It was Tamlin, but not. Rather, it was the Tamlin I’d dreamed of.

His skin gleamed with a golden sheen, and around his head glowed a circlet of sunshine. And his eyes—

Not merely green and gold, but every hue and variation that could be imagined, as though every leaf in the forest had bled into one shade. This was a High Lord of Prythian—devastatingly handsome, captivating, powerful beyond belief.

My breath caught in my throat as I touched the contours of his mask. The cool metal bit into my fingertips, and the emeralds slipped against my callused skin. I lifted my other hand and gently grasped either side of the mask. I pulled lightly.

It wouldn’t move.

He began smiling as I pulled again, and I blinked, dropping my hands. Instantly, the golden, glowing Tamlin vanished, and the one I knew returned. I could still hear the singing of the willow and the birds, but …

“Why can’t I see you anymore?”

“Because I willed my glamour back into place.”

“Glamour for what?”

“To look normal. Or as normal as I can look with this damned thing,” he added, gesturing to the mask. “Being a High Lord, even one with … limited powers, comes with physical markers, too. It’s why I couldn’t hide what I was becoming from my brothers—from anyone. It’s still easier to blend in.”

“But the mask truly can’t come off—I mean, are you sure there’s no one who knows how to fix what the magic did that night? Even someone in another court?” I don’t know why the mask bothered me so greatly. I didn’t need to see his entire face to know him.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“I just … just want to know what you look like.” I wondered when I’d grown so shallow.

“What do you think I look like?”

I tilted my head to the side. “A strong, straight nose,” I said, drawing from what I’d once tried to paint. “High cheekbones that bring out your eyes. Slightly … slightly arched brows,” I finished, blushing. He was grinning so broadly that I could almost see all of his teeth—those fangs nowhere in sight. I tried to think up an excuse for my forwardness, but a yawn crept from me as a sudden weight pressed on my eyes.

“What about your part of the bargain?”

“What?”

He leaned closer, his smile turning wicked. “What about my kiss?”

I grabbed his fingers. “Here,” I said, and slammed my mouth against the back of his hand. “There’s your kiss.”

Tamlin roared with laughter, but the world blurred, lulling me to sleep. The willow beckoned me to lie down, and I obliged. From far off, I heard Tamlin curse. “Feyre?”

Sleep. I wanted sleep. And there was no better place to sleep than right here, listening to the willow and the birds and the brook.

I curled on my side, using my arm for a pillow.

“I should bring you home,” he murmured, but he didn’t move to drag me to my feet. Instead, I felt a slight thud in the earth, and the spring rain and new grass scent of him cloyed in my nose as he lay beside me. I tingled with pleasure as he stroked my hair.

This was such a lovely dream. I’d never slept so wonderfully before. So warm, nestled beside him. Calm. Faintly, echoing into my world of slumber, he spoke again, his breath caressing my ear.

“You’re exactly as I dreamed you’d be, too.” Darkness swallowed everything.

CHAPTER

24

It wasn’t the dawn that awoke me, but rather a buzzing noise. I groaned as I sat up in bed and squinted at the squat woman with skin made from tree bark who fussed with my breakfast dishes.

“Where’s Alis?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

Tamlin must have carried me up here—must have carried me the whole way home.

“What?” She turned toward me. Her bird mask was familiar.

But I would have remembered a faerie with skin like that. Would have painted it already.

“Is Alis unwell?” I said, sliding from the bed. This was my room, wasn’t it? A quick glance told me yes.

“Are you out of your right mind?” the faerie said. I bit my lip. “I am Alis,” she clucked, and with a shake of her head, she strode into the bathing room to start my bath.

It was impossible. The Alis I knew was fair and plump and looked like a High Fae.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. A glamour—

that’s what Tamlin had said he wore. His faerie sight had stripped away the glamours I’d been seeing. But why bother to glamour everything?

Because I’d been a cowering human, that’s why. Because Tamlin knew I would have locked myself in this room and never come out if I’d seen them all for their true selves.

Things only got worse when I made my way downstairs to find the High Lord. The hallways were bustling with masked faeries I’d never seen before. Some were tall and humanoid—High Fae like Tamlin—others were … not. Faeries. I tried to avoid looking at those ones, as they seemed the most surprised to notice my attention.

I was almost shaking by the time I reached the dining room.

Lucien, mercifully, appeared like Lucien. I didn’t ask whether that

was because Tamlin had informed him to put up a better glamour or because he didn’t bother trying to be something he wasn’t.

Tamlin lounged in his usual chair but straightened as I lingered in the doorway. “What’s wrong?”

“There are … a lot of people—faeries—around. When did they arrive?”

I’d almost yelped when I looked out my bedroom window and spotted all the faeries in the garden. Many of them—all with insect masks—pruned the hedges and tended the flowers. Those faeries had been the strangest of all, with their iridescent, buzzing wings sprouting from their backs. And, of course, then there was the green-and-brown skin, and their unnaturally long limbs, and—

Tamlin bit his lip as if to keep from smiling. “They’ve been here all along.”

