A Court of Blood & Mercy || Elriel Dual POV

Chapter 28 - I Like It When You smile

The wind whistled through the dead leaves, sending another chill up Azriel's spine, his wings shuddering as the ice began to crystallize in his veins. The temperature was dropping as Solstice was nearing, the amber forests drying and freezing with every sunrise and every sunset, the misty fog and roaring mountains giving way to an eerie type of silence one could only find in an Autumn Winter.

He remembered listening to Feyre and Elain describe the Autumn season of their girlhood in the human lands one evening at dinner in what felt like another lifetime. They had smiled, wistful and longing, wondering after human Autumn with books by a fire while quiet orange leaves floated from the heavens beyond a windowpane. Elain had said it was warm and cozy, the kind of season that makes you not mind a rainstorm, so long as you were tucked beneath a blanket to watch the clouds gather and storm. Autumn amongst humans with their traditions and orchards... laughing children and piles of leaves for a season before it was all swept away by the snow of Winter. It sounded nice.

He wondered if Elain had believed that the Autumn Court would be like that— a perpetual warm afternoon in the waning sun as apples were picked and hay was gathered.

How disappointed she must have been to learn the truth.

That the Court of Fire was the coldest in all of Prythian.

His mind flashed to the enshrined copy of the Octavo in the temple beyond his hunting grounds.

Autumn was cold. It was bitter and savage. It breathed calculated and raw, as if the blood and spirit of the highland nomad clans had never left her, the fae hungry for war and the males reaching for domination. It was like the spirit of the peoples had swallowed the earth and the soil until the essence and breath of the Court was cold.

He watched his breath steam in front of his face as he adjusted his position, roosting farther back on his laurels as he waited, the small herd of deer beneath him quiet and unsuspecting of the Shadowsinger preying upon them.

Azriel and Elain had been eating almost entirely vegetarian since he arrived, and while he did not mind, he was feeling quite fussy about getting some meat on Elain's bones. Her daughter and wretch of a mate would be home in a little over a month's time, and he didn't know how she would react to the swing and shift back to reality. The debut... the whispers of civil Prythian war... it was all going to add additional stress, and Elain never seemed to handle stress well.

He ground the muscle in his jaw down as he focused on stilling himself, drawing back his arm slightly as he took aim with Truth Teller.

He had considered merely floating down from a cloud upon a rural farm of nearby Autumn folk, snatching and flying off with a ewe or sow before they knew what had happened, but the general poverty of the Autumn farmers made him want to deliver pigs and sheep instead of steal them. He could have spirited food from the Big House, but he was somehow wary of running into Eris. The heir seemed to spirit himself around the House of Vanserra almost as if he was also cut from Shadow. And of course, there was always the option of returning to Eliezer and his granite Moonstone Palace for an afternoon to bring back food, but the idea of being three courts away from Elain almost made him violently ill.

So here he was, in the forest beneath the Zhizn temple, stalking a herd of amicable deer.

He knew Elain would not be pleased with the killing... she never was. But he would do it without her knowledge, processing the deer and perhaps drying some of the meat before she could refuse.

Drawing back his arm, he felt the muscles pulse and twitch in his bicep, flinging the dagger forward in a sharp line, straight into the buck's chest.

The creature fell instantly and painlessly, his life snuffed out before he so much as realized.