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To Know That I'm With You - Chapter 1

Ch. 1/25 | Ao3

After Feyre Archeron's abrupt disappearance from the manor, Nesta is effectively sold to the Mandrays to save face. With one sister waiting patiently to start her own life and the other inspiring Nesta to seek more for herself, she flees into the woods. But fate has a tricky way of picking the Archerons up and setting them down exactly where they belong.

This is the second work in the (Au)rcheron Sisters series. To read Feyre’s story, start here with Your Eyes Whisper Have We Met.

If you don’t want to read the entire work, at least read the bonus chapter here so you know what’s happening with Cassian before this work begins.

Thank you @popjunkie42 and @witch-and-her-witcher-- I love you!

Thirteen Years Ago

Nesta had lost Feyre.

The knowledge pounded through her bloodstream like the beating of a drum, each pulse echoing the sentiment and shaking her down to her bones.

You lost her.

One job, and you lost her.

The woods blurred around her as she pressed on, the normally beautiful reds, oranges, and golds of the season around her falling by the wayside as she called out again.

“Feyre! Feyre, please!”

Nesta pushed wisps of hair back off her sweating forehead, despite the chill in the air. She’d taken off without even a cloak when she’d realized Feyre had gone missing, noting that the sun was already well past the midpoint of the sky and sinking fast in these late October days.

“ Feyre! ” Her small voice echoed through the trees as she ran, a mass of birds departing from a nearby tree and startling Nesta so badly she nearly tripped, hand reaching out blindly to steady herself against a tree as the crows cawed violently in departure.

“You will not cry. You will not .” She gritted the words out as she righted herself.

What would her mother say? To know she’d not only lost her sister out in the woods surrounding their manor but that she was now shedding tears for her failure. Nesta knew exactly what she would say, actually.

Elain would never . The voice was her mother’s. Always her mother’s.

And it was correct. Elain, perfect Elain, would never. Only 18 months younger, barely eight years old, and already a better everything , as their mother and grandmother so often liked to point out.

See how she speaks to the boys, Nesta? Why can’t you be warm and inviting that way? See how Elain completes her studies early, Nesta? Yet they’re so much better than yours? She’ll make a lovely wife and mother one day, Nesta. And what will you be then?

Nesta scoffed. Then why couldn’t Elain be tasked with watching their near-feral youngest sister? She could practically feel Grandmother’s whipping branch across her knuckles, the soles of her feet, as she ran. She knew what was coming if she was found out, if they realized she’d let Feyre run off again. She let it fuel her.

Feyre had become her responsibility in the last year or so, especially in the past few months since their mother had taken sick. There had been no room for arguments, her mother had told her. She was old enough now, and Feyre had become too difficult for the nursemaids to attend at all times. Nesta understood that sense of duty, knew that it was only the first in a series of many to come in her life.

Many conversations of its kind had been had since the illness had seized her mother, and Nesta tried not to spend too long ruminating on what it meant. She knew what it meant–their mother would not recover from this. Though Nesta wasn’t sure that Elain or Feyre had any inkling of what was to come. Still, Nesta had repeatedly been pulled into the room that smelled of herbs and antiseptic, her mother still all sharp and jagged edges as she took whatever slim dregs remained of Nesta’s childhood and replaced them with expectations for the future.

She would marry young, fulfil her duties as a good wife. Nesta had sat, still and stiff as a board, as her mother had clinically explained to her what those duties entailed in great detail.

Nesta had found her voice in the dark, though it was small, though it shook. “But I don’t want that.” Her mother wasn’t too weak to land a sharp slap across Nesta’s face, on the cheeks still rounded with the gleam of youth.

“It doesn’t matter what you want, you foolish child. It’s what you were bred for. And it’s what you’ll do.”

“Yes, Momma.”

On top of it all, there had been countless forced oaths in the dark, to take care of her sisters, to take care of the house.

“Soon, Nesta, you will be the lady of the house. And it will all fall to you. It cannot be in your nature to fail, or the rest of them will fail with you. Do you want that?”

“No, Momma.”

And what had she done? Immediately lost Feyre.

Failed.

