Morrigan was rapturous. The emotion I felt flood her mind when I sent her the mental message letting her know to expect me shortly was comforting. But I quickly shut off the link between our thoughts so that I could try to send another more important message. I’d deal with my cousin’s scorn at being cut short after fifty years of waiting later.
The midday sun as I waited for her felt glorious and I was the only one just then who knew it. The rest of the Mountain had either fled home the second Amarantha’s blood was spilt or were resting sound asleep below me. Often I’d come here when I wasn’t being kept to Amarantha’s bedside just to find a brief reprieve amid the chaos, a masochistic reminder that though I could not throw myself into the mountains off the balcony and fly, the ability to do so was still possible. It filled me with such hope some nights.
Shuffling sounded behind me startling me from my reverie. Feyre groaned when she stepped onto the balcony, the sunlight forcing her sleepy eyes to form narrow slits, but I only saw the way it made the gold stand out in the waves her hair as they blew on the breeze.
She was enchanting.
“I forgot it’s been a while for you,” I said with a small chuckle.
She opened her eyes wide enough to take in the glorious mountains in the distance, but then her gaze finally captured me and she was quiet. The silence from her stretched on and the longer it went, the more nervous I became. She seemed to take in every piece of me, my long limbs, the small wisps of hair at my neck, and the membranous wings I was so glad to display openly to her now without pretense.
But then she found my eyes and a turbulent sea of hurt and blood she carried calmed within them. “What do you want?” she asked, but her voice was not harsh or combative for once. Instead, she was soft towards me, considerate even, almost as if she maybe cared about me in some small way. It made my heart melt with longing for the missed companionship we could share, all from that one simple question on her lips.
But reality was cruel.
“Just to say good-bye,” I replied. “Before your beloved whisks you away forever.”
“Not forever,” Feyre said, twirling her tattooed hand before me and this time, there was some of that fire I loved in her voice. “Don’t you get a week every month?”
“How could I forget?”
She came closer and again I felt her eyes search me, scanning the contours of my face. I felt a flash of pain and a vision of blood - my blood - whip through her mind, but I locked it out before it could fully unfold. Now that the trials were over, I had pledged not to intrude on her mind anymore. She didn’t need my help anymore to survive some outrageous task or keep her head space clear while she suffered in a prison cell. Her thoughts should be her own, as they always should have been.
But it had definitely been my face her mind had conjured, bloody and beaten and broken by Amarantha and I knew what she wanted from me when she asked me so plainly, “Why?” Why did I do it?
And oh where to begin?
Because I love you, I thought. Because you’re my mate and you’re wonderful and alive and the only person who makes me feel like myself again and I could never have let you die without giving myself up for you first.
Instead I shrugged, offering her a half truth. “Because when the legends get written, I didn’t want to be remembered for standing on the sidelines. I want my future offspring to know that I was there, and that I fought against her at the end, even if I couldn’t do anything useful.”
I would have left it at that, but as I stared at Feyre, my heart fell into her hands and I couldn’t concentrate on what version of myself she was supposed to see anymore. So I gave her the other half of the truth. “Because I didn’t want you to fight alone. Or die alone.”
“Thank you,” she said, her voice low and almost hoarse, grateful even.
“I doubt you’ll be saying that when I take you to the Night Court.” I cast a grin to take her pain away, return some of the banter between us, but she looked away towards the mountains deflated once more.
“Are you going to fly home?” she asked. I chuckled at being asked such an endearing question and she didn’t even know why it thrilled me.
“Unfortunately, it would take longer than I can afford. Another day, I’ll taste the skies again.”
She returned her gaze to me, trailing along my wings that ruffled for her, and again, she sounded hoarse. “You never told me you loved the wings - or the flying.” And I realized then that she sounded so sorrowful not because of me and what I’d done to her, but for me and what I’d lost Under the Mountain.