“But … but I didn’t hear anything.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Lucien drawled, and twirled one of his daggers between his hands. “We made sure you couldn’t see or hear anyone but those who were necessary.”

I adjusted the lapels of my tunic. “So you mean that … that when I ran after the puca that night—”

“You had an audience,” Lucien finished for me. I thought I’d been so stealthy. Meanwhile, I’d been tiptoeing past faeries who had probably laughed their heads off at the blind human following an illusion.

Fighting against my rising mortification, I turned to Tamlin. His lips twitched and he clamped them tightly together, but the amusement still danced in his eyes as he nodded. “It was a valiant effort.”

“But I could see the naga—and the puca, and the Suriel. And

—and that faerie whose wings were … ripped off,” I said, wincing inwardly. “Why didn’t the glamour apply to them?”

His eyes darkened. “They’re not members of my court,” Tamlin said, “so my glamour didn’t keep a hold on them. The puca belongs to the wind and weather and everything that changes.

And the naga … they belong to someone else.”

“I see,” I lied, not quite seeing at all. Lucien chuckled, sensing it, and I glared sidelong at him. “You’ve been noticeably absent again.”

He used the dagger to clean his nails. “I’ve been busy. So have you, I take it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“If I offer you the moon on a string, will you give me a kiss, too?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Tamlin said to him with a soft snarl, but Lucien continued laughing, and was still laughing when he left the room.

Alone with Tamlin, I shifted on my feet. “So if I were to encounter the Attor again,” I said, mostly to avoid the heavy silence, “would I actually see it?”

“Yes, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.”

“You said it didn’t see me that time, and it certainly doesn’t seem like a member of your court,” I ventured. “Why?”

“Because I threw a glamour over you when we entered the garden,” he said simply. “The Attor couldn’t see, hear, or smell you.” His gaze went to the window beyond me, and he ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve done all I can to keep you invisible to creatures like the Attor—and worse. The blight is acting up again

—and more of these creatures are being freed from their tethers.”

My stomach turned over. “If you spot one,” Tamlin continued,

“even if it looks harmless but makes you feel uncomfortable, pretend you don’t see it. Don’t talk to it. If it hurts you, I … the results wouldn’t be pleasant for it, or for me. You remember what happened with the naga.”

This was for my own safety, not his amusement. He didn’t want me hurt—he didn’t want to punish them for hurting me. Even if the naga hadn’t been part of his court, had it hurt him to kill them?

Realizing he waited for my answer, I nodded. “The … the blight is growing again?”

“So far, only in other territories. You’re safe here.”

“It’s not my safety I’m worried about.”

Tamlin’s eyes softened, but his lips became a thin line as he said, “It’ll be fine.”

“Is it possible that the surge will be temporary?” A fool’s hope.

Tamlin didn’t reply, which was answer enough. If the blight was becoming active again … I didn’t bother to offer my aid. I already knew he wouldn’t allow me to help with whatever this conflict was.

Image 35

But I thought of that painting I’d given him, and what he’d said about it … and wished he would let me in anyway.

The next morning, I found a head in the garden.

A bleeding male High Fae head—spiked atop a fountain statue of a great heron flapping its wings. The stone was soaked in enough blood to suggest that the head had been fresh when someone had impaled it on the heron’s upraised bill.

I had been hauling my paints and easel out to the garden to paint one of the beds of irises when I stumbled across it. My tins and brushes had clattered to the gravel.

I didn’t know where I went as I stared at that still-screaming head, the brown eyes bulging, the teeth broken and bloody. No mask—so he wasn’t a part of the Spring Court. Anything else about him, I couldn’t discern.

His blood was so bright on the gray stone—his mouth open so vulgarly. I backed away a step—and slammed into something warm and hard.

I whirled, hands rising out of instinct, but Tamlin’s voice said,

“It’s me,” and I stopped cold. Lucien stood beside him, pale and grim.

“Not Autumn Court,” Lucien said. “I don’t recognize him at all.”

Tamlin’s hands clamped on my shoulders as I turned back toward the head. “Neither do I.” A soft, vicious growl laced his words, but no claws pricked my skin as he kept gripping me. His hands tightened, though, while Lucien stepped into the small pool in which the statue stood—striding through the red water until he peered up at the anguished face.

“They branded him behind the ear with a sigil,” Lucien said, swearing. “A mountain with three stars—”

“Night Court,” Tamlin said too quietly.

The Night Court—the northernmost bit of Prythian, if I recalled the mural’s map correctly. A land of darkness and starlight. “Why

… why would they do this?” I breathed.

Tamlin let go, coming to stand at my side as Lucien climbed the statue to remove the head. I looked toward a blossoming crab apple tree instead.

