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Cold. Bitter. Harsh. Unrelenting. Unforgiving. Deadly.
The Illyrian mountains reflected the inside of Nesta Archeron. If she’d been capable of it, she would have felt amused at the realization.
As it was, she simply accepted it.
Cassian had tried to speak with her, the first time he’d brought her into his home. Tried to tell her that he only agreed to this because they were desperate. That Feyre had ordered him as his High Lady to bring her to his home. When she hadn’t responded, he hadn’t reacted. He’d told her the rules: wean off the alcohol, no more bedding males, and to let him know before she left the cabin.
“Do not worry, General,” she said at last, staring at his shoulder. If she met his eyes, the storm which brewed under her skin would release. “I will stay out of your way and prevent any embarrassment for you.”
“Embarrassment?”
She ignored his confused question; instead, she took in the room, slowly, with a scrutinization her mother would have been proud of. The room was a combined living and kitchen area, the wall nearest the door lined with cloaks and weapons. The furniture was well made, but clearly chosen for comfort and function. There was even a woven blanket in a riot of colors laid across the back of a couch. Human Nesta would have longed to wrap herself in it, but she kept her fingers still. The colors had dulled with age, but a blanket only became worn like that from love and use.
“Where am I to sleep?”
He cleared his throat, as if surprised by the question. He instructed her to follow him up the stairs, giving her the most basic of tours. Her room was large for her, but nothing as extravagant as the manor Tamlin’s money had bought, or the house Feyre lived in with her mate. It was, she was gratified to note, a guest room meant to accommodate Illyrians. Every part of the room had a function, and while it was crafted well, she found the utilitarian designs a relief. Here she would not feel like the blot of unyielding grey in a portrait of vibrant color.
It had taken time to work through the alcohol withdrawal. After the first few attempts at comfort were rebuffed, Cassian stopped checking on her. She knew he could still hear her emptying her stomach, how she thrashed at night, caught between the nightmares and her own power.
It was better, for her, this way. It was after a night filled with nightmares, her stomach empty and her throat seared from bile, that she staggered to the chest of drawers and pulled on thick leggings under a wool dress. It was still dark outside, yet Cassian still opened his bedroom door as she rifled through the cloaks hanging by the door, trying to find one that wouldn’t consume her.
“Where are you going?” His voice was thick with sleep and her heart seized. Her walls were at their weakest after nights like this. When she dreamed of his body being broken in front of her, over and over. When he pleaded for her to run, to not leave him, to curse her, or the worst—dismiss her even though she might save him.
“Out,” she said, clipped, grabbing one of the cloaks and pulling it on. She needed to get out.
The camp was silent, save for the guards on patrol. They eyed her warily, but she marched with her shoulders back and her head held high. The ice bitten wind howled down from the mountain peaks around them, billowing her cloak behind her. She didn’t cling to it. Instead, Nesta let her walls crumble and her power roared up out of her to join the elements around her.
One of the guards stumbled backwards, making a sign against evil, but Nesta didn’t care. She was as unforgiving, indomitable as the mountains they’d made their home. They were better off warding themselves against the great snowcapped peaks than her.
She let Illyria rush into her, as if the mountain purged the Cauldron tainted power from her soul and replaced it with a piece of Ramiel itself.
Nesta walked, full of strength despite the abuse she’d performed. Every step into the wilds of the forest, she felt stronger. Her legs were no longer simply flesh and bone, but an extension of the mountain.
When the clearing appeared, a single misshapen boulder surrounded by untouched, frozen snow, Nesta knew that she’d never leave these mountains.
Rhysand, the most powerful high lord in history, could make these mountains tremble.
But Nesta knew, so very deep in her soul, she could command these mountains. They would rise at her call, because they were one and the same.
“I feel everything,” she spoke softly, the wind disappearing until there was only silence. “The trees, the animals, the Illyrians. The fire deep inside the earth, and the glaciers wrapping the peaks.”
