… this was chaos, and disorder, and lawlessness, joy and despair.
Rhys smoothly picked it up and set it on the golden queen’s chair. He did not need my power to open it—because no High Lord’s spells had been keyed to it.
Rhys flipped back the lid. A note lay atop the golden metal of the book.
I read your letter. About the woman you love. I believe you. And I believe in peace.
I believe in a better world.
If anyone asks, you stole this during the meeting.
Do not trust the others. The sixth queen was not ill.
That was it.
Rhys picked up the Book of Breathings.
Light and dark and gray and light and dark and gray—
He said to my two sisters, Cassian sticking close to Nesta, “It is your choice, ladies, whether you wish to remain here, or come with us. You have heard the situation at hand. You have done the math about an evacuation.” A nod of approval as he met Nesta’s gray-blue stare. “Should you choose to remain, a unit of my soldiers will be here within the hour to guard this place. Should you wish to come live with us in that city we just showed them, I’d suggest packing now.”
Nesta looked to Elain, still silent and wide-eyed. The tea she’d prepared—the finest, most exotic tea money could buy—sat undisturbed on the table.
Elain thumbed the iron ring on her finger.
“It is your choice,” Nesta said with unusual gentleness. For her, Nesta would go to Prythian.
Elain swallowed, a doe caught in a snare. “I—I can’t. I …”
But my mate nodded—kindly. With understanding. “The sentries will be here, and remain unseen and unfelt. They will look after themselves. Should you change your minds, one will be waiting in this room every day at noon and at midnight for you to speak. My home is your home. Its doors are always open to you.”
Nesta looked between Rhys and Cassian, then to me. Despair still paled her face, but … she bowed her head. And said to me,
“That was why you painted stars on your drawer.”
We immediately returned to Velaris, not trusting the queens to go long without noticing the Book’s absence, especially if the vague mention of the sixth alluded to further foul play amongst them.
Amren had the second half within minutes, not even bothering to ask about the meeting before she vanished into the dining room of the town house and shut the doors behind her. So we waited.
And waited.
Two days passed.
Amren still hadn’t cracked the code.
Rhys and Mor left in the early afternoon to visit the Court of Nightmares—to return the Veritas to Keir without his knowing, and ensure that the Steward was indeed readying his forces. Cassian had reports that the Illyrian legions were now camped across the mountains, waiting for the order to fly out to wherever our first battle might be.
There would be one, I realized. Even if we nullified the Cauldron using the Book, even if I was able to stop that Cauldron and the king from using it to shatter the wall and the world, he had armies gathered. Perhaps we’d take the fight to him once the Cauldron was disabled.
There was no word from my sisters, no report from Azriel’s soldiers that they’d changed their minds. My father, I remembered, was still trading in the continent for the Mother knew what goods.
Another variable in this.
And there was no word from the queens. It was of them that I most frequently thought. Of the two-faced, golden-eyed queen with not just a lion’s coloring … but a lion’s heart, too.
I hoped I saw her again.
With Rhys and Mor gone, Cassian and Azriel came to stay at the town house as they continued to plan our inevitable visit to Hybern. After that first dinner, when Cassian had broken out one of Rhys’s very old bottles of wine so we could celebrate my mating in style, I’d realized they’d come to stay for company, to dine with me, and … the Illyrians had taken it upon themselves to look after me.
Rhys said as much that night when I’d written him a letter and watched it vanish. Apparently, he didn’t mind his enemies knowing he was at the Court of Nightmares. If Hybern’s forces tracked him there … good luck to them.
I’d written to Rhys, How do I tell Cassian and Azriel I don’t need them here to protect me? Company is fine, but I don’t need sentries.
He’d written back, You don’t tell them. You set boundaries if they cross a line, but you are their friend—and my mate. They will protect you on instinct. If you kick their asses out of the house, they’ll just sit on the roof.
I scribbled, You Illyrian males are insufferable.
Rhys had just said, Good thing we make up for it with impressive wingspans.
Even with him across the territory, my blood had heated, my toes curling. I’d barely been able to hold the pen long enough to write, I’m missing that impressive wingspan in my bed. Inside me.
He’d replied, Of course you are.
I’d hissed, jotting down, Prick.
I’d almost felt his laughter down the bond—our mating bond.
Rhys wrote back, When I return, we’re going to that shop across the Sidra and you’re going to try on all those lacy little underthings for me.
I fell asleep thinking about it, wishing my hand was his, praying he’d finish at the Court of Nightmares and return to me soon.
Spring was bursting all across the hills and peaks around Velaris. I wanted to sail over the yellow and purple blooms with him.
The next afternoon, Rhys was still gone, Amren was still buried in the book, Azriel off on a patrol of the city and nearby shoreline, and Cassian and I were—of all things—just finishing up an early afternoon performance of some ancient, revered Fae symphony.
The amphi-theater was on the other side of the Sidra, and though he’d offered to fly me, I’d wanted to walk. Even if my muscles were barking in protest after his brutal lesson that morning.
The music had been lovely—strange, but lovely, written at a time, Cassian had told me, when humans had not even walked the earth. He found the music puzzling, off-kilter, but … I’d been entranced.
Walking back across one of the main bridges spanning the river, we remained in companionable silence. We’d dropped off more blood for Amren—who said thank you and get the hell out—and were now headed toward the Palace of Thread and Jewels, where I wanted to buy both of my sisters presents for helping us.
Cassian had promised to send them down with the next scout dispatched to retrieve the latest report. I wondered if he’d send anything to Nesta while he was at it.
I paused at the center of the marble bridge, Cassian halting beside me as I peered down at the blue-green water idling past. I could feel the threads of the current far below, the strains of salt and fresh water twining together, the swaying weeds coating the mussel-flecked floor, the tickling of small, skittering creatures over rock and mud. Could Tarquin sense such things? Did he sleep in his island-palace on the sea and swim through the dreams of fishes?
Cassian braced his forearms on the broad stone railing, his red Siphons like living pools of flame.
I said, perhaps because I was a busybody who liked to stick my nose in other people’s affairs, “It meant a great deal to me—what you promised my sister the other day.”
Cassian shrugged, his wings rustling. “I’d do it for anyone.”
“It meant a lot to her, too.” Hazel eyes narrowed slightly. But I casually watched the river. “Nesta is different from most people,” I explained. “She comes across as rigid and vicious, but I think it’s a wall. A shield—like the ones Rhys has in his mind.”
“Against what?”
“Feeling. I think Nesta feels everything—sees too much; sees and feels it all. And she burns with it. Keeping that wall up helps from being overwhelmed, from caring too greatly.”
“She barely seems to care about anyone other than Elain.”
I met his stare, scanning that handsome, tan face. “She will never be like Mor,” I said. “She will never love freely and gift it to everyone who crosses her path. But the few she does care for … I think Nesta would shred the world apart for them. Shred herself apart for them. She and I have our … issues. But Elain … ” My mouth quirked to the side. “She will never forget, Cassian, that you offered to defend Elain. Defend her people. As long as she lives, she will remember that kindness.”
He straightened, rapping his knuckles against the smooth marble. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I just—thought you should know. For whenever you see her again and she pisses you off. Which I’m certain will happen. But know that deep down, she is grateful, and perhaps does not possess the ability to say so. Yet the feeling—the heart—is there.”
I paused, debating pushing him, but the river flowing beneath us shifted.
Not a physical shifting. But … a tremor in the current, in the bedrock, in the skittering things crawling on it. Like ink dropped in water.
Cassian instantly went on alert as I scanned the river, the banks on either side.
“What the hell is that?” he murmured. He tapped the Siphon on each hand with a finger.
I gaped as scaled black armor began unfolding and slithering up his wrists, his arms, replacing the tunic that had been there. Layer after layer, coating him like a second skin, flowing up to his shoulders. The additional Siphons appeared, and more armor spread across his neck, his shoulders, down his chest and waist. I blinked, and it had covered his legs—then his feet.
The sky was cloudless, the streets full of chatter and life.
Cassian kept scanning, a slow rotation over Velaris.
The river beneath me remained steady, but I could feel it roiling, as if trying to flee from— “From the sea,” I breathed. Cassian’s gaze shot straight ahead, to the river before us, to the towering
cliffs in the distance that marked the raging waves where it met the ocean.
And there, on the horizon, a smear of black. Swift-moving—
spreading wider as it grew closer.
“Tell me those are birds,” I said. My power flooded my veins, and I curled my fingers into fists, willing it to calm, to steady—
“There’s no Illyrian patrol that’s supposed to know about this place … ,” he said, as if it were an answer. His gaze cut to me.
“We’re going back to the town house right now.”
The smear of black separated, fracturing into countless figures.
Too big for birds. Far too big. I said, “You have to sound the alarm
—”
But people were. Some were pointing, some were shouting.
Cassian reached for me, but I jumped back. Ice danced at my fingertips, wind howled in my blood. I’d pick them off one by one—
“Get Azriel and Amren—”
They’d reached the sea cliffs. Countless, long-limbed flying creatures, some bearing soldiers in their arms … An invading host. “Cassian.”
But an Illyrian blade had appeared in Cassian’s hand, twin to the one across his back. A fighting knife now shone in the other.
He held them both out to me. “Get back to the town house—right now.”
I most certainly would not go. If they were flying, I could use my power to my advantage: freeze their wings, burn them, break them. Even if there were so many, even if—
So fast, as if they were carried on a fell wind, the force reached the outer edges of the city. And unleashed arrows upon the shrieking people rushing for cover in the streets. I grabbed his outstretched weapons, the cool metal hilts hissing beneath my forge-hot palms.
Cassian lifted his hand into the air. Red light exploded from his Siphon, blasting up and away—forming a hard wall in the sky above the city, directly in the path of that oncoming force.
He ground his teeth, grunting as the winged legion slammed into his shield. As if he felt every impact.
The translucent red shield shoved out farther, knocking them back—
We both watched in mute horror as the creatures lunged for the shield, arms out—
They were not just any manner of faerie. Any rising magic in me sputtered and went out at the sight of them.
They were all like the Attor.
All long-limbed, gray-skinned, with serpentine snouts and razor-sharp teeth. And as the legion of its ilk punched through Cassian’s shield as if it were a cobweb, I beheld on their spindly gray arms gauntlets of that bluish stone I’d seen on Rhys, glimmering in the sun.
Stone that broke and repelled magic. Straight from the unholy trove of the King of Hybern.
One after one after one, they punched through his shield.
Cassian sent another wall barreling for them. Some of the creatures peeled away and launched themselves upon the outskirts of the city, vulnerable outside of his shield. The heat that had been building in my palms faded to clammy sweat.
People were shrieking, fleeing. And I knew his shields would not hold—
“GO! ” Cassian roared. I lurched into motion, knowing he likely lingered because I stayed, that he needed Azriel and Amren and
—
High above us, three of them slammed into the dome of the red shield. Clawing at it, ripping through layer after layer with those stone gauntlets.
That’s what had delayed the king these months: gathering his arsenal. Weapons to fight magic, to fight High Fae who would rely on it—
A hole ripped open, and Cassian threw me to the ground, shoving me against the marble railing, his wings spreading wide over me, his legs as solid as the bands of carved rock at my back
—
Screams on the bridge, hissing laughter, and then—
A wet, crunching thud.
“Shit,” Cassian said. “Shit—”
He moved a step, and I lunged from under him to see what it was, who it was—
Blood shone on the white marble bridge, sparkling like rubies in the sun.
There, on one of those towering, elegant lampposts flanking the bridge …
Her body was bent, her back arched on the impact, as if she were in the throes of passion.
Her golden hair had been shorn to the skull. Her golden eyes had been plucked out.
She was twitching where she had been impaled on the post, the metal pole straight through her slim torso, gore clinging to the metal above her.
Someone on the bridge vomited, then kept running.
But I could not break my stare from the golden queen. Or from the Attor, who swept through the hole it had made and alighted atop the blood-soaked lamppost.
“Regards,” it hissed, “of the mortal queens. And Jurian.” Then the Attor leaped into flight, fast and sleek—heading right for the theater district we’d left.
