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

The only thing that frightened him was that she might reject it. Hate him for it. Chafe against it. He’d beheld the truth in her eyes on Solstice, when the mating bond had been like so much gold thread between their souls, but she’d still hesitated. And yesterday his temper had gotten the better of him, and … he’d start off round two by getting her to say just one word to him, so he’d be free to speak the rest.

The apology, the declaration he still needed to make—all of it.

He scented both Nesta and Gwyn at Emerie’s back door when he knocked. It moved him beyond words, that Gwyn had braved the world beyond the library to comfort Nesta. Even as it shamed him that he’d been the cause of it.

But at his side, Rhys’s face was suddenly pale. “They’re not here.”

Cassian didn’t wait before he shoved into the shop, breaking the lock on Emerie’s door. If someone had hurt them, taken them—

No one was in the cozy room in the back. But—suddenly there were male scents in this room, as if they’d winnowed right in.

Illyrians had no magic like that.

Except on one night, when Illyrians possessed an ancient, wild power.

“No.” He charged up the stairs, the steps rank with those male scents, and that of the females’ fear. He found Nesta’s room first.

She’d fought. The bed was shoved across the room, the nightstand turned over, and blood—male blood, from the scent of it—lay in a puddle on the floor. But the acrid scent of the sleeping ointment, enough to knock out a horse, lingered.

His head went quiet. Emerie’s and Gwyn’s rooms were the same. Signs of a struggle, but not of the females themselves.

Fear bloomed, so vast and broad he could barely breathe. It was a message—to the females for thinking themselves warriors, and to him for teaching them, for defying the Illyrians’ archaic hierarchies and rules.

Rhys came up beside him, his face white with that same dread. “Devlon just confirmed everything. The Blood Rite began at midnight.”

And Gwyn, Emerie, and Nesta had been snatched from their beds. To participate in it.





PART FOUR

ATARAXIA





CHAPTER

64

Someone had poured sand into her mouth. And taken a hammer to her head.

Was still pounding on it, apparently.

Nesta pried her tongue from her teeth, swallowing a few times to work some moisture back into her mouth. Her aching head—

Scents hit her. Male, varied, and so many—

Hard, cold ground lay beneath her bare legs, pine needles poking through the thin material of her nightgown. Chill, blood-icing wind carried all those male scents above a tide of snow and pine and dirt—

Nesta’s eyes flew open. A broad male back filled her vision, most of it obscured by a pair of wings. Bound wings.

Images of last night pelted her: the males who’d grabbed her, how she’d fought until they’d pushed something against her face that had her blacking out, hearing Gwyn and Emerie screaming—

Nesta jolted upright.

The view was worse than she’d expected. Far, far worse.

Slowly, silently, she twisted in place. Unconscious Illyrian warriors were strewn around her. At her back, at her head. At her bare feet. More surrounded her, at least two hundred, stretching between the towering pines.

The Blood Rite.

She must have awoken before the others because she was Made. Different.

Nesta reached inward, toward that place where the ancient, awful power rested, and found nothing. As if the well had been drained, as if the sea had receded.

The Blood Rite’s spells bound magic. Her powers had been rendered useless.

She knew her shaking wasn’t entirely from the cold. Whatever time she had wouldn’t last long. The others would soon stir.

And find her standing among them, in nothing but a nightgown. Without weapons.

She had to move. Had to find Emerie and Gwyn in this endless sprawl of bodies. Unless they had been dumped elsewhere.

Cassian, Rhysand, and Azriel had all been left in different places, she remembered. They’d spent days killing their way to each other amid the bloodthirsty warriors and beasts who roamed these lands. But they had somehow found each other and scaled Ramiel, the sacred mountain, and won the Rite.

She’d be lucky to clear this general area.

Her breath catching, Nesta eased to her feet. Away from the shield of the warriors’ bodies, the cold slammed into her, nearly robbing her of breath. Her shaking deepened.

She needed something warmer. Needed shoes. Needed to make a weapon.

Nesta peered at the watery sun, as if it’d tell her what direction to go to find her friends. But the light seared her eyes, worsening the pounding in her head. Trees—she could find the mossy side of the trees, Cassian had said. North would lie that way.

The nearest tree rose about twenty feet and ten bodies away. From what she could see, no moss grew anywhere on it.

So she’d find higher ground and survey the land. See where Ramiel loomed and if she could spot the other dumping grounds.

But she needed clothes and weapons and food and to find Gwyn and Emerie, and oh, gods—

Nesta pressed a hand over her mouth to keep her trembling exhale to near-silence. Move. She had to move.

But someone already had.

The rustle of his wings gave him away. Nesta whirled.

A hundred feet off, separated from her by the sea of sleeping bodies, stood a beast of a male.