2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

preparing for flight.
But all I heard were those two words he’d said, echoing against the steady beat of
traitor, traitor:
She’s mine.
Being in Rhys’s arms again, against his body, was a test of stubbornness. For both of us.
To see who’d speak about it first.
We’d been flying over the most beautiful mountains I’d ever seen—snowy and flecked
with pines—heading toward rolling steppes beyond them when I said, “You’re training
female Illyrian warriors?”
“Trying to.” Rhys gazed across the brutal landscape. “I banned wing-clipping a long,
long time ago, but … at the more zealous camps, deep within the mountains, they do it.
And when Amarantha took over, even the milder camps started doing it again. To keep
their women safe, they claimed. For the past hundred years, Cassian has been trying to
build an aerial fighting unit amongst the females, trying to prove that they have a place on
the battlefield. So far, he’s managed to train a few dedicated warriors, but the males make
life so miserable that many of them left. And for the girls in training … ” A hiss of breath.
“It’s a long road. But Devlon is one of the few who even lets the girls train without a
tantrum.”
“I’d hardly call disobeying orders ‘without a tantrum.’ ”
“Some camps issued decrees that if a female was caught training, she was to be deemed
unmarriageable. I can’t fight against things like that, not without slaughtering the leaders
of each camp and personally raising each and every one of their offspring.”
“And yet your mother loved them—and you three wear their tattoos.”
“I got the tattoos in part for my mother, in part to honor my brothers, who fought every
day of their lives for the right to wear them.”
“Why do you let Devlon speak to Cassian like that?”
“Because I know when to pick my fights with Devlon, and I know Cassian would be
pissed if I stepped in to crush Devlon’s mind like a grape when he could handle it
himself.”
A whisper of cold went through me. “Have you thought about doing it?”
“I did just now. But most camp-lords never would have given the three of us a shot at
the Blood Rite. Devlon let a half-breed and two bastards take it—and did not deny us our
victory.”
Pines dusted with fresh snow blurred beneath us.
“What’s the Blood Rite?”
“So many questions today.” I squeezed his shoulder hard enough to hurt, and he