“Cassian,” Rhys drawled, “is not a lord. Though I’m sure he appreciates you thinking he is.” He surveyed his Inner Circle. “While we’re on the subject, neither is Azriel. Nor Amren. Mor, believe it or not, is the only pure-blooded, titled person in this room.” Not him? Rhys must have seen the question on my face because he said, “I’m half-Illyrian. As good as a bastard where the thoroughbred High Fae are concerned.”
“So you—you three aren’t High Fae?” I said to him and the two males.
Cassian finished his laughing. “Illyrians are certainly not High Fae. And glad of it.” He hooked his black hair behind an ear—rounded; as mine had once been. “And we’re not lesser faeries, though some try to call us that. We’re just—Illyrians. Considered expendible aerial cavalry for the Night Court at the best of times, mindless soldier grunts at the worst.”
“Which is most of the time,” Azriel clarified. I didn’t dare ask if those shadows were a part of being Illyrian, too.
“I didn’t see you Under the Mountain,” I said instead. I had to know without a doubt—if they were there, if they’d seen me, if it’d impact how I interacted while working with—
Silence fell. None of them, even Amren, looked at Rhysand.
It was Mor who said, “Because none of us were.”
Rhys’s face was a mask of cold. “Amarantha didn’t know they existed. And when someone tried to tell her, they usually found themselves without the mind to do so.”
A shudder went down my spine. Not at the cold killer, but—but … “You truly kept this city, and all these people, hidden from her for fifty years?”
Cassian was staring hard at his plate, as if he might burst out of his skin.
Amren said, “We will continue to keep this city and these people hidden from our enemies for a great many more.”
Not an answer.
Rhys hadn’t expected to see them again when he’d been dragged Under the Mountain. Yet he had kept them safe, somehow.
And it killed them—the four people at this table. It killed them all that he’d done it, however he’d done it. Even Amren.
Perhaps not only for the fact that Rhys had endured Amarantha while they had been here. Perhaps it was also for those left outside of the city, too. Perhaps picking one city, one place, to shield was better than nothing. Perhaps … perhaps it was a comforting thing, to have a spot in Prythian that remained untouched. Unsullied.
Mor’s voice was a bit raw as she explained to me, her golden combs glinting in the light, “There is not one person in this city who is unaware of what went on outside these borders. Or of the cost.”
I didn’t want to ask what price had been demanded. The pain that laced the heavy silence told me enough.
Yet if they might all live through their pain, might still laugh … I cleared my throat, straightening, and said to Azriel, who, shadows or no, seemed the safest and therefore was probably the least so, “How did you meet?” A harmless question to feel them out, learn who they were. Wasn’t it?
Azriel merely turned to Cassian, who was staring at Rhys with guilt and love on his face, so deep and agonized that some now-splintered instinct had me almost reaching across the table to grip his hand.
But Cassian seemed to process what I’d asked and his friend’s silent request that he tell the story instead, and a grin ghosted across his face. “We all hated each other at first.”
Beside me, the light had winked out of Rhys’s eyes. What I’d asked about Amarantha, what horrors I’d made him remember …
A confession for a confession—I thought he’d done it for my sake. Maybe he had things he needed to voice, couldn’t voice to these people, not without causing them more pain and guilt.
Cassian went on, drawing my attention from the silent High Lord at my right, “We are bastards, you know. Az and I. The Illyrians … We love our people, and our traditions, but they dwell in clans and camps deep in the mountains of the North, and do not like outsiders. Especially High Fae who try to tell them what to do. But they’re just as obsessed with lineage, and have their own princes and lords among them. Az,” he said, pointing a thumb in his direction, his red Siphon catching the light, “was the bastard of one of the local lords. And if you think the bastard son of a lord is hated, then you can’t imagine how hated the bastard is of a war-camp laundress and a warrior she couldn’t or wouldn’t remember.” His casual shrug didn’t match the vicious glint in his hazel eyes. “Az’s father sent him to our camp for training once he and his charming wife realized he was a shadowsinger.”
Shadowsinger. Yes—the title, whatever it meant, seemed to fit.
“Like the daemati,” Rhys said to me, “shadowsingers are rare—coveted by courts and territories across the world for their stealth and predisposition to hear and feel things others can’t.”
Perhaps those shadows were indeed whispering to him, then. Azriel’s cold face yielded nothing.
Cassian said, “The camp lord practically shit himself with excitement the day Az was dumped in our camp. But me … once my mother weaned me and I was able to walk, they flew me to a distant camp, and chucked me into the mud to see if I would live or die.”
“They would have been smarter throwing you off a cliff,” Mor said, snorting.
“Oh, definitely,” Cassian said, that grin going razor-sharp. “Especially because when I was old and strong enough to go back to the camp I’d been born in, I learned those pricks worked my mother until she died.”