Chapter Seventeen
CHAPTER
“I have a proposition for you.”
Stomach muscles throbbing, legs aching, Nesta stood before Clotho’s desk as the priestess finished writing on whatever manuscript she was annotating, her enchanted pen scratching along.
Clotho lifted her head when the pen dotted its last mark and wrote on a scrap of paper, Yes?
“Would you allow your priestesses to train with me every morning in the ring at the top of the House? Not all of them—just whoever might be interested.”
Clotho sat perfectly still. Then the pen moved. Train for what?
“To strengthen their bodies, to defend themselves, to attack, if they wish. But also to clear their minds. Help steady them.”
Who will oversee this training? You?
“No. I’m not qualified for that. I’ll be training with them.” Her heart pounded. She wasn’t sure why. “Cassian will be overseeing it. He’s not handsy— I mean, he’s respectful and …” Nesta shook her head. She sounded a proper fool.
Beneath the shadows of her hood, Nesta could sense Clotho’s gaze lingering upon her. The pen moved again.
Not many will come, I am afraid.
“I know. But even one or two … I’d like to offer.” Nesta gestured to a pillar beyond Clotho. “I’ll put a sign-up sheet there. Whoever wants to join is welcome.”
Again, that long stare from beneath the hood, its weight like a phantom touch.
Then Clotho wrote, Whoever wants to join has my blessing.
Nesta pasted the sign-up sheet onto the pillar that day.
No one had inked their name on it by the time she departed.
She awoke early, made the trek to the library to check the list, and found it still empty.
“It’ll take time,” Cassian consoled her when he read whatever lay etched on her face as she stepped into the training ring. He added a shade softly, “Keep reaching out your hand.”
So Nesta did.
Every afternoon when she arrived at the library, she checked the list. Every evening when she left, she checked it as well. It was always empty.
At training, Cassian began to instruct her on basic footwork and body positioning in hand-to-hand combat. No punches or kicks, not yet. Nesta held that infernal plank for ten seconds. Then fifteen. Then twenty. Thirty.
Cassian added weights to her exercises, in order to build up her flimsy arms. Heavy stones with carved handles to carry while she did her lunges and squats.
All while she breathed and breathed and breathed.
She tried the stairs again. Made it to step five hundred before her muscles demanded she turn around. The next night, she halted on six hundred ten. Then seven hundred fifty.
She didn’t know what she’d do at the bottom: find a tavern or a pleasure hall and drink herself stupid, she supposed. If she made it, she’d deserve it, she told herself with each step.
At night, exhaustion weighed so heavily she could barely eat and bathe before tumbling into bed. Barely read a chapter of a book before her eyelids drooped. She’d found a smutty novel she’d already read and loved in one of the trunks Elain had packed, and had laid it on the desk.
She’d said to the air, “I found this for you. It’s a present.” The book had vanished into nothing. But in the morning, she’d found a bouquet of autumnal flowers upon her desk, the glass vase bursting with asters and chrysanthemums of every color.
A week passed, during which she barely saw Gwyn, though she learned through Clotho that Merrill had been pushing her hard with the Valkyrie research. But Nesta had so many books to shelve that the hours passed swiftly.
Especially once she began using the books to train. While striding up the ramp, she’d hold a heavy stack and execute an assortment of lunges. Several times, she caught passing priestesses a level above peering at her while she did so.
Every day, she checked the sign-up sheet on the pillar beyond Clotho’s desk. Empty.
Day after day after day.
Keep reaching out your hand, Cassian had told her.
But what would it matter, she began to wonder, if no one bothered to reach back?
“You hold your fist like that when you punch someone and you’ll shatter your thumb.”
Panting, with sweat running down her back in great rivers, Nesta scowled at Cassian. She held up the fist he’d ordered her to make, her thumb inside her folded fingers. “What’s wrong with my fist?”
“Keep your thumb atop the knuckles on your pointer and middle finger.” He made a fist to demonstrate and wiggled the thumb tucked against his fingers. “If your thumb makes the hit, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
Studying the fist Cassian extended, Nesta mimicked the positioning on her own hand. “What then?”
He jerked his chin. “Get into the position we went over yesterday. Feet parallel, rooting your strength into the ground …”
“I know, I know,” Nesta muttered, and took up the stance he’d spent three days making her practice. She observed her feet as they shuffled into position, then she bent her knees slightly, bobbing twice to make sure she’d secured her center of power.