Failed the test before it had hardly begun.

The sun was sinking fast now, the dim, gray glow of evening against the dark gray thunderheads in the distance. Time was running out, and Nesta began to run again.

“Feyre, come on! Please–”

The first moment she was airborne, Nesta’s mind refused to catch up with what was happening. She blinked once, then hit the ground with a deafening crunch. Her yelp was drowned out by the dry leaves crushed around her as her body rolled so fast that her limbs tossed out limply, unable to grasp anything, her mind sluggish in response.

She slammed against something hard, the pause so jarring she felt it in her teeth. The world was spinning, the sky above her twisting and twirling with leaves in the wind against the gray backdrop. She gasped in a single deep breath, blurred eyes seeking long enough to realize she’d rolled down a steep, rocky incline and a fallen log had stopped her descent at the bottom.

And then the pain hit.

Nesta turned her head and vomited, the pain in her ankle so suddenly overwhelming that she couldn’t see anything else except blinding white light. She exhaled through her nose, wrenching her eyes shut and gritting her teeth so hard she worried they would crack. As the wave of pain crested and ebbed, she forced her eyes open again. The sky above remained unchanged, but the energy around her crackled with her newfound panic.

She was deep in the woods alone, unprotected, and badly injured. No one knew where she’d gone because she hadn’t wanted to get in trouble for losing her sister.

No one was coming to find her.

The branches above her rustled in the wind, scraping together and causing the leaves near her to shuffle around. It sounded like footsteps, but Nesta pulled her lips between her teeth, biting hard enough that she tasted blood.

She knew the stories of the woods from her nursemaid, the tales told to scare little girls like her and her sisters from venturing too far off. Nesta was old enough now to know the real dangers of this world–poverty, illness, and men– but these woods were old and her sudden immobility had brought her right back to those stories, the tree limbs around her stretching out like the claws of whatever beasts lurked in the darkness.

She inhaled deeply, then let the breath release through her nose. She needed to sit up, try to brace her ankle somehow. By tending to Feyre, of course, she’d learned how to treat most basic injuries. If she could find a sturdy stick as a splint, she could rip ribbons from her dress and bind it. Perhaps it would be enough to hold while she hobbled home. She tried to shove away the thought that she’d been wandering for well over an hour searching for Feyre before falling. She was deep in these woods now.

She summoned her will, rolling to the side as much as she could without jostling her leg and pushing her torso up to lean against the fallen log. Her eyes were still closed, her breath uneven and her skin slicked with a cold sweat. Distantly, she wondered why she’d stopped hurting as much. She’d heard stories from the guards of fighters pressing through an injury on sheer adrenaline, feeling nothing until later.

She forced her eyes open, made herself look at her ankle and immediately wished that she hadn’t. The second her eyes settled on the injury–much, much worse than she’d ever imagined–the pain consumed her. She retched again, the remainders of her lunch from hours before hitting the ground beside her as she fought off the blackening edges of her vision. The bone jutted from her skin, glimmering white beneath swaths of vibrant, unmissable red. She would not be splinting this. She would not be walking from these woods.

The breaking of a twig behind her knocked her from her spiral, but the twisting of her body to see the origin of the sound caused enough pain to make her cry out again.

She bit back the gag this time, already noting her face covered in shining tears. If something were here to kill her, she would die with the dignity she’d been bred to hold at all times.

But Nesta hadn’t been prepared for what emerged from the woods, stepping across the clearing in front of her as though it was sizing her up. It was a woman, or at least, some semblance of one. She stood about medium height, the slender form of her covered in tattered robes that shifted with an unnatural fluidity too smooth for the wind that blustered through the trees. Her hair was white and long, tendrils floating in that same unearthly way, holding onto the currents of wind languidly, slowly, in a way that screamed other.

“Who are you?” Nesta whispered across the clearing, her heart pounding so hard she feared it might leap from her chest. She thought she sounded more like a child than she could ever remember, clearing her throat and wincing at the immature croak of it. But the crone’s surprise was evident on her face, even with a strange, archaic mask flickering on and off of it like the flame of a candle.

