A Court of Silver Flames - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,72

jab.

“So those abdominal exercises are useful beyond wanting to show off your muscles?”

He threw her a wry grin. “You really think this is just for show?”

“I think I’ve caught you looking at yourself in that mirror at least a dozen times each lesson.” Nesta nodded to the slender mirror across the ring.

He chuckled. “Liar. You use that mirror to watch me when you think I’m not paying attention.”

She refused to let him see the truth on her face. Refused to so much as lower her head. She focused again on her stance.

“All business today, huh?”

“You want me to train,” Nesta said coolly, “so train me.”

Even if no priestesses showed up, even if she was a stupid fool for hoping that they would, she didn’t mind this training. It cleared her head, required so much thinking and breathing that the roaring thoughts had little chance to devour her whole. Only in the quiet moments did those thoughts pounce again, usually if she lost focus while working in the library or bathing. And when that happened, the stairwell always beckoned. The infernal ten thousand steps.

But would it do anything—the training, the work, the stairs—beyond keeping her busy? The thoughts still waited like wolves to swarm her. To rip her apart.

I loved you from the first moment I held you in my arms.

The wolves prowled closer, claws clicking.

“Where’d you go?” Cassian asked, hazel eyes dim with worry.

Nesta took up her stance again. It sent the wolves retreating a step. “Nowhere.”

Elain was in the private library.

Nesta knew it before she’d cleared the stairs, covered in dust from the library.

Her sister’s delicate scent of jasmine and honey lingered in the red-stoned hall like a promise of spring, a sparkling river that she followed to the open doors of the chamber.

Elain stood at the wall of windows, clad in a lilac gown whose close-fitting bodice showed how well her sister had filled out since those initial days in the Night Court. Gone were the sharp angles, replaced by softness and elegant curves. Nesta knew she herself had looked like that at one point, even if Elain’s breasts had always been smaller.

She peered down at herself, bony and gangly. Her sister turned toward her, glowing with health.

Elain’s smile was as bright as the setting sun beyond the windows. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”

Someone had brought Elain here, since there was no way in hell she had climbed those ten thousand steps.

Nesta didn’t return her sister’s smile, but rather gestured to her body, the leathers, the dust. “I’ve been busy.”

“You look a little better than you did a few weeks ago.”

The last time she’d seen Elain—a week before she’d come to the House. She’d passed her sister in the bustling market square they called the Palace of Bone and Salt, and though Elain had halted, no doubt intending to speak to her, Nesta had kept walking. Hadn’t looked back before vanishing into the throng. Nesta didn’t wish to consider how poorly she’d looked then, if the picture she presented now was better.

“You’ve got good coloring, I mean,” Elain clarified, striding from the windows to cross the room. She stopped a few feet away. As if holding herself back from the embrace she might have given.

Like Nesta was some sort of disease-ridden leper.

How many times had they been in this room during those initial months? How many times had it been this way, only with their positions switched? Elain had been the ghost then, too thin, with her thoughts turned inward.

Somehow, Nesta had become the ghost.

Worse than a ghost. A wraith, whose rage and hunger were bottomless, eternal.

Elain had only needed time to adjust. But Nesta knew she herself needed more than that.

“Are you enjoying your time up here?”

Nesta met her sister’s warm brown eyes. When human, Elain had easily been the prettiest of the three of them, and when she’d been turned High Fae, that beauty had been amplified. Nesta couldn’t put her finger on what changes had been wrought beyond the pointed ears, but Elain had gone from lovely to devastatingly beautiful. Elain never seemed to realize it.

It was always that way between them: Elain, sweet and oblivious, and Nesta, the snarling wolf at her side, poised to shred anyone who threatened her.

Elain is pleasant to look at, her mother had once mused while Nesta sat beside her dressing table, a servant silently brushing her mother’s gold-brown hair, but she has no ambition. She does not dream beyond her garden and