Cassian had pressed me back down against the bridge—and he surged toward the Attor. He halted, remembering me, but I rasped, “Go.”
“Run home. Now.”
That was the final order—and his good-bye as he shot into the sky after the Attor, who had already disappeared into the screaming streets.
Around me, hole after hole was punched through that red shield, those winged creatures pouring in, dumping the Hybern soldiers they had carried across the sea.
Soldiers of every shape and size—lesser faeries.
The golden queen’s gaping mouth was opening and closing like a fish on land. Save her, help her—
My blood. I could—
I took a step. Her body slumped.
And from wherever in me that power originated, I felt her death whisper past.
The screams, the beating wings, the whoosh and thud of arrows erupted in the sudden silence.
I ran. I ran for my side of the Sidra, for the town house. I didn’t trust myself to winnow—could barely think around the panic barking through my head. I had minutes, perhaps, before they hit my street. Minutes to get there and bring as many inside with me as I could. The house was warded. No one would get in, not even these things.
Faeries were rushing past, racing for shelter, for friends and family. I hit the end of the bridge, the steep hills rising up—
Hybern soldiers were already atop the hill, at the two Palaces, laughing at the screams, the pleading as they broke into buildings, dragging people out. Blood dribbled down the cobblestones in little rivers.
They had done this. Those queens had … had given this city of art and music and food over to these … monsters. The king must have used the Cauldron to break its wards.
A thunderous boom rocked the other side of the city, and I went down at the impact, blades flying, hands ripping open on the cobblestones. I whirled toward the river, scrambling up, lunging for my weapons.
Cassian and Azriel were both in the skies now. And where they flew, those winged creatures died. Arrows of red and blue light shot from them, and those shields—
Twin shields of red and blue merged, sizzling, and slammed into the rest of the aerial forces. Flesh and wings tore, bone melted—
Until hands encased in stone tumbled from the sky. Only hands.
Clattering on rooftops, splashing into the river. All that was left of them—what two Illyrian warriors had worked their way around.
But there were countless more who had already landed. Too many. Roofs were wrenched apart, doors shattered, screaming rising and then silenced—
This was not an attack to sack the city. It was an extermination.
And rising up before me, merely a few blocks down, the Rainbow of Velaris was bathed in blood.
The Attor and his ilk had converged there.
As if the queens had told him where to strike; where in Velaris would be the most defenseless. The beating heart of the city.
Fire was rippling, black smoke staining the sky—
Where was Rhys, where was my mate—
Across the river, thunder boomed again.
And it was not Cassian, or Azriel, who held the other side of the river. But Amren.
Her slim hands had only to point, and soldiers would fall—fall as if their own wings failed them. They slammed into the streets, thrashing, choking, clawing, shrieking, just as the people of Velaris had shrieked.
I whipped my head to the Rainbow a few blocks away—left unprotected. Defenseless.
The street before me was clear, the lone safe passage through hell.
A female screamed inside the artists’ quarter. And I knew my path.
I flipped my Illyrian blade in my hand and winnowed into the burning and bloody Rainbow.
This was my home. These were my people.
If I died defending them, defending that small place in the world where art thrived …
Then so be it.
And I became darkness, and shadow, and wind.
I winnowed into the edge of the Rainbow as the first of the Hybern soldiers rounded its farthest corner, spilling onto the river avenue, shredding the cafés where I had lounged and laughed.
They did not see me until I was upon them.
Until my Illyrian blade cleaved through their heads, one after another.
Six went down in my wake, and as I halted at the foot of the Rainbow, staring up into the fire and blood and death … Too many. Too many soldiers.
I’d never make it, never kill them all—
But there was a young female, green-skinned and lithe, an ancient, rusted bit of pipe raised above her shoulder. Standing her ground in front of her storefront—a gallery. People crouched inside the shop were sobbing.
Before them, laughing at the faerie, at her raised scrap of metal, circled five winged soldiers. Playing with her, taunting her.
Still she held the line. Still her face did not crumple. Paintings and pottery were shattered around her. And more soldiers were
landing, spilling down, butchering—
Across the river, thunder boomed—Amren or Cassian or Azriel, I didn’t know.
The river.
Three soldiers spotted me from up the hill. Raced for me.
But I ran faster, back for the river at the foot of the hill, for the singing Sidra.
I hit the edge of the quay, the water already stained with blood, and slammed my foot down in a mighty stomp.
And as if in answer, the Sidra rose.
I yielded to that thrumming power inside my bones and blood and breath. I became the Sidra, ancient and deep. And I bent it to my will.
I lifted my blades, willing the river higher, shaping it, forging it.
Those Hybern soldiers stopped dead in their tracks as I turned toward them.
And wolves of water broke from behind me.
The soldiers whirled, fleeing.
But my wolves were faster. I was faster as I ran with them, in the heart of the pack.
Wolf after wolf roared out of the Sidra, as colossal as the one I had once killed, pouring into the streets, racing upward.
I made it five steps before the pack was upon the soldiers taunting the shop owner.
I made it seven steps before the wolves brought them down, water shoving down their throats, drowning them—
I reached the soldiers, and my blade sang as I severed their choking heads from their bodies.
The shopkeeper was sobbing as she recognized me, her rusted bar still raised. But she nodded—only once.
I ran again, losing myself amongst my water-wolves. Some of the soldiers were taking to the sky, flapping upward, backtracking.
So my wolves grew wings, and talons, and became falcons and hawks and eagles.
They slammed into their bodies, their armor, drenching them.
The airborne soldiers, realizing they hadn’t been drowned, halted their flight and laughed—sneering.
I lifted a hand skyward, and clenched my fingers into a fist.
The water soaking them, their wings, their armor, their faces …
It turned to ice.
Ice that was so cold it had existed before light, before the sun had warmed the earth. Ice of a land cloaked in winter, ice from the parts of me that felt no mercy, no sympathy for what these creatures had done and were doing to my people.
Frozen solid, dozens of the winged soldiers fell to the earth as one. And shattered upon the cobblestones.
My wolves raged around me, tearing and drowning and hunting.
And those that fled them, those that took to the skies—they froze and shattered; froze and shattered. Until the streets were laden with ice and gore and broken bits of wing and stone.
Until the screaming of my people stopped, and the screams of the soldiers became a song in my blood. One of the soldiers rose up above the brightly painted buildings … I knew him.
The Attor was flapping, frantic, blood of the innocent coating his gray skin, his stone gauntlets. I sent an eagle of water shooting for him, but he was quicker, nimble.
He evaded my eagle, and my hawk, and my falcon, soaring high, clawing his way through the air. Away from me, my power—
from Cassian and Azriel, holding the river and the majority of the city, away from Amren, using whatever dark power she possessed to send so many droves of them crashing down without visible injury.
None of my friends saw the Attor sailing up, sailing free.
It would fly back to Hybern—to the king. It had chosen to come here, to lead them. For spite. And I had no doubt that the golden, lioness-queen had suffered at its hands. As Clare had.
Where are you?
Rhys’s voice sounded distantly in my head, through the sliver in my shield.
WHERE ARE YOU?
The Attor was getting away. With each heartbeat, it flew higher and higher—
WHERE—
I sheathed the Illyrian blade and fighting knife through my belt and scrambled to pick up the arrows that had fallen on the street.
Shot at my people. Ash arrows, coated in familiar greenish poison.
Bloodbane.
I’m exactly where I need to be, I said to Rhys.
And then I winnowed into the sky.
I winnowed to a nearby rooftop, an ash arrow clenched in either hand, scanning where the Attor was high above, flapping—
FEYRE.
I slammed a mental shield of adamant up against that voice; against him.
Not now. Not this moment.
I could vaguely feel him pounding against that shield. Roaring at it. But even he could not get in.
The Attor was mine.
In the distance, rushing toward me, toward Velaris, a mighty darkness devoured the world. Soldiers in its path did not emerge again.
My mate. Death incarnate. Night triumphant.
I spotted the Attor again, veering toward the sea, toward Hybern, still over the city.
I winnowed, throwing my awareness toward it like a net, spearing mind to mind, using the tether like a rope, leading me through time and distance and wind—
I latched onto the oily smear of its malice, pinpointing my being, my focus onto the core of it. A beacon of corruption and filth.
When I emerged from wind and shadow, I was right atop the Attor.
It shrieked, wings curving as I slammed into it. As I plunged those poisoned ash arrows through each wing. Right through the main muscle.
The Attor arched in pain, its forked tongue cleaving the air between us. The city was a blur below, the Sidra a mere stream from the height.
In the span of a heartbeat, I wrapped myself around the Attor. I became a living flame that burned everywhere I touched, became unbreakable as the adamant wall inside my mind.
Shrieking, the Attor thrashed against me—but its wings, with those arrows, with my grip …
Free fall.
Down into the world. Into blood and pain. The wind tore at us.
The Attor could not break free of my flaming grasp. Or from my poisoned arrows skewering its wings. Laming him. Its burning skin stung my nose.
As we fell, my dagger found its way into my hand.
The darkness consuming the horizon shot closer—as if spotting me.
Not yet.
Not yet.
I angled my dagger over the Attor’s bony, elongated rib cage.
“This is for Rhys,” I hissed in its pointed ear.
The reverberation of steel on bone barked into my hand.
Silvery blood warmed my fingers. The Attor screamed.
I yanked out my dagger, blood flying up, splattering my face.
“This is for Clare.”
I plunged my blade in again, twisting.
Buildings took form. The Sidra ran red, but the sky was empty—
free of soldiers. So were the streets.
The Attor was screaming and hissing, cursing and begging, as I ripped free the blade.
I could make out people; make out their shapes. The ground swelled up to meet us. The Attor was bucking so violently it was all I could do to keep it in my forge-hot grip. Burning skin ripped away, carried above us.
“And this,” I breathed, leaning close to say the words into its ear, into its rotted soul. I slid my dagger in a third time, relishing the splintering of bones and flesh. “This is for me.”
I could count the cobblestones. See Death beckoning with open arms.
I kept my mouth beside its ear, close as a lover, as our reflection in a pool of blood became clear. “I’ll see you in hell,” I whispered, and left my blade in its side.
Wind rippled the blood upon the cobblestones mere inches away.
And I winnowed out, leaving the Attor behind.
I heard the crack and splatter, even as I sifted through the world, propelled by my own power and the velocity of my plummet. I emerged a few feet away—my body taking longer than my mind to catch up.
My feet and legs gave out, and I rocked back into the wall of a pink-painted building behind me. So hard the plaster dented and cracked against my spine, my shoulders.
I panted, trembling. And on the street ahead—what lay broken and oozing on the cobblestones … The Attor’s wings were a twisted ruin. Beyond that, scraps of armor, splintered bone, and burned flesh were all that remained.
That wave of darkness, Rhysand’s power, at last hit my side of the river.
No one cried out at the star-flecked cascade of night that cut off all light.
I thought I heard vague grunting and scraping—as if it had sought out hidden soldiers lingering in the Rainbow, but then …
The wave vanished. Sunlight.
A crunch of boots before me, the beat and whisper of mighty wings.
A hand on my face, tilting up my chin as I stared and stared at the splattered ruin of the Attor. Violet eyes met mine.
Rhys. Rhys was here.
And … and I had …
He leaned forward, his brow sweat-coated, his breathing uneven. He gently pressed a kiss to my mouth.
To remind us both. Who we were, what we were. My icy heart thawed, the fire in my gut was soothed by a tendril of dark, and the water trickled out of my veins and back into the Sidra.
Rhys pulled back, his thumb stroking my cheek. People were weeping. Keening.
But no more screams of terror. No more bloodshed and destruction.
My mate murmured, “Feyre Cursebreaker, the Defender of the Rainbow.”
I slid my arms around his waist and sobbed.
And even as his city wailed, the High Lord of the Night Court held me until I could at last face this blood-drenched new world.
“Velaris is secure,” Rhys said in the black hours of the night. “The wards the Cauldron took out have been remade.”
We had not stopped to rest until now. For hours we’d worked, along with the rest of the city, to heal, to patch up, to hunt down answers any way we could. And now we were all again gathered, the clock chiming three in the morning.
