Nesta did not look at Ilyra’s face. She had learned, over the years, that faces lied. Faces were what people arranged for you. Iron arranged nothing.
So she looked at the collar.
It sat against the woman’s throat as though it had grown there. Black iron, worn at the edges, rubbed raw where it met skin. And carved into the metal, small and precise as a signature, was the mark that had been burning through Cassian’s leathers since the mountain woke.
Not similar. The same. Every curve of it.
“That’s his,” Nesta said, pointing her finger in anger.
“Yes.”
“Why is it on you?”
Ilyra’s smile shifted. Not wounded. Almost pleased, as though Nesta had asked the correct question first. “Of everything you could have said…”
“I’m not interested in everything. I’m interested in the collar.”
“Good.” Ilyra’s voice was rough with disuse, but beneath it ran something dry and quick that Nesta recognised immediately, because she owned a great deal of it herself. “I’ve been listening to you argue with him for three years. I wondered if you’d be as difficult in person.”
Behind her, Cassian made a sound. Nesta did not turn. “Listening?”
“Actually, feeling. It isn’t the same, but it’s the closest word I have.” Ilyra lifted one hand to the iron. The movement dragged a chain from the shadows behind her, and Nesta saw where it went. It was the eighth chain. The one that hadn’t broken. It ran from the wall to the collar, thick as her wrist, a dull orange glow ran through the links as it was burning hot. “Everything he feels comes down this thread. Most of it is noise. Pain, mostly. Five hundred years of pain, he is remarkably thorough about it. But three years ago something changed. It was like a window opening in a locked room.” Her eyes moved over Nesta’s face. “I have been very warm lately.”
Nesta’s grip on Ataraxia did not loosen. Something low in her chest did. “You’ve been living off him.”
“Yes.”
No apology. No hesitation. Nesta found, to her irritation, that she respected it.
“Ilyra.” Cassian had finally found his voice. It came out cracked down the middle. He stepped around Nesta before she could stop him, and this time she let him, because she had seen his face and there was nothing she could have said that would have mattered. She kept her sword where it was. Her other hand found the back of his belt and held on.
Ilyra watched him come. He was ready to crawl straight to her.
In reality, she was smaller than Nesta had expected. Her hair hung in a dark, matted curtain, her wrists were ringed with old scars, and she stood with her weight carefully balanced, like someone who had spent a very long time training in battle and knew every inch of her muscles and how to use them. But she looked at Cassian the way a person looks at a fire after a long winter. Not just hungry. Reverent.
“You got old,” she said.
Cassian laughed, as if it broke something in him; something that had been holding him back all this time, he sounded free. “I did not.”
“You have a scar through your eyebrow.”
“That’s from a Hybern blade.”
“It’s a very good scar. I like it.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “I’m sorry. I had a speech. I’ve had five hundred years to write it and I don’t remember any of it.”
Cassian stopped an arm’s length away. His hand came up. Stopped. His fingers were shaking.
“I saw you,” he said. “Just now. In the dark. You were sitting on the floor and there were twigs in your hair and I was complaining.”
“You were always complaining.”
“I didn’t remember you.” The words tore out of him. “Ilyra, I swear to you, I did not remember you. Not your face. Not your name. I remembered only the oath.” His voice broke. “But I didn’t remember loving you.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
Ilyra’s gaze slid past him to the stone. “Because I’m the one he made you forget.”
The passage went very quiet.
Emerie, who had been standing against the wall with the ledger clasped to her chest, said carefully, “I’d like to flag that I have a great many questions and they are all getting worse by the minute.”
From somewhere deeper in the dark, Arran laughed.
She tells it so well.
Ilyra’s whole body went rigid. The chain tightened. For one terrible moment Nesta watched the iron bite into her throat, and Cassian lunged and caught her shoulders. The silver light along the walls flared and went red.
“Stop it,” Cassian snarled at the dark. “Stop it, you bastard, stop—”
The chain loosened. Ilyra dragged in a breath and coughed. When she looked up, her eyes were wet, and furious, and entirely clear.
“He likes to show you who holds the leash,” she rasped. “Pay it no mind. It’s how he talks.”
