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

Nesta half-heard it, waiting for the sound, the perfect, beautiful sound, to begin again. Gwyn seemed to be shimmering with pride and contentedness.

Merrill finished the prayer, and the group began another song.

It was like a braid, the song—a plait of seven voices, weaving in and out, individual strands that together formed a pattern. Halfway through it, a drum appeared in the hand of the singer on the far left. A harp began strumming in the hands of one on the far right. A lute sounded from the center.

She’d never heard such music. Like a spell, a dream given form. The entire room sang, each voice resonating through the stone.

But Gwyn’s voice rose above them all, clear and powerful and yet husky on some notes. A mezzo-soprano. The word floated from the depths of Nesta’s memory, voiced by a watery-eyed music tutor who’d quickly declared Nesta hopeless at singing or playing, but in possession of an unusually fine ear.

The song ended, and more prayers and words flowed from Merrill, Clotho silent beside her. Then another song started—this one merrier, faster than the other. As if the songs were a progression. This one was a lilting chant, the words tumbling over each other like water dancing down a mountainside, and Nesta’s foot tapped on the ground in time to the beat. Nesta could have sworn that beneath the hem of Gwyn’s robe, the priestess’s foot was doing the same. The words and the countermelodies danced around and around, until the walls hummed with the music, until the stone seemed to be singing it back.

They finished, and started another song—led into it by a rolling drumbeat, then a single voice. Then the harp joined, a second voice with it. Then the lute, along with a third. The three sang around and into each other, another braid of voices and melodies. They reached the second verse, and the other four joined in, the room with them.

Gwyn’s voice soared like a bird through the cavern as she started the third song with a solo, and Nesta closed her eyes, leaning into the music, shutting out one sense in order to luxuriate in the sound of her friend. Something beckoned in Gwyn’s song, in a way the others’ hadn’t. Like Gwyn was calling only to her, her voice full of sunshine and joy and unshakable determination. Nesta had never heard a voice like Gwyn’s—by turns trained and wild, as if there was so much sound fighting to break free of Gwyn that she couldn’t quite contain it all. As if the sound needed to be loose in the world.

The others joined Gwyn for the second verse, and the harp’s harmonies rose above their song, archways of wordless notes.

With her eyes closed, only the music mattered—the song, the voices, the harp. It wrapped around her, as if she’d been dropped into a bottomless pool of sound. Gwyn’s voice rose again, holding such a high note it was like a ray of pure light, piercing and summoning. Two other voices rolled in to join, pulsing around that repeated high note, the harp still strumming, voices whispering and flowing, lulling Nesta down, down, down into a pure, ancient place where no outside world existed, no time, nothing but the music in her bones, the stones at her feet, her side, overhead.

The music took form behind Nesta’s eyes as the priestesses sang lyrics in languages so old, no one voiced them anymore. She saw what the song spoke of: mossy earth and golden sun, clear rivers and the deep shadows of an ancient forest. The harp strummed, and mountains rolled ahead, as if a veil had been cleared with the stroke of those strings, and she was flying toward it—toward a massive, mist-veiled mountain, the land barren save for moss and stones and a gray, stormy sea around it. The mountain itself held two peaks at its very top, and the stones jutting from its sides were carved in strange, ancient symbols, as old as the song itself.

Nesta’s body melted away, her bones and the stones of the cavern a distant memory as she flowed into the mountain, beheld towering, carved gates, and passed through them into a darkness so complete it was primordial; darkness that was full of living things, terrible things.

A path led into the dark, and she followed it, past doors with no handles, sealed forever. She felt horrors lurk behind those doors, one horror greater than the others—a being of mist and hatred—but the song led her past them all, invisible and unmarked.

This place was utterly lethal. A place of suffering and rage and death. Her very soul quaked to wander its halls. And even though she had passed by the door keeping her safe from that one being more horrible than all the rest … she knew it watched her. She refused to look back, to acknowledge it.

So Nesta drifted down and down, the harp and the voices pulsing and guiding, until she stopped before a rock. She laid a hand on it to find it was only an illusion, and she passed through it, down another long hall, beneath the mountain itself, and then she stood in a cavern, almost the twin to the one the priestesses sang in, as if they were linked in song and dreaming.

But rather than red stone, it was carved of black rock. Symbols had been etched into the smooth floor, into the curving walls, rising toward a ceiling so high it faded into gloom. Spells and wards pulsed around the room, but there, in the center of the space, set upon the floor as if it had been laid there by someone who’d merely walked away and forgotten it …

There, in the center of the chamber, sat a small, golden harp.

Cold leached through Nesta, clarifying her thoughts enough to realize where she stood. That the music of the priestesses had lulled her into a trance, that her own bones and the stone of the mountain surrounding her had been her scrying tools, and she had drifted to this place …