Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
Gwyn mastered herself enough to say, “I don’t know how, but Merrill learned you swapped the book out.” She gasped for air as she pointed up to a level high above. “You should go.”
Nesta frowned. “Who cares? I’m not going to let her scare me off like some errant child.”
Gwyn blanched. “When she’s in a fury, it is—”
“It is what, Gwyneth Berdara?” crooned a female voice from the stacks. “When I’m in a fury, it is what?”
Gwyn winced, turning slowly as the white-haired beauty appeared from the gloom. Her pale robes flowed behind her as if on a phantom wind, and the blue stone atop her hood flickered with light. Gwyn bowed her head, face paling. “I meant nothing by it, Merrill.”
Nesta ground her teeth at the bow, the fear on Gwyn’s face, in her soft words.
Priestesses halted along the railings above them.
Merrill turned her remarkable eyes to Nesta. “I do not appreciate thieves and liars.”
“Neither do I,” Nesta said coolly, lifting her chin.
Merrill hissed. “You tried to play me for a fool in my very own office.” She didn’t so much as look at Gwyn, who cringed away.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh? You mean when I went to see the book that my inane assistant had incorrectly given me—oh, yes, I knew about that from the start—and found the proper volume instead, with your scent upon it, it wasn’t you who did it?
” Merrill looked between Gwyn and Nesta.
“It is inexcusable to ask others to make up for your own stupidity and carelessness.”
Gwyn’s fear grated against her senses. Nesta said, voice dropping, “Gwyn did no such thing. And who cares? Are you so bored down here that you have to invent these dramas to entertain yourself?” She waved a hand to the open walkway behind Merrill.
“We’re both busy. Clear off and let us work in peace. ”
Someone gasped on a level above.
Merrill laughed, that phantom wind around her whispering. “Do you not know who I am, girl?”
“I know that you are keeping us from our work,” Nesta said with that flat calm she knew made people irate. “And I know that this is a library, but you hoard books like it is your own personal collection.”
Merrill bared her teeth. “You think I do not know you? The human girl who was shoved into the Cauldron and came out High Fae. The female who slew the King of Hybern and held up his head like a trophy as his blood rained upon her.”
Surprise lit Gwyn’s face at the graphic description.
Nesta didn’t allow herself to so much as swallow.
“The wind whispers to me even here, under so much stone,” Merrill said. “It finds its way in through the cracks and murmurs the goings-on of the world in my ear.” Merrill snorted. “Do you think you are entitled to do as you please now?”
Nesta’s power rumbled in her veins. She stomped on it, shoved it down and strangled it. “I think you like to hear yourself talk too much.”
“I am descended from Rabath, Lord of the Western Wind,” Merrill seethed. “Unlike Gwyneth Berdara, I am no lackey to be dismissed.”
To hell with this witch. To hell with restraint and hiding.
Nesta let enough of her power simmer to the surface that she knew her own eyes glowed. Let it crackle, even as she ignored its wild, unholy bellowing.
Gwyn had backed away a step. Even Merrill blinked as Nesta said, “With a fancy title like that, surely such a petty grudge should be beneath you.”
Nesta smiled, savage and cruel. Merrill only glanced between her and Gwyn before saying, “Get back to your work, nymph.”
Wind snapping at her heels, Merrill stalked into the gloom.
Nesta dropped the thread of her power, quelling its music and roaring with an iron hand.
But it wasn’t until Merrill’s brisk wind faded that Gwyn leaned against a stack, rubbing her hands over her face. The priestesses who’d been watching launched into movement again, their whispering filling the library.
Nesta asked into the rustling quiet, “Nymph?”
Gwyn lowered her hands, noted the lack of glowing power in Nesta’s eyes, and sighed in relief.
But her voice remained casual. “My grandmother was a river-nymph who seduced a High Fae male from the Autumn Court. So I’m a quarter nymph, but it’s enough for this.
” Gwyn gestured to her large eyes—blue so clear it could have been the shallow sea—and her lithe body.
“My bones are slightly more pliant than ordinary High Fae’s, but who cares about that? ”
Perhaps that was why Gwyn was so good at the balancing and movement.
Gwyn went on, “My mother was unwanted by either of their people. She could not dwell in the rivers of the Spring Court, but was too untamed to endure the confinement of the forest house of Autumn. So she was given in her childhood to the temple at Sangravah, where she was raised. She partook in the Great Rite when she was of age, and I, we—my sister and I, I mean—were the result of that sacred union with a male stranger. She never found out who he was, for the magic chose him that night, and no one ever showed up to ask about twin girls. We were raised in the temple as well. I never left its grounds until … until I came here.”