“It’s how he dies,” Cassian said.
“Not yet.” Ilyra smiled, bleakly. “Believe me. I’ve tried.”
It took her a while to try and explain. Nesta understood why. Not because the story was long. Not really. But because it was the kind of story that has been told only to the walls, over and over again, and the words had worn smooth from handling.
She sat on the floor with her back against the stone, because her legs would not hold her anymore. She had used up all her energy. Cassian sat across from her. Not touching. Not yet. Nesta stayed standing between him and the dark, Ataraxia across her knees, listening with her whole body.
“The oath was real,” Ilyra said. “My father wanted a warlord’s blood in the family. Cassian was seventeen and Illyrian and bright, and he’d just survived something nobody survives. Father offered him a place at Ramiel and a promise of safety for his brothers if he would swear to guard me. And to marry me.”
“I remember that part,” Cassian said hoarsely.
“I know. It’s the part he left you.” She tilted her head back against the stone. “What he didn’t expect was that we’d like each other.”
Cassian made a small sound.
“You hated me for about a month,” Ilyra said. “Then I flew into a tree.”
“You flew into several trees.”
“I was learning.”
“You were terrible.”
“You taught me anyway.” She was smiling at him now, the first unguarded smile Nesta had seen on her, and it hurt. It made her look seventeen too. “That’s the part I wanted you to keep. Whatever he took, I wanted you to keep that.”
Nesta watched Cassian’s face and did not look away. This was not a thing she could fix with a sword. She was almost ashamed of how badly she wished she could.
She was also, she noticed, not jealous. Not in the way she had braced for. What she felt was something stranger. A hot, protective ache, the particular fury of watching someone she loved discover he had been robbed.
“What happened?” she asked.
Ilyra’s eyes found her. “You mean how did I die?”
“Yes.”
“Directly.” Ilyra almost laughed. “He said you would be.”
“Who did?”
“Cassian. Ten minutes ago, in the dark, in the only way he can talk to me. He kept saying, you’ll like her, she’s terrible.”
“I did not,” Cassian said, “say that.”
“You did. It’s all through the thread.”
Nesta’s mouth twitched before she could stop it. Cassian put his face in his hands.
Then Ilyra’s smile faded, and she told it plainly.
Six months into their happiness, her father decided the oath was not binding enough. Cassian was too free. Too fond of her. Too likely to take her and run, and Arran wanted an heir bound to his court, not a love match with a mercenary. So he had arranged for the matter to be settled. A blade, in the dark, at a festival. A death that would look like an Illyrian’s rage.
“He killed me,” Ilyra said. “And then he used it.”
The words sat in the passage.
“The oath had a clause Cassian never read. A clause Father wrote and sealed in his own blood, in the first hour. Should the bound one die, her breath shall be held in iron, and the oath shall feed her, and the one who swore shall carry what she cannot.” Her hand lifted to the collar. “I should have stayed dead. Instead I woke in this, with your life running through it like a river, and my father standing over me saying, Now he has a reason never to break it.“
Cassian had gone white to the lips. “If I broke the oath—”
“I would die. Properly. And so, very probably, would you, because I am not the only thing it holds.” Ilyra said it gently, which was worse. “It was never a leash. It was a cage with two prisoners. You were meant to carry me and hate yourself for it and never, ever cut the thread. And then he took the memory so you couldn’t even grieve properly.”
“Why take the memory?” Emerie asked.
“Because a man who remembers loving someone starts looking for her.” Ilyra’s voice cracked at last. “And Father needed you to stay away from Ramiel until it was time.”
“Time for what?” Nesta said.
Ilyra looked at her for a long moment.
“That,” she said, “is the part I’ve been trying to say since you walked in.”
Emerie opened the ledger on her knee.
“The seven oaths,” she said slowly. “You cut them. We traced it. Coerced vows, released one by one, and every one sent power north to this mountain.”
“Yes.”
“You said you were cutting oaths and opening cages.”
“I was.” Ilyra’s hands tightened in her lap. “Mine. He told me each one would loosen the collar. He was right, at first. I felt it ease. I felt air. I thought I was digging my own way out through other people’s chains. I believed it for six years.” She shut her eyes. “It was seven keys. I was cutting the keys to his door and handing them over one at a time.”
