Chapter Fifty-Four
CHAPTER
Cassian beheld the open door to Lanthys’s cell and knew two things.
The first, and most obvious, was that he was about to die.
The second was that he would do anything in the world to prevent Nesta from meeting the same fate.
The second clarified his mind, cooled and sharpened his fear into another weapon. By the time the voice slithered from the darkness around them, he was ready.
“I wondered when you and I would meet again, Lord of Bastards.”
Cassian had never, not once, forgotten the timbre and iciness of that voice, how it made his very blood bristle with hoarfrost. But Cassian answered, “All these centuries in here and you haven’t invented a more creative name for me?”
Lanthys’s laugh twined around them like a snake. Cassian gripped Nesta’s hand, though his order to run still hung between them. It was too late for running. At least for him. All that remained was buying her enough time to escape.
“You thought yourself so clever with the ash mirror,” Lanthys seethed, voice echoing from all around them.
The light of Cassian’s left Siphon revealed only red-washed, misty darkness.
“Thought you could best me.” Another laugh.
“I am immortal, boy. A true immortal, as you might never hope to be. Two centuries in here is nothing. I knew I’d only need to bide my time before I found a way to escape. ”
“You found a way?” Cassian drawled to the mist that was Lanthys. “It seems like someone helped you out.” He clicked his tongue.
He just had to wait—wait until the attack came. Then Nesta could run. She was rigid beside him, utterly frozen. He nudged her with a foot, trying to knock her from her stupor. He needed her primed to run, not rooted to the spot like a deer.
“The door opened of my will alone,” Lanthys purred.
“Liar. Someone opened it for you.”
Lanthys’s mist thickened, rumbling with ire.
Nesta swallowed audibly, and Cassian knew.
When she’d ordered the Harp to let her go …
The Harp had also released Lanthys. Just open up these wards, she’d instructed it.
So it had: the wards on her, and the wards nearby—on Lanthys’s cell.
It had said it wanted to play. And here it was: playing with their lives.
What if the Harp had extended its reach beyond Lanthys’s door? If every single cell door here was open …
Fuck.
But Cassian said to the monster he feared above all others, “So you plan to swirl around me like a rain cloud? What of that handsome form I saw in the mirror?”
“Is that what your companion prefers?” Lanthys whispered from too close—far too close. Nesta cringed away. Lanthys inhaled. “What are you?”
“A witch,” she breathed. “From Oorid’s dark heart.”
“There is a name I have not heard in a long while.” Lanthys’s voice sounded mere feet from Nesta.
Cassian gritted his teeth. He needed the monster gathered on the other side of her—so the path upward was clear.
Had to draw Lanthys over toward him. “But you do not smell of Oorid’s heaviness, its despair.
” An inhale, still behind them, blocking the way out.
“Your scent …” He sighed. “A pity you’ve marred such a scent with Cassian’s stink.
I can barely distinguish anything on you besides his essence. ”
That alone, Cassian realized, kept Lanthys from realizing what she was. Being interested, as the Bone Carver had been. But it revealed another dangerous truth: where to strike first.
“What is it you are obscuring behind you?” Lanthys asked, and Nesta turned, as if tracking him, keeping the Harp hidden at her back.
Lanthys chuckled, though. “Ah. I see it now. Long have I wondered who would come to claim it. I could hear its music, you know. Its final note, like an echo in the stone. I was surprised to find it down here, hidden beneath the Prison, after all that time.”
The mist swirled and Lanthys drawled, “Such exquisite music it makes. What wonder it spins. Everything pays fealty to that Harp: seasons, kingdoms, the order of time and worlds. These are of no consequence to it. And its last string …” He laughed. “Even Death bows to that string.”
Nesta swallowed again. Cassian squeezed her hand tighter and said casually, “You true immortals are all the same: arrogant windbags who love to hear yourselves talk.”
“And you faeries are all blind to your own selves.” Lanthys crooned, circling again, and Cassian readied his blade. “Based upon scent alone, I would say that you two are—”
Cassian released Nesta’s hand and lunged forward, spearing his blade into the mist before Lanthys could say one more damning word.
Lanthys screamed in rage as Cassian’s Siphons flared, and Cassian roared, “RUN!” before he struck again.
Lanthys retreated, and Cassian used the breath to free the Siphon from his left hand before chucking it to her, willing it to light.
“Go!” he commanded as he tossed the stone to her.
