A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses #4) by Sarah J. Maas

That pleading female voice had faded. As if whatever she was, whoever she was, she knew no hope existed now.

Nesta fumbled internally for her power while the kelpie began to swim again, a hand around her wrist, lugging her behind him.

Her legs bumped into metallic objects and bones, somehow preserved within the bog.

Some of the bones still felt fleshy.

Please, she begged that power within her, slumbering and ancient and terrible. Please. Nesta cast for it, seeking it in the chasm inside herself.

She could see it glowing ahead, golden and shining. Her fingers strained for it.

The kelpie swam faster through the darkness, wending between the objects in the water as if they were the roots of a tree.

The golden thing drew nearer, and it was a round disk, her power, growing closer and closer and closer. As Nesta was dragged along, that golden disk rushed toward her splayed fingers. The kelpie didn’t seem to see it; he didn’t veer away as it shot toward her outstretched hand.

It was not her power that shone ahead.

The golden disk connected with her fingers, and Nesta knew what it was as she gripped it tight. Like called to like. Power to power.

The kelpie pulled her along, unaware. Nesta’s breath again became short. Her feet and legs sliced into dagger-sharp objects, ripping open on a few.

Power lay in her hand. Death gripped her by the other.

She knew what she had to do with the sort of clarity only pure desperation and terror could bring. Knew what she had to risk. Her fingers tightened on the thing in her hand.

The kelpie slowed, as if sensing her shift. But not fast enough.

He couldn’t stop her from slamming the Mask onto her face.





CHAPTER

36

Her lungs stopped hurting. Her body stopped aching.

She did not require air. She did not feel pain.

She could see dimly through the eyeholes of the Mask. The kelpie was a lean white thing—a creature of pure hate and hunger.

He dropped her, as if in shock and fear. As if he hesitated when he beheld what she now wore.

It was all Nesta needed.

She could feel them around her. The dead.

Feel their long-rotted bodies, some mere bones and others preserved, half-eaten beneath their ancient armor. Their weapons lay nearby, discarded and ignored by the creatures of the bog, who had been more interested in feeding on decaying flesh, even long-rotted.

Thousands and thousands of bodies.

But she would not call thousands. Not yet.

Her blood was a cold song, the Mask a slithering echo to it, whispering of all she might do. Home, it seemed to sigh. Home.

Nesta did not refuse it. Only embraced it, letting its magic—colder than her own and as old—flow into her veins.

The kelpie mastered himself, and bared his twin sets of teeth before he sprang.

A skeletal hand wrapped around his ankle.

The kelpie whirled, peering downward. Just as another bony hand, covered in a gauntlet cracked with age, wrapped around the other ankle.

A hand with flesh falling from its fingers gripped his mane of black hair.

The kelpie twisted toward her again, black eyes wide.

Drifting in the water, the power of the Mask an icy song through her, Nesta summoned the dead. To do what her own body could not.

Though she had fought back against Tomas, against the Cauldron, against the King of Hybern, they had all happened to her. She had survived, but she had been helpless and afraid.

Not today.

Today, she would happen to him.

The kelpie thrashed, freeing himself from one skeletal hand as ten others, at the ends of long, bony arms, extended. Their bodies rose with them. He tried to swim out of their grip, but a towering skeleton half-clad in rusted armor appeared behind him. Wrapped its arms around him. A face that was only bone peered over the kelpie’s shoulder, jaws opening to reveal pointed teeth—not High Fae, then—that gleamed before they buried themselves in the kelpie’s white flesh.

He screamed, but it was soundless. Just as the dead were soundless, surging from the murky bottom, some in marching formation, and converging on him.

Nesta let the power flow through her, allowing the Mask to do as it wished, raising the honored dead who had once been buried here and had suffered the sacrilege of serving as an endless meal to the kelpie and his ilk.

The kelpie bucked against the dead, his eyes pleading now. But Nesta looked upon him without an ounce of mercy, still tasting his foulness in her mouth.

She knew he could see her teeth gleaming. Knew the kelpie could see her cold smile as she bade the dead to rip him to shreds.



“NESTA!”

Up to his waist in the black water, so inky he couldn’t see his own hips beneath it, Cassian roared her name as Az soared overhead, scanning, scanning—

He’d caught her scent at the water’s edge—her scent and urine, gods damn him to hell. She’d seen something, been attacked by something so awful she’d wet herself, and now she was gone, under this water—

“NESTA!”

He didn’t know where to start in this blackness. If he continued to make much more noise, other things would come looking, but he had to find her, or else he’d crumple up and die, he’d—

“NESTA!”

Azriel landed in the water beside him. “I don’t see anything,” he panted, eyes as frantic as Cassian knew his own were. “We need Rhys—”

“He’s not answering.”