2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

Rhys winnowed in Cassian first, returning a heartbeat later for me and Azriel.
The spymaster had waited in silence. I tried not to look too uncomfortable as he
scooped me into his arms, those shadows that whispered to him stroking my neck, my
cheek. Rhys was frowning a bit, and I just gave him a sharp look and said, “Don’t let the
wind ruin my hair.”
He snorted, gripped Azriel’s arm, and we all vanished into a dark wind.
Stars and blackness, Azriel’s scarred hands clenching tightly around me, my arms
entwined around his neck, bracing, waiting, counting—
Then blinding sunlight, roaring wind, a plunge down, down—
Then we tilted, shooting straight. Azriel’s body was warm and hard, though those
brutalized hands were considerate as he gripped me. No shadows trailed us, as if he’d left
them in Velaris.
Below, ahead, behind, the vast, blue sea stretched. Above, fortresses of clouds plodded
along, and to my left … A dark smudge on the horizon. Land.
Spring Court land.
I wondered if Tamlin was on the western sea border. He’d once hinted about trouble
there. Could he sense me, sense us, now?
I didn’t let myself think about it. Not as I felt the wall.
As a human, it had been nothing but an invisible shield.
As a faerie … I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it crackling with power—the tang of it
coating my tongue.
“It’s abhorrent, isn’t it,” Azriel said, his low voice nearly swallowed up by the wind.
“I can see why you—we were deterred for all these centuries,” I admitted. Every
heartbeat had us racing closer to that gargantuan, nauseating sense of power.
“You’ll get used to it—the wording,” he said. Clinging to him so tightly, I couldn’t see
his face. I watched the light shift inside the sapphire Siphon instead, as if it were the great
eye of some half-slumbering beast from a frozen wasteland.
“I don’t really know where I fit in anymore,” I admitted, perhaps only because the wind
was screeching around us and Rhys had already winnowed ahead to where Cassian’s dark
form flew—beyond the wall.
“I’ve been alive almost five and a half centuries, and I’m not sure of that, either,” Azriel
said.
I tried to pull back to read the beautiful, icy face, but he tightened his grip, a silent
warning to brace myself.
How Azriel knew where the cleft was, I had no idea. It all looked the same to me:
invisible, open sky.