“Why don’t you sit?” She leaned against the doorway beside the shadowsinger.
“My shadows don’t like the flames so much.” A pretty lie. She’d seen Azriel before the fire plenty. But she looked at who sat close to it and knew the answer.
“Why did you come if it torments you so much?”
“Because Rhys wants me here. It’d hurt him if I didn’t come.”
“Well, I think holidays are stupid.”
“I don’t.”
She arched a brow. He explained, “They pull people together. And bring them joy. They are a time to pause and reflect and gather, and those are never bad things.” Shadows darkened his eyes, full of enough pain that she couldn’t stop herself from touching his shoulder. Letting him see that she understood why he stood in the doorway, why he wouldn’t go near the fire.
His secret to tell, never hers.
Azriel’s face remained neutral.
So Nesta gave him a small nod and walked back into the fray, taking a seat on the rolled arm of the nearest couch.
An hour passed before Mor began grousing about opening presents. Rhys snapped his fingers and a heap of them appeared.
Cassian braced himself for whatever awful gift Mor had gotten him—and glanced to Nesta. He’d kept her present in his pocket, saving it to give to her in private later. He’d done the same last year, and the damn thing had ended up at the bottom of the Sidra. Probably swept out to sea.
He’d spent months tracking down the book, so tiny it would fit in a doll’s hands, but so precious it had cost him an indecent amount of money. A miniature illuminated manuscript, crafted by the skilled hands of the smallest of the lesser Fae—one of the first printed books in existence. It hadn’t been meant for reading—but he’d figured that someone who adored books as much as Nesta would savor this piece of history. Even if she resented all things Fae. He’d regretted throwing it into the river the moment it had vanished under the ice, but … he’d been foolish that night.
This year, he prayed it was different. It felt different.
Nesta had been better tonight than last year. Another person entirely. She didn’t laugh freely like Mor and Feyre, or smile sweetly like Elain, but she spoke, and engaged, and sometimes smirked. She saw everything, heard everything. Even the fire, which she seemed to ignore. Pride filled his chest at that—and relief. It had only increased when he’d noticed that she’d cared enough about Az’s aloofness to go up to him to chat.
Only Amren ignored her, and Nesta ignored Amren. The tension between them was a living band of lightning. But no one said anything, and they seemed content to pretend the other didn’t exist.
No one offered gifts for the baby, as it went against Fae tradition to do so before a babe was born, fearful of calling bad luck by counting one’s blessings too soon. But Feyre’s birthday gifts were bountiful—perhaps glaringly so.
Cassian’s gifts were the usual odd medley: an ancient manuscript on warfare from Rhys, a bag of beef jerky from Azriel—I literally couldn’t think of anything you’d enjoy more, Az had said when Cassian had laughed—and a hideously ugly green sweater from Mor that made his skin look jaundiced. Amren had given him a travel set of spices—so you don’t have to suffer whenever you’re in Illyria—and Elain gave him a specially designed ceramic mug with a lid that he could travel with, bespelled against breaking, to keep tea warm for hours.
Feyre gave him a painting, which he opened in private, and had to fight back tears before he hid it behind the chair. A portrait of him, Azriel, and Rhys, standing atop Ramiel after the Blood Rite. Bloody and bruised and filthy, faces filled with grim triumph, their hands linked as they touched them to the monolith at its peak. She must have looked into Rhys’s mind for the image.
Cassian had kissed her cheek, her shield down for the moment, and murmured his thanks—as if that would ever cover it. He’d cherish the painting for the rest of his life.
He and Lucien did not exchange gifts, though the male had brought a gift for Feyre and one for his mate, who barely thanked him after opening the pearl earrings. Cassian’s heart strained at the pain etching deep into Lucien’s face as he tried to hide his disappointment and longing. Elain only shrank further into herself, no trace of that newfound boldness to be seen.
Cassian could feel Nesta watching him, but when he looked, her face was unreadable. No one had gotten her presents except for Feyre and Elain, who had together given her a year’s worth of book-buying credit to her favorite bookshop in the city. It was capped at around three hundred books, which they seemed to think would be more than she could read in a year. Five hundred books’ worth would have been a safer bet, he knew.
But then Azriel approached her. Nesta had blinked at the gift the shadowsinger set in her lap. “I didn’t get you anything,” she murmured to Az, her cheeks turning rosy.
“I know,” he said, smiling. “I don’t mind.”
Cassian tried to focus on the present in his hands—the silver comb and brush set he’d gotten Mor, engraved with her name—but his gaze snagged on Nesta’s fingers as she opened the small box. She peered at what was inside, then looked at Azriel in confusion. “What is it?”
Azriel plucked up the small folded silver wand within and unfurled it. One end held a clip, the other a small glass sphere. “You can attach this to whatever book you’re reading, and the little ball of faelight will shine. So you don’t have to squint when you’re reading at night.”
Nesta touched the glass ball, no bigger than her thumbnail, and faelight flickered within, casting a bright, easy glow upon her lap. She tapped it again and it turned off. And then she jumped to her feet and flung her arms around Azriel.
The room went silent for a beat.
But Azriel chuckled and squeezed her gently. Cassian smiled to see it—to see them. “Thank you,” Nesta said, quickly pulling away to marvel at the device. “It’s brilliant.”
Azriel blushed and stepped back, shadows swirling.
Nesta looked over to Cassian, and that light was once more in her eyes. Enough that he almost gave her his gift there and then.
But considering how last year’s attempt had gone, considering that since the ball she’d stayed out of his bed … he held back.
In case she shattered his heart all over again.
By one in the morning, Nesta’s eyes ached with exhaustion. The others were still drinking, but as she hadn’t been offered any wine—or wanted any, for that matter—she had not joined them in their singing and dancing. Though she had helped herself to thirds of Feyre’s ridiculously large pink birthday cake.
Cassian had said they were going to stay here tonight, as he’d be too drunk to fly them back to the House of Wind, and Mor and Azriel would be too drunk to winnow them, not to mention that he’d still have to fly them the last bit of the way. Rhys and Feyre would likely be enjoying each other by the time they were all ready to leave.
The door Feyre had directed her to was already open, faelights glowing inside the opulent bedroom bedecked in whites and creams and tans. Candles flickered in glass jars on the marble mantel. The curtains were already down for the night, heavy swaths of blue velvet—the only pop of color in the room, along with a few blue trinkets. It was soothing and smelled of jasmine, precisely the sort of room she’d have designed for herself if she’d been given the chance.