2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

I might have called the look on Rhys’s face a warning. “Thank you for your help,” he
said, placing a hand on my back to guide me out.
But if he knew … I turned again to the boy-creature. “There was a choice—in Death,” I
said.
Those eyes guttered with cobalt fire.
Rhys’s hand contracted on my back, but remained. Warm, steady. And I wondered if the
touch was more to reassure him that I was there, still breathing.
“I knew,” I went on, “that I could drift away into the dark. And I chose to fight—to hold
on for a bit longer. Yet I knew if I wanted, I could have faded. And maybe it would be a
new world, a realm of rest and peace. But I wasn’t ready for it—not to go there alone. I
knew there was something else waiting beyond that dark. Something good.”
For a moment, those blue eyes flared brighter. Then the boy said, “You know who has
the Cauldron, Rhysand. Who has been pillaging the temples. You only came here to
confirm what you have long guessed.”
“The King of Hybern.”
Dread sluiced through my veins and pooled in my stomach. I shouldn’t have been
surprised, should have known, but …
The carver said nothing more. Waiting for another truth.
So I offered up another shattered piece of me. “When Amarantha made me kill those
two faeries, if the third hadn’t been Tamlin, I would have put the dagger in my own heart
at the end.”
Rhys went still.
“I knew there was no coming back from what I’d done,” I said, wondering if the blue
flame in the carver’s eyes might burn my ruined soul to ash. “And once I broke their
curse, once I knew I’d saved them, I just wanted enough time to turn that dagger on
myself. I only decided I wanted to live when she killed me, and I knew I had not finished
whatever … whatever it was I’d been born to do.”
I dared a glance at Rhys, and there was something like devastation on his beautiful face.
It was gone in a blink.
Even the Bone Carver said gently, “With the Cauldron, you could do other things than
raise the dead. You could shatter the wall.”
The only thing keeping human lands—my family—safe from not just Hybern, but any
other faeries.
“It is likely that Hybern has been quiet for so many years because he was hunting the
Cauldron, learning its secrets. Resurrection of a specific individual might very well have
been his first test once the feet were reunited—and now he finds that the Cauldron is pure
energy, pure power. And like any magic, it can be depleted. So he will let it rest, let it
gather strength—learn its secrets to feed it more energy, more power.”