2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

CHAPTER
60
“Velaris is secure,” Rhys said in the black hours of the night. “The wards the Cauldron
took out have been remade.”
We had not stopped to rest until now. For hours we’d worked, along with the rest of the
city, to heal, to patch up, to hunt down answers any way we could. And now we were all
again gathered, the clock chiming three in the morning.
I didn’t know how Rhys was standing as he leaned against the mantel in the sitting
room. I was near-limp on the couch beside Mor, both of us coated in dirt and blood. Like
the rest of them.
Sprawled in an armchair built for Illyrian wings, Cassian’s face was battered and
healing slowly enough that I knew he’d drained his power during those long minutes when
he’d defended the city alone. But his hazel eyes still glowed with the embers of rage.
Amren was hardly better off. The tiny female’s gray clothes hung mostly in strips, her
skin beneath pale as snow. Half-asleep on the couch across from mine, she leaned against
Azriel, who kept casting alarmed glances at her, even as his own wounds leaked a bit.
Atop his scarred hands, Azriel’s blue Siphons were dull, muted. Utterly empty.
As I had helped the survivors in the Rainbow tend to their wounded, count their dead,
and begin repairs, Rhys had checked in every now and then while he’d rebuilt the wards
with whatever power lingered in his arsenal. During one of our brief breaks, he’d told me
what Amren had done on her side of the river.
With her dark power, she had spun illusions straight into the soldiers’ minds. They
believed they had fallen into the Sidra and were drowning; they believed they were flying
a thousand feet above and had dived, fast and swift, for the city—only to find the street
mere feet away, and the crunch of their skulls. The crueler ones, the wickedest ones, she
had unleashed their own nightmares upon them—until they died from terror, their hearts
giving out.
Some had fallen into the river, drinking their own spreading blood as they drowned.
Some had disappeared wholly.
“Velaris might be secure,” Cassian replied, not even bothering to lift his head from
where it rested against the back of the chair, “but for how long? Hybern knows about this
place, thanks to those wyrm-queens. Who else will they sell the information to? How long
until the other courts come sniffing? Or Hybern uses that Cauldron again to take down our
defenses?”
Rhys closed his eyes, his shoulders tight. I could already see the weight pushing down
on that dark head.