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The words were blurring together again.
Feyre’s hands shook as she set down the papers she was trying to read and pressed her clenched fists to her eyes. A long, deep breath cleared her lungs, but her head roared as slick, black panic dripped in, coating the walls of her mental shields until she could barely see out.
Trapped. She was trapped, and in her own mind—
Her heartbeat pounded against the steel bars of her ribcage, and she dropped her hands, blinking as the bright sunlight in her study blinded her. One moment—she allowed herself one single moment to spiral before she took another breath and braved a glance back at the petition.
Her heart dropped.
She couldn’t read it.
The sweeping, embellished penmanship was beyond her. The curls shifted and transformed before her eyes. What seemed like an uppercase S mutated into a lowercase F as her eyes followed the line. The strangely elongated dots over the I’s and unfamiliar curling accents over N’s crawled into one another to form sinister sneers that leered out at her from the page.
She picked the papers up again, holding them closer to her face, as if proximity might help her puzzle out what sound the long flourish of a joint P and Y might make.
She had to get this done. She had to. Rhys was expected in Day tomorrow to discuss ongoing trade negotiations with Helion, and she was meant to meet with the governors of the Palaces in Velaris at the same time to soothe their concerns about the rising costs of importing basic necessities. The concerns, Feyre thought with a drooping groan, that they detailed in the document she was holding. The ones that, according to Azriel’s brief report earlier in the morning, contained threats to bloat the prices of those everyday necessities beyond the means of the Night Court’s poorest citizens if they didn’t get their way.
She should have hired a secretary like she wanted to last Solstice. She had gotten as far as interviewing a few promising candidates before hiding their letters of interest in one of the overstuffed drawers in her desk, seized by a sudden sense of shame that, in nearly four centuries of ruling as High Lord, Rhys hadn’t needed a secretary. Tamlin never had one, either, unless she counted Lucien occasionally sorting through his correspondence and weeding out the junk mail. And, hell, although Tarquin had a council of advisors, he ignored those tittering old busybodies more often than not.
It was too late for that. Her people were counting on her.
Her mate was counting on her.
That thought increased the sick heat gathering behind Feyre’s ears and slipping down the sides of her neck and burning on her cheeks. Her mate, the same male who had insisted she learn to read. Who had once teased the idea of using it as a form of torment during her one week out of every month at the Night Court, if only to piss her off enough to keep fighting Under the Mountain.
And, gods, she had been doing so well on her own, anyway. Just two months ago, she’d read an ancient manuscript written by the founder of the university in Dunmere during their commencement ceremony without stumbling over a single word. The memory of that day threatened to undo her now. She could read that musty, half-rotted parchment with ease, but not this… this self-important drivel?
A bit of smoke tickled her nose, and Feyre glanced down to find her hands glowing like live coals, singeing holes into either side of the petition. She dropped it, dragging thoughts of ice-blasted winter winds and glassy, frozen lakes to the forefront of her mind—
But before she could calm herself, a night-kissed wind swept in, encasing her hands in cooling darkness. It smothered the crackling embers, the bits of paper blackened beneath her touch disintegrating into ash.
“Shall I sweep this mess into an envelope and have it delivered to their offices?” Careful hands swept the hair off of the back of her neck, looped it into a smooth coil, and laid it on her shoulder. “Put it in a box with a pint of lamb’s blood so they’re looking over their shoulders for Amren for a few days?”
Feyre pressed her lips together and shook her head, a knot in her throat. She couldn’t just mail a wordless reply. A threat. She wouldn’t take the easy way out. Not if she wanted to be the High Lady she wanted to be, the one her people deserved.
“I know the…” Rhys paused, and she felt him above her, leaning over her head to read the papers. He snorted, and a gentle, almost playful tap requesting entry reverberated against her panic-slick mental shields. “I know the price of Ceseran star-crystal can be steep, but I think the investment in one of our court’s natural resources to decorate our home is worth the price, darling.” His hand slipped down her arm, fingers tracing her tattoo right down to the symbol inked on her palm. “Viviane will be green with envy if we manage to best the Winter Court’s ice sculpture chandeliers, at the very least.”
Feyre’s anxiety ground to an abrupt halt.
Crystals.
Ceseran star crystals. Fine, sparkling, stone crystals.
Not sea salt crystals, like she’d thought. Like the kind Day was so good at processing, with their knack for harnessing the power of the sun to evaporate sea water. The kind Rhys was going to try to negotiate Helion into trading tomorrow, since most of the salt refineries along the Night Court’s coast had been prime targets during the war.