“Everything I love has always had a tendency to be taken from me,” I explained. “I tell very few about the wings. Or the flying.”
She merely looked at me in reply, studying my features up close. She was full of searching me today, it was practically all she’d done since her eyes had adjusted to the sunlight. The possibility that she had started to care for me even if only in the very slightest made my heart race. I’d spent fifty years thinking no one cared, or at least, no one I would ever see again, and now here was Feyre. Here was my mate when I needed her most to stitch the pieces of my soul together.
I could tell her about the bond, I thought to myself as I did some searching of my own, taking in her newly pointed ears and the more defined angles of her face. She still had her freckles, thank the Cauldron. Given the time, I would have counted each of them from the tip of her nose to the sides of her cheeks where I had once kissed her tears away. What it would be like to touch them again now without her fear of me hiding behind them.
My mate. My mate. My mate.
It was a simple fact. We were mates. It would explain so much of what I’d done for her the past three months, why I’d treated her as I had. Surely she could understand that? And even if it didn’t change how she felt about me, something I could never blame her for even if it broke me inside, knowing we were mates didn’t mean she had to accept the bond. But maybe it could forge a peace between us, a way for her to leave here without a heart full of hatred for me.
She cared. I heard it in her voice more than once already on this balcony, so surely that was a start, an open door for me to cross over and tell her…
“How does it feel to be a High Fae?” I asked, deflecting to buy myself time in my nervousness. I instantly regretted the question when she looked away from me yet again.
“I’m an immortal - who has been mortal,” she said after a long pause. “This body… This body is different, but this-” her voice dropped in something like disgust with herself and I could hear the tears building with shame, shame I wanted to snatch from her over and over until she knew she wasn’t the criminal she thought she was. “This is still human. Maybe it always will be. But it would have been easier to live with it… Easier to live with what I did if my heart had changed, too. Maybe I wouldn’t care so much; maybe I could convince myself their deaths weren’t in vain. Maybe immortality will take that away. I can’t tell whether I want it to.”
And I knew I couldn’t tell her. The bond would have to wait, maybe forever. She was so exhausted, in so much pain already that to heap upon her yet another challenge would have been cruel. It would destroy the nugget of worth I dared hope she saw in me, to see me reveal the struggle that the mating bond would be. I couldn’t do that to her. Not now. Not ever.
And why stop there? Maybe everything about me was a burden for her. Maybe it would be best to let her go, to free her of our bargain entirely and pretend the mating bond had never existed. It might kill me in the end to do it, to pretend to live without feeling, but I could try… for her, if it meant she could be happy again.
It was a long while that passed in which I didn’t say anything. Feyre noticed and turned a final time to me.
“Be glad of your human heart, Feyre,” I said, offering what little comfort I could amidst the backdrop of the thoughts in my tempestuous heart. “Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.” She simply nodded and with her mind locked, I didn’t know what she thought of me. It was agonizing not to know. “Well, good-bye for now,” I said hating that I had to go.
I bowed low for her, a gesture only Feyre could ever merit from me, and then began to fade away. But as my wings returned to my body and I rose back up, my eyes found hers and my entire body seized. My blood raced through my veins with the scent of her, of Feyre and everything that she was. Her mind, her body, her soul, I felt all of it and I wanted every ounce and then some. She was radiant, like hope and joy made manifest and my life felt complete just looking at her. It shocked me so thoroughly that I fell backwards, all of my usual grace utterly gone.
Feyre.
The name curled around my heart and I was lost. The entire world was her and she was me and if I didn’t have her now, I would go mad.
My mate. My mate. My mate.
Feyre had very clearly noticed my reaction even if she didn’t understand what it was due to. “What is-” she started to say, but the sound of her voice was a new frenzy, a war cry thrumming in my body to take her then and there, something I knew could not happen. And so I winnowed, without a word of explanation.
The shadow of surprise on Feyre’s face was the last thing I saw before the warm air of the Night Court took me home at last.