I didn’t know how Rhys was standing as he leaned against the mantel in the sitting room. I was near-limp on the couch beside Mor, both of us coated in dirt and blood. Like the rest of them.
Sprawled in an armchair built for Illyrian wings, Cassian’s face was battered and healing slowly enough that I knew he’d drained his power during those long minutes when he’d defended the city alone. But his hazel eyes still glowed with the embers of rage.
Amren was hardly better off. The tiny female’s gray clothes hung mostly in strips, her skin beneath pale as snow. Half-asleep on the couch across from mine, she leaned against Azriel, who kept casting alarmed glances at her, even as his own wounds leaked a bit. Atop his scarred hands, Azriel’s blue Siphons were dull, muted. Utterly empty.
As I had helped the survivors in the Rainbow tend to their wounded, count their dead, and begin repairs, Rhys had checked in every now and then while he’d rebuilt the wards with whatever power lingered in his arsenal. During one of our brief breaks, he’d told me what Amren had done on her side of the river.
With her dark power, she had spun illusions straight into the soldiers’ minds. They believed they had fallen into the Sidra and were drowning; they believed they were flying a thousand feet above and had dived, fast and swift, for the city—only to find the
street mere feet away, and the crunch of their skulls. The crueler ones, the wickedest ones, she had unleashed their own nightmares upon them—until they died from terror, their hearts giving out.
Some had fallen into the river, drinking their own spreading blood as they drowned. Some had disappeared wholly.
“Velaris might be secure,” Cassian replied, not even bothering to lift his head from where it rested against the back of the chair,
“but for how long? Hybern knows about this place, thanks to those wyrm-queens. Who else will they sell the information to? How long until the other courts come sniffing? Or Hybern uses that Cauldron again to take down our defenses?”
Rhys closed his eyes, his shoulders tight. I could already see the weight pushing down on that dark head.
I hated to add to that burden, but I said, “If we all go to Hybern to destroy the Cauldron … who will defend the city?”
Silence. Rhys’s throat bobbed.
Amren said, “I’ll stay.” Cassian opened his mouth to object, but Rhys slowly looked at his Second. Amren held his gaze as she added, “If Rhys must go to Hybern, then I am the only one of you who might hold the city until help arrives. Today was a surprise. A bad one. When you leave, we will be better prepared. The new wards we built today will not fall so easily.”
Mor loosed a sigh. “So what do we do now?”
Amren simply said, “We sleep. We eat.”
And it was Azriel who added, his voice raw with the aftermath of battle-rage, “And then we retaliate.”
Rhys did not come to bed.
And when I emerged from the bath, the water clouded with dirt and blood, he was nowhere to be found.
But I felt for the bond between us and trudged upstairs, my stiff legs barking in pain. He was sitting on the roof—in the dark. His great wings were spread behind him, draped over the tiles.
I slid into his lap, looping my arms around his neck.
He stared at the city around us. “So few lights. So few lights left tonight.”
I did not look. I only traced the lines of his face, then brushed my thumb over his mouth. “It is not your fault,” I said quietly.
His eyes shifted to mine, barely visible in the dark. “Isn’t it? I handed this city over to them. I said I would be willing to risk it, but
… I don’t know who I hate more: the king, those queens, or myself.”
I brushed the hair out of his face. He gripped my hand, halting my fingers. “You shut me out,” he breathed. “You—shielded against me. Completely. I couldn’t find a way in.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rhys let out a bitter laugh. “Sorry? Be impressed. That shield …
What you did to the Attor … ” He shook his head. “You could have been killed.”
“Are you going to scold me for it?”
His brows furrowed. Then he buried his face in my shoulder.
“How could I scold you for defending my people? I want to throttle you, yes, for not going back to the town house, but … You chose to fight for them. For Velaris.” He kissed my neck. “I don’t deserve you.”
My heart strained. He meant it—truly felt that way. I stroked his hair again. And I said to him, the words the only sounds in the silent, dark city, “We deserve each other. And we deserve to be happy.”
Rhys shuddered against me. And when his lips found mine, I let him lay me down upon the roof tiles and make love to me under the stars.
Amren cracked the code the next afternoon. The news was not good.
“To nullify the Cauldron’s power,” she said by way of greeting as we crowded around the dining table in the town house, having rushed in from the repairs we’d all been making on very little sleep, “you must touch the Cauldron—and speak these words.”
She had written them all down for me on a piece of paper.
“You know this for certain?” Rhys said. He was still bleak-eyed from the attack, from healing and helping his people all day.
Amren hissed. “I’m trying not to be insulted, Rhysand.”
Mor elbowed her way between them, staring at the two assembled pieces of the Book of Breathings. “What happens if we put both halves together?”
“Don’t put them together,” Amren simply said.
With either piece laid out, their voices blended and sang and hissed—evil and good and madness; dark and light and chaos.
“You put the pieces together,” she clarified when Rhys gave her a questioning look, “and the blast of power will be felt in every corner and hole in the earth. You won’t just attract the King of Hybern. You’ll draw enemies far older and more wretched. Things that have long been asleep—and should remain so.”
I cringed a bit. Rhys put a hand on my back.
“Then we move in now,” Cassian said. His face had healed, but he limped a bit from an injury I couldn’t see beneath his fighting leathers. He jerked his chin to Rhys. “Since you can’t winnow without being tracked, Mor and Az will winnow us all in, Feyre breaks the Cauldron, and we get out. We’ll be there and gone before anyone notices and the King of Hybern will have a new piece of cookware.”
I swallowed. “It could be anywhere in his castle.”
“We know where it is,” Cassian countered.
I blinked. Azriel said to me, “We’ve been able to narrow it down to the lower levels.” Through his spying, their planning for this trip all these months. “Every inch of the castle and surrounding lands is heavily guarded, but not impossible to get through. We’ve worked out the timing of it—for a small group of us to get in and out, quick and silent, and be gone before they know what’s happening.”
Mor said to him, “But the King of Hybern could notice Rhys’s presence the moment he arrives. And if Feyre needs time to nullify the Cauldron, and we don’t know how much time, that’s a risky variable.”
Cassian said, “We’ve considered that. So you and Rhys will winnow us in off the coast; we fly in while he stays.” They’d have to winnow me, I realized, since I still had not yet mastered doing it over long distances. At least, not with many stops in between. “As for the spell,” Cassian continued, “it’s a risk we’ll have to take.”
Silence fell as they waited for Rhys’s answer. My mate scanned my face, eyes wide.
Azriel pushed, “It’s a solid plan. The king doesn’t know our scents. We wreck the Cauldron and vanish before he notices …
It’ll be a graver insult than the bloodier, direct route we’d been considering, Rhys. We beat them yesterday, so when we go into that castle … ” Vengeance indeed danced in that normally placid face. “We’ll leave a few reminders that we won the last damn war for a reason.”
Cassian nodded grimly. Even Mor smiled a bit.
“Are you asking me,” Rhys finally said, far too calmly, “to stay outside while my mate goes into his stronghold?”
“Yes,” Azriel said with equal calm, Cassian shifting himself slightly between them. “If Feyre can’t nullify the Cauldron easily or quickly, we steal it—send the pieces back to the bastard when we’re done breaking it apart. Either way, Feyre calls you through the bond when we’re done—you and Mor winnow us out. They won’t be able to track you fast enough if you only come to retrieve us.”
Rhysand dropped onto the couch beside me at last, loosing a breath. His eyes slid to me. “If you want to go, then you go, Feyre.”
If I hadn’t been already in love with him, I might have loved him for that—for not insisting I stay, even if it drove his instincts mad, for not locking me away in the aftermath of what had happened yesterday.
And I realized—I realized how badly I’d been treated before, if my standards had become so low. If the freedom I’d been granted felt like a privilege and not an inherent right.
Rhys’s eyes darkened, and I knew he read what I thought, felt.
“You might be my mate,” he said, “but you remain your own person. You decide your fate—your choices. Not me. You chose yesterday. You choose every day. Forever.”
And maybe he only understood because he, too, had been helpless and without choices, had been forced to do such horrible things, and locked up. I threaded my fingers through his and squeezed. Together—together we’d find our peace, our future.
Together we’d fight for it.
“Let’s go to Hybern,” I said.
I was halfway up the stairs an hour later when I realized that I still had no idea what room to go to. I’d gone to my bedroom since we’d returned from the cabin, but … what of his?
With Tamlin, he’d kept his own rooms and slept in mine. And I supposed—I supposed it’d be the same.
I was almost to my bedroom door when Rhysand drawled from behind me, “We can use your room if you like, but … ” He was leaning against his open bedroom door. “Either your room or mine
—but we’re sharing one from now on. Just tell me whether I should move my clothes or yours. If that’s all right with you.”
“Don’t you—you don’t want your own space?”
“No,” he said baldly. “Unless you do. I need you protecting me from our enemies with your water-wolves.”
I snorted. He’d made me tell him that part of my tale over and over. I jerked my chin toward his bedroom. “Your bed is bigger.”
And that was that.
I walked in to find my clothes already there, a second armoire now beside his. I stared at the massive bed, then at all the open space around us.
Rhys shut the door and went to a small box on the desk—then silently handed it to me.
My heart thundered as I opened the lid. The star sapphire gleamed in the candlelight, as if it were one of the Starfall spirits trapped in stone. “Your mother’s ring?”
“My mother gave me that ring to remind me she was always with me, even during the worst of my training. And when I reached my majority, she took it away. It was an heirloom of her family—
had been handed down from female to female over many, many years. My sister wasn’t yet born, so she wouldn’t have known to give it to her, but … My mother gave it to the Weaver. And then she told me that if I were to marry or mate, then the female would either have to be smart or strong enough to get it back. And if the female wasn’t either of those things, then she wouldn’t survive the marriage. I promised my mother that any potential bride or mate would have the test … And so it sat there for centuries.”
My face heated. “You said this was something of value—”
“It is. To me, and my family.”
“So my trip to the Weaver—”
“It was vital that we learn if you could detect those objects. But
… I picked the object out of pure selfishness.”
“So I won my wedding ring without even being asked if I wanted to marry you.”
“Perhaps.”
I cocked my head. “Do—do you want me to wear it?”
“Only if you want to.”
“When we go to Hybern … Let’s say things go badly. Will anyone be able to tell that we’re mated? Could they use that against you?”
Rage flickered in his eyes. “If they see us together and can scent us both, they’ll know.”
“And if I show up alone, wearing a Night Court wedding ring—”
He snarled softly.
I closed the box, leaving the ring inside. “After we nullify the Cauldron, I want to do it all. Get the bond declared, get married, throw a stupid party and invite everyone in Velaris—all of it.”
Rhys took the box from my hands and set it down on the nightstand before herding me toward the bed. “And if I wanted to go one step beyond that?”
“I’m listening,” I purred as he laid me on the sheets.
I’d never worn so much steel. Blades had been strapped all over me, hidden in my boots, my inside pockets. And then there was the Illyrian blade down my back.
Just a few hours ago, I’d known such overwhelming happiness after such horror and sorrow. Just a few hours ago, I’d been in his arms while he made love to me.
And now Rhysand, my mate and High Lord and partner, stood beside me in the foyer, Mor and Azriel and Cassian armed and ready in their scale-like armor, all of us too quiet.
Amren said, “The King of Hybern is old, Rhys—very old. Do not linger.”
A voice near my chest whispered, Hello lovely, wicked liar.
The two halves of the Book of Breathings, each part tucked into a different pocket. In one of them, the spell I was to say had been written out clearly. I hadn’t dared speak it, though I had read it a dozen times.
“We’ll be in and out before you miss us,” Rhysand said. “Guard Velaris well.”
Amren studied my gloved hands and weapons. “That Cauldron,”
she said, “makes the Book seem harmless. If the spell fails, or if you cannot move it, then leave.” I nodded. She surveyed us all again. “Fly well.” I supposed that was as much concern as she’d show.
We turned to Mor—whose arms were out, waiting for me.