“The Night Court does what it wants,” Tamlin said. “They live by their own codes, their own corrupt morals.”

“They’re all sadistic killers,” Lucien said. I dared a glance at him; he was now perched on the heron’s stone wing. I looked away again. “They delight in torture of every kind—and would find this sort of stunt to be amusing.”

“Amusing, but not a message?” I scanned the garden.

“Oh, it’s a message,” Lucien said, and I cringed at the thick, wet sounds of flesh and bone on stone as he yanked the head off.

I’d skinned enough animals, but this … Tamlin put another hand on my shoulder. “To get in and out of our defenses, to possibly commit the crime nearby, with the blood this fresh …” A splash as Lucien landed in the water again. “It’s exactly what the High Lord of the Night Court would find amusing. The bastard.”

I gauged the distance between the pool and the house. Sixty, maybe seventy feet. That’s how close they’d come to us. Tamlin brushed a thumb against my shoulder. “You’re still safe here. This was just their idea of a prank.”

“This isn’t connected to the blight?” I asked.

“Only in that they know the blight is again awakening—and want us to know they’re circling the Spring Court like vultures, should our wards fall further.” I must have looked as sick as I felt, because Tamlin added, “I won’t let that happen.”

I didn’t have the heart to say that their masks made it fairly clear that nothing could be done against the blight.

Lucien splashed out of the fountain, but I couldn’t look at him, not with the head he bore, the blood surely on his hands and clothes. “They’ll get what’s coming to them soon enough.

Hopefully the blight will wreck them, too.” Tamlin growled at Lucien to take care of the head, and the gravel crunched as Lucien departed.

I crouched to pick up my paints and brushes, my hands shaking as I fumbled for a large brush. Tamlin knelt next to me, but his hands closed around mine, squeezing.

“You’re still safe,” he said again. The Suriel’s command echoed through my mind. Stay with the High Lord, human. You will be safe.

I nodded.

“It’s court posturing,” he said. “The Night Court is deadly, but this was only their lord’s idea of a joke. Attacking anyone here—

attacking you—would cause more trouble than it’s worth for him. If the blight truly does harm these lands, and the Night Court enters our borders, we’ll be ready.”

My knees shook as I rose. Faerie politics, faerie courts …

“Their idea of jokes must have been even more horrible when we were enslaved to you all.” They must have tortured us whenever they liked—must have done such unspeakable, awful things to their human pets.

A shadow flickered in his eyes. “Some days, I’m very glad I was still a child when my father sent his slaves south of the wall.

What I witnessed then was bad enough.”

I didn’t want to imagine. Even now, I still hadn’t looked to see if any hints of those long-ago humans had been left behind. I did not think five centuries would be enough to cleanse the stain of the horrors that my people had endured. I should have let it go—

should have, but couldn’t. “Do you remember if they were happy to leave?”

Tamlin shrugged. “Yes. Yet they had never known freedom, or known the seasons as you do. They didn’t know what to do in the mortal world. But yes—most of them were very, very happy to leave.” Each word was more ground out than the next. “I was happy to see them go, even if my father wasn’t.” Despite the stillness with which he stood, his claws poked out from above his knuckles.

No wonder he’d been so awkward with me, had no idea what to do with me, when I’d first arrived. But I said quietly, “You’re not your father, Tamlin. Or your brothers.” He glanced away, and I added, “You never made me feel like a prisoner—never made me feel like little more than chattel.”

The shadows that flickered in his eyes as he nodded his thanks told me there was more—still more that he had yet to tell me about his family, his life before they’d been killed and this title had been thrust upon him. I wouldn’t ask, not with the blight pressing down on him—not until he was ready. He’d given me space and respect; I could offer him no less.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to paint that day.

CHAPTER

25

Tamlin was called away to one of the borders hours after I found that head—where and why, he wouldn’t tell me. But I sensed enough from what he didn’t say: the blight was indeed crawling from other courts, directly toward ours.

He stayed the night—the first he’d ever spent away—but sent Lucien to inform me that he was alive. Lucien had emphasized that last word enough that I slept terribly, even as a small part of me marveled that Tamlin had bothered to let me know about his well-being. I knew—I knew I was headed down a path that would likely end in my mortal heart being left in pieces, and yet … And yet I couldn’t stop myself. I hadn’t been able to since that day with the naga. But seeing that head … the games these courts played, with people’s lives as tokens on a board … it was an effort to keep food down whenever I thought about it.

Yet despite the creeping malice, I awoke the next day to the sound of merry fiddling, and when I looked out the window I found the garden bedecked in ribbons and streamers. On the distant hills, I spied the makings of fires and maypoles being raised.

When I asked Alis—whose people, I’d learned, were called the urisk—she simply said, “Summer Solstice. The main celebration used to be at the Summer Court, but … things are different. So now we have one here, too. You’re going.”

