A Court of Thorns and Roses Free PDF By Sarah J. Maas Book

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.

I’d been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my

vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless. The gusting

wind blew thick flurries to sweep away my tracks, but buried along with

them any signs of potential quarry.

Hunger had brought me farther from home than I usually risked, but

winter was the hard time. The animals had pulled in, going deeper into the

woods than I could follow, leaving me to pick off stragglers one by one,

praying they’d last until spring.

They hadn’t.

I wiped my numb fingers over my eyes, brushing away the flakes

clinging to my lashes. Here there were no telltale trees stripped of bark to

mark the deer’s passing—they hadn’t yet moved on. They would remain

until the bark ran out, then travel north past the wolves’ territory and

perhaps into the faerie lands of Prythian—where no mortals would dare go,

not unless they had a death wish.

A shudder skittered down my spine at the thought, and I shoved it away,

focusing on my surroundings, on the task ahead. That was all I could do, all

I’d been able to do for years: focus on surviving the week, the day, the hour

ahead. And now, with the snow, I’d be lucky to spot anything—especially

from my position up in the tree, scarcely able to see fifteen feet ahead.

Stifling a groan as my stiff limbs protested at the movement, I unstrung my

bow before easing off the tree.

The icy snow crunched under my fraying boots, and I ground my teeth.

Low visibility, unnecessary noise—I was well on my way to yet another

fruitless hunt.

Only a few hours of daylight remained. If I didn’t leave soon, I’d have to

navigate my way home in the dark, and the warnings of the town hunters

still rang fresh in my mind: giant wolves were on the prowl, and in

numbers. Not to mention whispers of strange folk spotted in the area, tall

and eerie and deadly.

Anything but faeries, the hunters had beseeched our long-forgotten gods

—and I had secretly prayed alongside them. In the eight years we’d been

living in our village, two days’ journey from the immortal border of

Prythian, we’d been spared an attack—though traveling peddlers sometimes

brought stories of distant border towns left in splinters and bones and ashes.

These accounts, once rare enough to be dismissed by the village elders as

hearsay, had in recent months become commonplace whisperings on every

market day.

I had risked much in coming so far into the forest, but we’d finished our

last loaf of bread yesterday, and the remainder of our dried meat the day

before. Still, I would have rather spent another night with a hungry belly

than found myself satisfying the appetite of a wolf. Or a faerie.

Not that there was much of me to feast on. I’d turned gangly by this time

of the year, and could count a good number of my ribs. Moving as nimbly

and quietly as I could between the trees, I pushed a hand against my hollow

and aching stomach. I knew the expression that would be on my two elder

sisters’ faces when I returned to our cottage empty-handed yet again.