A Court of Silver Flames - Sarah J. Maas Page 0,63

the last time she’d laughed. A true, belly-deep laugh.

Maybe before her mother had died. She’d certainly had nothing to laugh about once they’d fallen into poverty.

Nesta nodded toward the desk. “No dinner tonight?”

Her bedroom door only swung open to reveal the dimly lit hallway.

“I’ve had enough of him for one day.” She’d barely been able to speak to Cassian for the rest of their lesson, unable to stop thinking of how he’d put up a wall without her so much as saying a word, anticipating that she would go after him, assuming that she was so awful she couldn’t have a normal conversation. That she’d mock him about his mother and their pain.

“I’d rather stay here.”

The door opened wider.

Nesta sighed. Her stomach ached with hunger. “You’re as much a busybody as the rest of them,” she muttered, and aimed for the dining room.

Cassian sat alone at the table, the setting sun gilding his black hair in golds and reds, shining through his beautiful wings. For a heartbeat, she understood Feyre’s urge to paint things—to capture sights like this, preserve them forever.

“How was the library?” he asked as she claimed the seat across from him.

“Nothing tried to eat me today, so it was fine.”

A plate of roast pork and green beans appeared with a glass of water before her.

He’d gone still, though. “Something tried to eat you on another day?”

“Well, it didn’t get close enough to try, but that was the general impression I received.”

He blinked, his Siphons glowing. “Tell me.”

Nesta wondered if she’d said something wrong, but she related the incident with the darkness and finished with Gwyn’s assistance. She hadn’t seen the priestess after that, but at the end of the day there had been a note on her cart that said, Just a friendly reminder to stay away from the lowest levels!

Nesta had snorted, balling up the note, but she’d kept it in her pocket.

Across from her, Cassian’s face was pale.

“You saw Bryaxis once,” Nesta said into the silence.

“A few times,” he breathed. His skin had turned greenish. “I know we should keep hunting for Bryaxis. It’s not a good thing that it’s out in the world. But I don’t think I could endure encountering it again.”

“What was it like?”

His eyes met hers. “My worst nightmares. And I’m not talking about petty phobias. I mean my deepest, most primal fears. I’ve put some of the worst, most vile monsters into the Prison, but these were monsters in every sense of the word. It’s … I don’t think anyone can understand unless they’ve seen it.”

He glanced at her again, and she could tell he was bracing for her venom.

Monster—she was a monster. The knowledge cut and sliced deep. But she said, hoping to let him see she wouldn’t pry into his business just to hurt him, “What manner of creatures did you put in the Prison?”

Cassian took a bite of food. A good sign that this, at least, was acceptable territory. “When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?”

The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her.

“They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful.

“When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil