A Court Of Wings And Ruin Audiobook Download
For Josh and Annie—
A gift. All of it.
BOOKS By SARAH J. MAAS
The Throne of Glass series
Throne of Glass
Crown of Midnight
Heir of Fire
Queen of Shadows
Empire of Storms
•
The Assassin's Blade
•
The Throne of Drinking glass Coloring Book
A Court of Thorns and Roses series
A Court of Thorns and Roses
A Court of Mist and Fury
A Court of Wings and Ruin
•
A Court of Thorns and Roses Coloring Book
CONTENTS
Rhysand: 2 Years Before the Wall
Part One: Princess of Carrion
Chapter i
Chapter ii
Affiliate 3
Chapter 4
Chapter v
Chapter 6
Chapter seven
Chapter viii
Affiliate ix
Chapter x
Part Ii: Cursebreaker
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter xiii
Chapter xiv
Affiliate fifteen
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter nineteen
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Affiliate 25
Affiliate 26
Affiliate 27
Affiliate 28
Chapter 29
Affiliate 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Affiliate 35
Chapter 36
Affiliate 37
Affiliate 38
Chapter 39
Affiliate twoscore
Affiliate 41
Affiliate 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Affiliate 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Role Three: High Lady
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Affiliate 57
Affiliate 58
Chapter 59
Affiliate sixty
Chapter 61
Affiliate 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Affiliate 70
Affiliate 71
Affiliate 72
Chapter 73
Affiliate 74
Chapter 75
Affiliate 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Affiliate 79
Chapter 80
Affiliate 81
Chapter 82
Acknowledgments
Rhysand
2 Years Earlier the Wall
The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums.
The killing field was at present a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted simply by broken wings jutting toward the grey heaven or the occasional bulk of a felled horse.
With the estrus, despite the heavy deject comprehend, the smell would shortly be unbearable. Flies already crawled along eyes gazing unblinkingly upward. They didn't differentiate between mortal and immortal flesh.
I picked my way across the once-grassy evidently, marking the banners half-buried in mud and gore. It took about of my lingering strength to proceed my wings from dragging over corpse and armor. My own ability had been depleted well before the carnage had stopped.
I'd spent the final hours fighting as the mortals beside me had: with sword and fist and creature, unrelenting focus. We'd held the lines against Ravennia's legions—hr after hour, we'd held the lines, as I had been ordered to exercise by my male parent, equally I knew I must do. To falter hither would have been the killing blow to our already-sundering resistance.
The go on looming at my dorsum was besides valuable to be yielded to the Loyalists. Not just for its location in the heart of the continent, but for the supplies information technology guarded. For the forges that smoldered day and night on its western side, toiling to stock our forces.
The smoke of those forges now blended with the pyres already being kindled behind me as I kept walking, scanning the faces of the dead. I made a annotation to dispatch any soldiers who could breadbasket it to claim weapons from either army. Nosotros needed them besides badly to bother with honor. Especially since the other side did non bother with information technology at all.
So notwithstanding—the battleground was and so notwithstanding, compared with the slaughter and chaos that had finally halted hours agone. The Loyalist army had retreated rather than surrender, leaving their dead for the crows.
I edged around a fallen bay gelding, the beautiful beast's eyes nevertheless wide with terror, flies crusting his bloodied flank. The rider was twisted beneath it, the human'south head partially severed. Non from a sword blow. No, those brutal gashes were claws.
They wouldn't yield easily. The kingdoms and territories that wanted their human slaves would non lose this war unless they had no other choice. And even then … We'd learned the hard way, very early on, that they had no regard for the ancient rules and rites of battle. And for the Fae territories that fought abreast mortal warriors … We were to be stomped out like vermin.
I waved away a fly that buzzed in my ear, my hand caked with blood both my own and foreign.
I'd always thought death would be some sort of peaceful homecoming—a sweet, sorry lullaby to usher me into whatever waited afterward.
I crunched downwardly with an armored kicking on the flagpole of a Loyalist standard-bearer, smearing red mud beyond the tusked boar embroidered on its emerald flag.
I now wondered if the lullaby of decease was not a lovely vocal, but the droning of flies. If flies and maggots were all Decease's handmaidens.
The battlefield stretched toward the horizon in every direction save the proceed at my back.
Three days, we had held them off; three days, nosotros had fought and died hither.
But we'd held the lines. Again and again, I'd rallied human being and faerie, had refused to allow the Loyalists break through, fifty-fifty when they'd hammered our vulnerable right flank with fresh troops on the second mean solar day.
I'd used my power until it was null but smoke in my veins, and then I'd used my Illyrian preparation until swinging my shield and sword was all I knew, all I could manage against the hordes.
A half-shredded Illyrian wing jutted from a cluster of High Fae corpses, equally if it had taken all six of them to bring the warrior downward. As if he'd taken them all out with him.
My heartbeat pounded through my battered body as I hauled abroad the piled corpses.