Cassian and Rhys would winnow with Azriel, my mate dropped off a few miles from the coast before the Illyrians found Mor and me seconds later.
I moved toward her, but Rhys stepped in front of me, his face tense. I rose up on my toes and kissed him. “I’ll be fine—we’ll all be fine.” His eyes held mine through the kiss, and when I broke away, his gaze went right to Cassian.
Cassain bowed. “With my life, High Lord. I’ll protect her with my life.”
Rhys looked to Azriel. He nodded, bowing, and said, “With both of our lives.”
It was satisfactory enough to my mate—who at last looked at Mor.
She nodded once, but said, “I know my orders.”
I wondered what those might be—why I hadn’t been told—but she gripped my hand.
Before I could say good-bye to Amren, we were gone.
Gone—and plunging through open air, toward a night-dark sea—
A warm body slammed into mine, catching me before I could panic and perhaps winnow myself somewhere. “Easy,” Cassian said, banking right. I looked below to see Mor still plummeting, then winnow again into nothing.
No sign or glimmer of Rhys’s presence near or behind us. A few yards ahead, Azriel was a swift shadow over the black water.
Toward the landmass we were now approaching.
Hybern.
No lights burned on it. But it felt … old. As if it were a spider that had been waiting in its web for a long, long time.
“I’ve been here twice,” Cassian murmured. “Both times, I was counting down the minutes until I could leave.”
I could see why. A wall of bone-white cliffs arose, their tops flat and grassy, leading away to a terrain of sloping, barren hills. And an overwhelming sense of nothingness.
Amarantha had slaughtered all her slaves rather than free them.
She had been a commander here—one of many. If that force that had attacked Velaris was a vanguard … I swallowed, flexing my hands beneath my gloves.
“That’s his castle ahead,” Cassian said through clenched teeth, swerving.
Around a bend in the coast, built into the cliffs and perched above the sea, was a lean, crumbling castle of white stone.
Not imperious marble, not elegant limestone, but … off-white.
Bone-colored. Perhaps a dozen spires clawed at the night sky. A few lights flickered in the windows and balconies. No one outside
—no patrol. “Where is everyone?”
“Guard shift.” They’d planned this around it. “There’s a small sea door at the bottom. Mor will be waiting for us there—it’s the closest entrance to the lower levels.”
“I’m assuming she can’t winnow us in.”
“Too many wards to risk the time it’d cost for her to break through them. Rhys might be able to. But we’ll meet him at the door on the way out.”
My mouth went a bit dry. Over my heart, the Book said, Home—
take me home.
And indeed I could feel it. With every foot we flew in, faster and faster, dipping down so the spray from the ocean chilled me to my bones, I could feel it.
Ancient—cruel. Without allegiance to anyone but itself.
The Cauldron. They needn’t have bothered learning where it was held inside this castle. I had no doubt I’d be drawn right to it. I shuddered.
“Easy,” Cassian said again. We swept in toward the base of the cliffs to the sea door before a platform. Mor was waiting, sword out, the door open.
Cassian loosed a breath, but Azriel reached her first, landing swiftly and silently, and immediately prowled into the castle to scout the hall ahead.
Mor waited for us—her eyes on Cassian as we landed. They didn’t speak, but their glance was too long to be anything but casual. I wondered what their training, their honed senses, detected.
The passage ahead was dark, silent. Azriel appeared a heartbeat later. “Guards are down.” There was blood on his knife
—an ash knife. Az’s cold eyes met mine. “Hurry.”
I didn’t need to focus to track the Cauldron to its hiding place. It tugged on my every breath, hauling me to its dark embrace.
Any time we reached a crossroads, Cassian and Azriel would branch out, usually returning with bloodied blades, faces grim, silently warning me to hurry.
They’d been working these weeks, through whatever sources Azriel had, to get this encounter down to an exact schedule. If I needed more time than they’d allotted, if the Cauldron couldn’t be moved … it might all be for nothing. But not these deaths. No, those I did not mind at all.
These people—these people had hurt Rhys. They’d brought tools with them to incapacitate him. They had sent that legion to wreck and butcher my city.
I descended through an ancient dungeon, the stones dark and stained. Mor kept at my side, constantly monitoring. The last line of defense.
If Cassian and Azriel were hurt, I realized, she was to make sure I got out by whatever means. Then return.
But there was no one in the dungeon—not that I encountered, once the Illyrians were done with them. They had executed this masterfully. We found another stairwell, leading down, down, down—
I pointed, nausea roiling. “There. It’s down there.”
Cassian took the stairs, Illyrian blade stained with dark blood.
Neither Mor nor Azriel seemed to breathe until Cassian’s low whistle bounced off the stairwell stones from below.
Mor put a hand on my back, and we descended into the dark.
Home, the Book of Breathings sighed. Home.
Cassian was standing in a round chamber beneath the castle—
a ball of faelight floating above his shoulder.
And in the center of the room, atop a small dais, sat the Cauldron.
The Cauldron was absence and presence. Darkness and …
whatever the darkness had come from.
But not life. Not joy or light or hope.
It was perhaps the size of a bathtub, forged of dark iron, its three legs—those three legs the king had ransacked those temples to find—crafted like creeping branches covered in thorns.
I had never seen something so hideous—and alluring.
Mor’s face had drained of color. “Hurry,” she said to me. “We’ve got a few minutes.”
Azriel scanned the room, the stairs we’d strode down, the Cauldron, its legs. I made to approach the dais, but he extended an arm into my path. “Listen.”
So we did.
Not words. But a throbbing.
Like blood pulsed through the room. Like the Cauldron had a heartbeat.
Like calls to like. I moved toward it. Mor was at my back, but didn’t stop me as I stepped up onto the dais.
Inside the Cauldron was nothing but inky, swirling black.
Perhaps the entire universe had come from it.
Azriel and Cassian tensed as I laid a hand on the lip. Pain—
pain and ecstasy and power and weakness flowed into me.
Everything that was and wasn’t, fire and ice, light and dark, deluge and drought.
The map for creation.
Reeling back into myself, I readied to read that spell.
The paper trembled as I pulled it from my pocket. As my fingers brushed the half of the Book inside.
Sweet-tongued liar, lady of many faces—
One hand on half of the Book of Breathings, the other on the Cauldron, I took a step outside myself, a jolt passing through my blood as if I were no more than a lightning rod.
Yes, you see now, princess of carrion—you see what you must do …
“Feyre,” Mor murmured in warning.
But my mouth was foreign, my lips might as well have been as far away as Velaris while the Cauldron and the Book flowed through me, communing.
The other one, the Book hissed. Bring the other one … let us be joined, let us be free.
I slid the Book from my pocket, tucking it into the crook of my arm as I tugged the second half free. Lovely girl, beautiful bird—
so sweet, so generous …
Together together together
“Feyre.” Mor’s voice cut through the song of both halves.
Amren had been wrong. Separate, their power was cleaved—
not enough to take on the abyss of the Cauldron’s might. But together … Yes, together, the spell would work when I spoke it.
Whole, I would become not a conduit between them, but rather their master. There was no moving the Cauldron—it had to be now.
Realizing what I was about to do, Mor lunged for me with a curse.
Too slow.
I laid the second half of the Book atop the other.
A silent ripple of power hollowed out my ears, buckled my bones.
Then nothing.
From far away, Mor said, “We can’t risk—”
“Give her a minute,” Cassian cut her off.
I was the Book and the Cauldron and sound and silence.
I was a living river through which one flowed into the other, eddying and ebbing, over and over, a tide with no end or beginning.
The spell—the words—
I looked to the paper in my hand, but my eyes did not see, my lips did not move.
I was not a tool, not a pawn. I would not be a conduit, not be the lackey of these things—
I’d memorized the spell. I would say it, breathe it, think it—
From the pit of my memory the first word formed. I slogged toward it, reaching for that one word, that one word that would be a tether back into myself, into who I was—
Strong hands tugged me back, wrenching me away.
Murky light and moldy stone poured into me, the room spinning as I gasped down breath, finding Azriel shaking me, eyes so wide I could see the white around them. What had happened, what—
Steps sounded above. Azriel instantly shoved me behind him, bloodied blade lifting.
The movement cleared my head enough to feel something wet and warm trickle down my lip and chin. Blood—my nose had been bleeding.
But those steps grew louder, and my friends had their weapons angled as a handsome brown-haired male swaggered down the steps. Human—his ears were round. But his eyes …
I knew the color of those eyes. I’d stared at one, encased in crystal, for three months.
“Stupid fool,” he said to me.
“Jurian,” I breathed.
I gauged the distance between my friends and Jurian, weighed my sword against the twin ones crossed over his back. Cassian took a step toward the descending warrior and snarled, “You.”
Jurian snickered. “Worked your way up the ranks, did you?
Congratulations.”
I felt him sweep toward us. Like a ripple of night and wrath, Rhys appeared at my side. The Book was instantly gone, his movement so slick as he took it from me and tucked it into his own jacket that I barely registered it had happened.
But the moment that metal left my hands … Mother above, what had happened? I’d failed, failed so completely, been so pathetically overwhelmed by it—
“You look good, Jurian,” Rhys said, strolling to Cassian’s side—
casually positioning himself between me and the ancient warrior.
“For a corpse.”
“Last time I saw you,” Jurian sneered, “you were warming Amarantha’s sheets.”
“So you remember,” Rhysand mused, even as my rage flared.
“Interesting.”
Jurian’s eyes sliced to Mor. “Where is Miryam?”
“She’s dead,” Mor said flatly. The lie that had been told for five hundred years. “She and Drakon drowned in the Erythrian Sea.”
The impassive face of the princess of nightmares.
“Liar,” Jurian crooned. “You were always such a liar, Morrigan.”
Azriel growled, the sound unlike any I’d heard from him before.
Jurian ignored him, chest starting to heave. “Where did you take Miryam?”
“Away from you,” Mor breathed. “I took her to Prince Drakon.
They were mated and married that night you slaughtered Clythia.
And she never thought of you again.”
Wrath twisted his tan face. Jurian—hero of the human legions
… who along the way had turned himself into a monster as awful as those he’d fought.
Rhys reached back to grab my hand. We’d seen enough. I gripped the rim of the Cauldron again, willing it to obey, to come with us. I braced for the wind and darkness.
Only they didn’t come.
Mor gripped Cassian and Azriel’s hands—and stayed still.
Jurian smiled.
Rhysand drawled, hand tightening in mine, “New trick?”
Jurian shrugged. “I was sent to distract you—while he worked his spell.” His smile turned lupine. “You won’t leave this castle unless he allows you to. Or in pieces.”
My blood ran cold. Cassian and Azriel crouched into fighting stances, but Rhys cocked his head. I felt his dark power rise and rise, as if he’d splatter Jurian then and there.
But nothing happened. Not even a brush of night-flecked wind.
“Then there’s that,” Jurian said. “Didn’t you remember? Perhaps you forgot. It was a good thing I was there, awake for every moment, Rhysand. She stole his book of spells—to take your powers.”
Inside me, like a key clicking in a lock, that molten core of power just … halted. Whatever tether to it between my mind and soul was snipped—no, squeezed so tight by some invisible hand that nothing could flow.
I reached for Rhys’s mind, for the bond—
I slammed into a hard wall. Not of adamant, but of foreign, unfeeling stone.
“He made sure,” Jurian went on as I banged against that internal wall, tried to summon my own gifts to no avail, “that particular book was returned to him. She didn’t know how to use half of the nastier spells. Do you know what it is like to be unable to sleep, to drink or eat or breathe or feel for five hundred years?
Do you understand what it is like to be constantly awake, forced to watch everything she did?”
It had made him insane—tortured his soul until he went insane.
That’s what the sharp gleam was in his eyes.
“It couldn’t have been so bad,” Rhys said, even as I knew he was unleashing every ounce of will on that spell that contained us, bound us, “if you’re now working for her master.”
A flash of too-white teeth. “Your suffering will be long, and thorough.”
“Sounds delightful,” Rhys said, now turning us from the room. A silent shout to run.
But someone appeared atop the stairs.
