A Court of Thorns and Roses eBook Bundle (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1-4)

by Sarah J. Maas

And I could have sworn I saw great, burning wings, each feather a simmering ember, spread wide. Could have sworn a crown of incandescent light floated just above her flaming hair.

She spread those wings, flame and light

There was only light. Bright, clean light, dancing on the waves.

The mating bond. It wasn’t there. It was gone. Because his own chest … it was not moving. And Rhys was dead.

Light glowed beyond my shut eyelids.

Those star-flecked eyes.

like living bands of lightning flashing through me.

shimmering as bright as any star.

Mor stiffened, following the mare’s line of sight. To the tangle of wood to their left, little more than a thatch of trees from this distance.

But Mor scented nothing, saw nothing. The tendril of power she speared toward the woods revealed only the usual birds and small beasts. A hart drinking from a hole in an iced-over stream. Nothing, except— There, between a snarl of thorns. A patch of darkness. It did not move, did not seem to do anything but linger. And watch. Familiar and yet foreign. Something in her power whispered not to touch it, not to go near it. Even from this distance. Mor obeyed. But she still watched that darkness in the thorns, as if a shadow had fallen asleep amongst them. Not like Azriel’s shadows, twining and whispering. Something different. Something that stared back, watching her in turn.

The cold of the gaps between stars, the cold of a world before light.

It was a kiss of venom, a death so permanent that every inch of her roared in defiance.

In the beginning And in the end There was Darkness And nothing more

Wrapped in black eternity, Nesta and the Cauldron twined, burning through the darkness like a newborn star.

Nesta knew that her silver flame came from a colder, darker place. A place that was old—and yet wholly new.

The silver fire, that sense of death looming, the raw power he’d witnessed as it blasted into the King of Hybern. Whatever it was, it existed beyond the usual array of High Fae gifts.

Rhys had built the model himself centuries ago. It could not only track the sun, but also tell time, and it somehow allowed Rhys to ponder the existence of life beyond their own world

What if I tell you what the rock and darkness and sea beyond whispered to me, Lord of Bloodshed? How they shuddered in fear, on that island across the sea. How they trembled when she emerged. She took something—something precious. She ripped it out with her teeth. What did you wake that day in Hybern, Prince of Bastards?

Vallahan.” The ancient, mountainous Fae territory across the northern sea had been stirring since before the war with Hybern, and had been both enemy and ally to Prythian in different historical eras. What role Vallahan’s hot-tempered king and proud people would play in this new world of theirs was yet to be decided,

Beyond that, only starlight silvered the lowlands before the cold and empty sea.

She let the starlight gently brush her head, her face, her neck. Imagined it running its shimmering fingers down her cheek,

The knife gleamed in the starlight,

His hounds detected strange scents at the site of the abduction. Ones that seemed human, but were … odd, somehow.”

Cassian could have sworn flames rippled across her blue eyes.

“Koschei is—was—the Bone Carver’s older brother.”

“Koschei is no mere sorcerer. He’s confined to the lake only due to an ancient spell. Because he was outsmarted once. Everything he does is to free himself.”

Koschei is as old as the sea—older.” “Some say he is Death itself,” Eris murmured. “I do not know if that is true,” Vassa said, “but they call him Koschei the Deathless, for he has no death awaiting him. He is truly immortal.

“I fear what may happen if he ever gets free of the lake. If he sees this world on the cusp of disaster and knows he could strike, and strike hard, and make himself its master. As he once tried to do, long ago.”

“Those wouldn’t happen to be the same soldiers who went missing, would they?” Eris nodded gravely. “They returned with my father, but they were … off. Aloof and strange. They vanished soon after—and my hounds confirmed that the scents at the scene are the same as those on gifts Briallyn sent to curry my father’s favor.”

Keep reaching out your hand.

Nesta blinked at her hand. She had seen sparks. Her fingers were embedded in the stone, the rock glowing as if lit with an inner flame. Gasping, she snatched back her hand, and the stone went dark. But the fingerprints remained, four furrows buried in the top of the step, a single hole in the riser where her thumb had pressed.

