A Court of Wings and Ruin

A door opened and shut in the foyer beyond, and I braced myself as Nesta appeared. Helion paused his debating the wall to survey her carefully, as he had done earlier.

Spell-Cleaver. That was his title.

She surveyed him with her usual disdain.

But Helion gave her the same bow he’d offered me—though his smile was edged with enough sensuality that even my heart raced a bit. No wonder the Lady of Autumn hadn’t stood a chance. “I don’t think we were introduced properly earlier,” he crooned to Nesta. “I’m—”

“I don’t care,” Nesta said with a snap of her wrist, striding right past him and up to my side. “I’d like a word,” she said. “Now.”

Cassian was biting his knuckle to keep from laughing—at the utter surprise and shock on Helion’s face. It wasn’t every day, I supposed, that anyone of either sex dismissed him so thoroughly. I threw the High Lord a semi-apologetic glance and led my sister out of the room.

“What is it?” I asked when Nesta and I had entered her bedroom, the space bedecked in pink silk and gold, accents of ivory scattered throughout. The lavishness of it indeed put our various homes to shame.

“We need to leave,” Nesta said. “Right now.”

Every sense went on alert. “Why?”

“It feels wrong. Something feels wrong.”

I studied her, the clear sky beyond the towering, drape-framed windows. “Rhys and the others would sense it. You’re likely just picking up on all the power gathered here.”

“Something is wrong,” Nesta insisted.

“I’m not doubting you feel that way but … If none of the others are picking it up—”

“I am not like the others.” Her throat bobbed. “We need to leave.”

“I can send you back to Velaris, but we have things to discuss here—”

“I don’t care about me, I—”

The door opened, and Cassian stalked in, face grave. The sight of the wings, the Illyrian armor in this opulent, pink-filled room planted itself in my mind, the painting already taking form, as he said, “What’s wrong.”

He studied every inch of her. As if there were nothing and no one else here, anywhere.

But I said, “She senses something is off—says we need to leave right away.”

I waited for the dismissal, but Cassian angled his head. “What, precisely, feels wrong?”

Nesta stiffened, mouth pursing as she weighed his tone. “It feels like there’s this … dread. This sense that … that I forgot something but can’t remember what.”

Cassian stared at her for a moment longer. “I’ll tell Rhys.”

And he did.

Within moments, Rhys, Cassian, and Azriel had vanished, leaving Mor and Helion in alert silence. I waited with Nesta. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen.

Thirty minutes later, they returned, shaking their heads. Nothing.

Not in the palace, not in the lands around it, not in the skies above or the earth below. Not for miles and miles. Nothing. Rhys even checked with Amren, and found nothing amiss in Velaris—Elain, mercifully, safe and sound.

None of them, however, were stupid enough to suggest that Nesta had made it up. Not with that otherworldly power in her veins. Or that perhaps the dread was a lingering effect of her time in Hybern. Like the crushing panic that I’d struggled to face down, that still stalked me some nights.

So we stayed. We ate in our private dining room, Helion joining us, no sign of Tarquin or Thesan—certainly not Tamlin.

Kallias and Viviane appeared midway through the meal, and Mor kicked Cassian out of his seat to make space for her friend. They chatted and gossiped—even though Mor kept glancing at Helion.

And the High Lord of Day kept glancing at her.

Azriel barely spoke, those shadows still perched on his shoulders. Mor barely looked at him.

But we dined and drank for hours, until night was overhead. And though Rhys and Kallias were tense, careful around each other … By the end of the meal, they were at least talking.

Nesta was the first to leave the table, still wary and on edge. The others made one final check of the grounds before we tumbled into the silk sheets of our cloud-soft beds.

Rhys and I left Mor and Helion talking knee to knee on the sitting room cushions, Viviane and Kallias long returned to their suite. I had no idea where Azriel went off to—or Cassian, for that matter.

And when I emerged from washing up in the ivory-and-gold bathing room and Helion’s deep murmur and Mor’s sultry laugh flitted in from the hall—when it moved past our door and then her door creaked open and closed …

Rhysand’s wings were folded in tightly as he surveyed the stars beyond the bedroom windows. Quieter and smaller here, somehow.

“Why?”

He knew what I meant.

“Mor gets spooked. And what Az did today scared the shit out of her.”

“The violence?”

“The violence as a result of what he feels, lingering guilt over the deal with Eris—and what neither of them will face.”

“Don’t you think it’s been long enough? And that taking Helion to bed is likely the worst possible thing to do?”

But I had no doubt Helion needed a distraction as much as Mor did. From thinking too long about the people they loved—who they could not have.

“Mor and Azriel have both taken lovers throughout the centuries,” he said, wings shifting slightly. “The only difference here is the close proximity.”

“You sound remarkably fine with this.”

Rhys glanced over a shoulder to where I lingered by the foot of the massive ivory bed, its carved headboard fashioned after overlapping waterlilies. “It’s their life—their relationship. They have both had plenty of opportunities to confess what they feel. Yet they have not. Mor especially. For private reasons of her own, I’m sure. My meddling isn’t going to make it any better.”

“But—but he loves her. How can he sit idly by?”

“He thinks she’s happier without him.” His eyes shone with the memory—of his own choice to sit back. “He thinks he’s unworthy of her.”

“It seems like an Illyrian trait.”

Rhys snorted, returning to the stars. I came up to his side and slid my arm around his waist. He opened his arm to me, cupping my shoulder as I rested my head against that soft spot where his own shoulder met his chest. A heartbeat later, his wing curved around me, too, enveloping me in his shadowed warmth. “There will come a day when Azriel has to decide if he is going to fight for her or let her go. And it won’t be because some other male insults her or beds her.”