Chapter 3: Honey and Smoke
He winnowed you both there before you'd finished pulling on your blouse.
One moment you were in the bare room at the top of the House of Wind, the next you were standing in the alley outside your studio, the cobbles cold under your bare feet and the smell of the river on the air. It was the hour before dawn. The Rainbow was asleep, its painted doors dark, its lanterns burned out. Your studio window was glowing.
Not furnace-glow. You'd banked the furnace. This was a hard white light, moving.
Azriel put himself between you and the door without seeming to move at all. One moment he was beside you; the next he was in front, wings half-spread, and in his hand was a long black dagger you hadn't seen him draw, its blade drinking the light. The shadows poured off him and slid under the door ahead of him like water.
He tilted his head. Listening. You realized the shadows were telling him things.
"Two," he murmured. "Day Court. One of them has a light-wielder's gift. They're going through your sketchbooks." A pause. His voice went very flat. "They're looking for you."
Your stomach dropped through the cobbles.
"My cousin," you whispered. "It'll be someone my cousin sent."
He glanced back at you. Just once, quickly, and through the bond you felt the question he didn't ask out loud.
"My family's minor nobility. Old. The kind that cares a lot about bloodlines." The words came out tight. "Heat-wielders are rare in Day. My cousin wanted me to marry an ally of his and breed more of us. I said no. He said it wasn't a question. I left in the night with my apprenticeship papers and never went back." You swallowed. "That was six years ago. I thought he'd given up."
Azriel was quiet for one heartbeat. Through the bond, you felt something in him go absolutely, glacially calm, the way deep water is calm.
"Stay here," he said.
"Azriel."
"Please." He looked back at you again, and in the dark his hazel eyes were burning. "Let me do this. For you. Let me be good at the thing I'm good at."
You let him go.
He went in through the door like smoke. There was no sound. There was a flash of hard white light through the window, a muffled thud, a second flash cut off abruptly. A shelf of glass rang like bells as something heavy hit it. Then nothing.
The silence stretched so long you were halfway to the door when it opened, and Azriel stood there, unhurt, his dagger sheathed, his shadows coiling contentedly around his shoulders.
"Come and see," he said. "They'd like to talk to you."
They were both sitting on the floor of your studio, back to back, bound at the wrists by ropes of living shadow. One was a tall High Fae male in Day Court gold whose face you vaguely remembered from your aunt's dinner table, now sporting a split lip. The other was a female with sun-bright hair who glared at Azriel with pure murderous hatred and at you with something closer to shame.
Your sketchbooks were scattered across the floor. A shelf had come down. Three of your best pitchers were in pieces.
Azriel crouched down in front of the male, unhurried, and drew the black dagger again. He didn't threaten with it. He just laid it flat across his knee, where the man could see it.
"This is Truth-Teller," he said pleasantly. "You've probably heard of it. It doesn't miss, and it doesn't lie. I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're going to answer them, and then you're going to go home and tell your master something from me." He tilted his head. "Who sent you?"
The male's eyes were fixed on the dagger. "Lord Calaen."
Your cousin. You'd known, but hearing it still landed like a slap.
"What were you supposed to do?"
"Bring her home." The male swallowed. "Alive. Unharmed. He has a match arranged. He said she'd come to her senses once she was back."
The shadows around the room thickened and went very cold. Azriel's face didn't change at all.
"Here's my message," Azriel said softly. "She's not coming to her senses. She's not coming home. She lives here, in the Night Court, under the protection of the High Lord of the Night Court and his Inner Circle. If Lord Calaen sends anyone else across our border to touch so much as a pane of her glass, I will come to Day myself, and I will find him, and I will not bring Truth-Teller." He leaned in. "Tell him the shadowsinger said so. Tell him she's my mate."
The female's head snapped up. She stared at you.
"Is it true?" she said. "You're mated to him? To the Night Court's spymaster?"
Your face was burning. Your hands were burning too, as they always did when you felt too much. You looked at Azriel, crouched on your floor among the broken glass with his dagger across his knee and his shadows wrapped around two terrified Day Court agents, and through the bond you felt the thing he was trying very hard to hide from you: that he'd said it without asking, and now he was afraid. Afraid he'd claimed something that wasn't his to claim yet.
"Not quite," you said. "Give me a minute."
You walked to the back of the studio, to the cupboard where you kept your lunches. There was a paper bag on the top shelf. Inside it was one honey bun, a day old, slightly squashed.
You took it out and tore it in half. You walked back across the broken glass to where Azriel was crouching, and you knelt down in front of him on the floor, in front of two Day Court spies and every shadow in the room, and held half of it out to him on your open palm.
