2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

fade again.
By the time Rhys returned, my mind felt like a mud puddle.
I spent the entire hour doing as I’d been ordered, though I’d flinched at every sound
from the nearby stairwell: quiet steps of servants, the flapping of sheets being changed,
someone humming a beautiful and winding melody. And beyond that, the chatter of birds
that dwelled in the unnatural warmth of the mountain or in the many potted citrus trees.
No sign of my impending torment. No sentries, even, to monitor me. I might as well have
had the entire place to myself.
Which was good, as my attempts to lower and raise that mental shield often resulted in
my face being twisted or strained or pinched.
“Not bad,” Rhys said, peering over my shoulder.
He’d appeared moments before, a healthy distance away, and if I hadn’t known better, I
might have thought it was because he didn’t want to startle me. As if he’d known about
the time Tamlin had crept up behind me, and panic had hit me so hard I’d knocked him on
his ass with a punch to his stomach. I’d blocked it out—the shock on Tam’s face, how
easy it had been to take him off his feet, the humiliation of having my stupid terror so out
in the open …
Rhys scanned the pages I’d scribbled on, sorting through them, tracking my progress.
Then, a scrape of claws inside my mind—that only sliced against black, glittering
adamant.
I threw my lingering will into that wall as the claws pushed, testing for weak spots …
“Well, well,” Rhysand purred, those mental claws withdrawing. “Hopefully I’ll be
getting a good night’s rest at last, if you can manage to keep the wall up while you sleep.”
I dropped the shield, sent a word blasting down that mental bridge between us, and
hauled the walls back up. Behind it, my mind wobbled like jelly. I needed a nap.
Desperately.
“Prick I might be, but look at you. Maybe we’ll get to have some fun with our lessons
after all.”
I was still scowling at Rhys’s muscled back as I kept a healthy ten steps behind him while
he led me through the halls of the main building, the sweeping mountains and blisteringly
blue sky the only witnesses to our silent trek.
I was too drained to demand where we were now going, and he didn’t bother explaining
as he led me up, up—until we entered a round chamber at the top of a tower.
A circular table of black stone occupied the center, while the largest stretch of
uninterrupted gray stone wall was covered in a massive map of our world. It had been
marked and flagged and pinned, for whatever reasons I couldn’t tell, but my gaze drifted