What the House Keeps

The House of Wind woke Nesta at three in the morning by dropping a book on her face. She came up swinging, which was not a habit she was proud of, and her fist met nothing but the cold air of the bedroom. The book slid off her chest and thumped onto the rug. Somewhere in the walls, the House made a sound she had learned to recognize over the past year: a low groan of old stone, like a dog whining at a door. "What," Nesta said into the dark. "What is it." The candle on the nightstand lit itself. The book lay open on the floor, and it was not one of the books the House usually brought her, the ones with cracked spines and heroines who said exactly what they meant. This was a field manual. Illyrian, by the stitching, the leather gone soft from handling. It had fallen open to a diagram of a wing, every bone and membrane labeled in a cramped, careful hand. Nesta was out of bed before she had finished reading the first label. The corridor was dark, and the House did not bother lighting it for her. It didn't need to. She knew where she was going. The landing pad on the western side of the House was open to the sky, a wide flat shelf of stone where the Illyrians took off and landed when they couldn't be bothered with stairs, and the wind came off the mountain cold enough to bite. She had her nightgown on and nothing else, and she did not care. Cassian was sitting with his back against the archway, his legs stretched out in front of him, his head tipped back against the stone. His left wing was folded tight. His right wing was not folded at all. It lay across the landing pad at an angle no wing should lie at, and even in the starlight Nesta could see the dark, glistening tear that ran from the second joint nearly to the edge of the membrane. "Don't," he said, before she could open her mouth. His eyes were closed. "It looks worse than it is." "It looks," Nesta said, "like someone took a cleaver to you." "Spear. Barbed." He opened one eye. "And you should see the other fellow." She knelt beside him. Up close, she could smell the blood, and beneath it the cold, mineral scent of high altitude, the steppes at night. He had been gone eleven days. Some trouble on the border between the Illyrian war-camps and the lands that belonged to no one; Rhys had sent him with a dozen soldiers and orders to settle it quietly. Nesta had not asked what quietly meant. She had trained every morning with Gwyn and Emerie, and she had read in the evenings, and she had climbed the ten thousand steps twice in one week because her legs needed something to do that wasn't pacing. "Why are you sitting out here," she said. "Didn't want to wake you." "You flew back like this?" "Glided, mostly. Ugly landing." He tried to smile. It didn't hold. "Az would have carried me, but he's still out there tidying up, and Rhys and Feyre are at the river house with the baby, and I didn't want to bang on Madja's door at this hour like some pup who fell out of a tree." "So you thought you'd bleed on the porch." "I thought I'd rest a minute first." Nesta looked at the wing. She looked at the field manual, which had appeared on the stone beside her knee while she wasn't watching, still open to the same page. *Thank you,* she thought at the walls, and the House creaked once in what she chose to take as acknowledgment. "Hold still," she said. "Nes. You don't have to do anything. It'll close on its own by morning if I keep it straight." "It will not close on its own by morning, because I can see the barb is still in it." That shut him up. He turned his head and looked at his own wing, and she watched him find it: the small black hook of metal lodged just below the joint, the flesh around it puffed and angry. His jaw tightened. "Ah," he said. "That would explain the stabbing sensation." The House sent warm water. Nesta did not see it arrive, only turned around and there it was, a basin steaming on the stone, with clean linen folded beside it and a small pair of pliers that looked like they belonged in a jeweler's workshop. A bottle of something amber. A bar of the harsh brown soap the healers used. She reached to push up her sleeves and found bare arms; the nightgown didn't have any. "The book says," she began, then read it again to be sure. "The book says you have to fold the wing toward the body while the barb comes out. Otherwise the membrane tears further." "The book's right." His voice had gone quieter. "I'll fold. You pull. Quick and straight, the way it went in. Don't twist it." "I know how to pull something straight." "I know you do." She wrapped linen around the base of the barb so she wouldn't slip. Her