Cassian circled her. “Good. Any punch you make should be swift and precise, not a wild swing that’ll knock you off balance and deprive your arm of strength. Your body and breath will power the punch more than your actual arm.” He took up a similar stance—and struck at the air.
He moved so smoothly, so brutally, that the blow was done before she could blink.
He held out his arm when he’d finished, muscles shifting.
He’d rolled up his sleeves against the warm autumn day, but hadn’t taken his shirt off entirely.
In the stark sunlight, the tattoo along his left arm seemed to drink down the brightness.
“Line up the first two knuckles with your forearm. That’s what you want to hit with, and the strength in your arm will carry right through to them.
If you hit with your ring finger and pinky, you’ll break your hand. ”
“I had no idea punching was so fraught with peril.”
“Apparently, it takes brains to be a brute.”
Nesta flattened her brows, but focused on aligning her forearm and the knuckles he’d indicated. “That’s it?”
“To hit with the proper knuckles, you need to angle your wrist downward just a fraction.”
“Why?”
“So your wrist doesn’t snap.”
She lowered her arm. “Considering how many ways there are to break my own hand when punching someone, it doesn’t seem worth it.”
“That’s why a good warrior knows when to pick his battles.” He lowered his fist. “You have to ask yourself if the risk is worth it each time.”
“And do you always throw a punch with perfect form?”
“Yes,” Cassian said without one ounce of doubt.
He shook his hair from his eyes. “Well, most of the time. There have been some brawls when I didn’t have the right angle and balance, but a punch, even one that could break my hand, was the best way out of a bind.
I’ve shattered my hand …” He squinted at the sky, as if doing a mental tally. “Oh, probably ten times.”
“In five hundred years.”
“I can’t be perfect every moment of every day, Nes.” His eyes flickered.
There had been no repeats of that madness in the hallway last week. And she’d been too tired at night to even make it up to the dining room, let alone to pleasure herself in bed.
“Right,” he said. “Now shift your hips into the punch.” He struck at the air again. He moved more slowly this time, letting her see how his body flowed into the blow. “It will engage your core and your shoulder, both of which add extra power.” Another jab.
“So those abdominal exercises are useful beyond wanting to show off your muscles?”
He threw her a wry grin. “You really think this is just for show?”
“I think I’ve caught you looking at yourself in that mirror at least a dozen times each lesson.” Nesta nodded to the slender mirror across the ring.
He chuckled. “Liar. You use that mirror to watch me when you think I’m not paying attention.”
She refused to let him see the truth on her face. Refused to so much as lower her head. She focused again on her stance.
“All business today, huh?”
“You want me to train,” Nesta said coolly, “so train me.”
Even if no priestesses showed up, even if she was a stupid fool for hoping that they would, she didn’t mind this training.
It cleared her head, required so much thinking and breathing that the roaring thoughts had little chance to devour her whole.
Only in the quiet moments did those thoughts pounce again, usually if she lost focus while working in the library or bathing.
And when that happened, the stairwell always beckoned. The infernal ten thousand steps.
But would it do anything—the training, the work, the stairs—beyond keeping her busy? The thoughts still waited like wolves to swarm her. To rip her apart.
I loved you from the first moment I held you in my arms.
The wolves prowled closer, claws clicking.
“Where’d you go?” Cassian asked, hazel eyes dim with worry.
Nesta took up her stance again. It sent the wolves retreating a step. “Nowhere.”
Elain was in the private library.
Nesta knew it before she’d cleared the stairs, covered in dust from the library.
Her sister’s delicate scent of jasmine and honey lingered in the red-stoned hall like a promise of spring, a sparkling river that she followed to the open doors of the chamber.
Elain stood at the wall of windows, clad in a lilac gown whose close-fitting bodice showed how well her sister had filled out since those initial days in the Night Court.
Gone were the sharp angles, replaced by softness and elegant curves.
Nesta knew she herself had looked like that at one point, even if Elain’s breasts had always been smaller.
She peered down at herself, bony and gangly. Her sister turned toward her, glowing with health.
Elain’s smile was as bright as the setting sun beyond the windows. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”
Someone had brought Elain here, since there was no way in hell she had climbed those ten thousand steps.
Nesta didn’t return her sister’s smile, but rather gestured to her body, the leathers, the dust. “I’ve been busy.”