A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses 3)

Brannagh hissed, “This is not about armies, so I will trust you to keep that mouth shut until we have use for you.”

I snorted. “You mean to tell me all of this nonsense hasn’t been to find a place to break through the wall and use the Cauldron to also transport the mass of your armies here?”

She laughed, swinging her dark curtain of hair over a shoulder. “The Cauldron is not for transporting grunt armies. It is for remaking worlds. It is for bringing down this hideous wall and reclaiming what we were.”

I merely crossed my legs. “I’d think that with an army of ten thousand you wouldn’t need any magical objects to do your dirty work.”

“Our army is ten times that, girl,” Brannagh sneered. “And twice that number if you count our allies in Vallahan, Montesere, and Rask.”

Two hundred thousand. Mother save us.

“You’ve certainly been busy all these years.” I surveyed them, utterly nonplussed. “Why not strike when Amarantha had the island?”

“The king had not yet found the Cauldron, despite years of searching. It served his purposes to let her be an experiment for how we might break these people. And served as good motivation for our allies on the continent to join us, knowing what would await them.”

I finished off my apple and chucked the core into the woods. They watched it fly like two hounds tracking a pheasant.

“So they’re all going to converge here? I’m supposed to play hostess to so many soldiers?”

“Our own force will take care of Prythian before uniting with the others. Our commanders are preparing for it as we speak.”

“You must think you stand a shot at losing if you’re bothering to use the Cauldron to help you win.”

“The Cauldron is victory. It will wipe this world clean again.”

I lifted my brows in irreverent cynicism. “And you need this exact spot to unleash it?”

“This exact spot,” Dagdan said, a hand on the hilt of his sword, “exists because a person or object of mighty power passed through it. The Cauldron will study the work they’ve already done—and magnify it until the wall collapses entirely. It is a careful, complex process, and one I doubt your mortal mind can grasp.”

“Probably. Though this mortal mind did manage to solve Amarantha’s riddle—and destroy her.”

Brannagh merely turned back to the wall. “Why do you think Hybern let her live for so long in these lands? Better to have someone else do his dirty work.”

I had what I needed.

Tamlin and Jurian were still off hunting, the royals were preoccupied, and I’d sent the sentries to fetch me more water, claiming that some of my bruises still ached and I wanted to make a poultice for them.

They’d looked positively murderous at that. Not at me—but at who had given me those bruises. Who had picked Ianthe over them—and Hybern over their honor and people.

I’d brought three packs, but I’d only need one. The one I’d carefully repacked with Alis’s new supplies, now tucked beside everything I’d anticipated needing to get clear of them and go. The one I’d brought with me on every trip out to the wall, just in case. And now …

I had numbers, I had a purpose, I had a specific location, and the names of foreign territories.

But more than that, I had a people who had lost faith in their High Priestess. I had sentries who were beginning to rebel against their High Lord. And as a result of those things, I had Hybern royals doubting the strength of their allies here. I’d primed this court to fall. Not from outside forces—but its own internal warring.

And I had to be clear of it before it happened. Before the last sliver of my plan fell into place.

The party would return without me. And to maintain that illusion of strength, Tamlin and Ianthe would lie about it—where I’d gone.

And perhaps a day or two after that, one of these sentries would reveal the news, a carefully sprung trap that I’d coiled into his mind like one of my snares.

I’d fled for my life—after being nearly killed by the Hybern prince and princess. I’d planted images in his head of my brutalized body, the markings consistent with what Dagdan and Brannagh had already revealed to be their style. He’d describe them in detail—describe how he helped me get away before it was too late. How I ran for my life when Tamlin and Ianthe refused to intervene, to risk their alliance with Hybern.

And when the sentry revealed the truth, no longer able to stomach keeping quiet when he saw how my sorry fate was concealed by Tamlin and Ianthe, just as Tamlin had sided with Ianthe the day he’d flogged that sentry …

When he described what Hybern had done to me, their Cursebreaker, their newly anointed Cauldron-blessed, before I’d fled for my life …

There would be no further alliance. For there would be no sentry or denizen of this court who would stand with Tamlin or Ianthe after this. After me.

I ducked into my tent to grab my pack, my steps light and swift. Listening, barely breathing, I scanned the camp, the woods.

A few seconds extra had me snatching Tamlin’s bandolier of knives from where he’d left them inside his tent. They’d get in the way while using a bow and arrow, he’d explained that morning.

Their weight was considerable as I slung it across my chest. Illyrian fighting knives.

Home. I was going home.

I didn’t bother to look back at that camp as I slipped into the northern tree line. If I winnowed without stopping between leaps, I’d be at the foothills in an hour—and would vanish through one of the caves not long after that.

I made it about a hundred yards into the cover of the trees before I halted.

I heard Lucien first.

“Back off.”

A low female laugh.

Everything in me went still and cold at that sound. I’d heard it once before—in Rhysand’s memory.

Keep going. They were distracted, horrible as it was.

Keep going, keep going, keep going.

“I thought you’d seek me out after the Rite,” Ianthe purred. They couldn’t be more than thirty feet through the trees. Far enough away not to hear my presence, if I was quiet enough.

“I was obligated to perform the Rite,” Lucien snapped. “That night wasn’t the product of desire, believe me.”

“We had fun, you and I.”

“I’m a mated male now.”

Every second was the ringing of my death knell. I’d primed everything to fall; I’d long since stopped feeling any sort of guilt or doubt about my plan. Not with Alis now safely away.

And yet—and yet—

“You don’t act that way with Feyre.” A silk-wrapped threat.

“You’re mistaken.”

“Am I?” Twigs and leaves crunched, as if she was circling him. “You put your hands all over her.”

I had done my job too well, provoked her jealousy too much with every instance I’d found ways to get Lucien to touch me in her presence, in Tamlin’s presence.

“Do not touch me,” he growled.

And then I was moving.

I masked the sound of my footfalls, silent as a panther as I stalked to the little clearing where they stood.

Where

Lucien stood, back against a tree—twin bands of blue stone shackled around his wrists.

I’d seen them before. On Rhys, to immobilize his power. Stone hewn from Hybern’s rotted land, capable of nullifying magic. And in this case … holding Lucien against that tree as Ianthe surveyed him like a snake before a meal.

She slid a hand over the broad panes of his chest, his stomach.

And Lucien’s eyes shot to me as I stepped between the trees, fear and humiliation reddening his golden skin.

“That’s enough,” I said.

Ianthe whipped her head to me. Her smile was innocent, simpering. But I saw her note the pack, Tamlin’s bandolier. Dismiss them. “We were in the middle of a game. Weren’t we, Lucien?”

He didn’t answer.

And the sight of those shackles on him, however she’d trapped him, the sight of her hand still on his stomach—

“We’ll return to the camp when we’re done,” she said, turning to him again. Her hand slid lower, not for his own pleasure, but simply to throw it in my face that she could—

I struck.

Not with my knives or magic, but my mind.

I ripped down the shield I’d kept up around her to avoid the twins’ control—and slammed myself into her consciousness.

A mask over a face of decay. That’s what it was like to go inside that beautiful head and find such hideous thoughts inside it. A trail of males she’d used her power on or outright forced to bed, convinced of her entitlement to them. I pulled back against the tug of those memories, mastering myself. “Take your hands off him.”

She did.

“Unshackle him.”

Lucien’s skin drained of color as Ianthe obeyed me, her face queerly vacant, pliant. The blue stone shackles thumped to the mossy ground.

Lucien’s shirt was askew, the top button on his pants already undone.

The roaring that filled my mind was so loud I could barely hear myself as I said, “Pick up that rock.”