2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

Elain’s voice wobbled as she noted the same thing and quickly said to him, “It … it is
very hard, you understand, to … accept it.” I realized the dark metal of her ring … it was
iron. Even though I had told them about iron being useless, there it was. The gift from her
Fae-hating soon-to-be-husband’s family. Elain cast pleading eyes on Rhys, then Azriel,
such mortal fear coating her features, her scent. “We are raised this way. We hear stories of
your kind crossing the wall to hurt us. Our own neighbor, Clare Beddor, was taken, her
family murdered …”
A naked body spiked to a wall. Broken. Dead. Nailed there for months.
Rhys was staring at his plate. Unmoving. Unblinking.
He had given Amarantha Clare’s name—given it, despite knowing I’d lied to him about
it.
Elain said, “It’s all very disorienting.”
“I can imagine,” Azriel said. Cassian flashed him a glare. But Azriel’s attention was on
my sister, a polite, bland smile on his face. Her shoulders loosened a bit. I wondered if
Rhys’s spymaster often got his information through stone-cold manners as much as stealth
and shadows.
Elain sat a little higher as she said to Cassian, “And as for Feyre’s hunting during those
years, it was not Nesta’s neglect alone that is to blame. We were scared, and had received
no training, and everything had been taken, and we failed her. Both of us.”
Nesta said nothing, her back rigid.
Rhys gave me a warning look. I gripped Nesta’s arm, drawing her attention to me. “Can
we just … start over?”
I could almost taste her pride roiling in her veins, barking to not back down.
Cassian, damn him, gave her a taunting grin.
But Nesta merely hissed, “Fine.” And went back to eating.
Cassian watched every bite she took, every bob of her throat as she swallowed.
I forced myself to clean my plate, aware of Nesta’s own attention on my eating.
Elain said to Azriel, perhaps the only two civilized ones here, “Can you truly fly?”
He set down his fork, blinking. I might have even called him self-conscious. He said,
“Yes. Cassian and I hail from a race of faeries called Illyrians. We’re born hearing the
song of the wind.”
“That’s very beautiful,” she said. “Is it not—frightening, though? To fly so high?”
“It is sometimes,” Azriel said. Cassian tore his relentless attention from Nesta long
enough to nod his agreement. “If you are caught in a storm, if the current drops away. But
we are trained so thoroughly that the fear is gone before we’re out of swaddling.” And yet,
Azriel had not been trained until long after that. You get used to the wording, he’d told me
earlier. How often did he have to remind himself to use such words? Did “we” and “our”