Summer—in the weeks that I’d been painting and dining with Tamlin and wandering the court lands at his side, summer had come. Did my family still truly believe me to be visiting some long-lost aunt? What were they doing with themselves? If it was the solstice, then there would be a small gathering in the village center—nothing religious, of course, though the Children of the Blessed might wander in to try to convert the young people; just some shared food, donated ale from the solitary tavern, and maybe some line dances. The only thing to celebrate was a day’s

break from the long summer days of planting and tilling. From the decorations around the estate, I could tell this would be something far grander—far more spirited.

Tamlin remained gone for most of the day. Worry gnawed at me even as I painted a quick, loose rendering of the streamers and ribbons in the garden. Perhaps it was petty and selfish, given the returning blight, but I also quietly hoped that the solstice didn’t require the same rites as Fire Night. I didn’t let myself think too much about what I would do if Tamlin had a flock of beautiful faeries lining up for him.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that I heard Tamlin’s deep voice and Lucien’s braying laugh echo through the halls all the way to my painting room. Relief sent my chest caving in, but as I rushed to find them, Alis yanked me upstairs. She stripped off my paint-splattered clothes and insisted I change into a flowing, cornflower-blue chiffon gown. She left my hair unbound but wove a garland of pink, white, and blue wildflowers around the crown of my head.

I might have felt childish with it on, but in the months I’d been there, my sharp bones and skeletal form had filled out. A woman’s body. I ran my hands over the sweeping, soft curves of my waist and hips. I had never thought I would feel anything but muscle and bone.

“Cauldron boil me,” Lucien whistled as I came down the stairs.

“She looks positively Fae.”

I was too busy looking Tamlin over—scanning for any injury, any sign of blood or mark that the blight might have left—to thank Lucien for the compliment. But Tamlin was clean, almost glowing, completely unarmed—and smiling at me. Whatever he’d gone to deal with had left him unscathed. “You look lovely,” Tamlin murmured, and something in his soft tone made me want to purr.

I squared my shoulders, disinclined to let him see how much his words or voice or sheer well-being impacted me. Not yet. “I’m surprised I’m even allowed to participate tonight.”

“Unfortunately for you and your neck,” Lucien countered,

“tonight’s just a party.”

“Do you lie awake at night to come up with all your witty replies for the following day?”

Lucien winked at me, and Tamlin laughed and offered me his arm. “He’s right,” the High Lord said. I was aware of every inch

where we touched, of the hard muscles beneath his green tunic.

He led me into the garden, and Lucien followed. “Solstice celebrates when the sun outshines the night. As the longest day of the year, it’s a time when everyone can take down their hair and simply enjoy being a faerie—not High Fae or faerie, just us, and nothing else.”

“So there’s singing and dancing and excessive drinking,”

Lucien chimed in, falling into step beside me. “And dallying,” he added with a wicked grin.

Indeed, every brush of Tamlin’s body against mine made it harder to avoid the urge to lean into him entirely, to smell him and touch him and taste him. Whether he noticed the heat singeing my neck and face, or heard my uneven heartbeat, he revealed nothing, holding my arm tighter as we walked out of the garden and into the fields beyond.

The sun was beginning its final descent when we reached the plateau on which the festivities were to be held. I tried not to gawk at the faeries gathered, even as I was in turn gawked at by them.

I’d never seen so many in one place before, at least not without the glamour hiding them from me. Now that my eyes were open to the sight, the exquisite dresses and lithe forms that were shaped and colored and built so strangely and differently were a marvel to behold. Yet what little novelty my own presence by the High Lord’s side offered soon wore off—helped by a low, warning growl from Tamlin that sent the others scattering to mind their own business.

Table after table of food had been lined up along the far edge of the plateau, and I lost Tamlin while I waited in line to fill a plate, leaving me to try my best not to look like I was some human plaything of his. Music started near the giant, smoking bonfire—

fiddles and drums and merry instruments that had me tapping my feet in the grass. Light and joyous and open, the mirthful sister to the bloodthirsty Fire Night.

Lucien, of course, excelled at disappearing when I needed him, and so I ate my fill of strawberry shortcake, apple tart, and blueberry pie—no different from summer treats in the mortal realm

—alone beneath a sycamore covered with silken lanterns and sparkling ribbons.

I didn’t mind the solitude—not when I was busy contemplating the way the lanterns and ribbons shone, the shadows they cast;

perhaps it would be my next painting. Or maybe I would paint the ethereal faeries beginning to dance. Such angles and colors to them. I wondered if any of them had been the subjects of the painters whose work was displayed in the gallery.

I moved only to get myself something to drink. The plateau became more crowded as the sun sank toward the horizon.

Across the hills, other bonfires and parties began, their music filtering through the occasional pause in ours. I was pouring myself a goblet of golden sparkling wine when Lucien finally appeared behind me, peering over my shoulder. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

“Oh?” I said, frowning at the fizzing liquid.

“Faerie wine at the solstice,” Lucien hinted.

