2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

Across the river, thunder boomed—Amren or Cassian or Azriel, I didn’t know.
The river.
Three soldiers spotted me from up the hill. Raced for me.
But I ran faster, back for the river at the foot of the hill, for the singing Sidra.
I hit the edge of the quay, the water already stained with blood, and slammed my foot
down in a mighty stomp.
And as if in answer, the Sidra rose.
I yielded to that thrumming power inside my bones and blood and breath. I became the
Sidra, ancient and deep. And I bent it to my will.
I lifted my blades, willing the river higher, shaping it, forging it.
Those Hybern soldiers stopped dead in their tracks as I turned toward them.
And wolves of water broke from behind me.
The soldiers whirled, fleeing.
But my wolves were faster. I was faster as I ran with them, in the heart of the pack.
Wolf after wolf roared out of the Sidra, as colossal as the one I had once killed, pouring
into the streets, racing upward.
I made it five steps before the pack was upon the soldiers taunting the shop owner.
I made it seven steps before the wolves brought them down, water shoving down their
throats, drowning them—
I reached the soldiers, and my blade sang as I severed their choking heads from their
bodies.
The shopkeeper was sobbing as she recognized me, her rusted bar still raised. But she
nodded—only once.
I ran again, losing myself amongst my water-wolves. Some of the soldiers were taking
to the sky, flapping upward, backtracking.
So my wolves grew wings, and talons, and became falcons and hawks and eagles.
They slammed into their bodies, their armor, drenching them. The airborne soldiers,
realizing they hadn’t been drowned, halted their flight and laughed—sneering.
I lifted a hand skyward, and clenched my fingers into a fist.
The water soaking them, their wings, their armor, their faces … It turned to ice.
Ice that was so cold it had existed before light, before the sun had warmed the earth. Ice
of a land cloaked in winter, ice from the parts of me that felt no mercy, no sympathy for
what these creatures had done and were doing to my people.
Frozen solid, dozens of the winged soldiers fell to the earth as one. And shattered upon
the cobblestones.