A COURT OF WRATH AND FURY. acotar

xi. long nights and beauty

But now was the sun and her leather, hot and tight. Simpler times, harder times, she was not sure what the moment reminded her of.

A shadow passed above, a flicker of darkness through her eyelids. Elain, probably, filling her watering can again.

"Briar."

Her eyes flicked open at that, squinting in the brightness at the dark figure above her. A mop of dark curls, black leathers, the tips of taloned wings poking up above broad shoulders - Azriel.

She grunted in response.

One of his eyebrows quirked up, a cheek twitching in an almost-smirk. It was difficult to remember him sometimes, hard to differentiate between the male with the small smirks - with the loose curls and twirling shadows, who she had met dozens of times and who remembered as she forgot - and the male who had dragged her by her hair into a dungeon cell, who had emanated such a wild feralness, who had bore his teeth and hated so intensely.

Some days, she thought the High Lord and Lady - fucking Feyre - might change their minds about her. That the Spymaster would come to drag her away, would kill her in any way he might like and throw her corpse to the cliffs.

Today, he was taking her sun. He was taking her warmth and her life and the aliveness from the little sapling beside her.

"What."

"You seem ready," he stated.

Briar waved a hand to gesture towards her clothes, levelling a blank stare up at him. "Obviously."

He looked up towards the sky at that, huffing out air and shaking his head slowly. Beside her, the little sapling had such a smooth little leaf. It had grown since yesterday, she could tell. It practically squirmed in her fingers.

"Get up, then. The priestesses are waiting."

The priestesses, the training rings, this whole court waiting and waiting for Briar. For Briar to move, for Briar to remember, Briar, Briar, Briar.

Azriel stared down at her, eyes flickering with darkness as a shadow drifted from his shoulders down to her cheek.

She wished that she could see the expectation on his face - his belief that she was going to train and meet Helion and magically remember her entire life. Or that she could see doubt. That his anger at her was clear, that he was expecting this endless cycle of forgetting to continue on forever.

Anything, anything other than that blank stare beneath heavy brows.

"We have to fly," he stated. His lips twitched when her brows furrowed. "The House of Wind is embedded into the mountainside."

Of course it was. "That's... that's a stupid idea for a house." His smirk grew a little wider. "Probably yours, wasn't it?" And then he was glaring.

"We're going to be running late if we don't leave now." Late because of your sulking, he did not say.

Briar rolled into a sit and then stood, ruffling her hands through her curls to brush out the soil that clung to the strands. She glanced around, scanning the garden for Elain to bid goodbye to.

"Is it alright if I carry you?" Azriel asked.

"Well I can't fly on my own," she muttered, feeling hot and a bit uneasy as he stepped towards her, chest just inches away from her own.