Such pain filled Gwyn’s eyes then. Such terrible pain that Nesta knew not to ask about her mother, or the twin sister.
Gwyn shook her head, as if dispelling the memory. She spread her fingers. “My twin had the webbed fingers of the nymphs—I don’t.”
Had.
Again, Gwyn sighed. “Merrill will make your life a living hell, you know.”
“She can try,” Nesta said mildly. “It’d be difficult to make it any worse.”
“Well, now we have a common enemy. Merrill will never forget this.” She nodded toward the railings where the priestesses had been.
“Though I suppose they won’t, either. It’s not every day someone stands up to her.
Only Clotho can really make her fall in line, but Clotho lets her have her way, mostly because Merrill throws those windy tantrums that can send everyone’s manuscripts scattering. ”
“Anytime you need someone to knock Merrill down a few pegs, let me know.”
Gwyn smiled slightly. “Next time, perhaps I’ll have the courage to do it myself.”
It seemed the priestesses didn’t forget what Nesta had done.
Nesta, Gwyn, and Emerie were going through their opening stretches, Cassian stone-faced and eagle-eyed to catch any mistake, when footsteps scuffed in the archway beyond the pit.
They all paused at the three hooded figures who emerged, hands clasped so tightly that their knuckles were white.
But the priestesses stepped into the sunlight, the open air. Blinked up at it, as if remembering what such things were.
Gwyn nimbly rolled to her feet, grinning so broadly that Nesta was momentarily taken aback by it. The priestess had been pretty in the library, but with that joy, that confidence as she aimed for the three priestesses, she had emerged into a beauty to rival Merrill or Mor.
Or maybe nothing had changed at all beyond that confidence, the way Gwyn’s shoulders were pushed back, her head high, her smile free as she said, “Roslin. Deirdre. Ananke. I was hoping you’d come.”
Nesta hadn’t checked the sign-up sheet that morning. Had stopped believing anyone except Gwyn would ever come to training.
But the three of them huddled together as Cassian offered a casual smile that was nearly a replica of Rhys’s. Designed to put people at ease and lessen the threat of his power, his body. “Ladies,” he said, gesturing to the ring. “Welcome.”
Roslin and Ananke said nothing, but the one in the middle, Deirdre, tugged back her hood.
Nesta clamped down on every instinct that would have had her gasping. Emerie, on the mat beside her, seemed to be trying to do the same.
A long, vicious scar cut across Deirdre’s face, narrowly missing her left eye.
It was raised, stark white against her brown skin, and flowed from her tightly curling black hair to her slender, lovely jaw.
Her round dark eyes, framed by a thick sweep of lashes that made them seem even rounder, were wide but determined as she said, “We hope we are not too late.”
All of them looked to Nesta. But she wasn’t the leader here.
She threw Cassian a glance, and he gave her a shrug as if to say, I’m just the instructor.
Another scar flowed down Deirdre’s neck, disappearing beneath her robe. For such scars to exist on a High Fae at all suggested an event of such violence, such horror, that Nesta’s stomach clenched. But she stepped toward the priestess. “We were just starting.”
“Give me those stones and bones, please,” Nesta said quietly to the House as she sat in the private library, a map of all seven courts before her, Cassian a step behind her.
A small earthenware bowl appeared beside the map, filled with them.
Nesta swallowed against the dryness in her mouth.
Cassian whistled. “It really does listen to you.”
She peered over a shoulder. She’d invited him here after she’d returned from working in the library out of pure caution, she told herself. If she lost control, if she wasn’t able to witness where her finger landed on the map, someone had to be here. That person just so happened to be him.
Never mind that he’d once stood beside her, his hand upon her back as it was now, and let her lean into his warmth and strength.
Cassian glanced between the bowl of scrying instruments and the map. “Why did you change your mind?”
Nesta didn’t give herself time to hesitate before she slid her fingers into the bowl and scooped up the handful of stones and bones. They clinked against each other, hollow and ancient.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about those priestesses who came to practice today. Roslin said she hadn’t set foot outside in sixty years. And Deirdre, with those scars …” She took a long breath. “I am asking them to be brave, to work hard, to face their fears. Yet I’m not doing the same.”
“No one accused you of that.”
“I don’t need anyone to say it. I know it. And I might fear this scrying, but I fear being a cowardly hypocrite even more.”