A Court of Heart and Fealty | Rhysand

Chapter 39: Acceptance

Chapter 39: Acceptance

Azriel showed up for breakfast the next morning. He was tired, Galadriel observed, for though his movements were swift and precise as wind, heaviness weighted each step like he had dragged home whatever burden he'd been bearing outside of the Night Court. She could sympathise with his position, still feeling like she was scraping the dregs of her energy. Never before had she strained her own magic so far and when she did get close, it replenished itself within hours. That was a muscle ache. This... This was healing from an invisible battle wound. It was strange to suffer the consequences of drained magic that was not hers.

"Thank you," Galadriel said, taking the seat across from him. Azriel apparently wasn't a morning eater, cradling a coffee. "For coming to get me and, well, saving my life."

He sipped at his drink, the azure gemstone on the back of his hand glittering with the morning sun. "You shouldn't have gone."

Her gaze lowered. "No," she agreed. At least, not without a better plan. Not while she was in the midst of an internal crisis. He'd trained her better than that. At that thought, she added, "It wasn't your fault. They caught me off guard and I should have known better than to let it down."

Azriel fiddled with a gold mark he slipped from his leather sleeve. It seemed to hold no importance, other than something for his scarred hands to work with while he thought. Even now, knowing him more than she ever had before, Galadriel could not even glimpse at what might be going through his mind.

He glanced at the empty space on her finger and said, "You did exactly what I trained you to do."

It was what she had been waiting to hear, but that tone—dismissal and distance—were not exactly a comforting reassurance. "Should I have not taken it?" Maybe there was an element she had missed. A specific moment that she should have devoured that poison. When she was alone in the cell, perhaps.

"No, you did everything right," Azriel hissed out. Galadriel blanched, the back of her chair creaking as her spine pressed into it. The shadowsinger tightened his jaw, that coin landing with a heavy thump against the table.

"Then why do I feel like you're upset at me?"

"Because you could have died, Galadriel." With a long inhale, he set the coin into that rhythmic thump thump thump. "You are Rhysand's mate. My High Lord's mate."

"Everybody seems so keen on the word now."

"It would have been my fault. He asked me to ensure that you removed the ring and I didn't. If I had arrived only a minute later, my brother's mate would have been dead because of it."

"Is that the only importance I hold to you now?" Galadriel's shoulders slumped as Azriel silently met her stare. "I'm not just Rhysand's mate, Azriel. I have been your spy for two centuries and I thought maybe I might be your friend as well now. Was I ever something to you? Would you have cared a year ago?"

She knew the answer before it came and Azriel's mouth, stuck agape in a stupor, gave her enough incentive to push from the chair and table. He said something when her back turned on him, but for the first time ever, she blocked him out completely, wandering aimlessly into the winding maze of corridors that was the House of Wind. It took a while of that meandering for her head to come up with a destination.

Galadriel sat herself down on the edge of the stone courtyard on the rooftop. The wind blew beneath her bare feet, and she could feel in it the drop between her and the ground so far below that the rocks dotting the earth were merely smudges. Heights had never been so much of an issue. In Spring, most of her youth was spent climbing trees in the orchards belonging to the manor, or the trees in the forest under her brothers' supervision.