hands were steady. That surprised her, distantly; a year ago her hands had shaken every morning until the second glass of wine. Now they held the pliers like they held a sword in the ring, firm and without fuss. "On three," Cassian said. She pulled on two. He made a noise through his teeth that she would remember for some time. The wing jerked inward, curling toward his body like a startled bird's, and the barb came free in the pliers, trailing a thin dark thread of blood. Nesta dropped it into the basin, where it clinked against the bottom. "You said three," he managed. "You'd have tensed on three." "That's—" He breathed out hard. "That's exactly what I would have done to a recruit. Cauldron boil me. Who taught you that?" "You did." He laughed, and it hurt him, and he kept laughing anyway, his head knocking softly against the arch. She cleaned the wound. The amber stuff in the bottle stung, judging by how still he went, but he didn't say a word. The book, at her elbow, had turned its own page to a drawing of stitches, and Nesta looked at it for a long moment before she shook her head. "I'm not sewing you," she said. "I'll make it worse." "Then don't. Madja can do it in the morning. Just bind it so it doesn't flap around." She bound it. The linen went around the joint and over the torn membrane, careful, layered, the way she'd seen Emerie wrap her own hands before practice. When she tied it off, Cassian lifted the wing an inch, testing, and set it back down. "Good," he said. "That's good." The wind had died down a little. Nesta became aware of how cold she was, now that there was nothing left to do with her hands. Her bare feet were numb on the stone. She sat back on her heels and wiped her palms on her nightgown, leaving faint rust-colored streaks. Cassian was watching her. In the ring he measured her stance and the angle of her blade in quick flicks of his eyes. This look took its time. "What," she said. "You came out here in your nightgown." "The House threw a book at me." "Did it." He glanced at the dark doorway behind her, and his mouth twitched. "Remind me to bring it something nice. Do Houses like anything? Polish? Fresh rugs?" "It likes chocolate cake. It keeps making them." "For you." "For itself, I think. I'm only the excuse." He reached for her hand. His fingers were cold and rough and still faintly sticky with dried blood, and she let him take hers anyway. For a while neither of them said anything. Below them, far down the mountain, Velaris lay spread along the Sidra like someone had spilled a jar of embers along the riverbank, a few lights still burning in the Rainbow where the painters kept their own hours. "I didn't sleep much," Nesta said finally. "While you were gone." "No?" "I climbed the stairs. Twice in one week. Gwyn said I was going to wear grooves in them." He was quiet. She could feel him not saying anything, which with Cassian was a deliberate act, like holding a door open. "I kept thinking," she said, and stopped, and made herself go on. "I kept thinking about my father. How he went to fight because of me, and I was there, and I saw it, and there was nothing. Nothing I could do with my hands. And then you were gone and I didn't know where and I thought, if it happens again I'll be up here reading about some woman who climbs out a window on a rope of bedsheets, and I won't even know." His thumb moved over her knuckles. Slowly, back and forth. "So I'm glad," Nesta said, with great precision, "that you came here first. Instead of Madja. Even if you sat on the porch like an idiot." "I'm always going to come here first." "You don't know that." "I do." He tipped his head toward her until his temple rested against hers. He smelled of blood and wind and the cheap Illyrian soap he refused to give up. "I knew it about thirty miles out, when the wing went bad and I had to pick somewhere to put down. Could've landed at the camp. Could've gone to Rhys. I pointed myself at this rock and thought, she'll be asleep, I'll just sit near her for a bit." Nesta closed her eyes. "You absolute fool," she said, and it came out softer than she meant. "Mm. Yours, though." The House sighed around them, an enormous breath through every corridor at once, and somewhere inside a door swung open on its own. Nesta did not need to look to know which one. Their room, with the bed turned down and the fire already laid and, she would have bet a month of training, a chocolate cake sitting on the table that had not been there an hour ago. "Up," she said, getting her shoulder under his good arm. "Mind the wing." "Bossy." "You love it." "I do," Cassian said, and leaned on her the whole way in.