2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

A twitch of his lips. “Indeed.”
I glanced at the shut door. “You flew here.”
He nodded. “Mor wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone, and there are only so many
places that are as secure as this one. Since I didn’t want our Hybern friends tracking me to
you, I had to do it the old-fashioned way. It took … a while.”
“You’re—better?”
“Healed completely. Quickly, considering the bloodbane. Thanks to you.”
I avoided his stare, turning for the kitchen. “You must be hungry. I’ll heat something
up.”
Rhys straightened. “You’d—make me food?”
“Heat,” I said. “I can’t cook.”
It didn’t seem to make a difference. But whatever it was, the act of offering him food …
I dumped some cold soup into a pan and lit the burner. “I don’t know the rules,” I said, my
back to him. “So you need to explain them to me.”
He lingered in the center of the cabin, watching my every move. He said hoarsely, “It’s
an … important moment when a female offers her mate food. It goes back to whatever
beasts we were a long, long time ago. But it still matters. The first time matters. Some
mated pairs will make an occasion of it—throwing a party just so the female can formally
offer her mate food … That’s usually done amongst the wealthy. But it means that the
female … accepts the bond.”
I stared into the soup. “Tell me the story—tell me everything.”
He understood my offer: tell me while I cooked, and I’d decide at the end whether or
not to offer him that food.
A chair scraped against the wood floor as he sat at the table. For a moment, there was
only silence, interrupted by the clack of my spoon against the pot.
Then Rhys said, “I was captured during the War. By Amarantha’s army.”
I paused my stirring, my gut twisting.
“Cassian and Azriel were in different legions, so they had no idea that my forces and I
had been taken prisoner. And that Amarantha’s captains held us for weeks, torturing and
slaughtering my warriors. They put ash bolts through my wings, and they had those same
chains from the other night to keep me down. Those chains are one of Hybern’s greatest
assets—stone delved from deep in their land, capable of nullifying a High Fae’s powers.
Even mine. So they chained me up between two trees, beating me when they felt like it,
trying to get me to tell them where the Night Court forces were, using my warriors—their
deaths and pain—to break me.
“Only I didn’t break,” he said roughly, “and they were too dumb to know that I was an
Illyrian, and all they had to do to get me to yield would have been to try to cut off my