I knew him—in my bones. The shoulder-length black hair, the ruddy skin, the clothes that edged more toward practicality than finery. He was of surprisingly average height, but muscled like a young man.
But his face—which looked perhaps like a human man in his forties … Blandly handsome. To hide the depthless, hateful black eyes that burned there.
The King of Hybern said, “The trap was so easy, I’m honestly a bit disappointed you didn’t see it coming.”
Faster than any of us could see, Jurian fired a hidden ash bolt through Azriel’s chest.
Mor screamed.
We had no choice but to go with the king.
The ash bolt was coated in bloodbane that the King of Hybern claimed flowed where he willed it. If we fought, if we did not come with him upstairs, the poison would shoot to his heart. And with our magic locked down, without the ability to winnow …
If I could somehow get to Azriel, give him a mouthful of my blood … But it’d take too long, require too many moving parts.
Cassian and Rhys hauled Azriel between them, his blood splattering on the floor behind us as we went up the twisting stairways of the king’s castle.
I tried not to step in it as Mor and I followed behind, Jurian at our backs. Mor was shaking—trying hard not to, but shaking as she stared at the protruding end of that arrow, visible between the gap in Azriel’s wings.
None of us dared strike the King of Hybern where he stalked ahead, leading the way. He’d taken the Cauldron with him, vanishing it with a snap of his fingers and a wry look at me.
We knew the king wasn’t bluffing. It’d take one move on their part for Azriel to die.
The guards were out now. And courtiers. High Fae and creatures—I didn’t know where they fit in—who smiled like we were their next meal. Their eyes were all dead. Empty.
No furniture, no art. As if this castle were the skeleton of some mighty creature.
The throne room doors were open, and I balked. A throne room
— the throne room that had honed Amarantha’s penchant for public displays of cruelty. Faelights slithered along the bone-white walls, the windows looking out to the crashing sea far below.
The king mounted a dais carved of a single block of dark emerald—his throne assembled from the bones of … I felt the blood drain from my face. Human bones. Brown and smooth with age.
We stopped before it, Jurian leering at our backs. The throne room doors shut.
The king said to no one in particular, “Now that I’ve upheld my end of the bargain, I expect you to uphold yours.” From the shadows near a side door, two figures emerged.
I began shaking my head as if I could unsee it as Lucien and Tamlin stepped into the light.
Rhysand went still as death. Cassian snarled. Hanging between them, Azriel tried and failed to lift his head.
But I was staring at Tamlin—at that face I had loved and hated so deeply—as he halted a good twenty feet away from us.
He wore his bandolier of knives—Illyrian hunting-blades, I realized.
His golden hair was cut shorter, his face more gaunt than I’d last seen it. And his green eyes … Wide as they scanned me from head to toe. Wide as they took in my fighting leathers, the Illyrian sword and knives, the way I stood within my group of friends—my family.
He’d been working with the King of Hybern. “No,” I breathed.
But Tamlin dared one more step closer, staring at me as if I were a ghost. Lucien, metal eye whirring, stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” I said again, this time louder.
“What was the cost,” Rhysand said softly from my side. I clawed and tore at the wall separating our minds; heaved and pulled against that fist stifling my magic.
Tamlin ignored him, looking at the king at last. “You have my word.”
The king smiled.
I took a step toward Tamlin. “What have you done?”
The King of Hybern said from his throne, “We made a bargain. I give you over, and he agrees to let my forces enter Prythian through his territory. And then use it as a base as we remove that ridiculous wall.”
I shook my head. Lucien refused to meet the pleading stare I threw his way.
“You’re insane,” Cassian hissed.
Tamlin held out a hand. “Feyre.” An order—like I was no better than a summoned dog.
I made no movement. I had to get free; had to get that damn power free—
“You,” the king said, pointing a thick finger at me, “are a very difficult female to get ahold of. Of course, we’ve also agreed that you’ll work for me once you’ve been returned home to your husband, but … Is it husband-to-be, or husband? I can’t remember.”
Lucien glanced between us all, face paling. “Tamlin,” he murmured.
But Tamlin didn’t lower the hand stretched toward me. “I’m taking you home.”
I backed up a step—toward where Rhysand still held Azriel with Cassian.
“There’s that other bit, too. The other thing I wanted,” the king went on. “Well, Jurian wanted. Two birds with one stone, really.
The High Lord of Night dead—and to learn who his friends were. It drove Jurian quite mad, honestly, that you never revealed it during those fifty years. So now you know, Jurian. And now you can do what you please with them.”
Around me, my friends were tense—taut. Even Azriel was subtly moving a bloody, scarred hand closer to his blades. His blood pooled at the edge of my boots.
I said steadily, clearly, to Tamlin, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You’ll say differently, my dear,” the king countered, “when I complete the final part of my bargain.”
Horror coiled in my gut.
The king jerked his chin at my left arm. “Break that bond between you two.”
“Please,” I whispered.
“How else is Tamlin to have his bride? He can’t very well have a wife who runs off to another male once a month.”
Rhys remained silent, though his grip tightened on Azriel.
Observing—weighing, sorting through the lock on his power. The thought of that silence between our souls being permanent …
My voice cracked as I said to Tamlin, still at the opposite end of the crude half circle we’d formed before the dais, “Don’t. Don’t let him. I told you—I told you that I was fine. That I left—”
“You weren’t well,” Tamlin snarled. “He used that bond to manipulate you. Why do you think I was gone so often? I was looking for a way to get you free. And you left.”
“I left because I was going to die in that house!”
The King of Hybern clicked his tongue. “Not what you expected, is it?”
Tamlin growled at him, but again held out his hand toward me.
“Come home with me. Now.”
“No.”
“Feyre.” An unflinching command.
Rhys was barely breathing—barely moving.
And I realized … realized it was to keep his scent from becoming apparent. Our scent. Our mating bond.
Jurian’s sword was already out—and he was looking at Mor as if he was going to kill her first. Azriel’s blood-drained face twisted with rage as he noticed that stare. Cassian, still holding him upright, took them all in, assessing, readying himself to fight, to defend.
I stopped beating at the fist on my power. Stroked it gently—
lovingly.
I am Fae and not-Fae, all and none, I told the spell that gripped me. You do not hold me. I am as you are—real and not, little more than gathered wisps of power. You do not hold me.
“I’ll come with you,” I said softly to Tamlin, to Lucien, shifting on his feet, “if you leave them alone. Let them go.”
You do not hold me.
Tamlin’s face contorted with wrath. “They’re monsters. They’re
—” He didn’t finish as he stalked across the floor to grab me. To drag me out of here, then no doubt winnow away.
You do not hold me.
The fist gripping my power relaxed. Vanished.
Tamlin lunged for me over the few feet that remained. So fast—
too fast—
I became mist and shadow.
I winnowed beyond his reach. The king let out a low laugh as Tamlin stumbled.
And went sprawling as Rhysand’s fist connected with his face.
Panting, I retreated right into Rhysand’s arms as one looped around my waist, as Azriel’s blood on him soaked into my back.
Behind us, Mor leaped in to fill the space Rhys had vacated, slinging Azriel’s arm over her shoulders.
But that wall of hideous stone remained in my mind, and still blocked Rhys’s own power.
Tamlin rose, wiping the blood now trickling from his nose as he backed to where Lucien held his position with a hand on his sword.
But just as Tamlin neared his Emissary, he staggered a step.
His face went white with rage.
And I knew Tamlin understood a moment before the king laughed. “I don’t believe it. Your bride left you only to find her mate. The Mother has a warped sense of humor, it seems. And what a talent—tell me, girl: how did you unravel that spell?”
I ignored him. But the hatred in Tamlin’s eyes made my knees buckle. “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.
Tamlin’s eyes were on Rhysand, his face near-feral. “You,” he snarled, the sound more animal than Fae. “What did you do to her? ”
Behind us, the doors opened and soldiers poured in. Some looked like the Attor. Some looked worse. More and more, filling up the room, the exits, armor and weapons clanking.
Mor and Cassian, Azriel sagging and heavy-lidded between them, scanned each soldier and weapon, sizing up our best odds of escape. I left them to it as Rhys and I faced Tamlin.
“I’m not going with you,” I spat at Tamlin. “And even if I did …
You spineless, stupid fool for selling us out to him! Do you know what he wants to do with that Cauldron?”
“Oh, I’m going to do many, many things with it,” the king said.
And the Cauldron appeared again between us.
“Starting now.”
Kill him kill him kill him I could not tell if the voice was mine or the Cauldron’s. I didn’t care. I unleashed myself.
Talons and wings and shadows were instantly around me, surrounded by water and fire—
Then they vanished, stifled as that invisible hand gripped my power again, so hard I gasped.
“Ah,” the king said to me, clicking his tongue, “that. Look at you.
A child of all seven courts—like and unlike all. How the Cauldron purrs in your presence. Did you plan to use it? Destroy it? With that book, you could do anything you wished.”
I didn’t say anything. The king shrugged. “You’ll tell me soon enough.”
“I made no bargain with you.”
“No, but your master did, so you will obey.”
Molten rage poured into me. I hissed at Tamlin, “If you bring me from here, if you take me from my mate, I will destroy you. I will destroy your court, and everything you hold dear.”
Tamlin’s lips thinned. But he said simply, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lucien cringed.
The king jerked his chin to the guards by the side door through which Tamlin and Lucien had appeared. “No—she doesn’t.” The doors opened again. “There will be no destroying,” the king went on as people—as women walked through those doors.
Four women. Four humans. The four remaining queens.
“Because,” the king said, the queens’ guards falling into rank behind them, hauling something in the core of their formation,
“you will find, Feyre Archeron, that it is in your best interest to behave.”
The four queens sneered at us with hate in their eyes. Hate.
And parted to let their personal guards through.
Fear like I had never known entered my heart as the men dragged my sisters, gagged and bound, before the King of Hybern.
This was some new hell. Some new level of nightmare. I even went so far as to try to wake myself up.
But there they were—in their nightgowns, the silk and lace dirty, torn.
Elain was quietly sobbing, the gag soaked with her tears. Nesta, hair disheveled as if she’d fought like a wildcat, was panting as she took us in. Took in the Cauldron.
“You made a very big mistake,” the king said to Rhysand, my mate’s arms banded around me, “the day you went after the Book.
I had no need of it. I was content to let it lie hidden. But the moment your forces started sniffing around … I decided who better than to be my liaison to the human realm than my newly reborn friend, Jurian? He’d just finished all those months of recovering from the process, and longed to see what his former home had become, so he was more than happy to visit the continent for an extended visit.”
Indeed the queens smiled at him—bowed their heads. Rhys’s arms tightened in silent warning.
“The brave, cunning Jurian, who suffered so badly at the end of the War—now my ally. Here to help me convince these queens to aid in my cause. For a price of his own, of course, but it has no bearing here. And wiser to work with me, my men, than to allow you monsters in the Night Court to rule and attack. Jurian was right to warn their Majesties that you’d try to take the Book—that you would feed them lies of love and goodness, when he had seen what the High Lord of the Night Court was capable of. The hero of the human forces, reborn as a gesture to the human world of my good faith. I do not wish to invade the continent—but to
work with them. My powers ensconced their court from prying eyes, just to show them the benefits.” A smirk at Azriel, who could hardly lift his head to snarl back. “Such impressive attempts to infiltrate their sacred palace, Shadowsinger—and utter proof to their Majesties, of course, that your court is not as benevolent as you seem.”
“Liar,” I hissed, and whirled on the queens, daring only a step away from Rhys. “They are liars, and if you do not let my sisters go, I will slaughter—”
“Do you hear the threats, the language they use in the Night Court?” the king said to the mortal queens, their guards now around us in a half circle. “Slaughter, ultimatums … They wish to end life. I desire to give it.”
The eldest queen said to him, refusing to acknowledge me, my words, “Then show us—prove this gift you mentioned.”
Rhysand tugged me back against him. He said quietly to the queen, “You’re a fool.”
