2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

Arrows shredded his wings. Struck his legs.
And I think I was screaming. Not for fear as we plummeted, but for him—for the blood
and the greenish sheen on those arrows. Not just ash, but poison—
A dark wind—his power—slammed into me, and then I was being thrown far and wide
as he sent me tumbling beyond the arrows’ range, tumbling through the air—
Rhys’s roar of wrath shook the forest, the mountains beyond. Birds rose up in waves,
taking to the skies, fleeing that bellow.
I slammed into the dense canopy, my body barking in agony as I shattered through
wood and pine and leaf. Down and down—
Focus focus focus
I flung out a wave of that hard air that had once shielded me from Tamlin’s temper.
Threw it out beneath me like a net.
I collided with an invisible wall so solid I thought my right arm might snap.
But—I stopped falling through the branches.
Thirty feet below, the ground was nearly impossible to see in the growing darkness.
I did not trust that shield to hold my weight for long.
I scrambled across it, trying not to look down, and leaped the last few feet onto a wide
pine bough. Hurtling over the wood, I reached the trunk and clung to it, panting,
reordering my mind around the pain, the steadiness of being on ground.
I listened—for Rhys, for his wings, for his next roar. Nothing.
No sign of the archers who he’d been falling to meet. Who he’d thrown me far, far
away from.Trembling, I dug my nails into the bark as I listened for him.
Ash arrows. Poisoned ash arrows.
The forest grew ever darker, the trees seeming to wither into skeletal husks. Even the
birds hushed themselves.
I stared at my palm—at the eye inked there—and sent a blind thought through it, down
that bond. Where are you? Tell me and I’ll come to you. I’ll find you.
There was no wall of onyx adamant at the end of the bond. Only endless shadow.
Things—great, enormous things—were rustling in the forest.
Rhysand. No response.
The last of the light slipped away.
Rhysand, please.
No sound. And the bond between us … silent. I’d always felt it protecting me, seducing
me, laughing at me on the other side of my shields. And now … it had vanished.
A guttural howl rippled from the distance, like rocks scraping against each other.