Reinforcements had arrived at dawn on the third and final day, sent by my father afterwards my plea for aid. I had been too lost in battle-rage to notation who they were beyond an Illyrian unit of measurement, especially when and so many had been wielding Siphons.
But in the hours since they'd saved our asses and turned the tide of the battle, I had not spotted either of my brothers amongst the living. Did not know if Cassian or Azriel had fifty-fifty fought on the plain.
The latter was unlikely, every bit my male parent kept him shut for spying, but Cassian … Cassian could take been reassigned. I wouldn't have put it by my begetter to shift Cassian to a unit most likely to be slaughtered. As this i had been, barely half limping off the battleground earlier.
My aching, bloodied fingers dug into dented armor and damp, stiff flesh equally I heaved away
the concluding of the Loftier Fae corpses piled atop the fallen Illyrian soldier.
The dark hair, the golden-dark-brown skin … The same as Cassian's.
Simply it was non Cassian's death-grey face that gaped at the heaven.
My breath whooshed from me, my lungs still raw from roaring, my lips dry and chapped.
I needed water—badly. Just nearby, another set of Illyrian wings poked up from the piled dead.
I stumbled and lurched toward it, letting my mind drift someplace nighttime and serenity while I righted the twisted neck to peer at the face beneath the simple helm.
Non him.
I picked my way through the corpses to some other Illyrian.
Then another. And some other.
Some I knew. Some I didn't. Still the killing field stretched onward nether the sky.
Mile afterwards mile. A kingdom of the rotting dead.
And nonetheless I looked.
Function ONE
PRINCESS OF CARRION
Chapter
1
Feyre
The painting was a prevarication.
A bright, pretty lie, bursting with stake pink blooms and fatty beams of sunshine.
I'd begun information technology yesterday, an idle written report of the rose garden lurking beyond the open up windows of the studio. Through the tangle of thorns and satiny leaves, the brighter green of the hills rolled away into the distance.
Incessant, unrelenting spring.
If I'd painted this glimpse into the court the way my gut had urged me, it would have been flesh-shredding thorns, flowers that high-strung off the sunlight for any plants smaller than them, and rolling hills stained reddish.
Merely each brushstroke on the broad canvas was calculated; each dab and swirl of blending colors meant to portray non merely idyllic spring, but a sunny disposition as well. Non too happy, but gladly, finally healing from horrors I carefully divulged.
I supposed that in the past weeks, I had crafted my demeanor every bit intricately as i of these paintings. I supposed that if I had also called to show myself as I truly wished, I would have been adorned with flesh-shredding talons, and hands that high-strung the life out of those now in my company. I would accept left the gilded halls stained red.
Just not yet.
Not withal, I told myself with every brushstroke, with every movement I'd made these weeks. Swift revenge helped no one and nothing but my own, roiling rage.
Fifty-fifty if every fourth dimension I spoke to them, I heard Elain'south sobbing as she was forced into the Cauldron. Even if every time I looked at them, I saw Nesta fling that finger at the King of Hybern in a decease-promise. Fifty-fifty if every time I scented them, my nostrils were once again total of the tang of Cassian'south blood as information technology pooled on the night stones of that bone-castle.
The paintbrush snapped between my fingers.
I'd cleaved it in two, the pale handle damaged beyond repair.
Blasphemous nether my breath, I glanced to the windows, the doors. This place was besides total of watching eyes to risk throwing it in the rubbish bin.
I cast my listen around me like a net, trawling for any others virtually enough to witness, to be spying. I plant none.
I held my hands before me, ane half of the brush in each palm.
For a moment, I let myself come across past the glamour that concealed the tattoo on my correct hand and forearm. The markings of my truthful heart. My true championship.
Loftier Lady of the Night Court.
One-half a thought had the broken paintbrush going up in flames.
The burn down did non burn me, even equally it devoured wood and brush and paint.
When it was cipher simply fume and ash, I invited in a wind that swept them from my palms and out the open up windows.
For good measure, I summoned a breeze from the garden to serpent through the room, wiping away any lingering tendril of smoke, filling it with the musty, suffocating olfactory property of roses.
Mayhap when my task here was done, I'd burn this manor to the ground, too. Starting with those roses.
Ii approaching presences tapped confronting the back of my mind, and I snatched up another brush, dipping it in the closest swirl of paint, and lowered the invisible, dark snares I'd erected around this room to warning me of any visitors.
I was working on the way the sunlight illuminated the delicate veins in a rose petal, trying non to think of how I'd once seen it exercise the same to Illyrian wings, when the doors opened.
I made a skilful show of appearing lost in my work, hunching my shoulders a bit, angling my head. And fabricated an even better show of slowly looking over my shoulder, as if the struggle to part myself from the painting was a truthful effort.
But the battle was the grinning I forced to my oral cavity. To my optics—the real tell of a grinning'due south genuine nature. I'd proficient in the mirror. Over and over.
So my eyes easily crinkled equally I gave a subdued nonetheless happy smile to Tamlin.