The king cut in, “Is she? Why submit to old age and ailments when what I offer is so much better?” He waved a hand toward me. “Eternal youth. Do you deny the benefits? A mortal queen becomes one who might reign forever. Of course, there are risks
—the transition can be … difficult. But a strong-willed individual could survive.”
The youngest queen, the dark-haired one, smiled slightly.
Arrogant youth—and bitter old age. Only the two others, the ones who wore white and black, seemed to hesitate, stepping closer to each other—and their towering guards.
The ancient queen lifted her chin, “Show us. Demonstrate it can be done, that it is safe.” She had spoken of eternal youth that day, had spat in my face about it. Two-faced bitch.
The king nodded. “Why did you think I asked my dear friend Ianthe to see who Feyre Archeron would appreciate having with her for eternity?” Even as horror filled my ears with roaring silence, I glanced at the queens, the question no doubt written on my face. The king explained, “Oh, I asked them first. They deemed it too … uncouth to betray two young, misguided women.
Ianthe had no such qualms. Consider it my wedding present for you both,” he added to Tamlin.
But Tamlin’s face tightened. “What?”
The king cocked his head, savoring every word. “I think the High Priestess was waiting until your return to tell you, but didn’t you ever ask why she believed I might be able to break the bargain? Why she had so many musings on the idea? So many millennia have the High Priestesses been forced to their knees for the High Lords. And during those years she dwelled in that foreign court … such an open mind, she has. Once we met, once I painted for her a portrait of a Prythian free of High Lords, where the High Priestesses might rule with grace and wisdom … She didn’t take much convincing.”
I was going to vomit. Tamlin, to his credit, looked like he might, too.
Lucien’s face had slackened. “She sold out—she sold out Feyre’s family. To you.”
I had told Ianthe everything about my sisters. She had asked.
Asked who they were, where they lived. And I had been so stupid, so broken … I had fed her every detail.
“Sold out?” The king snorted. “Or saved from the shackles of mortal death? Ianthe suggested they were both strong-willed women, like their sister. No doubt they’ll survive. And prove to our queens it can be done. If one has the strength.”
My heart stopped. “Don’t you—
The king cut me off, “I would suggest bracing yourselves.”
And then hell exploded in the hall.
Power, white and unending and hideous, barreled into us.
All I knew was Rhysand’s body covering mine as we were all thrown to the floor, the shout of pain as he took the brunt of the king’s power.
Cassian twisted, wings flaring wide as he shielded Azriel.
His wings—his wings—
Cassian’s scream as his wings shredded under talons of pure magic was the most horrific sound I’d ever heard. Mor surged for him, but too late.
Rhys was moving in an instant, as if he’d lunge for the king, but power hit us again, and again. Rhys slammed to his knees.
My sisters were shrieking over their gags. But Elain’s cry—a warning. A warning to—
To my right, now exposed, Tamlin ran for me. To grab me at last.
I hurled a knife at him—as hard as I could.
He had to dive to miss it. And he backed away at the second one I had ready, gaping at me, at Rhys, as if he could indeed see the mating bond between us.
But I whirled as soldiers pressed in, cutting us off. Whirled, and saw Cassian and Azriel on the ground, Jurian laughing softly at the blood gushing from Cassian’s ravaged wings—
Shreds of them remained.
I scrambled for him. My blood. It might be enough, be—
Mor, on her knees beside Cassian, hurtled for the king with a cry of pure wrath.
He sent a punch of power to her. She dodged, a knife angled in her hand, and—
Azriel cried out in pain.
She froze. Stopped a foot from the throne. Her knife clattered to the floor.
The king rose. “What a mighty queen you are,” he breathed.
And Mor backed away. Step by step.
“What a prize,” the king said, that black gaze devouring her.
Azriel’s head lifted from where he was sprawled in his own blood, eyes full of rage and pain as he snarled at the king, “Don’t you touch her.”
Mor looked at Azriel—and there was real fear there. Fear—and something else. She didn’t stop moving until she again kneeled beside him and pressed a hand to his wound. Azriel hissed—but covered her bloody fingers with his own.
Rhys positioned himself between me and the king as I dropped to my knees before Cassian. I ripped at the leather covering my forearm—
“Put the prettier one in first,” the king said, Mor already forgotten.
I twisted—only to have the king’s guards grab me from behind.
Rhys was instantly there, but Azriel shouted, back arching as the king’s poison worked its way in.
“Please refrain,” the king said, “from getting any stupid ideas, Rhysand.” He smiled at me. “If any of you interfere, the shadowsinger dies. Pity about the other brute’s wings.” He gave
my sisters a mockery of a bow. “Ladies, eternity awaits. Prove to their Majesties the Cauldron is safe for … strong-willed individuals.”
I shook my head, unable to breathe, to think a way out of it—
Elain was shaking, sobbing, as she was hauled forward. Toward the Cauldron.
Nesta began thrashing against the men that held her.
Tamlin said, “Stop.”
The king did no such thing.
Lucien, beside Tamlin, again put a hand on his sword. “Stop this.”
Nesta was bellowing at the guards, at the king, as Elain yielded step after step toward that Cauldron. As the king waved his hand, and liquid filled it to the brim. No, no—
The queens only watched, stone-faced. And Rhys and Mor, separated from me by those guards, did not dare to even shift a muscle.
Tamlin spat at the king, “This is not part of our deal. Stop this now.”
“I don’t care,” the king said simply.
Tamlin launched himself at the throne, as if he’d rip him to shreds.
That white-hot magic slammed into him, shoving him to the ground. Leashing him.
Tamlin strained against the collar of light on his neck, around his wrists. His golden power flared—to no avail. I tore at the fist still gripping my own, sliced at it, over and over—
Lucien staggered a step forward as Elain was gripped between two guards and hoisted up. She began kicking then, weeping while her feet slammed into the sides of the Cauldron as if she’d push off it, as if she’d knock it down—
“That is enough.” Lucien surged for Elain, for the Cauldron.
And the king’s power leashed him, too. On the ground beside Tamlin, his single eye wide, Lucien had the good sense to look horrified as he glanced between Elain and the High Lord.
“Please,” I begged the king, who motioned Elain to be shoved into the water. “Please, I will do anything, I will give you anything.”
I shot to my feet, stepping away from where Cassian lay prostrate,
and looked to the queens. “Please—you do not need proof, I am proof that it works. Jurian is proof it is safe.”
The ancient queen said, “You are a thief, and a liar. You conspired with our sister. Your punishment should be the same as hers. Consider this a gift instead.”
Elain’s foot hit the water, and she screamed—screamed in terror that hit me so deep I began sobbing. “Please,” I said to none of them.
Nesta was still fighting, still roaring through her gag.
Elain, who Nesta would have killed and whored and stolen for.
Elain, who had been gentle and sweet. Elain, who was to marry a lord’s son who hated faeries …
The guards shoved my sister into the Cauldron in a single movement.
My cry hadn’t finished sounding before Elain’s head went under.
She did not come up.
Nesta’s screaming was the only sound. Cassian blindly lurched toward it—toward her, moaning in pain.
The King of Hybern bowed slightly to the queens. “Behold.”
Rhys, a wall of guards still cleaving us, curled his fingers into a fist. But he did not move, as Mor and I did not dare move, not with Azriel’s life dangling in the king’s grasp.
And as if it had been tipped by invisible hands, the Cauldron turned on its side.
More water than seemed possible dumped out in a cascade.
Black, smoke-coated water.
And Elain, as if she’d been thrown by a wave, washed onto the stones facedown.
Her legs were so pale—so delicate. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them bare.
The queens pushed forward. Alive, she had to be alive, had to have wanted to live—
Elain sucked in a breath, her fine-boned back rising, her wet nightgown nearly sheer.
And as she rose from the ground onto her elbows, the gag in place, as she twisted to look at me—
Nesta began roaring again.
Pale skin started to glow. Her face had somehow become more beautiful—infinitely beautiful, and her ears … Elain’s ears were now pointed beneath her sodden hair.
The queens gasped. And for a moment, all I could think of was my father. What he would do, what he would say, when his most beloved daughter looked at him with a Fae face.
“So we can survive,” the dark-haired youngest breathed, eyes bright.
I fell to my knees, the guards not bothering to grab me as I sobbed. What he’d done, what he’d done—
“The hellcat now, if you’ll be so kind,” the King of Hybern said.
I whipped my head to Nesta as she went silent. The Cauldron righted itself.
Cassian again stirred, slumping on the floor—but his hand twitched. Toward Nesta.
Elain was still shivering on the wet stones, her nightgown shoved up to her thighs, her small breasts fully visible beneath the soaked fabric. Guards snickered.
Lucien snarled at the king over the bite of the magic at his throat, “Don’t just leave her on the damned floor—”
There was a flare of light, and a scrape, and then Lucien was stalking toward Elain, freed of his restraints. Tamlin remained leashed on the ground, a gag of white, iridescent magic in his mouth now. But his eyes were on Lucien as—
As Lucien took off his jacket, kneeling before Elain. She cringed away from the coat, from him—
The guards hauled Nesta toward the Cauldron.
There were different kinds of torture, I realized.
There was the torture that I had endured, that Rhys had endured.
And then there was this.
The torture that Rhys had worked so hard those fifty years to avoid; the nightmares that haunted him. To be unable to move, to fight … while our loved ones were broken. My eyes met with those of my mate. Agony rippled in that violet stare—rage and guilt and utter agony. The mirror to my own.
Nesta fought every step of the way.
She did not make it easy for them. She clawed and kicked and bucked.
And it was not enough.
And we were not enough to save her.
I watched as she was hoisted up. Elain remained shuddering on the ground, Lucien’s coat draped around her. She did not look at the Cauldron behind her, not as Nesta’s thrashing feet slammed into the water.
Cassian stirred again, his shredded wings twitching and spraying blood, his muscles quivering. At Nesta’s shouts, her raging, his eyes fluttered open, glazed and unseeing, an answer to some call in his blood, a promise he’d made her. But pain knocked him under again.
Nesta was shoved into the water up to her shoulders. She bucked even as the water sprayed. She clawed and screamed her rage, her defiance.
“Put her under,” the king hissed.
The guards, straining, shoved her slender shoulders. Her brown-gold head.
And as they pushed her head down, she thrashed one last time, freeing her long, pale arm.
Teeth bared, Nesta pointed one finger at the King of Hybern.
One finger, a curse and a damning.
A promise.
And as Nesta’s head was forced under the water, as that hand was violently shoved down, the King of Hybern had the good sense to look somewhat unnerved.
Dark water lapped for a moment. The surface went flat.
I vomited on the floor.
The guards at last let Rhysand kneel beside me in the growing pool of Cassian’s blood—let him tuck me into him as the Cauldron again tilted.
Water poured forth, Lucien hoisting Elain in his arms and out of the way. The bonds on Tamlin vanished, along with the gag. He was instantly on his feet, snarling at the king. Even the fist on my mind lightened to a mere caress. As if he knew he’d won.
I didn’t care. Not as Nesta was sprawled upon the stones.
I knew that she was different.
From however Elain had been Made … Nesta was different.
Even before she took her first breath, I felt it.
As if the Cauldron in making her … had been forced to give more than it wanted. As if Nesta had fought even after she went under, and had decided that if she was to be dragged into hell, she was taking that Cauldron with her.
As if that finger she’d pointed was now a death-promise to the King of Hybern.
Nesta took a breath. And when I beheld my sister, with her somehow magnified beauty, her ears … When Nesta looked to me …
Rage. Power. Cunning.
Then it was gone, horror and shock crumpling her face, but she didn’t pause, didn’t halt. She was free—she was loose.
She was on her feet, tripping over her slightly longer, leaner limbs, ripping the gag from her mouth—
Nesta slammed into Lucien, grabbing Elain from his arms, and screamed at him as he fell back, “Get off her! ”
Elain’s feet slipped against the floor, but Nesta gripped her upright, running her hands over Elain’s face, her shoulders, her hair— “Elain, Elain, Elain,” she sobbed.
Cassian again stirred—trying to rise, to answer Nesta’s voice as she held my sister and cried her name again and again.
But Elain was staring over Nesta’s shoulder.
