A Court of Silver Flames - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,224

words. As if it had been following one path and now branched off in another direction. In a hundred years, a thousand, this moment would still be etched in his mind. That he would tell his children, his grandchildren, Right then and there. That was when it all changed.

Azriel went wholly still, as if he, too, had felt the shift. As if he, too, were aware that far larger forces peered into that training ring as Gwyn moved.

Smooth as the Sidra, swift as the wind off the Illyrian Mountains, her entire body working in singing harmony, Gwyn lunged toward the ribbon, twirled, and as she spun, her arm opened up, executing a perfect backhanded slice that cut the winter morning itself.

Half the ribbon fluttered to the red stone.

A flawless, precise slice. Not one frayed strand rippled in the wind as the severed ribbon hanging from the beam flapped.

Nesta bent down, picked up the fallen half of the ribbon, and solemnly tied it around Gwyn’s brow. A makeshift version of what the priestesses wore atop their heads with their stones. But Cassian had never seen Gwyn display her Invoking Stone.

Gwyn lifted trembling fingers to her brow, touching the ribbon with which Nesta had crowned her.

Nesta’s voice was thick as she declared, “Valkyrie.”

It became the ritual: to cut that ribbon, to be crowned with its severed half and anointed Valkyrie.

Gwyn was the first. Emerie the second. By the end of training that morning, Nesta became the third.

It made facing Cassian only slightly easier. Even if the need within her had only grown worse, clawing at the underside of her skin, begging to get out. To get to him.

Every time she met his stare, or got within a few feet of him, it roared at her to strip off her clothes and offer herself to him. She focused on the white ribbon around her brow, focused on what the three of them had accomplished.

The lesson finished, and she might have dragged Cassian down to her bedroom had he not simply taken to the skies and left. He didn’t come back until the following morning.

He was avoiding her.

But the next morning, she understood why—or at least he had a reason for his vanishing act.

The training ring had been transformed again.

An obstacle course lay all around it, coiled like a snake throughout. Nesta was one of the last to arrive, and joined the crowd of females who lingered by the door, murmuring about it as Cassian and Azriel turned to them all. Cassian said, “Valkyries were fearless and brilliant warriors on their own. But their true strength came from being a highly trained unit.” He motioned to the obstacle course. “Alone, none of you will be able to get through that course. Together, you can find a way.”

Emerie snorted.

Cassian leveled a grin at her. “Looks simple, doesn’t it?”

Emerie had the good sense to look nervous.

Azriel clapped his hands, and all the females straightened. “You’ll work in groups of three.”

Gwyn asked Az, her teal eyes bright, “What do we get if we finish the course?”

Az’s shadows danced around him. “Since there’s no chance in hell any of you will finish the course, we didn’t bother to get a prize.”

Boos sounded. Gwyn lifted her chin in challenge. “We look forward to proving you wrong.”

Proving Azriel and Cassian wrong would take a while, it seemed.

Gwyn, Emerie, and Nesta made it the farthest in three hours: a grand, whopping halfway.

Roslin, Deirdre, and Ananke made it to the obstacle behind them before time was up, and Ananke’s golden hair was matted with blood from the blow she’d taken to the head from a spinning, many-armed wooden thing.

“Sadistic monsters,” Gwyn hissed as the three friends limped toward the water station, defeat heavy on their shoulders.

“We try again tomorrow,” Emerie swore, sporting a black eye thanks to the swinging log that had knocked her on her ass before Nesta could grab her. “We keep trying until we wipe that smug look off their stupid perfect faces.”

Indeed, Azriel and Cassian had just leaned against the wall, arms crossed, and smiled at them the entire time.

Gwyn threw Azriel a withering stare as she strode past him. “See you tomorrow, Shadowsinger,” she tossed over a shoulder.

Az stared after her, brows high with amusement. When he turned back, Nesta grinned. “You have no idea what you just started,” she said. Az angled his head, hazel eyes narrowing as Gwyn reached the archway.

“Remember how Gwyn was with the ribbon?” Nesta winked and clapped the shadowsinger on the