The edges of her seemed strangely blurred, no real delineating features to determine where her body ended and the air around her began. Her hands were strange, the glow of them like the moon shining off her skin, despite the dying light of day still around them. She held a basket in one hand, a lantern in the other, the coarse, twisted fingers twitching with a restless energy despite both already tending to something.

“Who are you?” Nesta demanded again, hoping there was more strength in her voice this time.

The woman cocked her head to the side, observing Nesta through the strange, flickering mask. Beneath it, the woman’s skin looked made of bark and stone, craggled and ridged and moving with each twitch of her face. Her eyes were depthless pits of darkness in her face that seemed to suck any remaining light from the space between them.

And they were fixed directly on Nesta.

“You can see me?” The voice was strange, and it made Nesta ache in a way she was unfamiliar with. Her body wanted to run, her mind wanted to stay. It sounded like the voices of many, young and old and ageless, deep and light and haunting. Nesta had the feeling that the stories from her nursemaids might not have all been tall tales, and that this creature before her might be far older than her mind could comprehend. Might be more ancient than the woods surrounding them, even.

“Am I not supposed to?” To that, the crone smiled, jagged teeth causing Nesta to inhale sharply.

“What do you see, child?”

Nesta hesitated. “Is this…is this some sort of trick?”

“Humor me,” the crone hissed.

And Nesta did, reciting back to her exactly how she saw her, down to the deep purple stitching of her tattered robes, dulled by time and use. She left no details out, wanting to rise to the expectations, even if they might be her last. The crone took her in as she did, empty eyes somehow raking over every inch of Nesta’s body even as it shook and trembled with pain, adrenaline, and shock. When she finished, she was met with the strangest sense of approval from the woman.

“You are out here alone?”

Nesta knew she shouldn’t answer, but she did anyway, a curt nod.

“Haven’t you been warned these woods are dangerous?” Another flash of those fangs, the lantern illuminating her face even more now as the light disappeared from the sky. Nesta lifted her chin.

Death with dignity.

But the crone did not step closer, didn’t move at all save for the gruesome smile still splitting across her cracked and earthen face. Then, those depthless eyes flashed, a shock of blinding light falling across the woods and Nesta. The crone dipped her head back to Nesta, eyes glowing with a paranormal white mist. The crone’s voice twisted, warping into something deep– a cacophony of discordant sound as her mouth opened to speak the words across the clearing to Nesta.

The three-faced goddess, three gifts bestowWith bloodline certain, but not yet knownEach with a gift from times of auldOne life, one death, one rebirth told

The wheel of fates begun to spin,A binding of souls, the veil is thinnedAll hinged upon the thread of worth,Each choice will mark the role’s true birth

No stars shall shine without the Night,No Day shall break without the sight.No Bloodshed clears without the flame,A cleansing fire to purge the claim

So heed the call, the fearsome tales,Or else the dark fates should prevailThe Cauldron spurn, the fire will burn,And from the dust, all things return

Nesta was speechless, the words bouncing through her consciousness as the witch before her blinked, coming back into herself and letting the milky mist recede from her eyes.

“Your sister is beneath your bed, painting on the wooden beams that support it.” The witch’s lips twitched up into an almost-smile at the admission.

Nesta sputtered, confusion and relief rising and warring in her throat.

Safe. Feyre was safe.

But Nesta was still stuck here, the darkness all but covering the woods now, the small clearing only illuminated by the shaky glow of the lantern. Then Nesta felt a warmth embrace her leg. The witch hadn’t moved from her spot across the small clearing, but it felt as though there were hands gently caressing her skin, as though asking for permission. Nesta nodded, the stretch of the long-dried tears itching at her face with the movement. With a gasp and a sharp sting, the sensation was entirely gone. Nesta glanced down to find her leg completely healed, the bone protruding from it nothing but a horrific memory and a small crescent shaped scar. She lifted her foot and rotated the ankle, feeling nothing out of the ordinary.

When she looked back up again, the witch had already begun to slip back into the trees.

“Until we meet again, Nesta Archeron.”

#reblogging to read later #I am excited #I just have a million things to do and then #I can FINALLY read #as a little treat #for me

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