At Lucien—whose face she had finally taken in.
Dark brown eyes met one eye of russet and one of metal.
Nesta was still weeping, still raging, still inspecting Elain—
Lucien’s hands slackened at his sides.
His voice broke as he whispered to Elain, “You’re my mate.”
I didn’t let Lucien’s declaration sink in.
Nesta, however, whirled on him. “She is no such thing,” she said, and shoved him again.
Lucien didn’t move an inch. His face was pale as death as he stared at Elain. My sister said nothing, the iron ring glinting dully on her finger.
The King of Hybern murmured, “Interesting. So very interesting.” He turned to the queens. “See? I showed you not once, but twice that it is safe. Who should like to be Made first?
Perhaps you’ll get a handsome Fae lord as your mate, too.”
The youngest queen stepped forward, her eyes indeed darting between all the Fae men assembled. As if they were hers for the picking.
The king chuckled. “Very well, then.”
Hate flooded me, so violent I had no control over it, no song in my heart but its war-cry. I was going to kill them. I was going to kill all of them—
“If you’re so willing to hand out bargains,” Rhys suddenly said, rising to his feet and tugging me with him, “perhaps I’ll make one with you.”
“Oh?”
Rhys shrugged.
No. No more bargains—no more sacrifices. No more giving himself away piece by piece.
No more.
And if the king refused, if there was nothing to do but watch my friends die …
I could not accept it. I could not endure it—not that.
And for Rhys, for the family I’d found … They had not needed me—not really. Only to nullify the Cauldron.
I had failed them. Just as I had failed my sisters, whose lives I’d now shattered …
I thought of that ring waiting for me at home. I thought of the ring on Elain’s finger, from a man who would now likely hunt her down and kill her. If Lucien let her leave at all.
I thought of all the things I wanted to paint—and never would.
But for them—for my family both of blood and my own choosing, for my mate … The idea that hit me did not seem so frightening.
And so I was not afraid.
I dropped to my knees in a spasm, gripping my head as I gnashed my teeth and sobbed, sobbed and panted, pulling at my hair—
The fist of that spell didn’t have time to seize me again as I exploded past it.
Rhys reached for me, but I unleashed my power, a flash of that white, pure light, all that could escape with the damper from the king’s spell. A flash of the light that was only for Rhys, only because of Rhys. I hoped he understood.
It erupted through the room, the gathered force hissing and dropping back.
Even Rhys had frozen—the king and queens openmouthed. My sisters and Lucien had whirled, too.
But there, deep within Day’s light … I gleaned it. A purifying, clear power. Cursebreaker—spellbreaker. The light wiped through every physical trapping, showing me the snarls of spells and glamours, showing me the way through … I burned brighter, looking, looking—
Buried inside the bone-walls of the castle, the wards were woven strong.
I sent that blinding light flaring once more—a distraction and sleight of hand as I severed the wards at their ancient arteries.
Now I only had to play my part.
The light faded, and I was curled on the floor, head in my hands.
Silence. Silence as they all gawked at me.
Even Jurian had stopped gloating from where he now leaned against the wall.
But my eyes were only on Tamlin as I lowered my hands, gulping down air, and blinked. I looked at the host and the blood and the Night Court, and then finally back at him as I breathed,
“Tamlin?”
He didn’t move an inch. Beyond him, the king gaped at me.
Whether he knew I’d ripped his wards wide open, whether he knew it was intentional, was not my concern—not yet.
I blinked again, as if clearing my head. “Tamlin?” I peered at my hands, the blood, and when I beheld Rhys, when I saw my grim-faced friends, and my drenched, immortal sisters—
There was nothing but shock and confusion on Rhys’s face as I scrambled back from him.
Away from them. Toward Tamlin. “Tamlin,” I managed to say again. Lucien’s eye widened as he stepped between me and Elain. I whirled on the King of Hybern. “Where—” I again faced Rhysand. “What did you do to me,” I breathed, low and guttural.
Backing toward Tamlin. “What did you do? ”
Get them out. Get my sisters out.
Play—please play along. Please—
There was no sound, no shield, no glimmer of feeling in our bond. The king’s power had blocked it out too thoroughly. There was nothing I could do against it, Cursebreaker or no.
But Rhys slid his hands into his pockets as he purred, “How did you get free?”
“What?” Jurian seethed, pushing off the wall and storming toward us.
But I turned toward Tamlin and ignored the features and smell and clothes that were all wrong. He watched me warily. “Don’t let him take me again, don’t let him—don’t—” I couldn’t keep the sobs from shuddering out, not as the full force of what I was doing hit me.
“Feyre,” Tamlin said softly. And I knew I had won.
I sobbed harder.
Get my sisters out, I begged Rhys through the silent bond. I ripped the wards open for you—all of you. Get them out.
“Don’t let him take me,” I sobbed again. “I don’t want to go back.”
And when I looked at Mor, at the tears streaming down her face as she helped Cassian get upright, I knew she realized what I meant. But the tears vanished—became sorrow for Cassian as she turned a hateful, horrified face to Rhysand and spat, “What did you do to that girl?”
Rhys cocked his head. “How did you do it, Feyre?” There was so much blood on him. One last game—this was one last game we were to play together.
I shook my head. The queens had fallen back, their guards forming a wall between us.
Tamlin watched me carefully. So did Lucien.
So I turned to the king. He was smiling. Like he knew.
But I said, “Break the bond.”
Rhysand went still as death.
I stormed to the king, knees barking as I dropped to the floor before his throne. “Break the bond. The bargain, the—the mating bond. He—he made me do it, made me swear it—”
“No,” Rhysand said.
I ignored him, even as my heart broke, even as I knew that he hadn’t meant to say it— “Do it,” I begged the king, even as I silently prayed he wouldn’t notice his ruined wards, the door I’d left wide open. “I know you can. Just—free me. Free me from it.”
“No,” Rhysand said.
But Tamlin was staring between us. And I looked at him, the High Lord I had once loved, and I breathed, “No more. No more death—no more killing.” I sobbed through my clenched teeth.
Made myself look at my sisters. “No more. Take me home and let them go. Tell him it’s part of the bargain and let them go. But no more—please.”
Cassian slowly, every movement pained, stirred enough to look over a shredded wing at me. And in his pain-glazed eyes, I saw it
—the understanding.
The Court of Dreams. I had belonged to a court of dreams. And dreamers.
And for their dreams … for what they had worked for, sacrificed for … I could do it.
Get my sisters out, I said to Rhys one last time, sending it into that stone wall between us.
I looked to Tamlin. “No more.” Those green eyes met mine—
and the sorrow and tenderness in them was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. “Take me home.”
Tamlin said flatly to the king, “Let them go, break her bond, and let’s be done with it. Her sisters come with us. You’ve already crossed too many lines.”
Jurian began objecting, but the king said, “Very well.”
“No,” was all Rhys said again.
Tamlin snarled at him, “I don’t give a shit if she’s your mate. I don’t give a shit if you think you’re entitled to her. She is mine—
and one day, I am going to repay every bit of pain she felt, every bit of suffering and despair. One day, perhaps when she decides she wants to end you, I’ll be happy to oblige her.”
Walk away—just go. Take my sisters with you.
Rhys was only staring at me. “Don’t.”
But I backed away—until I hit Tamlin’s chest, until his hands, warm and heavy, landed on my shoulders. “Do it,” he said to the king.
“No,” Rhys said again, his voice breaking.
But the king pointed at me. And I screamed.
Tamlin gripped my arms as I screamed and screamed at the pain that tore through my chest, my left arm.
Rhysand was on the ground, roaring, and I thought he might have said my name, might have bellowed it as I thrashed and sobbed. I was being shredded, I was dying, I was dying—
No. No, I didn’t want it, I didn’t want to—
A crack sounded in my ears.
And the world cleaved in two as the bond snapped.
I fainted.
When I opened my eyes, mere seconds had passed. Mor was now hauling away Rhys, who was panting on the floor, eyes wild, fingers clenching and unclenching—
Tamlin yanked off the glove on my left hand.
Pure, bare skin greeted him. No tattoo.
I was sobbing and sobbing, and his arms came around me.
Every inch of them felt wrong. I nearly gagged on his scent.
Mor let go of Rhysand’s jacket collar, and he crawled— crawled back toward Azriel and Cassian, their blood splashing on his hands, on his neck, as he hauled himself through it. His rasping breaths sliced into me, my soul—
The king merely waved a hand at him. “You are free to go, Rhysand. Your friend’s poison is gone. The wings on the other, I’m afraid, are a bit of a mess.”
Don’t fight it—don’t say anything, I begged him as Rhys reached his brothers. Take my sisters. The wards are down.
Silence.
So I looked—just once—at Rhysand, and Cassian, and Mor, and Azriel.
They were already looking at me. Faces bloody and cold and enraged. But beneath them … I knew it was love beneath them.
They understood the tears that rolled down my face as I silently said good-bye.
Then Mor, swift as an adder, winnowed to Lucien. To my sisters.
To show Rhys, I realized, what I’d done, the hole I’d blasted for them to escape—
She slammed Lucien away with a palm to the chest, and his roar shook the halls as Mor grabbed my sisters by the arm and vanished.
Lucien’s bellow was still sounding as Rhys lunged, gripping Azriel and Cassian, and did not even turn toward me as they winnowed out.
The king shot to his feet, spewing his wrath at his guards, at Jurian, for not grabbing my sisters. Demanding to know what had happened to the castle wards—
I barely heard him. There was only silence in my head. Such silence where there had once been dark laughter and wicked amusement. A wind-blasted wasteland.
Lucien was shaking his head, panting, and whirled to us. “Get her back,” he snarled at Tamlin over the ranting of the king. A mate—a mate already going wild to defend what was his.
Tamlin ignored him. So I did, too. I could barely stand, but I faced the king as he slumped into his throne, gripping the arms so tightly the whites of his knuckles showed. “Thank you,” I breathed, a hand on my chest—the skin so pale, so white. “Thank you.”
He merely said to the gathered queens, now a healthy distance away, “Begin.”
The queens looked at each other, then their wide-eyed guards, and snaked toward the Cauldron, their smiles growing. Wolves circling prey. One of them sniped at another for pushing her—the king murmured something to them all that I didn’t bother to hear.
Jurian stalked over to Lucien amid the rising squabble, laughing under his breath. “Do you know what Illyrian bastards do to pretty females? You won’t have a mate left—at least not one that’s useful to you in any way.”
Lucien’s answering growl was nothing short of feral.
I spat at Jurian’s feet. “You can go to hell, you hideous prick.”
Tamlin’s hands tightened on my shoulders. Lucien spun toward me, and that metal eye whirred and narrowed. Centuries of cultivated reason clicked into place.
I was not panicking at my sisters being taken.
I said quietly, “We will get her back.”
But Lucien was watching me warily. Too warily.
I said to Tamlin, “Take me home.”
But the king cut in over the bickering of the queens, “Where is it.”
I preferred the amused, arrogant voice to the flat, brutal one that sliced through the hall.
“You— you were to wield the Book of Breathings,” the king said.
“I could feel it in here, with …”
The entire castle shuddered as he realized I had not been holding it in my jacket.
I just said to him, “Your mistake.”
His nostrils flared. Even the sea far below seemed to recoil in terror at the wrath that whitened his ruddy face. But he blinked and it was gone. He said tightly to Tamlin, “When the Book is retrieved, I expect your presence here.”
Power, smelling of lilac and cedar and the first bits of green, swirled around me. Readying us to winnow away—through the wards they had no inkling I’d smashed apart.
So I said to the king, and Jurian, and the queens assembled, already at the lip of the Cauldron and hissing over who would go in first, “I will light your pyres myself for what you did to my sisters.”
Then we were gone.
Rhysand
I slammed into the floor of the town house, and Amren was instantly there, hands on Cassian’s wings, swearing at the damage. Then at the hole in Azriel’s chest.
Even her healing couldn’t fix both. No, we’d need a real healer for each of them, and fast, because if Cassian lost those wings …
I knew he’d prefer death. Any Illyrian would.
