A Court of Silver Flames （A Court of Thorns and Roses #4）
Sarah J. Maas
The black water nipping at her thrashing heels was freezing.
Not the bite of winter chill, or even the burn of solid ice, but something colder. Deeper.
The cold of the gaps between stars, the cold of a world before light.
The cold of hell—true hell, she realized as she bucked against the strong hands trying to shove her into that Cauldron.
True hell, because that was Elain lying on the stone floor with the red-haired, one-eyed Fae male hovering over her. Because those were pointed ears poking through her sister’s sodden gold-brown hair, and an immortal glow radiating from Elain’s fair skin.
True hell—worse than the inky depths mere inches from her toes.
Put her under, the hard-faced Fae king ordered.
And the sound of that voice, the voice of the male who had done this to Elain …
She knew she was going into the Cauldron. Knew she would lose this fight.
Knew no one was coming to save her: not sobbing Feyre, not Feyre’s gagged former lover, not her devastated new mate.
Not Cassian, broken and bleeding on the floor. The warrior was still trying to rise on trembling arms. To reach her.
The King of Hybern—he had done this. To Elain. To Cassian.
And to her.
The icy water bit into the soles of her feet.
It was a kiss of venom, a death so permanent that every inch of her roared in defiance.
She was going in—but she would not go gently.
The water gripped her ankles with phantom talons, tugging her down. She twisted, wrenching her arm free from the guard who held it.
And Nesta Archeron pointed. One finger—at the King of Hybern.
A death-promise. A target marked.
Hands shoved her into the water’s waiting claws.
Nesta laughed at the fear that crept into the king’s eyes just before the water devoured her whole.
In the beginning
And in the end
There was Darkness
And nothing more
She did not feel the cold as she sank into a sea that had no bottom, no horizon, no surface. But she felt the burning.
Immortality was not a serene youth.
It was fire.
It was molten ore poured into her veins, boiling her human blood until it was nothing but steam, forging her brittle bones until they were fresh steel.
And when she opened her mouth to scream, when the pain ripped her very self in two, there was no sound. There was nothing in this place but darkness and agony and power—
They would pay. All of them.
Starting with this Cauldron.
Starting now.
She tore into the darkness with talons and teeth. Rent and cleaved and shredded.
And the dark eternity around her shuddered. Bucked. Thrashed.
She laughed as it recoiled. Laughed around the mouthful of raw power she ripped out and swallowed whole; laughed at the fistfuls of eternity she shoved into her heart, her veins.
The Cauldron struggled like a bird under a cat’s paw. She refused to relent.
Everything it had stolen from her, from Elain, she would take from it.
Wrapped in black eternity, Nesta and the Cauldron twined, burning through the darkness like a newborn star.
PART ONE
NOVICE
CHAPTER
1
Cassian raised his fist to the green door in the dim hallway—and hesitated.
He’d cut down more enemies than he cared to tally, had stood knee-deep in gore on countless battlefields and kept swinging, had made choices that cost him the lives of skilled warriors, had been a general and a grunt and an assassin, and yet … here he was, lowering his fist.
Balking.
The building on the north side of the Sidra River was in need of new paint. And new floors, if the creaking boards beneath his boots as he’d climbed the two flights had been any indication. But at least it was clean. Definitely grim by Velaris’s standards, but when the city itself had no slums, that wasn’t saying much. He’d seen and stayed in far worse.
He’d never understood, though, why Nesta insisted on dwelling here. He got why she wouldn’t take up rooms in the House of Wind—it was too far from the city, and she couldn’t fly or winnow in. Which meant dealing with the ten thousand steps up and down. But why live in this dump, when the town house was sitting empty? Since construction had finished on Feyre and Rhys’s sprawling home on the river, the town house had been left open to any of their friends who needed or wanted it. He knew for a fact that Feyre had offered Nesta a room there—and had been rejected.
He frowned at the door’s peeling paint. No sounds trickled through the sizable gap between the door and the floor, wide enough for even the fattest of rats to meander through; no fresh scents lingered in the cramped hallway.