I unleashed every drop of the flame in me, a wall of it between us and them. Sealing his brothers inside the cave.
“Run,” I gasped out, but Lucien was already at my side, a steadying hand under my arm as I burned that flame hotter and hotter. It wouldn’t keep them contained for long, and I could indeed feel someone’s power rising to challenge mine.
But there was another force to wield.
Lucien understood the same moment I did.
Sweat simmered on Lucien’s brow as a pulse of flame-licked power slammed into the stones just above us. Dust and debris rained down.
I threw any trickle of magic into Lucien’s next blow.
His next.
As Eris’s livid face emerged from my net of flame, glowing like a new-forged god of wrath, Lucien and I brought down the cave ceiling.
Fire burst through the small cracks like a thousand flaming serpents’ tongues—but the cave-in did not so much as tremble.
“Hurry,” Lucien panted, and I didn’t waste breath agreeing as we staggered into the night.
Our packs, our weapons, our food … all inside that cave.
I had two daggers on me, Lucien one. I’d been wearing my cloak, but … he’d indeed given me his. He shivered against the cold as we dragged and clawed our way up the mountain slope, and did not dare stop.
Had I still remained human, I would have been dead.
The cold was bone-deep, the screaming wind lashing us like burning whips. My teeth clacked against each other, my fingers so stiff I could scarcely grapple onto the icy granite with each mile we staggered through the mountains. Perhaps both of us were spared from an icy death by the kernel of flame that had just barely kindled inside our veins.
We didn’t pause once, an unspoken fear that if we did, the cold would leech any lingering warmth and we’d never again move. Or Lucien’s brothers would gain ground.
I tried, over and over, to shout down the bond to Rhys. To winnow. To grow wings and attempt to fly us out of the mountain pass we trudged through, the snow waist-deep and so densely packed in places we had to crawl over it, our skin scraped raw from the ice.
But the faebane’s stifling grip still held the majority of my power in check.
We had to be close to the Winter Court border, I told myself as we squinted against a blast of icy wind through the other end of the narrow mountain pass. Close—and once we were over it, Eris and the others wouldn’t dare set foot into another court’s territory.
My muscles screamed with every step, my boots soaked through with snow, my feet perilously numb. I’d spent enough human winters in the forest to know the dangers of exposure—the threat of cold and wet.
Lucien, a step behind me, panted hard as the walls of rock and snow parted to reveal a bitter, star-flecked night—and more mountains beyond. I almost whimpered.
“We’ve got to keep going,” he said, snow crusting the stray strands of his hair, and I wondered if the sound had indeed left me.
Ice tickled my frozen nostrils. “We can’t last long—we need to get warm and rest.”
“My brothers—”
“We will die if we continue.” Or lose fingers and toes at the best. I pointed to the mountain slope ahead, a hazardous plunge down. “We can’t risk that at night. We need to find a cave and try to make a fire.”
“With what?” he snapped. “Do you see any wood?”
I only continued on. Arguing just wasted energy—and time.
And I didn’t have an answer, anyway.
I wondered if we’d make it through the night.
We found a cave. Deep and shielded from wind or sight. Lucien and I carefully covered our tracks, making sure the wind blew in our favor, veiling our scents.
That was where our luck ran out. No wood to be found; no fire in either of our veins.
So we used our only option: body heat. Huddled in the farthest reaches of the cave, we sat thigh to thigh and arm to arm beneath my cloak, shuddering with cold and dripping wet.
I could scarcely hear the hollow scream of the wind over my chattering teeth. And his.
Find me, find me, find me, I tried shouting down that bond. But my mate’s wry voice didn’t answer.
There was only the roaring void.
“Tell me about her—about Elain,” Lucien said quietly. As if the death that squatted in the dark beside us had drawn his thoughts to his own mate as well.
I debated not saying anything, shaking too hard to dredge up speech, but … “She loves her garden. Always loved growing things. Even when we were destitute, she managed to tend a little garden in the warmer months. And when—when our fortune returned, she took to tending and planting the most beautiful gardens you’ve ever seen. Even in Prythian. It drove the servants mad, because they were supposed to do the work and ladies were only meant to clip a rose here and there, but Elain would put on a hat and gloves and kneel in the dirt, weeding. She acted like a purebred lady in every regard but that.”
Lucien was silent for a long moment. “Acted,” he murmured. “You talk about her as if she’s dead.”
“I don’t know what changes the Cauldron wrought on her. I don’t think going home is an option. No matter how she might yearn to.”
“Surely Prythian is a better alternative, war or no.”
I steeled myself before saying, “She is engaged, Lucien.”
I felt every inch of him go stiff beside me. “To whom.”
Flat, cold words. With the threat of violence simmering beneath.
“To a human lord’s son. The lord hates faeries—has dedicated his life and wealth to hunting them. Us. I was told that though it’s a love match, her betrothed’s father was keen to have access to her considerable dowry to continue his crusade against faerie-kind.”
“Elain loves this lord’s son.” Not quite a question.
“She says she does. Nesta—Nesta thought the father and his obsession with killing faeries was bad enough to raise some alarms. She never voiced the concern to Elain. Neither did I.”
“My mate is engaged to a human male.” He spoke more to himself than to me.
“I’m sorry if—”
“I want to see her. Just once. Just—to know.”
“To know what?”
He hitched my damp cloak higher around us. “If she is worth fighting for.”
I couldn’t bring myself to say she was, to give him that sort of hope when Elain might very well do everything in her power to hold to her engagement. Even if immortality had already rendered it impossible.
Lucien leaned his head back against the rock wall behind us. “And then I’ll ask your mate how he survived it—knowing you were engaged to someone else. Sharing another male’s bed.”
I tucked my freezing hands under my arms, gazing toward the gloom ahead.
“Tell me when you knew,” he demanded, his knee pressing into mine. “That Rhysand was your mate. Tell me when you stopped loving Tamlin and started loving him instead.”
I chose not to answer.
“Was it going on before you even left?”
I whipped my head to him, even if I could barely make out his features in the dark. “I never touched Rhysand like that until months later.”
“You kissed Under the Mountain.”
“I had as little choice in that as I did in the dancing.”
“And yet this is the male you now love.”
He didn’t know—he had no inkling of the personal history, the secrets, that had opened my heart to the High Lord of the Night Court. They were not my stories to tell.
“One would think, Lucien, that you’d be glad I fell in love with my mate, given that you’re in the same situation Rhys was in six months ago.”
“You left us.”
Us. Not Tamlin. Us. The words echoed into the dark, toward the howling wind and lashing snow beyond the bend.
“I told you that day in the woods: you abandoned me long before I ever physically left.” I shivered again, hating every point of contact, that I so desperately needed his warmth. “You fit into the Spring Court as little as I did, Lucien. You enjoyed its pleasures and diversions. But don’t pretend you weren’t made for something more than that.”