2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

Amren was standing at the foot of my bed.
CHAPTER
18
I jolted back, slamming into the headboard, blinded by the morning light blazing in,
fumbling for a weapon, anything to use—
“No wonder you’re so thin if you vomit up your guts every night.” She sniffed, her lip
curling. “You reek of it.”
The bedroom door was shut. Rhys had said no one entered without his permission, but
—
She chucked something onto the bed. A little gold amulet of pearl and cloudy blue
stone. “This got me out of the Prison. Wear it in, and they can never keep you.”
I didn’t touch the amulet.
“Allow me to make one thing clear,” Amren said, bracing both hands on the carved
wooden footboard. “I do not give that amulet lightly. But you may borrow it, while you do
what needs to be done, and return it to me when you are finished. If you keep it, I will find
you, and the results won’t be pleasant. But it is yours to use in the Prison.”
By the time my fingers brushed the cool metal and stone, she’d walked out the door.
Rhys hadn’t been wrong about the firedrake comparison.
Rhys kept frowning at the amulet as we hiked the slope of the Prison, so steep that at times
we had to crawl on our hands and knees. Higher and higher we climbed, and I drank from
the countless little streams that gurgled through the bumps and hollows in the moss-andgrass
slopes. All around the mist drifted by, whipped by the wind, whose hollow moaning
drowned out our crunching footsteps.
When I caught Rhys looking at the necklace for the tenth time, I said, “What?”
“She gave you that.”
Not a question.
“It must be serious, then,” I said. “The risk with—”
“Don’t say anything you don’t want others hearing.” He pointed to the stone beneath us.
“The inmates have nothing better to do than to listen through the earth and rock for gossip.
They’ll sell any bit of information for food, sex, maybe a breath of air.”
I could do this; I could master this fear.
Amren had gotten out. And stayed out. And the amulet—it’d keep me free, too.