There, dead in the center of the Illyrian tattoo snaking down his spine, a new tattoo had appeared. An eight-pointed star, whose compass points radiated in sharp lines across and up the groove of his back, twining with the Illyrian markings long inked there. The eastern and western points of the star shot right onto his wings, black blending into black. A matching one, he knew, would be on Nesta’s spine. He tried not to think about her bare expanse of skin, now marked in black ink, as he faced her.

Merrill’s brilliant. Horrible, but brilliant. When she first came here, she was obsessed with theories regarding the existence of different realms—different worlds. Living on top of each other without even knowing it. Whether there is merely one existence, our existence, or if it might be possible for worlds to overlap, occupying the same space but separated by time and a whole bunch of other things

“Some philosophers believe there are eleven worlds like that. And some believe there are as many as twenty-six, the last one being Time itself,

“The feared general, felled by seasonal allergies.”

“I can feel something. Like a cat. Small and clever and curious. It’s watching.”

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.”

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 incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.”

“Seven-headed Lubia, who made the mistake of surfacing from the caves of the deep ocean to prey on girls along the western coast. Blue Annis, who was a terror to behold—cobalt skin and iron claws and, like Lubia, a taste for female flesh. Lubia, at least, swallowed her prey swiftly. Annis … she took longer. Annis was like Lanthys in that regard.”

“Do you know how your eyes glow when your power rises to the surface? Like molten steel. Like silver fire.”

“The Cauldron Made many objects of power, long ago, forging weapons of unrivaled might. Most were lost to history and war, and when I went into the Prison, only three remained. At the time, some claimed there were four, or that the fourth had been Unmade, but today’s legends only tell of three.” “The Mask,” Rhys murmured, “the Harp, and the Crown.”

“The Mask can raise the dead,” Amren answered for Rhys. “It is a death mask, molded from the face of a long-forgotten king. Wear it and you may summon the dead to you, command them to march at your will. The Harp can open any door, physical or otherwise. Some say between worlds. And the Crown …” Amren shook her head. “The Crown can influence anyone, even piercing through the mightiest of mental shields. Its only flaw is that it requires close physical proximity to initially sink its claws into a victim’s mind. But wear the Crown, and you could make your enemies do your bidding. Could make a parent slaughter their child, aware of the horror but unable to stop themselves.”

“What does it have to do with the Cauldron?” Nesta pushed. “Like calls to like,” Feyre murmured, looking to Amren, who nodded. “Because the Trove was Made by the Cauldron, so might the Trove find its Maker.”

“They were Made in a time when wild magic still roamed the earth, and the Fae were not masters of all. Made objects back then tended to gain their own self-awareness and desires. It was not a good thing.”

Nesta asked into the rustling quiet, “Nymph?” Gwyn lowered her hands, noted the lack of glowing power in Nesta’s eyes, and sighed in relief. But her voice remained casual. “My grandmother was a river-nymph who seduced a High Fae male from the Autumn Court. So I’m a quarter nymph, but it’s enough for this.” Gwyn gestured to her large eyes—blue so clear it could have been the shallow sea—and her lithe body.

“My mother was unwanted by either of their people. She could not dwell in the rivers of the Spring Court, but was too untamed to endure the confinement of the forest house of Autumn. So she was given in her childhood to the temple at Sangravah, where she was raised. She partook in the Great Rite when she was of age, and I, we—my sister and I, I mean—were the result of that sacred union with a male stranger. She never found out who he was, for the magic chose him that night, and no one ever showed up to ask about twin girls. We were raised in the temple as well. I never left its grounds until … until I came here.”

Nesta had caught glimpses of wine-red hair on Roslin and golden hair on Ananke, their skin pale as cream.

Nesta lay in her bed, body arched. Bathed in silver fire.

Nesta erupted, silver fire blasting outward,

“What is her power?” Azriel asked. “Death,” Rhys whispered, hands trembling again as he got to his feet and aimed toward the window, which was now repairing itself shard by shard, as if a careful, patient hand worked upon it. He gazed at the female sleeping in the bed, and fear clouded the face of the High Lord of the Night Court. “Pure death.”