2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

to anywhere else? Anyone else?”
“Other cities,” he said calmly, “are known to the world. Velaris has remained secret
beyond the borders of these lands for millennia. Amarantha did not touch it, because she
did not know it existed. None of her beasts did. No one in the other courts knows of its
existence, either.”
“How?”
“Spells and wards and my ruthless, ruthless ancestors, who were willing to do anything
to preserve a piece of goodness in our wretched world.”
“And when Amarantha came,” I said, nearly spitting her name, “you didn’t think to
open this place as a refuge?”
“When Amarantha came,” he said, his temper slipping the leash a bit as his eyes
flashed, “I had to make some very hard choices, very quickly.”
I rolled my eyes, twisting away to scan the rolling, steep hills, the sea far beyond. “I’m
assuming you won’t tell me about it.” But I had to know—how he’d managed to save this
slice of peace and beauty.
“Now’s not the time for that conversation.”
Fine. I’d heard that sort of thing a thousand times before at the Spring Court, anyway. It
wasn’t worth dredging up the effort to push about it.
But I wouldn’t sit in my room, couldn’t allow myself to mourn and mope and weep and
sleep. So I would venture out, even if it was an agony, even if the size of this place …
Cauldron, it was enormous. I jerked my chin toward the city sloping down toward the
river. “So what is there that was worth saving at the cost of everyone else?”
When I faced him, his blue eyes were as ruthless as the churning winter sea in the
distance. “Everything,” he said.
Rhysand wasn’t exaggerating.
There was everything to see in Velaris: tea shops with delicate tables and chairs
scattered outside their cheery fronts, surely heated by some warming spell, all full of
chattering, laughing High Fae—and a few strange, beautiful faeries. There were four main
market squares; Palaces, they were called: two on this side—the southern side—of the
Sidra River, two on the northern.
In the hours that we wandered, I only made it to two of them: great, white-stoned
squares flanked by the pillars supporting the carved and painted buildings that watched
over them and provided a covered walkway beneath for the shops built into the street
level.
The first market we entered, the Palace of Thread and Jewels, sold clothes, shoes,
supplies for making both, and jewelry—endless, sparkling jeweler’s shops. Yet nothing
inside me stirred at the glimmer of sunlight on the undoubtedly rare fabrics swaying in the