The letterhead wasn’t even from Bone and Salt like she’d thought. She looked at it again, not even bothering to read the swirling text, and the stylized bone and sprinkle of salt she thought she saw in the crest atop the page was actually a slim needle and a smattering of faceted stones: the seal of the Palace of Thread and Jewels.
Feyre splintered, and then cracked, and then the walls around her mind were crumbling as laid her head on the desk.
And Rhys rushed to catch her.
He shored up her mental barriers around them both with a wisp of a thought. Then his arms were around her, and he lifted her out of her seat and whisked her to the plush armchairs on the other side of her desk. She was on his lap in a heartbeat, burying her face in his neck as frustrated, humiliated tears seared lines into her cheeks.
Stupid. It was all so, so stupid.
She was stupid. Was she or wasn’t she supposed to be High Lady of the Night Court? A world leader? How had she ever expected to do that if she couldn’t even read?
Stop. The word was firm and furious. It was the same tone he’d used on Keir all those months ago before shattering his arm, the same voice she remembered hearing Under the Mountain when frustration got the better of him. You will not think about my mate like that.
Feyre rolled her eyes, pushing at his chest and angling herself away.
“I’m your mate, you prick.”
That doesn’t give you the right to think so poorly about someone I love. His arms were steel bands around her, and he didn’t let her shift even an inch beyond his embrace. You’re just overwhelmed, Feyre.
He slid through her thoughts, deeper into her mind, and paused over her most recent memories as if waiting for permission. Feyre huffed, but shrugged her shoulders; Rhys stroked a soothing hand down her arm and dove in.
He flipped through her memories, those razor-sharp claws skimming over them as gently as fingertips trailing words on a page. She let him, too consumed with hating herself to bother watching him the way he was watching her. When he found what he was looking for, he paused, his silence and stillness so pointed that she joined him, and they looked at the petition again together through her eyes, tracing the letters as they blurred and shifted.
The hand on her arm stiffened. A slow, sorry sigh ruffled her hair. And now I see why.
Stupid bleated through Feyre’s mind before she had the sense to tamp it down.
A quiet growl split the air.
Brilliant, Rhys corrected her, shifting her higher on his lap as he grazed his nose over her temple. He filled the space between them with awe. With love. Which girl figured out how to hunt by watching the adults around her? Who knows just the colors to mix to capture the golden light of dusk shining through an Illyrian wing on canvas? Who crafted and commanded the water wolves, perfectly formed for battle, with next to no combat training at all?
I can’t read, Feyre reminded him sourly, and she was horrified at the shrill cord of panic—of memory—in her mental voice. It was a tight, terrifying thing that brought to mind levers and grasshoppers and molten iron spikes.
“You can.” Rhys’s voice, though the same velvet, gentle thing she loved, was stern enough that it brooked no further argument. In her mind, he shoved back the bone-shattering dread that accompanied those memories. In the study, he used the edge of his sleeve to wipe away her tears. “You read all the time, Feyre. I’m the one to blame; I should have caught this sooner, when we started your lessons. I didn’t know you were still struggling.”
It’s not like I said anything. Why would she say anything? Why bring his attention to it, when the issue had already been remedied? She could read well enough, and that was that. She rolled her eyes. “You think you should have caught it?”
“Me.” The hand that landed on her thigh was firm, holding her to him, and Feyre focused on that unwavering grip rather than her shame. On the slow, gentle burn it ignited in her belly, as always. “I should have looked before we started. I should have questioned why a girl from your background resisted learning to read until adulthood. I should have thought to test you. You have a common learning disability—one that’s typically caught when younglings are just beginning their lessons. Caught and managed.”
I thought you meant to torture me. I doubt I would have submitted to any tests you tried to give me that week. She blew out a huff of joyless laughter.
Maybe not, Rhys said smoothly into her mind.
The words were so easy and so tempered that they set off a warning bell; Feyre examined them, dug a little deeper, and found the slight, almost imperceptible vein of strain running through them. It was proof enough that he was holding back his own emotions from her. She poked at him with a mental finger.
His own adamant shields parted reluctantly, the crack just large enough to let out a small curl of guilt so strong it made her gorge rise. To give her some idea of what he was feeling.
She caught that guilt and tossed it away. Stop that.
“Thank you, love.” Rhys brushed a kiss against her hairline in quiet gratitude. Now what can I do to make you feel better?
Feyre thought of watching him read the petition through her eyes, of the way he’d focused so intently on the way the letters blended together and morphed into strange shapes. What do you mean this can be… managed?