She looked over her shoulder, an eyebrow raised at the unnaturally large shadow. “I can feel you there, you overgrown bat.”
Cassian stepped forward into the moonlight. He was dressed warmly, but he didn’t wear his fighting leathers. Good. She didn’t want to fight.
She looked back to the boulder in front of her, reaching forward and brushing her fingertips across the moss covered stone.
Cassian stayed quiet, a silent sentinel—he reminded her of the stone gargoyles some of the wealthy families had on their houses. The moon drifted overhead, seeing the western skies as the false dawn rose in the east.
“You should return if you do not wish to be seen with me.” It was impossible to avoid the pain now, the walls completely gone. When she tried to raise them, the steadfast presence of the mountain wavered and she wanted to laugh. Laugh with the bitterness of the earth around her. Of course, it would be like that. If she wanted to feel this bond with the land around her, she could not barricade herself from the world.
Illyria demanded her vulnerability in return for its strength.
“Why would you think I care about being seen with you?”
Cassian didn’t sound like the General of the Night Court Armies. He sounded like a young male, like if he had a cap, he’d be wringing it in his hands. As it were, his wings were tucked in tight and his hands shoved into his pockets. She took the rest of him in, really in. Half of his hair had slipped from the bun he kept his hair in as he slept, his eyes were shadowed as if he’d had as rough of nights as she had. He hadn’t lost any weight, but there was suffering in the lines of his face and neck, his shoulders not quite as square and his back not as stiff.
Maybe it was the clear vulnerability he showed, unwittingly or not, or maybe it was the quiet strength of the mountains around her, but she faced the festering pain within her. The pain she tried to hide, to cover with anything, ignoring the poison it leeched into her life.
“Because before—during the war—you would pull away the moment one of them appeared.” She thought of his pulling away, as if he’d been burned, when Mor had arrived. “Because you would always go to them first. I was always the afterthought.” She should stop there, but now that she’d began to speak, the poison needed to be released if she were ever to heal. Even if it’d leave a scar, it needed to cleaned. She kept his gaze, his brow furrowed but he made no effort to interrupt her.
“Because when I became this”—she gestured to herself—“I was thrust into a war that I had no right to be in. I had a power that terrifies and consumes me, and you were the only one to have ever seen me before. Not even Elain or Feyre saw me like you had that very first day we met. Certainly, my father didn’t see me, even in the moments before Hybern killed him.” Her throat threatened to close but she pushed the words out.
“I begged you to look at me, Cassian. And you’d look at me and I’d think maybe this time, he’ll see me drowning. He’ll see that I was still stuck in the Cauldron.” Tears began to spill down her cheeks. They burned her cheeks, acid spilling out of her. Every tear tore at her insides, but every tear left her lighter. “And then, then you’d look away. You would look at Mor. I’d expected my sisters to leave me in the corner, it’s where I’d been all of my life. In the back, angry at the world and wanting to scream and scream and scream.”
The ground quivered under their feet, snow falling from the trees. She didn’t move, and Cassian stayed too, flexing his wings only enough to stay balanced.
“When no one was near, when no one could see—you’d show,” she said, anger curling in her heart. She wasn’t afraid of it, she knew it wouldn’t take her over. She was the silent mountain that survives wildfires year after year. “You’d grin at me, as if you hadn’t been ignoring me. Like I wasn’t just something to amuse yourself with. You’d have flirtations and challenges on your tongue and still you didn’t see, Cassian. You didn’t see me.”
She dashed the last of the tears from her cheeks, dragging in a deep breath of the refreshing cold mountain air. She squared her shoulders as she faced off with the male across from her. She didn’t get a chance to continue.
“We’re so fucking stupid,” he said, his voice breathless but it carried through the still air. She began to protest, but her jaw snapped shut at the bitter bark of laughter that came from him. He shoved his hands through his hair, pulling the rest of it from the tie but not caring. It fell around him to his shoulders in a windswept, sleep messed tangle. “Yes, Nesta both of us.” He took a breath, and his back straightened, his shoulder squaring. She responded, shifting until she felt more squared, ready for his round of words.