Azriel went utterly still.
"You don't have to," he said, barely audible. "Not now. Not because of them. You can take as long as—"
"I've been feeding your shadows for weeks," you said. "I think it's your turn."
He looked at the honey bun in your hand for a long, long moment. Then at you. Then, slowly, he leaned forward and took a bite out of it, straight from your palm, his eyes never leaving your face.
The bond flared.
It was like the snap, but the opposite: not a door blown open but a door gently, finally closed, with both of you on the same side of it. Warmth ran down the cord between your hearts and back again, his and yours braided together until you couldn't tell them apart. You felt the instant it settled. So did he. You saw it on his face: the astonishment, the relief so huge it looked like grief, the joy.
He finished the bun. He licked a smear of honey off your thumb, very deliberately, and the female Day Court agent made a strangled noise and looked at the ceiling.
"There," you said, a little unsteadily. "Now it's true."
Rhysand himself came to collect the prisoners an hour later. He appeared in your doorway with dawn pinking the sky behind him, dark-haired and violet-eyed and tremendously amused, took in the broken glass and the bound agents and the honey on his spymaster's mouth, and said, "Well. Feyre owes me ten gold marks." Then he winked at you, said "Welcome to the family," and winnowed away with both Day Court agents before you could think of a single thing to say.
Azriel flew you up to the roof.
Your studio's roof was flat and tarred and full of the clutter of six years: broken crates, a chair with three legs, pots of herbs you kept meaning to water. You'd never been up there with anyone. He set you down by the low wall at the edge, where you could see all of Velaris waking up beneath you, smoke rising from a hundred chimneys, the Sidra silver in the new light.
And then he stood there with his wings mantled around you both, blocking out the wind, and just looked at you.
"What?" you said.
"I'm trying to figure out what I did to deserve this."
"You stole a honey bun," you said. "Well. Your shadows did."
He laughed. It sounded easier than it had last night, like something long rusted was starting to move freely. Then he cupped your face in both scarred hands, warm now from your skin, and kissed you, slow and deep and certain, with the whole city waking up below.
You didn't make it back downstairs.
You did it right there on the roof, in the soft pink light, with his wings spread wide to shield you and his shadows curled around the two of you like a wall. You pulled his shirt over his head, and he laid you back on his own folded jacket, and this time there was no desperation in it, no six days of wanting cracking open at once. This time it was slow. Easy. Unhurried. He kissed every part of you he could reach, as if he were making a map he meant to keep, and you ran your burning hands over his scars and his wings and felt him shiver under your palms. You knew now exactly where to touch, where the edges of his wings met his back, and you used it mercilessly until he was gasping into your neck.
"Cruel," he said again, laughing breathlessly.
"You love it."
"I love you," Azriel said.
You stopped.
He'd said it simply, against your temple, his body over yours and his heart beating against your breastbone. Through the bond it came with no wall in front of it at all: just the plain bright truth of it, steady as sunrise.
"I love you," he said again, quieter. "I don't know how to do this. I've never let myself. But I love you, and I'm going to learn."
You pulled him down and kissed him, and when he moved into you, you felt it through the bond from both sides at once, the heat and the fullness and the sweet, aching stretch, his pleasure and yours echoing back and forth between you until it built to something impossible. You moved together in the dawn light, slow and then not slow, his name and yours spilling out of both of your mouths, and when you came apart you did it together, his wings flaring wide and dark across the sky, his shadows singing.
Later, much later, you were sitting with your back against the low wall, wrapped in his jacket, with his head in your lap and his wings sprawled carelessly across the tar. One of his shadows had brought up the smoked-glass vessel from his room and set it on the wall beside you. The silver threads inside it glittered in the sun.
"I'll need to rebuild that shelf," you said, combing your fingers through his hair.
"I'll help."
"You'll break things."
"Probably." He didn't sound worried about it. His eyes were closed. "I'm told the glassmaker knows how to fix them."
You smiled down at him. Through the bond you could feel how happy he was, so plainly that you thought your own heart might crack under it.
Then his eyes opened, and the happiness went sharp and alert, and his gaze fixed on something over your shoulder.
You turned. A small bird of golden light was hovering over the roof, flickering like a candle flame. It dropped a scroll into your lap. The seal on it was a sunburst.
You knew that seal. Everyone in the Day Court knew that seal.
"Helion," Azriel said quietly, sitting up. "The High Lord of Day."
You broke the seal with shaking fingers. There were only two lines.
My lady, it read. Your cousin has made claims about you to my court that I find deeply interesting. I would like you, and your mate, to come to Day and explain.