Rhysand POV:
I have stood in silence for four hours.
Feyre is by my side, hands grasping my arms, cheek resting on my shoulder. Her own eyes try to reach mine, but I cannot meet them knowing that they are a mere window to my soul for Feyre. And for the first time in a long while, I am scared of that. I watch her brow furrow in my peripheral vision; she knows how I feel, my fear equally claiming her as it does me. Her silky voice shoots itself down the bond.
Rhysand? Full of worry, concern. A long time ago I would have abhorred anyone being able to see my every emotion, worry, thought. I trusted Feyre though, and I trusted her heart. But even she could not mend the deep tear that ripped through me the moment I held my sister's broken body in my arms. It was my job alone, and Gods I hated it. It was like I was right back in Amarantha's bed, back in the War five hundred years ago separated from my brothers, back at the banks of that river with the heads of my mother and my sister in my lap. Shaking my head silently, I instead gazed to the mountains. I can feel Feyre's concern deepen.
"Rhysand, please.." tears shake Feyre's voice, and it hurts me so thoroughly I almost fall to my knees. "Rhysand talk to me." Mor, Cassian, Azriel, Amren even Nesta and Elain stand behind me, silent but their emotions tangible through the thick air. We all are still coming to terms with it; Diana, who we thought died at the hands of the Spring Court more than five hundred years ago was alive, and only a room away from me. But I dared not open the door that separated us. Not just because I didn't want to be in the healers' way; even through the thick walls you could hear the quiet murmuring, bandages being unwrapped and poultices being mixed together, spells in indecipherable languages cast over and over again, as if they needed all the magic in the world to help my sister. No, it was as if I touched her, she would dissolve beneath me like sand in high winds, a mere slip of my consciousness, a reminder of my trauma. And if that happened, it felt as if I would dissolve right along with her.
I remembered the day that I found her clearer than any other, remembered how visceral and earth-shatteringly real it had felt as I cradled her head in my arms and sobbed like a child for days on end. The same emotions coursed through me right now, almost stronger than they had been. But I knew that five hundred years could not stop me from recognizing my sister, that the worry and pain that bloomed from within me as I heard each rasping breath struggle to come from her heaving chest was the same worry and pain I had felt for Diana all these years. I closed my eyes, focusing on the noise that both troubled and steadied me. In, out, in, out. Just keep breathing, I pleaded my sister, please keep breathing. I couldn't do it again, bury a second grave, mourn a second death. I couldn't-
"Where in the gaping asshole of our Great Mother do you keep the goddamn liquor?!"
For a moment I forget to breathe, forget to blink, forget every instinct of life as I behold her. The tan skin, the wild dark curls that whispered around her face and rolled down her back, and the nose, the lips, the cheekbones of my mother. Violet eyes twin to mine, but what was behind them was something I could not recognize. Not rage, not sadness, not elation. It was indescribable, too dangerous to label and too feral to be boxed.
The healers fluttered behind her, their protests reaching unwilling ears as my sister storms right past us, straight to the cabinet directly behind me. With surprising ferocity she flings the heavy doors open, and runs her hands up and down shelves, seemingly looking for something. Nobody makes a move, nobody speaks, nobody breathes. It was as if we were all suspended like unmanned puppets and only she was being moved. Through the long linen nightgown she wears I can see the blue-black of bruises and blood rising through thick bandages, most of which adorn her lower legs. Legs that were broken only hours ago.
How in the bloody Cauldron was she up? I thought frantically through my own shock. However good a healer may be and however fast Fae can recuperate, no one, save a god, should be able to have two broken legs and yet stride right out the door as if it had simply never happened. No, she should be practically comatose in bed, not moving for at least a week, if not a month. But as she plucked the biggest and strongest liquor bottle off the shelf, flicked off the tightly screwed on cap as if it was a fly on her arm and downed the entirety of the golden liquid in one gulp, it was made quite clear that she had completely recuperated.
I watched in speechlessness as she guzzles the bottle, no trace of a wince on her face even though the sheer smell of it wafting across the room made even my eyes water. Dropping into a nearby armchair, she mimicked the same movement of her body with the crystal bottle as she let go of it and barely noticed how it shattered on the floor. The glass sprayed across the carpet, the last drops of the liquor that she had not managed to consume sinking in. But nobody moves. We all just stare in opened mouth shock that she doesn't acknowledge. She simply lets the tenuous seconds pass, only filled with her laboring breath. Finally, from behind me, Amren's voice is only a whisper, but a needed one. "Bloody hell," she says, a hint of a shake in her normally sensuous voice, "way to make an entrance."
Diana's head made a slight turn toward me, eyes half-lidded and yet fully penetrating my own with a gaze that spoke a thousand words I could not understand.
"Yes," she drawls, her unfamiliar lilting accent a strange contrast to the heaviness of our mother language. "I have a fondness for theatrics." Her full lips curve ever so slightly, eyes still torturously claiming only mine. "I take after my dear brother."