“Well, Clotho,” he said, leaning back in the chair, surrounded by the sounds of rustling parchment and the robes of the priestesses like fluttering wings, “you asked for an audience?”
Her pen made a flourish as it finished what she’d been writing.
I have asked Nesta twice now not to practice in the library, and she has disregarded my request. For five days, she has blatantly ignored my commands to stop.
Cassian’s brows rose. “She’s practicing down here?”
Again, the pen scraped over the paper. He glanced to the open pit to his left, as if he’d spot Nesta down there. A week had passed since that madness in her bedroom, and they had not spoken of it, done nothing further. He wasn’t entirely sure it would be wise to continue.
In addition to the grueling set of exercises to hone her body, Cassian had walked her through the minutiae of hand-to-hand combat, individual steps and movements that could be assembled in endless combinations. Learning each of those steps required not just strength but focus—to remember which movement correlated with the numbered step, to let her body start to remember all on its own: a jab, a hook, a high kick … He’d lost count of how many times he’d caught her muttering at her body to remember so she didn’t need to think so hard.
But he knew she liked the punches. The kicks. A light shone in her face as her body flowed through the motions, a slingshot of strength all narrowing to a point of impact. He’d always felt that way when he did the movements correctly, like his body and mind and soul had lined up and begun singing.
Clotho wrote, Nesta has practiced constantly of late.
“Has she done any damage?”
No. But I asked her to stop, and she has not.
He suppressed his smile. Perhaps the morning lessons weren’t demanding enough. “Is her work suffering for it?”
No. That’s beside the point.
His mouth twisted to the side.
Clotho wrote, I need you to put a stop to this.
“Does it bother the others?”
It distracts them, to see someone kicking and punching at shadows.
Cassian had to duck his head so she wouldn’t read the amusement in his eyes. “I’ll talk to her. Is she down there now?” He nodded to the sloping ramp. “With your permission, of course.”
This was their safe harbor. It didn’t matter if he was a member of Rhys’s court, or that he’d come here before. Every time, he asked permission. He’d only ever failed to do so once: when Hybern’s Ravens had attacked.
Yes. I give you permission to enter. Nesta is on Level Five. Perhaps you shall manage to get through to her.
Taking that as his cue, Cassian rose. “You do know this is Nesta Archeron we’re talking about? She does nothing unless she wishes to. And she’s the least likely to listen to me.”
Clotho huffed a laugh. She has a will of iron.
“Of steel.” He smiled. “Good seeing you, Clotho.”
You as well, Lord Cassian.
“Just Cassian,” he said, as he had said so many times now.
You are a lord in good deeds. It is not a title born, but earned.
He bowed his head as he said thickly, “Thank you.”
It took him until he reached the section where Clotho had said Nesta would be to shake off the high priestess’s words. What they meant to him.
The scuffing steps greeted him first, then the steady, rhythmic breathing he’d come to know so intimately. Cassian made his breathing match it, turned his own steps silent, and peered into the next row of stacks.
Anyone walking along the ramp would only have to look to the right to see Nesta standing there, in a near-perfect fighting stance, throwing punches toward the shelf. She’d picked five books as targets and worked through each punch toward them as if they were the parts on a body he’d shown her where to strike.
Then she halted, blew out a breath and brushed back a strand of errant hair, and straightened the books before returning to the metal cart behind her.
“You’re still dropping your elbow,” he said, and she whirled, falling back against the cart with enough surprise that he swallowed his laugh. He’d never seen Nesta Archeron so … ruffled.
She lifted her chin as she stalked toward him. He watched every movement of her legs. She’d stopped throwing her weight onto her right leg so much, and muscles shifted in her thighs, sleek and strong. Three weeks might not be much time for a human body to pack on muscle, but she was High Fae now. “I’m not dropping my elbow,” she challenged, emerging from the row of stacks and into the flat area before the slope of the ramp.
“I just saw you do it twice with that right hook.”
She leaned against the end of a long shelf. “I assume Clotho sent you to reprimand me.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know you were so invested in the training that you kept at it down here.”