“Where is she?” Amren demanded.
Where is she where is she where is she
“Get the Book out of here,” I said, dumping the pieces onto the ground. I hated the touch of them, their madness and despair and joy. Amren ignored the order.
Mor hadn’t appeared—dropping off or hiding Nesta and Elain wherever she deemed safest.
“Where is she?” Amren said again, pressing a hand to Cassian’s ravaged back. I knew she didn’t mean Mor.
As if my thoughts had summoned her, my cousin appeared—
panting, haggard. She dropped to the floor before Azriel, her blood-caked hands shaking as she ripped the arrow free of his chest, blood showering the carpet. She shoved her fingers over the wound, light flaring as her power knit bone and flesh and vein together.
“Where is she?” Amren snapped one more time.
I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
So Mor said them for me as she knelt over Azriel, both of my brothers mercifully unconscious. “Tamlin offered passage through his lands and our heads on platters to the king in exchange for trapping Feyre, breaking her bond, and getting to bring her back
to the Spring Court. But Ianthe betrayed Tamlin—told the king where to find Feyre’s sisters. So the king had Feyre’s sisters brought with the queens—to prove he could make them immortal.
He put them in the Cauldron. We could do nothing as they were turned. He had us by the balls.”
Those quicksilver eyes shot to me. “Rhysand.”
I managed to say, “We were out of options, and Feyre knew it.
So she pretended to free herself from the control Tamlin thought I’d kept on her mind. Pretended that she … hated us. And told him she’d go home—but only if the killing stopped. If we went free.”
“And the bond,” Amren breathed, Cassian’s blood shining on her hands as she slowed its dribbling.
Mor said, “She asked the king to break the bond. He obliged.”
I thought I might be dying—thought my chest might actually be cleaved in two.
“That’s impossible,” Amren said. “That sort of bond cannot be broken.”
“The king said he could do it.”
“The king is a fool,” Amren barked. “That sort of bond cannot be broken.”
“No, it can’t,” I said.
They both looked at me.
I cleared my head, my shattering heart—breaking for what my mate had done, sacrificed for me and my family. For her sisters.
Because she hadn’t thought … hadn’t thought she was essential.
Even after all she had done. “The king broke the bargain between us. Hard to do, but he couldn’t tell that it wasn’t the mating bond.”
Mor started. “Does—does Feyre know—”
“Yes,” I breathed. “And now my mate is in our enemy’s hands.”
“Go get her,” Amren hissed. “Right now.”
“No,” I said, and hated the word.
They gaped at me, and I wanted to roar at the sight of the blood coating them, at my unconscious and suffering brothers on the carpet before them.
But I managed to say to my cousin, “Weren’t you listening to what Feyre said to him? She promised to destroy him—from within.”
Mor’s face paled, her magic flaring on Azriel’s chest. “She’s going into that house to take him down. To take them all down.”
I nodded. “She is now a spy—with a direct line to me. What the King of Hybern does, where he goes, what his plans are, she will know. And report back.”
For between us, faint and soft, hidden so none might find it …
between us lay a whisper of color, and joy, of light and shadow—a whisper of her. Our bond.
“She’s your mate,” Amren bit at me. “Not your spy. Go get her.”
“She is my mate. And my spy,” I said too quietly. “And she is the High Lady of the Night Court.”
“What?” Mor whispered.
I caressed a mental finger down that bond now hidden deep, deep within us, and said, “If they had removed her other glove, they would have seen a second tattoo on her right arm. The twin to the other. Inked last night, when we crept out, found a priestess, and I swore her in as my High Lady.”
“Not—not consort,” Amren blurted, blinking. I hadn’t seen her surprised in … centuries.
“Not consort, not wife. Feyre is High Lady of the Night Court.”
My equal in every way; she would wear my crown, sit on a throne beside mine. Never sidelined, never designated to breeding and parties and child-rearing. My queen.
As if in answer, a glimmer of love shuddered down the bond. I clamped down on the relief that threatened to shatter any calm I feigned having.
“You mean to tell me,” Mor breathed, “that my High Lady is now surrounded by enemies?” A lethal sort of calm crept over her tear-stained face.
“I mean to tell you,” I said, watching the blood clot on Cassian’s wings with Amren’s tending. Beneath Mor’s own hands, Azriel’s bleeding at last eased. Enough to keep them alive until the healer got here. “I mean to tell you,” I said again, my power building and rubbing itself against my skin, my bones, desperate to be unleashed upon the world, “that your High Lady made a sacrifice for her court—and we will move when the time is right.”
Perhaps Lucien being Elain’s mate would help—somehow. I’d find a way.
And then I’d assist my mate in ripping the Spring Court, Ianthe, those mortal queens, and the King of Hybern to shreds. Slowly.
“Until then?” Amren demanded. “What of the Cauldron—of the Book?”
“Until then,” I said, staring toward the door as if I might see her walk through it, laughing and vibrant and beautiful, “we go to war.”
Feyre
Tamlin landed us in the gravel of the front drive.
I had forgotten how quiet it was here.
How small. Empty.
Spring bloomed—the air gentle and scented with roses.
Still lovely. But there were the front doors he’d sealed me behind. There was the window I’d banged on, trying to get out. A pretty, rose-covered prison.
But I smiled, head throbbing, and said through my tears, “I thought I’d never see it again.”
Tamlin was just staring at me, as if not quite believing it. “I thought you would never, either.”
And you sold us out—sold out every innocent in this land for that. All so you could have me back.
Love—love was a balm as much as it was a poison.
But it was love that burned in my chest. Right alongside the bond that the King of Hybern hadn’t so much as touched, because he hadn’t known how deep and far he’d have to delve to cleave it.
To cleave me and Rhysand apart.
It had hurt—hurt like hell to have the bargain between us ended
—and Rhys had done his job perfectly, his horror flawless. We had always been so good at playing together.
I had not doubted him, had not said anything but Yes when he’d taken me down to the temple the night before, and I’d sworn my vows. To him, to Velaris, to the Night Court.
And now … a gentle, loving stroke down that bond, concealed beneath that wasteland where the bargain had been. I sent a
glimmer of feeling back down the line, wishing I could touch him, hold him, laugh with him.
But I kept those thoughts clear from my face. Kept anything but quiet relief from it as I leaned into Tamlin, sighing. “It feels—feels as if some of it was a dream, or a nightmare. But … But I remembered you. And when I saw you there today, I started clawing at it, fighting, because I knew it might be my only chance, and—”
“How did you break free of his control,” Lucien said flatly from behind us.
Tamlin gave him a warning growl.
I’d forgotten he was there. My sister’s mate. The Mother, I decided, did have a sense of humor. “I wanted it—I don’t know how. I just wanted to break free of him, so I did.”
We stared each other down, but Tamlin brushed a thumb over my shoulder. “Are—are you hurt?”
I tried not to bristle. I knew what he meant. That he thought Rhysand would do anything like that to anyone— “I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I don’t … I don’t remember those things.”
Lucien’s metal eye narrowed, as if he could sense the lie.
But I looked up at Tamlin, and brushed my hand over his mouth.
My bare, empty skin. “You’re real,” I said. “You freed me.”
It was an effort not to turn my hands into claws and rip out his eyes. Traitor—liar. Murderer.
“You freed yourself,” Tamlin breathed. He gestured to the house. “Rest—and then we’ll talk. I … need to find Ianthe. And make some things very, very clear.”
“I—I want to be a part of it this time,” I said, halting when he tried to herd me back into that beautiful prison. “No more … No more shutting me out. No more guards. Please. I have so much to tell you about them—bit and pieces, but … I can help. We can get my sisters back. Let me help.”
Help lead you in the wrong direction. Help bring you and your court to your knees, and take down Jurian and those conniving, traitorous queens. And then tear Ianthe into tiny, tiny pieces and bury them in a pit no one can find.
Tamlin scanned my face, and finally nodded. “We’ll start over.
Do things differently. When you were gone, I realized … I’d been
wrong. So wrong, Feyre. And I’m sorry.”
Too late. Too damned late. But I rested my head on his arm as he slipped it around me and led me toward the house. “It doesn’t matter. I’m home now.”
“Forever,” he promised.
“Forever,” I parroted, glancing behind—to where Lucien stood in the gravel drive.
His gaze on me. Face hard. As if he’d seen through every lie.
As if he knew of the second tattoo beneath my glove, and the glamour I now kept on it.
As if he knew that they had let a fox into a chicken coop—and he could do nothing.
Not unless he never wanted to see his mate—Elain—again.
I gave Lucien a sweet, sleepy smile. So our game began.
We hit the sweeping marble stairs to the front doors of the manor.
And so Tamlin unwittingly led the High Lady of the Night Court into the heart of his territory.
Thank you to the following people who make my life blessed beyond all measure:
To my husband, Josh: You got me through this year. (Through many years before it, but this one in particular.) I don’t have the words to describe how much I love you, and how grateful I am for all that you do. For the countless meals you cooked so I didn’t have to stop writing; for the hundreds of dishes you washed afterward so I could run back into my office and keep working; for the hours of dog-walking, especially those early mornings, just so I could get some sleep … This book is now a real book because of you. Thank you for carrying me when I was too weary, for wiping away my tears when my heart was heavy, and for coming with me on so many adventures around the world.
To Annie, who can’t read this, but who deserves credit, anyway: Every second with you is a gift. Thank you for making a fairly solitary job not the slightest bit lonely—and for the laughter and joy and love you’ve brought into my life. Love you, baby pup.
To Susan Dennard, my Threadsister and anam cara: Pretty sure I’m a broken record at this point, but thank you for being a friend worth waiting for, and for the fun, truly epic times we’ve had together. To Alex Bracken, Erin Bowman, Lauren Billings, Christina Hobbs, Victoria Aveyard, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Gena Showalter, and Claire Legrand: I’m so lucky to call you guys my friends. I adore you all.
To my agent, Tamar Rydzinski: What would I do without you?
You’ve been my rock, my guiding star, and my fairy godmother from the very beginning. Seven books later, I still don’t have the words to express my gratitude. To my editor, Cat Onder: Working
with you on these books has been a highlight of my career. Thank you for your wisdom, your kindness, and your editorial brilliance.
To my phenomenal teams at Bloomsbury worldwide and CAA—
Cindy Loh, Cristina Gilbert, Jon Cassir, Kathleen Farrar, Nigel Newton, Rebecca McNally, Natalie Hamilton, Sonia Palmisano, Emma Hopkin, Ian Lamb, Emma Bradshaw, Lizzy Mason, Courtney Griffin, Erica Barmash, Emily Ritter, Grace Whooley, Eshani Agrawal, Nick Thomas, Alice Grigg, Elise Burns, Jenny Collins, Linette Kim, Beth Eller, Diane Aronson, Emily Klopfer, Melissa Kavonic, Donna Mark, John Candell, Nicholas Church, Adiba Oemar, Hermione Lawton, Kelly de Groot, and the entire foreign rights team—it’s an honor to know and work with you.
Thank you for making my dreams come true. To Cassie Homer: Thank you for everything. You are an absolute delight.
To my family (especially my parents): I love you to the moon and back.
To Louisse Ang, Nicola Wilksinson, Elena Yip, Sasha Alsberg, Vilma Gonzalez, Damaris Cardinali, Alexa Santiago, Rachel Domingo, Jamie Miller, Alice Fanchiang, and the Maas Thirteen: your generosity, friendship, and support mean the world to me.
And, lastly, to my readers: You guys are the greatest. The actual greatest. None of this would have been possible without you.
Thank you from the very bottom of my heart for all that you do for me and my books.
POWER GAMES HAVE BEGUN.
WAR IS UPON THEM.
Don’t miss the next book in this
New York Times bestselling series
news and updates from
• Sneak peeks at new titles
• Details of signings and events
• Share your messages and pictures
You can also find
SARAH J. MAAS online at
TWITTER: @SJMaas
TUMBLR: sjmaas.tumblr.com
INSTAGRAM: therealsjmaas
PINTEREST: sarahjmaas
FACEBOOK: Throne of Glass
A Court of Thorns and Roses