“Hmm,” I said, taking a sniff. It didn’t reek of alcohol. In fact, it smelled like summers spent lying in the grass and bathing in cool pools. I’d never smelled anything so fantastic.

“I’m serious,” Lucien said as I lifted the glass to my lips, my brows raised. “Remember the last time you ignored my warning?”

He poked me in the neck, and I batted his hand away.

“I also remember you telling me how witchberries were harmless, and the next thing I knew, I was half-delirious and falling all over myself,” I said, recalling the afternoon from a few weeks ago. I’d had hallucinations for hours afterward, and Lucien had laughed himself sick—enough so that Tamlin had chucked him into the reflection pool. I shook away the thought. Today—just for today—I would indeed let my hair down. Today, let caution be damned. Forget the blight hovering at the edges of the court, threatening my High Lord and his lands. Where was Tamlin, anyway? If there had been some threat, surely Lucien would have known—surely they would have called off the celebration.

“Well, I mean it this time,” Lucien said, and I shifted my goblet out of his reach. “Tam would gut me if he caught you drinking that.”

“Always looking after your best interests,” I said, and pointedly chugged the contents of the glass.

It was like a million fireworks exploding inside me, filling my veins with starlight. I laughed aloud, and Lucien groaned.

“Human fool,” he hissed. But his glamour had been ripped away. His auburn hair burned like hot metal, and his russet eye

smoldered like a bottomless forge. That was what I would capture next.

“I’m going to paint you,” I said, and giggled—actually giggled

as the words popped out.

“Cauldron boil and fry me,” he muttered, and I laughed again.

Before he could stop me, I’d downed another glass of faerie wine.

It was the most glorious thing I’d ever tasted. It liberated me from bonds I hadn’t known existed.

The music became a siren song. The melody was my lodestone, and I was powerless against its lure. With each step, I savored the dampness of the grass beneath my bare feet. I didn’t remember when I’d lost my shoes.

The sky was an eddy of molten amethyst, sapphire, and ruby, all bleeding into a final pool of onyx. I wanted to swim in it, wanted to bathe in its colors and feel the stars twinkling between my fingers.

I stumbled, blinking, and found myself standing at the edge of the ring of dancing. A cluster of musicians played their faerie instruments, and I swayed on my feet as I watched the faeries dancing, circling the bonfire. Not formal dancing. It was like they were as loose as I was. Free. I loved them for it.

“Damn it, Feyre,” Lucien said, gripping my elbow. “Do you want me to kill myself trying to keep you from impaling your mortal hide on another rock?”

“What?” I said, turning to him. The whole world spun with me, delightful and entrancing.

“Idiot,” he said when he looked at my face. “Drunken idiot.”

The tempo increased. I wanted to be in the music, wanted to ride its speed and weave between its notes. I could feel the music around me, like a living, breathing thing of wonder and joy and beauty.

“Feyre, stop,” Lucien said, and grabbed me again. I’d been dancing away, and my body was still swaying toward the pull of the sound.

You stop. Stop being so serious,” I said, shaking him off. I wanted to hear the music, wanted to hear it hot off the instruments. Lucien swore as I burst into movement.

I skipped between the dancers, twirling my skirts. The seated, masked musicians didn’t look up at me as I leaped before them,

dancing in place. No chains, no boundaries—just me and the music, dancing and dancing. I wasn’t faerie, but I was a part of this earth, and the earth was a part of me, and I would be content to dance upon it for the rest of my life.

One of the musicians looked up from his fiddling, and I halted.

Sweat gleamed on the strong column of his neck as he rested his chin upon the dark wood of the fiddle. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the cords of muscle along his forearms. He had once mentioned that he would have liked to be a traveling minstrel if not a warrior or a High Lord—now, hearing him play, I knew he could have made a fortune from it.

“I’m sorry, Tam,” Lucien panted, appearing from nowhere. “I left her alone for a little at one of the food tables, and when I caught up to her, she was drinking the wine, and—”

Tamlin didn’t pause in his playing. His golden hair damp with sweat, he looked marvelously handsome—even though I couldn’t see most of his face. He gave me a feral smile as I began to dance in place before him. “I’ll look after her,” Tamlin murmured above the music, and I glowed, my dancing becoming faster. “Go enjoy yourself.” Lucien fled.

I shouted over the music, “I don’t need a keeper!” I wanted to spin and spin and spin.

“No, you don’t,” Tamlin said, never once stumbling over his playing. How his bow did dance upon the strings, his fingers sturdy and strong, no signs of those claws that I had come to stop fearing … “Dance, Feyre,” he whispered.

So I did.

I was loosened, a top whirling around and around, and I didn’t know who I danced with or what they looked like, only that I had become the music and the fire and the night, and there was nothing that could slow me down.

