y 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.”
Again that silence fell—different this time. The tension and simmering anger of a unit who had endured so much, survived so much … and felt each other’s pain keenly.
“The Illyrians,” Rhys smoothly cut in, that light finally returning to his gaze, “are unparalleled warriors, and are rich with stories and traditions. But they are also brutal and backward, particularly in regard to how they treat their females.”
Azriel’s eyes had gone near-vacant as he stared at the wall of windows behind me.
“They’re barbarians,” Amren said, and neither Illyrian male objected. Mor nodded emphatically, even as she noted Azriel’s posture and bit her lip. “They cripple their females so they can keep them for breeding more flawless warriors.”
Rhys cringed. “My mother was low-born,” he told me, “and worked as a seamstress in one of their many mountain war-camps. When females come of age in the camps—when they have their first bleeding—their wings are … clipped. Just an incision in the right place, left to improperly heal, can cripple you forever. And my mother—she was gentle and wild and loved to fly. So she did everything in her power to keep herself from maturing. She starved herself, gathered illegal herbs—anything to halt the natural course of her body. She turned eighteen and hadn’t yet bled, to the mortification of her parents. But her bleeding finally arrived, and all it took was for her to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, before a male scented it on her and told the camp’s lord. She tried to flee—took right to the skies. But she was young, and the warriors were faster, and they dragged her back. They were about to tie her to the posts in the center of camp when my father winnowed in for a meeting with the camp’s lord about readying for the War. He saw my mother thrashing and fighting like a wildcat, and …” He swallowed. “The mating bond between them clicked into place. One look at her, and he knew what she was. He misted the guards holding her.”
My brows narrowed. “Misted?”
Cassian let out a wicked chuckle as Rhys floated a lemon wedge that had been garnishing his chicken into the air above the table. With a flick of his finger, it turned to citrus-scented mist.
“Through the blood-rain,” Rhys went on as I shut out the image of what it’d do to a body, what he could do, “my mother looked at him. And the bond fell into place for her. My father took her back to the Night Court that evening and made her his bride. She loved her people, and missed them, but never forgot what they had tried to do to her—what they did to the females among them. She tried for decades to get my father to ban it, but the War was coming, and he wouldn’t risk isolating the Illyrians when he needed them to lead his armies. And to die for him.”
“A real prize, your father,” Mor grumbled.
“At least he liked you,” Rhys countered, then clarified for me, “my father and mother, despite being mates, were wrong for each other. My father was cold and calculating, and could be vicious, as he had been trained to be since birth. My mother was soft and fiery and beloved by everyone she met. She hated him after a time—but never stopped being grateful that he had saved her wings, that he allowed her to fly whenever and wherever she wished. And when I was born, and could summon the Illyrian wings as I pleased … She wanted me to know her people’s culture.”
“She wanted to keep you out of your father’s claws,” Mor said, swirling her wine, her shoulders loosening as Azriel at last blinked, and seemed to shake off whatever memory had frozen him.
“That, too,” Rhys added drily. “When I turned eight, my mother brought me to one of the Illyrian war-camps. To be trained, as all Illyrian males were trained. And like all Illyrian mothers, she shoved me toward the sparring ring on the first day, and walked away without looking back.”
“She abandoned you?” I found myself saying.
“No—never,” Rhys said with a ferocity I’d heard only a few times, one of them being this afternoon. “She was staying at the camp as well. But it is considered an embarrassment for a mother to coddle her son when he goes to train.”
My brows lifted and Cassian laughed. “Backward, like he said,” the warrior told me.
“I was scared out of my mind,” Rhys admitted, not a shade of shame to be found. “I’d been learning to wield my powers, but Illyrian magic was a mere fraction of it. And it’s rare amongst them—usually possessed only by the most powerful, pure-bred warriors.” Again, I looked at the slumbering Siphons atop the warriors’ hands. “I tried to use a Siphon during those years,” Rhys said. “And shattered about a dozen before I realized it wasn’t compatible—the stones couldn’t hold it. My power flows and is honed in other ways.”
“So difficult, being such a powerful High Lord,” Mor teased.
Rhys rolled his eyes. “The camp-lord banned me from using my magic. For all our sakes. But I had no idea how to fight when I set foot into that training ring that day. The other boys in my age group knew it, too. Especially one in particular, who took a look at me, and beat me into a bloody mess.”
“You were so clean,” Cassian said, shaking his head. “The pretty half-breed son of the High Lord—how fancy you were in your new training clothes.”
“Cassian,” Azriel told me with that voice like darkness given sound, “resorted to getting new clothes over the years by challenging other boys to fights, with the prize being the clothes off their backs.” There was no pride in the words—not for his people’s brutality. I didn’t blame the shadowsinger, though. To treat anyone that way …
Cassian, however, chuckled. But I was now taking in the broad, strong shoulders, the light in his eyes.
I’d never met anyone else in Prythian who had ever been hungry, desperate—not like I’d been.
Cassian blinked, and the way he looked at me shifted—more assessing, more … sincere. I could have sworn I saw the words in his eyes: You know what it is like. You know the mar
k it leaves.
“I’d beaten every boy in our age group twice over already,” Cassian went on. “But then Rhys arrived, in his clean clothes, and he smelled … different. Like a true opponent. So I attacked. We both got three lashings apiece for the fight.”
I flinched. Hitting children—
“They do worse, girl,” Amren cut in, “in those camps. Three lashings is practically an encouragement to fight again. When they do something truly bad, bones are broken. Repeatedly. Over weeks.”
I said to Rhys, “Your mother willingly sent you into that?” Soft fire indeed.
“My mother didn’t want me to rely on my power,” Rhysand said. “She knew from the moment she conceived me that I’d be hunted my entire life. Where one strength failed, she wanted others to save me.
“My education was another weapon—which was why she went with me: to tutor me after lessons were done for the day. And when she took me home that first night to our new house at the edge of the camp, she made me read by the window. It was there that I saw Cassian trudging through the mud—toward the few ramshackle tents outside of the camp. I asked her where he was going, and she told me that bastards are given nothing: they find their own shelter, own food. If they survive and get picked to be in a war-band, they’ll be bottom-ranking forever, but receive their own tents and supplies. But until then, he’d stay in the cold.”
“Those mountains,” Azriel added, his face hard as ice, “offer some of the harshest conditions you can imagine.”
I’d spent enough time in frozen woods to get it.
“After my lessons,” Rhys went on, “my mother cleaned my lashings, and as she did, I realized for the first time what it was to be warm, and safe, and cared for. And it didn’t sit well.”
“Apparently not,” Cassian said. “Because in the dead of night, that little prick woke me up in my piss-poor tent and told me to keep my mouth shut and come with him. And maybe the cold made me stupid, but I did. His mother was livid. But I’ll never forget the look on her beautiful face when she saw me and said, ‘There is a bathtub with hot running water. Get in it or you can go back into the cold.’ Being a smart lad, I obeyed. When I got out, she had clean nightclothes and ordered me into bed. I’d spent my life sleeping on the ground—and when I balked, she said she understood because she had felt the same once, and that it would feel as if I was being swallowed up, but the bed was mine for as long as I wanted it.”