Red splashed across her fear-tight face as she caught his Siphon, but Cassian was already pivoting to Lanthys.
The crunching, fading steps told him Nesta obeyed.
Good.
Lanthys gathered in the darkness, a cobra readying to strike.
Cassian just prayed Nesta made it out of the gates before he died.
Nesta ran from the voice that was hate and cruelty and hunger entwined. The voice that robbed her of joy, of warmth, of anything but primal, basic fear.
Her thighs protested at the path’s steepness, but she sprinted up toward the gates, obeying Cassian’s command, the roaring from the warrior and the monster echoing off the stones.
Red light flashed behind her. The doors of the Prison’s cells rattled.
Beasts screamed behind them, as if realizing one of them had gotten out. Wanting out themselves.
She clenched the Harp in one hand, Cassian’s Siphon blazing in the other. She had to reach the gates. Then make it down the mountain. And then holler for Rhysand, and pray he had some sort of spell to sense his name on the wind. Then he’d have to race back up the mountain, down the path, and …
Cassian might be dead by the time she reached the gates so high above. He might be dying now.
A cold bolt shot through her heart.
She had run from him. Left him.
The Harp warmed in her hand, humming. The gold gleamed as if molten.
We shall open doors and pathways; we shall move through space and eons together, it had sung during her unintentional scrying. Our music will free us of earthly rules and borders.
Open doors … She had opened a door with it—to Lanthys’s cell. Opened a door through its own power pressing on her. But to move through space …
The small strings are for games—light movement and leaping—but the longer, the final ones … Such deep wonders and horrors we could strum into being.
Nesta counted the strings. Twenty-six. She’d touched the first, the smallest, to free herself from the Harp’s power, but what did the others do?
Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six …
Gwyn’s voice floated from far away, recounting Merrill’s earlier research on dimensions. The possibility of twenty-six dimensions.
We shall move through space and eons together … The small strings are for games—light movement and leaping … Could the Harp … Nesta’s breath caught in her throat. Could the Harp transplant her from one place to another? Not only open a door, but create one she might walk through?
Free us of earthly rules and borders …
She had to try it. For Cassian.
Motion stirred in the gloom above, rushing steps headed her way. Someone had entered the Prison through the gates. Nesta angled Cassian’s Siphon toward the sound, bracing for whatever monster might come barreling down—
Fae males in worn, dirty armor charged toward her. At least ten Autumn Court soldiers.
She knew who’d sent them, winnowing them on Koschei’s power. Who controlled them, even from across the sea.
I know where you are, Nesta Archeron.
And since Rhys had lowered the shields around the Prison … they’d walked right in.
Nesta didn’t think. She seized that silver fire within her. Let it wreathe her hands.
“Take me to Cassian,” she whispered, and plucked the first silver string of the Harp.
The world and oncoming soldiers vanished, and she had the sense of being thrown, even as she stood still, and she prayed and prayed—
Metal flashed, and red light flared, and there was Cassian, bleeding on the ground, Siphons blazing, fighting the mist in front of him.
There was nowhere to strike a fatal blow. The mist scattered at every thrust of Cassian’s sword, and Lanthys shrieked at each one, but Lanthys could not be killed. Only contained, Cassian had said.
And the Harp could open doorways—but not slay people. She ran for Cassian, finger readying on the Harp’s string to haul them out of there.
But Cassian’s eyes flared, and he yelled, “GET—”
The mist wrapped around his throat and hurled him.
Her scream shattered through the tunnel as he hit the rock wall, wings crunching, and fell to the floor. He didn’t move.
A laugh like a knife scraping over stone filled the tunnel and then Nesta was thrown, too, slamming into the wall so hard her teeth clacked and her head spun, breath whooshing from her as her fingers splayed on the Harp before she hit the floor.
But she’d landed near Cassian, and she hurried to turn him over, praying his neck hadn’t snapped, that she hadn’t doomed him by coming here—
Cassian’s chest rose and fell, and the mighty, primal thing inside her body breathed a sigh of relief. Short-lived, as Lanthys laughed again.
“You shall wish the blow killed him before I’m through with you both,” the creature said. “You shall wish you kept running.” But Nesta refused to hear another word, not as she knelt over Cassian, the only thing between him and Lanthys.
She had been here before.
Had been in this exact position, his head on her lap, Death laughing at them.
Then, she had curled over him and waited to die. Then, she had stopped fighting.