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

Her friends regarded her curiously, and Nesta swallowed. “Let me make a wish for all of us,” she explained, gathering the three charms. A small gift—for the friends who had become like sisters.

A chosen family. Like the one Feyre had found for herself.

Nesta squeezed the charms in her palm, closing her eyes, and said: “I wish for us to have the courage to go out into the world when we are ready, but to always be able to find our way back to each other. No matter what.”

Gwyn and Emerie cheered at that. And when Nesta opened her eyes, palm unfurling, she could have sworn the coins glowed faintly.





CHAPTER

60

Cassian had been gone for five days. Five days, to inspect every single one of the Illyrian legions, and remember how to behave like a normal, sane male rather than a lovesick puppy. But somehow, by the time he returned, a shift had occurred.

Not just the world-altering shift that had happened on Winter Solstice between him and Nesta. But a shift between Nesta and Emerie and Gwyn.

He emerged into the frigid morning to find the three of them already in the practice ring. They stood around the beam, the ribbon drifting gracefully on the icy wind. Gwyn held a blade in her hand, and Emerie and Nesta stood a few feet away. All three wore braided, colorful bracelets with silver charms dangling from them.

Cassian lingered at the doorway as Nesta murmured to Gwyn, “You’ve got this.” Azriel came up beside him, silent as the shadows that wreathed his wings.

Gwyn stared the ribbon down like an enemy on a battlefield. It rippled in the wind, dancing away, its motions unpredictable as any foe.

“Do it for the miniature pegasus,” Emerie said. Cassian had no idea what it meant, but Gwyn’s lips twitched upward.

Nesta laughed.

The sound might as well have been a lightning strike to his head for how much it rocked him, that laugh. Free and light and so unlike anything he’d ever heard from her that even Azriel blinked. A true laugh. “The miniature pegasus,” Nesta said, “was an illusion. And is now back in his make-believe meadow.”

“He loved Gwyn most,” Emerie teased. “Despite your efforts to woo him.”

They fell silent again as Gwyn shifted her feet, angling the blade. The wind waggled the ribbon again, as if taunting her.

Cassian glanced over at Az, but his attention was fixed on the young priestess, admiration and quiet encouragement shining from his face.

Gwyn whispered, “I am the rock against which the surf crashes.” Nesta straightened at the words, as if they were a prayer and a summons. Gwyn lifted the blade. “Nothing can break me.”

Cassian’s throat tightened, and even from across the ring, he could see Nesta’s eyes gleaming with pride and pain.

Emerie said, “Nothing can break us.”

The world seemed to pause at the words. As if it had been following one path and now branched off in another direction. In a hundred years, a thousand, this moment would still be etched in his mind. That he would tell his children, his grandchildren, Right then and there. That was when it all changed.

Azriel went wholly still, as if he, too, had felt the shift. As if he, too, were aware that far larger forces peered into that training ring as Gwyn moved.

Smooth as the Sidra, swift as the wind off the Illyrian Mountains, her entire body working in singing harmony, Gwyn lunged toward the ribbon, twirled, and as she spun, her arm opened up, executing a perfect backhanded slice that cut the winter morning itself.

Half the ribbon fluttered to the red stone.

A flawless, precise slice. Not one frayed strand rippled in the wind as the severed ribbon hanging from the beam flapped.

Nesta bent down, picked up the fallen half of the ribbon, and solemnly tied it around Gwyn’s brow. A makeshift version of what the priestesses wore atop their heads with their stones. But Cassian had never seen Gwyn display her Invoking Stone.

Gwyn lifted trembling fingers to her brow, touching the ribbon with which Nesta had crowned her.

Nesta’s voice was thick as she declared, “Valkyrie.”



It became the ritual: to cut that ribbon, to be crowned with its severed half and anointed Valkyrie.

Gwyn was the first. Emerie the second. By the end of training that morning, Nesta became the third.

It made facing Cassian only slightly easier. Even if the need within her had only grown worse, clawing at the underside of her skin, begging to get out. To get to him.

Every time she met his stare, or got within a few feet of him, it roared at her to strip off her clothes and offer herself to him. She focused on the white ribbon around her brow, focused on what the three of them had accomplished.

The lesson finished, and she might have dragged Cassian down to her bedroom had he not simply taken to the skies and left. He didn’t come back until the following morning.

He was avoiding her.

But the next morning, she understood why—or at least he had a reason for his vanishing act.

The training ring had been transformed again.

An obstacle course lay all around it, coiled like a snake throughout. Nesta was one of the last to arrive, and joined the crowd of females who lingered by the door, murmuring about it as Cassian and Azriel turned to them all. Cassian said, “Valkyries were fearless and brilliant warriors on their own. But their true strength came from being a highly trained unit.” He motioned to the obstacle course. “Alone, none of you will be able to get through that course. Together, you can find a way.”