Her eyes practically glowed in the dimness. “I’m tired of being weak. Of depending on others to defend me.”
Fair enough. “Before I dispense with the lecture about ignoring Clotho’s requests, let me just say that—”
“Show me.” Nesta stepped away from the shelf and squared off against him. “Show me where I’m dropping my elbow.”
He blinked at the rippling intensity in her face. Then he swallowed.
Swallowed, because there she was: a glimpse of that person he’d known before the war with Hybern had ended. A glimmer of her, like a mirage—like if he looked at it too long, she’d slip away and vanish.
So Cassian said, “Get into your stance.”
Nesta obeyed.
Hoping Clotho wouldn’t come shove him over the railing for disobeying her orders, he said, “All right. Throw the right hook.”
Nesta did so. And dropped her damn elbow.
“Get back into position.” She did, and he asked, “May I?”
Nesta nodded, and kept perfectly still as he made minute adjustments to the angle of her arm. “Punch again. Slowly.”
She heeded him, and his hand wrapped around her elbow as it began to dip. “See? Keep this up.” He maneuvered her arm back into starting position. “Don’t forget to flow the weight through your hips.” He took her arm, keeping a good foot of distance between their bodies, and moved it through the punch. “Like this.”
“All right.” Nesta reset herself, and he took a step away. Without his order, she did the punch again. Perfectly.
Cassian whistled.
“Do that with more force and you’ll shatter a male’s jaw,” he said with a crooked grin. “Give me a combination one-two, then four-five-three, then one-one-two.”
Nesta’s brows bunched as she reset herself. Her feet shifted into position, grounding her weight into the stone floor.
And then she moved, and it was like watching a river, like watching the wind cut through a mountain. Not perfect, but close.
“If you did that against an opponent,” Cassian said, “they’d be on the ground, gasping for air.”
“And then I’d make the kill.”
“Yes, a sword through the heart would finish the job. But if you struck their chest hard enough with that final punch, you might make one of their lungs collapse. On a battlefield, you’d opt for either the killing blow with a sword or just leave them there, unable to move, for someone else to finish off while you face the next opponent.”
She nodded, as if this all seemed like perfectly normal conversation. Like he was giving her gardening tips.
“All right.” Cassian cleared his throat and tucked back his wings, “so, no more practicing in the library. The next person Clotho asks to scold you probably won’t be someone you feel like talking to.”
Nesta’s eyes darkened as she considered which of her least favorite people it would be, and she nodded again.
His task done, he said, “Give me one more combination.” He rattled off the order.
Her smile was nothing short of feline as she did just that. And her right hook didn’t so much as bob downward.
“Good,” he said, and turned toward the ramp that would lead him out.
He startled at what he beheld: priestesses stopped along the railings on several different levels, staring toward them. Toward Nesta.
At his attention, they instantly began walking or working or shelving books. But a young priestess with coppery-brown hair—the only one of them with no hood or stone—lingered at the rail the longest. Even from a level below and across the pit, he could see that her large eyes were the color of shallow, warm water. They were wide for a moment before she, too, quickly vanished.
Cassian looked back to Nesta, who met his stare with near-simmering eyes.
“Your right hook was perfect this morning,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“But not when I watched you in the stacks.”
“I figured you’d correct me.”
Shock and delight slammed into him. She’d moved out of the stacks before she let him do so. Into plain view. So they would all see him teaching her.
He gaped at her.
“You can tell Clotho I won’t need to practice in the library anymore,” Nesta said mildly, and turned back down the row.
She’d known Clotho and the others would never invite him, and never go up to the ring to see what he could do. How he’d teach them. So she’d shown the priestesses what she was learning, day after day. More than that, she’d pissed off Clotho enough that the priestess had ordered him down here.
Where Nesta had used him in a demonstration. Not for herself, but for the priestesses who’d drifted over to watch.
Cassian let out a soft laugh. “Crafty, Archeron.”
Nesta lifted a hand over a shoulder in farewell as she reached her cart.
