ACOTAR 05: Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas

Author:Sarah J. Maas [Maas, Sarah J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-02-15T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

37

There was a place in the Court of Nightmares where even Keir and his elite squadron of Darkbringers did not dare tread.

Once the Night Court’s enemies entered that place, they did not come out. Not alive, anyway.

Most of what remained of their bodies didn’t leave, either. Those went through the hatch in the center of the circular room—and into the pit of writhing beasts below. To their scales and claws and merciless hunger. The beasts did not feed often; they could receive a body every ten years and make it last, going into hibernation between meals.

The trickling blood of the two Autumn Court males through the black stone floor’s grate woke them.

Their snarls and hisses, their snapping tails and scraping claws should have incentivized the males chained to the chairs to talk.

Azriel leaned against the wall by the lone door, Truth-Teller bloody in his hand. Cassian, a step beside him, and Feyre, on Az’s other side, watched as Rhys and Amren approached the two males.

“Are you feeling more inclined to explain yourselves?” Rhys said, hands sliding into his pockets.

Only the knowledge that Nesta slept safely in a bedroom in Rhys’s palace above this mountain, warded by his High Lord’s power, allowed Cassian to remain in this room. The Mask, covered with a black velvet cloth, lay on a table in another room of the palace, equally warded and bespelled. Azriel had winnowed them away from the bog moments after Nesta had passed out, and had brought them to Rhys’s residence atop the Hewn City. Cassian knew, when Rhys had vanished a heartbeat later, that he’d gone to the bog for the Autumn Court soldiers, and would bring them here.

Nesta had been unconscious ever since.

The two males were similar-looking, in the way that people from individual courts tended to share characteristics: the Autumn Court skewed toward hair of varying shades of red, brown or gold eyes—sometimes green, and mostly pale skin. The male on the left had auburn hair that was browner; the hair of the one on the right shone like bright copper. Both remained vacant-faced.

“They must be under some sort of an enchantment,” Amren observed, circling the males. “Their only drive seems to be to harm without reason, without context.”

“Why did you attack members of my court in the Bog of Oorid?” Rhys asked with that same mild calm that so many had heard right before being ripped to bloody ribbons.

Rhys had agreed that the soldiers who attacked were likely the Autumn Court soldiers who had gone missing, but how they had ended up in the Bog of Oorid … Well, that was what they intended to uncover. Rhys had tried to get into their heads, but found nothing but fog and mist.

The males only stared toward Cassian, toward Azriel, and bristled with violence.

Feyre observed from the wall, “They’re like rabid dogs, lost to sanity.”

“They fought like them, too,” Cassian said. “No intelligence—just a desire to kill.”

Rhys extended a hand toward the one with the brownish hair, the male bleeding from places Azriel knew would hurt but not kill.

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