“I can imagine,” Azriel said. Cassian flashed him a glare. But Azriel’s attention was on my sister, a polite, bland smile on his face. Her shoulders loosened a bit. I wondered if Rhys’s spymaster often got his information through stone-cold manners as much as stealth and shadows.
Elain sat a little higher as she said to Cassian, “And as for Feyre’s hunting during those years, it was not Nesta’s neglect alone that is to blame. We were scared, and had received no training, and everything had been taken, and we failed her. Both of us.”
Nesta said nothing, her back rigid.
Rhys gave me a warning look. I gripped Nesta’s arm, drawing her attention to me. “Can we just … start over?”
I could almost taste her pride roiling in her veins, barking to not back down.
Cassian, damn him, gave her a taunting grin.
But Nesta merely hissed, “Fine.” And went back to eating.
Cassian watched every bite she took, every bob of her throat as she swallowed.
I forced myself to clean my plate, aware of Nesta’s own attention on my eating.
Elain said to Azriel, perhaps the only two civilized ones here, “Can you truly fly?”
He set down his fork, blinking. I might have even called him self-conscious. He said, “Yes. Cassian and I hail from a race of faeries called Illyrians. We’re born hearing the song of the wind.”
“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.