CHAPTER
60
“Velaris is secure,” Rhys said in the black hours of the night. “The wards the Cauldron took out have been remade.”
We had not stopped to rest until now. For hours we’d worked, along with the rest of the city, to heal, to patch up, to hunt down answers any way we could. And now we were all again gathered, the clock chiming three in the morning.
I didn’t know how Rhys was standing as he leaned against the mantel in the sitting room. I was near-limp on the couch beside Mor, both of us coated in dirt and blood. Like the rest of them.
Sprawled in an armchair built for Illyrian wings, Cassian’s face was battered and healing slowly enough that I knew he’d drained his power during those long minutes when he’d defended the city alone. But his hazel eyes still glowed with the embers of rage.
Amren was hardly better off. The tiny female’s gray clothes hung mostly in strips, her skin beneath pale as snow. Half-asleep on the couch across from mine, she leaned against Azriel, who kept casting alarmed glances at her, even as his own wounds leaked a bit. Atop his scarred hands, Azriel’s blue Siphons were dull, muted. Utterly empty.
As I had helped the survivors in the Rainbow tend to their wounded, count their dead, and begin repairs, Rhys had checked in every now and then while he’d rebuilt the wards with whatever power lingered in his arsenal. During one of our brief breaks, he’d told me what Amren had done on her side of the river.
With her dark power, she had spun illusions straight into the soldiers’ minds. They believed they had fallen into the Sidra and were drowning; they believed they were flying a thousand feet above and had dived, fast and swift, for the city—only to find the street mere feet away, and the crunch of their skulls. The crueler ones, the wickedest ones, she had unleashed their own nightmares upon them—until they died from terror, their hearts giving out.
Some had fallen into the river, drinking their own spreading blood as they drowned. Some had disappeared wholly.
“Velaris might be secure,” Cassian replied, not even bothering to lift his head from where it rested against the back of the chair, “but for how long? Hybern knows about this place, thanks to those wyrm-queens. Who else will they sell the information to? How long until the other courts come sniffing? Or Hybern uses that Cauldron again to take down our defenses?”
Rhys closed his eyes, his shoulders tight. I could already see the weight pushing down on that dark head.
I hated to add to that burden, but I said, “If we all go to Hybern to destroy the Cauldron … who will defend the city?”
Silence. Rhys’s throat bobbed.
Amren said, “I’ll stay.” Cassian opened his mouth to object, but Rhys slowly looked at his Second. Amren held his gaze as she added, “If Rhys must go to Hybern, then I am the only one of you who might hold the city until help arrives. Today was a surprise. A bad one. When you leave, we will be better prepared. The new wards we built today will not fall so easily.”
Mor loosed a sigh. “So what do we do now?”
Amren simply said, “We sleep. We eat.”
And it was Azriel who added, his voice raw with the aftermath of battle-rage, “And then we retaliate.”
Rhys did not come to bed.
And when I emerged from the bath, the water clouded with dirt and blood, he was nowhere to be found.
But I felt for the bond between us and trudged upstairs, my stiff legs barking in pain. He was sitting on the roof—in the dark. His great wings were spread behind him, draped over the tiles.
I slid into his lap, looping my arms around his neck.
He stared at the city around us. “So few lights. So few lights left tonight.”
I did not look. I only traced the lines of his face, then brushed my thumb over his mouth. “It is not your fault,” I said quietly.
His eyes shifted to mine, barely visible in the dark. “Isn’t it? I handed this city over to them. I said I would be willing to risk it, but … I don’t know who I hate more: the king, those queens, or myself.”