“That’s very beautiful,” she said. “Is it not—frightening, though? To fly so high?”
“It is sometimes,” Azriel said. Cassian tore his relentless attention from Nesta long enough to nod his agreement. “If you are caught in a storm, if the current drops away. But we are trained so thoroughly that the fear is gone before we’re out of swaddling.” And yet, Azriel had not been trained until long after that. You get used to the wording, he’d told me earlier. How often did he have to remind himself to use such words? Did “we” and “our” and “us” taste as foreign on his tongue as they did on mine?
“You look like High Fae,” Nesta cut in, her voice like a honed blade. “But you are not?”
“Only the High Fae who look like them,” Cassian drawled, waving a hand to me and Rhys, “are High Fae. Everyone else, any other differences, mark you as what they like to call ‘lesser’ faeries.”
Rhysand at last said, “It’s become a term used for ease, but masks a long, bloody history of injustices. Many lesser faeries resent the term—and wish for us all to be called one thing.”
“Rightly so,” Cassian said, drinking from his water.
Nesta surveyed me. “But you were not High Fae—not to begin. So what do they call you?” I couldn’t tell if it was a jab or not.
Rhys said, “Feyre is whoever she chooses to be.”
Nesta now examined us all, raising her eyes to that crown. But she said, “Write your letter to the queens tonight. Tomorrow, Elain and I will go to the village to dispatch it. If the queens do come here,” she added, casting a frozen glare at Cassian, “I’d suggest bracing yourselves for prejudices far deeper than ours. And contemplating how you plan to get us all out of this mess should things go sour.”
“We’ll take that into account,” Rhys said smoothly.
Nesta went on, utterly unimpressed by any of us, “I assume you’ll want to stay the night.”
Rhys glanced at me in silent question. We could easily leave, the males finding the way home in the dark, but … Too soon, perhaps, the world would go to hell. I said, “If it’s not too much trouble, then yes. We’ll leave after breakfast tomorrow.”
Nesta didn’t smile, but Elain beamed. “Good. I think there are a few bedrooms ready—”
“We’ll need two,” Rhys interrupted quietly. “Next to each other, with two beds each.”
I narrowed my brows at him.
Rhys explained to me, “Magic is different across the wall. So our shields, our senses, might not work right. I’m taking no chances. Especially in a house with a woman betrothed to a man who gave her an iron engagement ring.”
Elain flushed a bit. “The—the bedrooms that have two beds aren’t next to each other,” she murmured.
I sighed. “We’ll move things around. It’s fine. This one,” I added with a glare in Rhys’s direction, “is only cranky because he’s old and it’s past his bedtime.”
Rhys chuckled, Cassian’s wrath slipping enough that he grinned, and Elain, noticing Azriel’s ease as proof that things weren’t indeed about to go badly, offered one of her own as well.
Nesta just rose to her feet, a slim pillar of steel, and said to no one in particular, “If we’re done eating, then this meal is over.”
And that was that.
Rhys wrote the letter for me, Cassian and Azriel chiming in with corrections, and it took us until midnight before we had a draft we all thought sounded impressive, welcoming, and threatening enough.
My sisters cleaned the dishes while we worked, and had excused themselves to bed hours before, mentioning where to find our rooms.
Cassian and Azriel were to share one, Rhys and I the other.
I frowned at the large guest bedroom as Rhys shut the door behind us. The bed was large enough for two, but I wasn’t sharing it. I whirled to him, “I’m not—”
Wood thumped on carpet, and a small bed appeared by the door. Rhys plopped onto it, tugging off his boots. “Nesta is a delight, by the way.”
“She’s … her own creature,” I said. It was perhaps the kindest thing I could say about her.
“It’s been a few centuries since someone got under Cassian’s skin that easily. Too bad they’re both inclined to kill the other.”
Part of me shuddered at the havoc the two would wreak if they decided to stop fighting.
“And Elain,” Rhys said, sighing as he removed his other boot, “should not be marrying that lord’s son, not for about a dozen reasons, the least of which being the fact that you won’t be invited to the wedding. Though maybe that’s a good thing.”
I hissed. “That’s not funny.”
“At least you won’t have to send a gift, either. I doubt her father-in-law would deign to accept it.”
“You have a lot of nerve mocking my sisters when your own friends have equally as much melodrama.” His brows lifted in silent question. I snorted. “Oh, so you haven’t noticed the way Azriel looks at Mor? Or how she sometimes watches him, defends him? And how both of them do such a good job letting Cassian be a buffer between them most of the time?”
Rhys leveled a look at me. “I’d suggest keeping those observations to yourself.”
“You think I’m some busybody gossip? My life is miserable enough as it is—why would I want to spread that misery to those around me as well?”
“Is it miserable? Your life, I mean.” A careful question.
“I don’t know. Everything is happening so quickly that I don’t know what to feel.” It was more honest than I’d been in a while.
“Hmmm. Perhaps once we return home, I should give you the day off.”
“How considerate of you, my lord.”
