If the priestess gathered that she’d been played, she didn’t let on. But there was something like sorrow leaking from Clotho, as if she, too, had wanted to see that sheet filled today.

Nesta didn’t know why it mattered. Why Clotho’s sorrow knocked the wind from her, but then Nesta was moving, up through the House to the ten thousand steps.

Perhaps she was good for nothing after all. Perhaps she’d been a fool to think that this trick might convince them. Maybe physical training wasn’t what they required to overcome their demons, and she’d been arrogant enough to assume she knew what they needed.

Down and down the stairs Nesta walked, the walls pressing in.

She only made it to stair nine hundred before she turned around, her steps as heavy as if they’d been weighed with lead blocks.

Nesta was still sweating and breathing hard when she stumbled into her room and found a book on the nightstand. She raised a brow at the title. “This isn’t your usual sort of romance,” she said to the room.

It wasn’t a romance at all. It was an old bound manuscript called The Dance of Battle.

Nesta said, “You can take this one back, thank you.” The last thing she wanted to read at night was some dreary old text about war strategy. The House did no such thing, and Nesta sighed and picked up the manuscript, the black leather binding so age-worn it was butter soft.

A familiar smell drifted to her from the pages. “You didn’t leave this for me, did you?”

The House replied by plopping down a stack of romances, as if to say, This is what I would have chosen.

Nesta peered at the manuscript, full of Cassian’s scent, as if he’d read it a thousand times.

He’d left it for her. Deemed her worthy of whatever lay inside.

Nesta perched on the edge of the bed and thumbed open the text.

It was midnight when she took a break from reading The Dance of Battle and rubbed her temples. She hadn’t put it down, not even to eat dinner at her desk, holding it with one hand while she devoured her stew with the other.

It was astonishing how much of the art of warfare was like the social manipulation her mother had insisted she learn: picking battlegrounds, finding allies amongst the enemies of one’s enemies … Some of it was wholly new, of course, and such a precise way of thinking that she knew she’d have to read the manuscript many times to fully grasp its lessons.

She’d been aware that Cassian knew how to lead armies. Had watched him do so with unflinching precision and cleverness. But reading the manuscript, she realized she had never understood just how much advanced thinking went into planning battles and wars.

Nesta set the manuscript on her nightstand and lay back against her pillows.

She pictured Cassian on a battlefield, as he’d been that day he’d gone up against a Hybern commander and thrown a spear so hard the male had been hurled from his horse upon impact.

He departed from the manuscript’s advice in only one way: he fought on the front lines with his soldiers, rather than commanding from the rear.

She let her thoughts drift for a time, until they snared upon another tangle of thorns.

Did it matter if the priestesses didn’t show up for training? Beyond her own reluctance to concede failure, did it matter?

It did. Somehow, it did.

She had failed in every aspect of her life. Utterly and spectacularly failed, and keeping others from realizing it had been her main purpose. She had shut them out, had shut herself out, because the weight of all those failures threatened to shatter her into a thousand pieces.

Nesta rubbed her face with her hands.

Sleep was a long time coming.

Sweat was still running down her body when Nesta entered the library the next afternoon, aiming for the ramp to take her down to where she’d left her cart.

She didn’t have the courage to look at the empty sign-up sheet. To rip it down.

She didn’t have the courage to look at Clotho and admit her defeat. She kept walking.

But Clotho halted her with an upraised hand. Nesta swallowed. “What?”

Clotho pointed behind Nesta, her gnarled finger indicating the doorway. No, the pillar.

And it was not sorrow leaking from the priestess, but something like buzzing excitement. Something that made Nesta whirl on her heel and stride for the pillar.

A name had been scrawled on the sheet.

One name, in bold letters. One name, ready for tomorrow’s lesson.

GWYN

PART TWO

BLADE

CHAPTER

25

“Stop looking so nervous,” Cassian muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’m not nervous,” Nesta muttered back, even as she bounced on her feet, trying not to stare toward the open archway as the clock ticked toward nine.

“Just relax.” He straightened his jacket.

“You’re the one fidgeting,” she hissed.

“Because you’re making me fidget.”

Steps scuffed on the stone beyond the archway, and Nesta’s breath rushed from her in a wave she didn’t realize she was holding back as Gwyn’s coppery-brown hair appeared. In the sunlight, the color of her hair was extraordinary, strands of gold glinting, and her teal eyes were a near-perfect match to the stones the other priestesses wore.

Gwyn beheld them standing in the center of the ring and stopped short.

The tang of her fear set Nesta approaching. “Hello.”

Gwyn’s hands were shaking as she took another step into the ring and peered into the open bowl of the sky.

The first time she’d been outside—truly outside—in years.

Cassian, to his credit, moved to the rack of wooden practice weapons that he’d claimed they wouldn’t be using for months, and pretended to adjust them.

Gwyn swallowed. “I, um—I realized on the way up here that I don’t have proper clothes.” She gestured to her pale robes. “I suspect these will not be ideal.”

Cassian said without looking over, “I can teach you in the robes, if you wish. Whatever’s most comfortable.”

Gwyn offered him a tight smile. “I’ll see how today’s lesson goes and then decide. We wear the robes mostly from tradition, not strict rules.” She met Nesta’s gaze again as she smiled. “I forgot how it feels to have the full sun upon my head.” She peered up again. “Forgive me if I spend some time gawking at the sky.”

“Of course,” Nesta said. She hadn’t encountered Gwyn yesterday after seeing that she’d signed up for this morning’s lesson, but she’d been almost afraid to—worried that one accidentally uttered sour remark would make Gwyn reconsider.

Words stalled in Nesta’s throat, but Cassian seemed to anticipate that. “All right. No more chitchat. Nes, show our new friend—Gwyn, is it? I’m Cassian. Nes, show her your feet.”

“Feet?” Gwyn’s copper brows rose.

Nesta rolled her eyes. “You’ll see.”

Gwyn grasped the concept of grounding through her feet better than Nesta had, and certainly had no issues with dropping her weight into her right hip and other things Nesta had worked to correct for three weeks. Even with the robes, it was clear that Gwyn was built lithe and lean, accustomed to the casual grace of the Fae that Nesta was only learning.