To Lucien.
"Sorry to interrupt," Tamlin said, scanning my face for any sign of the shadows I remembered to occasionally fall prey to, the ones I wielded to keep him at bay when the sun sank beyond those foothills. "But I thought you might want to go ready for the meeting."
I made myself eat. Lower the paintbrush. No more than than the nervous, unsure girl I'd been long ago. "Is—you talked information technology over with Ianthe? She's truly coming?"
I hadn't seen her yet. The High Priestess who had betrayed my sisters to Hybern, betrayed u.s.a. to Hybern.
And even if Rhysand's murky, swift reports through the mating bond had soothed some of my dread and terror … She was responsible for it. What had happened weeks agone.
It was Lucien who answered, studying my painting as if it held the proof I knew he was searching for. "Aye. She … had her reasons. She is willing to explain them to y'all."
Perhaps forth with her reasons for laying her easily on whatsoever males she pleased, whether they wished her to or not. For doing it to Rhys, and Lucien.
I wondered what Lucien truly made of it. And the fact that the collateral in her friendship with Hybern had wound up being his mate. Elain.
We had not spoken of Elain save for once, the solar day after I'd returned.
Despite what Jurian implied regarding how my sisters volition be treated by Rhysand, I had told him, despite what the Night Courtroom is like, they won't hurt Elain or Nesta like that—not even so. Rhysand has more creative ways to harm them.
Lucien still seemed to dubiety it.
But and so again, I had likewise implied, in my ain "gaps" of retention, that perhaps I had non received the same inventiveness or courtesy.
That they believed it then easily, that they thought Rhysand would ever forcefulness someone … I added the insult to the long, long list of things to repay them for.
I prepare down the brush and pulled off the pigment-flecked smock, carefully laying information technology on the stool I'd been perched on for two hours now.
"I'll go modify," I murmured, flicking my loose braid over a shoulder.
Tamlin nodded, monitoring my every movement every bit I neared them. "The painting looks cute."
"It's nowhere near done," I said, dredging up that girl who had shunned praise and compliments, who had wanted to go unnoticed. "It's still a mess."
Frankly, information technology was some of my best work, even if its soullessness was only apparent to me.
"I think we all are," Tamlin offered with a tentative grin.
I reined in the urge to roll my eyes, and returned his smiling, brushing my hand over his shoulder equally I passed.
Lucien was waiting outside my new bedroom when I emerged x minutes later.
Information technology had taken me two days to stop going to the old 1—to turn correct at the top of the stairs and non left. But at that place was naught in that old bedchamber.
I'd looked into it once, the twenty-four hour period after I returned.
Shattered furniture; shredded bedding; dress strewn nearly as if he'd gone looking for me inside the armoire. No i, information technology seemed, had been immune in to clean.
But it was the vines—the thorns—that had made it unlivable. My old sleeping room had been overrun with them. They'd curved and slithered over the walls, entwined t
hemselves amongst the debris. As if they'd crawled off the trellises beneath my windows, every bit if a hundred years had passed and not months.
That bedroom was at present a tomb.
I gathered the soft pink skirts of my gauzy dress in a hand and close the sleeping room door backside me. Lucien remained leaning against the door across from mine.
His room.
I didn't doubt he'd ensured I now stayed across from him. Didn't doubt that the metallic eye he possessed was e'er turned toward my own chambers, even while he slept.
"I'm surprised you're so calm, given your promises in Hybern," Lucien said past fashion of greeting.
The hope I'd made to kill the human queens, the Rex of Hybern, Jurian, and Ianthe for what they'd done to my sisters. To my friends.
"You yourself said Ianthe had her reasons. Furious as I might be, I can hear her out."
I had not told Lucien of what I knew regarding her truthful nature. It would mean explaining that Rhys had thrown her out of his own home, that Rhys had done information technology to defend himself and the members of his court, and it would raise likewise many questions, undermine too many carefully crafted lies that had kept him and his court—my court—safe.
Though I wondered if, afterwards Velaris, it was even necessary. Our enemies knew of the city, knew it was a identify of good and peace. And had tried to destroy it at the first opportunity.
The guilt for the attack on Velaris after Rhys had revealed it to those human queens would haunt my mate for the residuum of our immortal lives.
"She's going to spin a story that you'll desire to hear," Lucien warned.
I shrugged, heading down the carpeted, empty hall. "I can determine for myself. Though information technology sounds similar you've already chosen not to believe her."
He fell into footstep beside me. "She dragged two innocent women into this."
"She was working to ensure Hybern'south brotherhood held strong."
Lucien halted me with a hand around my elbow.
I allowed it considering not allowing information technology, winnowing the way I'd done in the forest those months ago, or using an Illyrian defensive maneuver to knock him on his ass, would ruin my ruse. "You're smarter than that."
I studied the broad, tan manus wrapped around my elbow. And so I met ane centre of russet and one of whirring gold.
Lucien breathed, "Where is he keeping her?"
I knew who he meant.
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