Through it all, Tamlin and his musicians played such joyous music that I didn’t think the world could contain it all. I sashayed over to him, my faerie lord, my protector and warrior, my friend, and danced before him. He grinned at me, and I didn’t break my dancing as he rose from his seat and knelt before me in the grass, offering up a solo on his fiddle to me.

Music just for me—a gift. He played on, his fingers fast and hard upon the strings of his fiddle. My body slithering like a snake,

I tipped my head back to the heavens and let Tamlin’s music fill all of me.

There was a pressure at my waist, and I was swept away in someone’s arms as they whisked me back into the ring of dancing. I laughed so hard I thought I’d combust, and when I opened my eyes, I found Tamlin there, spinning me round and round.

Everything became a blur of color and sound, and he was the only object in it, tethering me to sanity, to my body, which glowed and burned in every place he touched.

I was filled with sunshine. It was like I’d never experienced summer before, like I’d never known who was waiting to emerge from that forest of ice and snow. I didn’t want it to end—I never wanted to leave this hilltop.

The music came to a close, and, gasping for breath, I glanced at the moon—it was near setting. Sweat slid down every part of my body.

Tamlin, panting as well, took my hand. “Time goes faster when you’re drunk on faerie wine.”

“I’m not drunk,” I said, snorting. He only chuckled and led me from the dancing. I dug my heels into the ground as we neared the edge of the firelight. “They’re starting again,” I said, pointing to the dancers gathering before the refreshed musicians.

He leaned close, his breath caressing the shell of my ear as he whispered, “I want to show you something better.”

I stopped objecting.

He led me off the hill, navigating his way by moonlight.

Whatever path he chose, he did so out of consideration for my bare feet, for only soft grass cushioned my steps. Soon, even the music faded away, replaced by the sighing of trees in the night breeze.

“Here,” Tamlin said, pausing at the edge of a vast meadow. His hand lingered on my shoulder as we looked out.

The high grasses moved like water as the last of the moonlight danced upon them.

“What is it?” I breathed, but he put a finger to his lips and beckoned me to look.

For a few minutes, there was nothing. Then, from the opposite side of the meadow, dozens of shimmering shapes floated out

across the grass, little more than mirages of moonlight. That was when the singing began.

It was a collective voice, but in it existed both male and female

—two sides of the same coin, singing to each other in a call and response. I raised a hand to my throat as their music rose and they danced. Ghostly and ethereal, they waltzed across the field, no more than slender slants of moonlight.

“What are they?”

“Will-o’-the-wisps—spirits of air and light,” he said softly.

“Come to celebrate the solstice.”

“They’re beautiful.”

His lips grazed my neck as he murmured against my skin,

“Dance with me, Feyre.”

“Really?” I turned and found my face mere inches from his.

He cracked a lazy smile. “Really.” As though I were nothing but air myself, he pulled me into a sweeping dance. I barely remembered any of the steps I’d learned in childhood, but he compensated for it with his feral grace, never faltering, always sensing any stumble before I made it as we danced across the spirit-riddled field.

I was as unburdened as a piece of dandelion fluff, and he was the wind that stirred me about the world.

He smiled at me, and I found myself smiling back. I didn’t need to pretend, didn’t need to be anything but what I was right then, being twirled about the meadow, the will-o’-the-wisps dancing around us like dozens of moons.

Our dancing slowed and we stood there, holding each other as we swayed to the songs of the spirits. He rested his chin upon my head and stroked my hair, his fingers grazing the bare skin of my neck.

“Feyre,” he whispered onto my head. He made my name sound beautiful. “Feyre,” he whispered again—not in question, but simply as if he enjoyed saying it.

As quickly as they’d appeared, the spirits vanished, taking their music with them. I blinked. The stars were fading, and the sky had turned grayish purple.

Tamlin’s face was inches from my own. “It’s almost dawn.”

I nodded, mesmerized by the sight of him, the smell and feel of him holding me. I reached up to touch his mask. It was so cold,

despite how flushed his skin was just beyond it. My hand shook, and my breathing became shallow as I grazed the skin of his jaw.

It was smooth—and hot.

He wet his lips, his breathing as uneven as my own. His fingers contracted against the plane of my lower back, and I let him tug me closer to him—until our bodies were touching, and the warmth of him seeped into me.

I had to tilt my head back to see his face. His mouth was caught somewhere between a smile and a wince.

“What?” I asked, and put a hand on his chest, preparing to shove myself back. But his other hand slipped under my hair, resting at the base of my neck.

“I’m thinking I might kiss you,” he said quietly, intently.

“Then do it.” I blushed at my own boldness.

But Tamlin only gave that breathy laugh, and leaned in.

His lips brushed mine—testing, soft and warm. He pulled back a little. He was still staring at me, and I stared right back as he kissed me again, harder, but nothing like the way he’d kissed my neck. He withdrew more fully this time and watched me.

“That’s it?” I demanded, and he laughed and kissed me fiercely.