They’d needed to see it, Nesta realized. What Cassian was like when he taught her. That there was touching, but it was always with her permission, and always professional. Needed to see how he never mocked her, only gently corrected. And needed to see what he’d taught her. Hear him say precisely what she could do with all those punching and kicking combinations.
What the priestesses might learn to do.
But that evening, as Nesta left, the sign-up sheet remained blank.
She looked back at Clotho, who sat at her desk, as she always did, from dawn until dusk.
If the priestess gathered that she’d been played, she didn’t let on. But there was something like sorrow leaking from Clotho, as if she, too, had wanted to see that sheet filled today.
Nesta didn’t know why it mattered. Why Clotho’s sorrow knocked the wind from her, but then Nesta was moving, up through the House to the ten thousand steps.
Perhaps she was good for nothing after all. Perhaps she’d been a fool to think that this trick might convince them. Maybe physical training wasn’t what they required to overcome their demons, and she’d been arrogant enough to assume she knew what they needed.
Down and down the stairs Nesta walked, the walls pressing in.
She only made it to stair nine hundred before she turned around, her steps as heavy as if they’d been weighed with lead blocks.
Nesta was still sweating and breathing hard when she stumbled into her room and found a book on the nightstand. She raised a brow at the title. “This isn’t your usual sort of romance,” she said to the room.
It wasn’t a romance at all. It was an old bound manuscript called The Dance of Battle.
Nesta said, “You can take this one back, thank you.” The last thing she wanted to read at night was some dreary old text about war strategy. The House did no such thing, and Nesta sighed and picked up the manuscript, the black leather binding so age-worn it was butter soft.
A familiar smell drifted to her from the pages. “You didn’t leave this for me, did you?”
The House replied by plopping down a stack of romances, as if to say, This is what I would have chosen.
Nesta peered at the manuscript, full of Cassian’s scent, as if he’d read it a thousand times.
He’d left it for her. Deemed her worthy of whatever lay inside.
Nesta perched on the edge of the bed and thumbed open the text.
It was midnight when she took a break from reading The Dance of Battle and rubbed her temples. She hadn’t put it down, not even to eat dinner at her desk, holding it with one hand while she devoured her stew with the other.
It was astonishing how much of the art of warfare was like the social manipulation her mother had insisted she learn: picking battlegrounds, finding allies amongst the enemies of one’s enemies … Some of it was wholly new, of course, and such a precise way of thinking that she knew she’d have to read the manuscript many times to fully grasp its lessons.
She’d been aware that Cassian knew how to lead armies. Had watched him do so with unflinching precision and cleverness. But reading the manuscript, she realized she had never understood just how much advanced thinking went into planning battles and wars.
Nesta set the manuscript on her nightstand and lay back against her pillows.
She pictured Cassian on a battlefield, as he’d been that day he’d gone up against a Hybern commander and thrown a spear so hard the male had been hurled from his horse upon impact.
He departed from the manuscript’s advice in only one way: he fought on the front lines with his soldiers, rather than commanding from the rear.
She let her thoughts drift for a time, until they snared upon another tangle of thorns.
Did it matter if the priestesses didn’t show up for training? Beyond her own reluctance to concede failure, did it matter?
It did. Somehow, it did.
She had failed in every aspect of her life. Utterly and spectacularly failed, and keeping others from realizing it had been her main purpose. She had shut them out, had shut herself out, because the weight of all those failures threatened to shatter her into a thousand pieces.
Nesta rubbed her face with her hands.
Sleep was a long time coming.
Sweat was still running down her body when Nesta entered the library the next afternoon, aiming for the ramp to take her down to where she’d left her cart.
She didn’t have the courage to look at the empty sign-up sheet. To rip it down.
She didn’t have the courage to look at Clotho and admit her defeat. She kept walking.
But Clotho halted her with an upraised hand. Nesta swallowed. “What?”
Clotho pointed behind Nesta, her gnarled finger indicating the doorway. No, the pillar.
And it was not sorrow leaking from the priestess, but something like buzzing excitement. Something that made Nesta whirl on her heel and stride for the pillar.
A name had been scrawled on the sheet.
One name, in bold letters. One name, ready for tomorrow’s lesson.
GWYN