“I’m a Cauldron damned Illyrian bastard,” he said, laughing but there was no humor in his voice. “Over five hundred years, and that’s still I am. Made to survive in mud, in cold, on my own. To survive or die. I clean up”—it was his turn to gesture to himself—
‘but under the general of the night armies, under the seven siphons, under this I’m the Cauldron damned fae monster you believed all fae to be. I’m the Lord of Bloodshed, and I earned that title with pride and fury.”
He took a step closer to her and she did not move. The world was quiet around them.
“And then I meet this human full of equal pride and fury,” he snarled. “But she’d never look at me. She’d made it clear that I was beneath her, not that I didn’t know that already. But I couldn’t stay away, not from you Nesta. Every feral part of me growled and demanded I scale the mountain to you and steal you away like the brute you declared me.”
Another step closer, his wings looser, but not quite mantling.
“Then you were made fae,” he said, voice lower. “You were constantly around. Every damned minute around you was—still is—a damn battle within me. Against the brute I am, trying to be something closer to the refined creature that would be worth your notice. You clung to your human traditions, your reserved nature. So, I began to covet the moments when no one else was around, when you would finally see me.”
He stepped up to her, her head tilted back to look at him. Both of them glared. There was nothing soft between them. Only will as hard as Illyrian steel.
“You thought I was embarrassed to be seen with you?” Cassian was quieter now, but he hadn’t softened the edge of his words. “I only pulled away because everything I knew about you said you’d defend your privacy with ferocity. I didn’t hold you in front of our families because I expected you to push me away, upset at the public display. I forced myself to steal glances at you. To put a cauldron dammed appropriate amount of space between us else risk being burned by your fire. Even though it was what every part of me screamed to do.”
Nesta couldn’t breathe. The fire within her dampened as she basked in his own fire. The bond between them, covered in tar and oil and dirt and coal and blood and layers and layers of ice began to emerge.
Savage power, once caged within each of them, broke free. The bond shook, scorching, glowing red as flame as their powers sought to collide and combust.
Cassian wrapped an arm around her waist, a steel band holding her to his chest, his other hand grasping her hair even as she grabbed fistfuls of his tunic.
A more familiar gleam entered his eyes, not lessening the fire there but becoming one with it.
“If I’d known, Nesta Archeron, that you had wanted me by your side for all the world to see, not even all the High Lords and Ladies would have been able to make me leave.”
He crushed his lips to hers, and that savagery within them collided. A wave of power burst from him in red; the mountain rocked beneath them. They devoured each other. Two forces of nature colliding and combining, rather than combusting.
When they pulled apart, Cassian leaned his forehead against hers. They ignored the rising sun. The duties he should be attending to.
“Just say the word, Nesta,” he said between panted breaths. “Say the word, and I’ll fly you to Velaris and fuck you on your sister’s dining table. I will say only your name as I bury myself in you over and over for the entire fucking city to see.” He paused, his fervor softening. “I’d rather not, though. Since then I’d have to kill anyone who saw you naked. I am a fae brute, after all.”
Nesta couldn’t respond. She could only stare up at the male she could feel as if he were another part of her. A small part of her, a part that was still human, told her that this was out of one of her romance novels. How else could they have stumbled and misunderstood each other so badly?
“Time,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I want the time you promised in the next life. I want it now, Cassian. I want you.”
“I’ve been yours, sweetheart, since the beginning. Since the first time you refused to be afraid of me. I will always be yours.”
It was Nesta who rose up on her toes, pressing her mouth to his.
The wound inside of her had been lanced of its infection. A balm had covered it, and she knew it would heal. She would heal. She contained the strength and power of the mountains around her, and this male was her home. Just as the mountains were his. Just as she was his.