My hands went around his neck, pulling him closer, crushing myself against him. His hands roved my back, playing in my hair, grasping my waist, as if he couldn’t touch enough of me at once.

He let out a low groan. “Come,” he said, kissing my brow.

“We’ll miss it if we don’t go now.”

“Better than will-o’-the-wisps ?” I asked, but he kissed my cheeks, my neck, and finally my lips. I followed him into the trees, through the ever-lightening world. His hand was solid and unmovable around mine as we passed through the low-lying mists, and he helped me up a bare hill slick with dew.

We sat atop its crest, and I hid my smile as Tamlin put an arm around my shoulders, tucking me in close. I rested my head against his chest while he toyed with the flowers in my garland.

In silence, we stared out over the rolling green expanse.

The sky shifted into periwinkle, and the clouds filled with pink light. Then, like a shimmering disk too rich and clear to be described, the sun slipped over the horizon and lined everything

with gold. It was like seeing the world being born, and we were the sole witnesses.

Tamlin’s arm tightened around me, and he kissed the top of my head. I pulled back, looking up at him.

The gold in his eyes, bright with the rising sun, flickered.

“What?”

“My father once told me that I should let my sisters imagine a better life—a better world. And I told him that there was no such thing.” I ran my thumb over his mouth, marveling, and shook my head. “I never understood—because I couldn’t … couldn’t believe that it was even possible.” I swallowed, lowering my hand. “Until now.”

His throat bobbed. His kiss that time was deep and thorough, unhurried and intent.

I let the dawn creep inside me, let it grow with each movement of his lips and brush of his tongue against mine. Tears pricked beneath my closed eyes.

It was the happiest moment of my life.

CHAPTER

26

The next day, Lucien joined us for lunch—which was breakfast for all of us. Ever since I’d complained about the unnecessary size of the table, we’d taken to dining at a much-reduced version. Lucien kept rubbing at his temples as he ate, unusually silent, and I hid my smile as I asked him, “And where were you last night?”

Lucien’s metal eye narrowed on me. “I’ll have you know that while you two were dancing with the spirits, I was stuck on border patrol.” Tamlin gave a pointed cough, and Lucien added, “With some company.” He gave me a sly grin. “Rumor has it you two didn’t come back until after dawn.”

I glanced at Tamlin, biting my lip. I’d practically floated into my bedroom that morning. But Tamlin’s gaze now roved my face as if searching for any tinge of regret, of fear. Ridiculous.

“You bit my neck on Fire Night,” I said under my breath. “If I can face you after that, a few kisses are nothing.”

He braced his forearms on the table as he leaned closer to me. “Nothing?” His eyes flicked to my lips. Lucien shifted in his seat, muttering to the Cauldron to spare him, but I ignored him.

“Nothing,” I repeated a bit distantly, watching Tamlin’s mouth move, so keenly aware of every movement he made, resenting the table between us. I could almost feel the warmth of his breath.

“Are you sure?” he murmured, intent and hungry enough that I was glad I was sitting. He could have had me right there, on top of that table. I wanted his broad hands running over my bare skin, wanted his teeth scraping against my neck, wanted his mouth all over me.

“I’m trying to eat,” Lucien said, and I blinked, the air whooshing out of me. “But now that I have your attention, Tamlin,” he snapped, though the High Lord was looking at me again—

devouring me with his eyes. I could hardly sit still, could hardly

stand the clothes scratching my too-hot skin. With some effort, Tamlin glanced back at his emissary.

Lucien shifted in his seat. “Not to be the bearer of truly bad tidings, but my contact at the Winter Court managed to get a letter to me.” Lucien took a steadying breath, and I wondered—

wondered if being emissary also meant being spymaster. And wondered why he was bothering to say this in my presence at all.

The smile instantly faded from Tamlin’s face. “The blight,” Lucien said tightly, softly. “It took out two dozen of their younglings. Two dozen, all gone.” He swallowed. “It just … burned through their magic, then broke apart their minds. No one in the Winter Court could do anything—no one could stop it once it turned its attention toward them. Their grief is … unfathomable. My contact says other courts are being hit hard—though the Night Court, of course, manages to remain unscathed. But the blight seems to be sending its wickedness this way—farther south with every attack.”

All the warmth, all the sparkling joy, drained from me like blood down a drain. “The blight can … can truly kill people?” I managed to say. Younglings. It had killed children, like some storm of darkness and death. And if offspring were as rare as Alis had claimed, the loss of so many would be more devastating than I could imagine.

Tamlin’s eyes were shadowed, and he slowly shook his head

—as if trying to clear the grief and shock of those deaths from him. “The blight is capable of hurting us in ways you—” He shot to his feet so quickly that his chair flipped over. He unsheathed his claws and snarled at the open doorway, canines long and gleaming.

The house, usually full of the whispering skirts and chatter of servants, had gone silent.