Cassian’s head came up. “Why did he need you to cut them?”
“Because only a person bound by an oath can cut an oath. That’s the whole of the magic. He could not do it himself. He needed a prisoner who wanted out.”
Nesta’s jaw tightened. “And the eighth?”
“The eighth is not a vow I could cut.” Ilyra opened her eyes. “It’s the one he saved.”
Cassian’s mark pulsed red through his leathers. The chain between the wall and the collar thrummed in answer. Nesta felt it in her soul; she was losing him, little by little.
Ilyra’s gaze dropped to Cassian’s wrist. Nesta saw it too. The vow-mark. Fine silver lines, curving over the pulse. The one he had given her freely, in a quiet room, three months after the bond settled. The one nobody had asked him for.
“That,” Ilyra said softly. “Do you know when I first felt it?”
“I do not like where this is going,” said Cassian.
“The night you made it. I woke up on this floor and every link in my chain sang. It was the first time in five centuries I’d felt something answer.” She looked up at Nesta, and the knowing smile was gone. What replaced it was worse. It was pity. “There was a second part to the clause. The one he never let Cassian read. I only heard it once, when I was dying.”
She drew a breath.
“And should the one who swore bind himself again, by choice and without compulsion, the oath shall pass through her, and through the one he chose, and the door shall open.“
Silence.
Nesta felt the passage tilt.
Through her.
She thought of the voice behind the stone. Maybe you were not part of the bargain. But you may be exactly what is needed. She thought of Cassian’s quiet room, and his hand on her wrist, and the way he had said I would like to give you something that isn’t a command. She thought of how long she had refused to believe anyone could give her anything freely.
“He wasn’t waiting for Cassian to come back,” she said slowly.
“No.”
“He was waiting for someone Cassian would choose.”
“For five hundred years.” Ilyra’s eyes shone. “Without knowing if it would ever happen. A cursed, grieving warrior who’d forgotten how to love anyone. Father didn’t expect it. He built the clause as a joke on his own legacy, a trap he thought could never spring. And then three years ago, something changed.”
Cassian’s voice came out like gravel. “That’s why the oath reacted to Rhys. It wasn’t a competing claim. It was looking.”
“Yes.”
“And how it knows she’s Made.”
“Yes.”
Nesta found she was very calm. It was the old calm, the cold, clean one, the one she had worn through the Cauldron and the war and every long night of Rhysand’s House. She had made a career of it.
“You said seven opened the door,” she said.
Ilyra’s face crumpled. “Seven keys. Seven oaths. That’s the door. It’s already open.”
“Then what is the eighth?”
Ilyra didn’t answer.
Behind the stone, in the black, Arran began to speak again, and this time the voice was almost gentle.
Eight will feed it.
Cassian was on his feet before Nesta saw him move. “Don’t you dare—”
Not eight oaths, boy. Eight lives.
Nesta’s hand tightened on Ataraxia.
“Ilyra,” she said, very quietly. “How many people did you cut free?”
“Seven.”
“And where are they now?”
Ilyra’s mouth opened. Closed. The colour left her face so fast it was almost unkind.
“I never—” she whispered. “I never saw them. I only ever felt the oath go. I assumed they were free.”
Emerie dropped the ledger. It hit the stone with a flat crack. And the pages, all of them, began to turn. Faster. Faster. Ink crawling across the margins in a hand Nesta had never seen, a long, elegant, patient hand. When the pages stopped, the final line was still wet.
VIII. N. Archeron. Freely bound. By choice. Delivered.
“No,” Cassian said.
The eighth chain moved.
It slid across the stone with a sound like a long slow breath. Not toward Cassian. Not toward Ilyra. It uncoiled from the wall, past the collar, past the broken links of the seven, and lifted its iron head like a snake that has finally smelled its prey.
It was heading straight for Nesta’s throat.
“Don’t,” Ilyra said, scrambling back against the stone. “Don’t let it touch you. Please. It does not ask twice.”
Cassian threw himself between them. “Nesta, move—“
Behind the stone, Arran said, almost fondly:
There she is.
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