A small thrill that made Feyre raise a brow in question shot down the bond, and Rhys patted her thigh before reaching for the papers on her desk. The remains of the petition floated into his hand on a night-kissed wind, and he held it in front of them.
She scowled at it.
“The ancient bastards were using honorifics, too,” Rhys murmured, scanning the page. The shadows on his furrowed brow darkened, that loosed bit of power revealing just how upset he was.
“Honorifics?” Feyre’s eyes caught on one of the words she’d been unable to read, all curlicues and double-dotted vowels and sharp accents.
“Formal language. Outdated. They were trying to get on their High Lady’s good side, I suspect, and forgot you weren’t a thousand-year-old windbag just like them.” The dark look vanished from his expression, and he lifted his chin, his starry eyes raking over her from head to toe. “Luckily for me. I shudder to think of the chaos you might cause as a meddling bureaucrat.”
“I wouldn’t be so bad. I’d just keep you bound in red tape until I got my way.” The lights in Rhys’s flared, and the opening measures of heady, hungry desire thrummed down the bond. Feyre stroked a mental claw of her own down the bridge linking them, but used her actual finger to nudge him back to attention. “And what does any of that have to do with this?”
Her mate shook his head, pinched her side, and cleared his throat. “Cassian had a hard time learning to read when my mother started teaching him. He knew some of his letters from odd jobs he picked up here and there in the camps, but Illyrian characters are different than those in the common tongue. Similarly shaped, but different—like these. He was quite frustrated when she started teaching him that characters he thought meant one thing actually meant another.” When he spoke next, his voice was quieter, “I assumed that wasn’t the case with you when you were able to sound out the first few notes I wrote out for you.”
Rhys snapped his fingers, every unnecessary flourish disappeared, the surplus ink seeping sleepily into the parchment. The handwriting faded next, and a moment later, a printed font that was so stark, so minimal, and so clean that Feyre was left gaping floated onto the page from that hidden inkwell within. The lines were crisp and even, and the ink itself was several shades of darkest blue, each line slightly varied to differentiate it from the one above and below it.
“In the end, she developed a system of writing with one of the tutors I had before we moved to Windhaven. Each character is written clearly so there’s no mistaking it for anything other than what it is. Every line a different color so you don’t lose your place easily,” he explained, but Feyre wasn’t listening.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the parchment. On a good day, she had no trouble reading most uniformly printed pages—she had read voraciously after her first few lessons with Rhys, since there had been little else to do when their weeks together ended and she was returned to the Spring Court—but this…
This was different.
It was like she had been reading underwater, holding her breath and squinting through the blur of stinging tears and distorted light to make out every letter. But looking at the page Rhys held, it was as if she’d finally been allowed to surface, finally been given leave to breathe and take her time reading under a clear, noon sun.
She gripped Rhys’s arm. “Teach me to do that.”
“We can arrange lessons with Clotho. She’s the master. This,” Rhys shook the parchment, and whatever glamour he’d placed on it melted away. Feyre couldn’t help herself; she let out a despairing little moan, reaching for the letter. An apologetic pang crossed the bond, and Rhys glamoured it again. “It’s just a bit of temporary trickery, compared to what she can do. She can teach you how to make the change permanent and how to do it to more than one page at a time, so you’ll always be able to read whatever it is you transcribe like this.”
Permanent. Feyre glanced at the wall of windows across the study. The sun was still high; the priestesses would be in the middle of their afternoon shifts. She pushed off of Rhys’s lap, and this time he was the one to make a sorry noise as she slipped out of his embrace.
Heart racing, she gathered the stack of papers on her desk, glancing at them to make sure she had the correct ones.
“She’s not busy, is she? Let’s go.”
“Feyre darling.” Rhys handed her the letter he held, but instead of standing, he sat back, watching her with those too-perceptive eyes. The corners of his lips curled upward, and he pulled another paper out of thin air, glamoured it, and held it out to her. “First, tell me which option is clearer. It’ll be helpful to know before you begin, so Clotho can know where to begin.”
Feyre bent down to read whatever it was he held. That wonderful, clear font was inked in three different sizes and three different colors—a deep forest green letters no larger than anything printed in a normal book, moody violet just a bit larger than that, and, again, the blue of a midnight sky with letters as large as her smallest fingernail—and crossed the paper in three neat lines that read:
Rhysand is the most—
She snatched it out of his hand, balled it up, and threw it at his head.
Rhys, a good sport for once in his long, smug life, let it bounce off his forehead with a laugh, so she bent down and followed it with a kiss.