Not the pregnant silence of Fire Night, but rather a trembling quiet that made me want to scramble under the table. Or just start running. Lucien swore and drew his sword.

“Get Feyre to the window—by the curtains,” Tamlin growled to Lucien, not taking his eyes off the open doors. Lucien’s hand gripped my elbow, dragging me out of my chair.

“What’s—” I started, but Tamlin growled again, the sound echoing through the room. I snatched one of the knives off the table and let Lucien lead me to the window, where he pushed me

against the velvet drapes. I wanted to ask why he didn’t bother hiding me behind them, but the fox-masked faerie just pressed his back into me, pinning me between him and the wall.

The tang of magic shoved itself up my nostrils. Though his sword was pointed at the floor, Lucien’s grip tightened on it until his knuckles turned white. Magic—a glamour. To conceal me, to make me a part of Lucien—invisible, hidden by the faerie’s magic and scent. I peered over his shoulder at Tamlin, who took a long breath and sheathed his claws and fangs, his baldric of knives appearing from thin air across his chest. But he didn’t draw any of the knives as he righted his chair and slouched in it, picking at his nails. As if nothing were happening.

But someone was coming, someone awful enough to frighten them—someone who would want to hurt me if they knew I was here.

The hissing voice of the Attor slithered through my memory.

There were worse creatures than it, Tamlin had told me. Worse than the naga, and the Suriel, and the Bogge, too.

Footsteps sounded from the hall. Even, strolling, casual.

Tamlin continued cleaning his nails, and in front of me, Lucien assumed a position of appearing to be looking out the window.

The footsteps grew louder—the scuff of boots on marble tiles.

And then he appeared.

No mask. He, like the Attor, belonged to something else.

Some one else.

And worse … I’d met him before. He’d saved me from those three faeries on Fire Night.

With steps that were too graceful, too feline, he approached the dining table and stopped a few yards from the High Lord. He was exactly as I remembered him, with his fine, rich clothing cloaked in tendrils of night: an ebony tunic brocaded with gold and silver, dark pants, and black boots that went to his knees. I’d never dared to paint him—and now knew I would never have the nerve to.

“High Lord,” the stranger crooned, inclining his head slightly.

Not a bow.

Tamlin remained seated. With his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but Tamlin’s voice was laced with the promise of violence as he said, “What do you want, Rhysand?”

Rhysand smiled—heartbreaking in its beauty—and put a hand on his chest. “Rhysand? Come now, Tamlin. I don’t see you for forty-nine years, and you start calling me Rhysand? Only my prisoners and my enemies call me that.” His grin widened as he finished, and something in his countenance turned feral and deadly, more so than I’d ever seen Tamlin look. Rhysand turned, and I held my breath as he ran an eye over Lucien. “A fox mask.

Appropriate for you, Lucien.”

“Go to Hell, Rhys,” Lucien snapped.

“Always a pleasure dealing with the rabble,” Rhysand said, and faced Tamlin again. I still didn’t breathe. “I hope I wasn’t interrupting.”

“We were in the middle of lunch,” Tamlin said—his voice void of the warmth to which I’d become accustomed. The voice of the High Lord. It turned my insides cold.

“Stimulating,” Rhysand purred.

“What are you doing here, Rhys?” Tamlin demanded, still in his seat.

“I wanted to check up on you. I wanted to see how you were faring. If you got my little present.”

“Your present was unnecessary.”

“But a nice reminder of the fun days, wasn’t it?” Rhysand clicked his tongue and surveyed the room. “Almost half a century holed up in a country estate. I don’t know how you managed it.

But,” he said, facing Tamlin again, “you’re such a stubborn bastard that this must have seemed like a paradise compared to Under the Mountain. I suppose it is. I’m surprised, though: forty-nine years, and no attempts to save yourself or your lands. Even now that things are getting interesting again.”

“There’s nothing to be done,” conceded Tamlin, his voice low.

Rhysand approached Tamlin, each movement smooth as silk.

His voice dropped into a whisper—an erotic caress of sound that brought heat to my cheeks. “What a pity that you must endure the brunt of it, Tamlin—and an even greater pity that you’re so resigned to your fate. You might be stubborn, but this is pathetic.

How different the High Lord is from the brutal war-band leader of centuries ago.”

Lucien interrupted, “What do you know about anything? You’re just Amarantha’s whore.”

“Her whore I might be, but not without my reasons.” I flinched as his voice whetted itself into an edge. “At least I haven’t bided my time among the hedges and flowers while the world has gone to Hell.”

Lucien’s sword rose slightly. “If you think that’s all I’ve been doing, you’ll soon learn otherwise.”

“Little Lucien. You certainly gave them something to talk about when you switched to Spring. Such a sad thing, to see your lovely mother in perpetual mourning over losing you.”

Lucien pointed his sword at Rhysand. “Watch your filthy mouth.”

Rhysand laughed—a lover’s laugh, low and soft and intimate.

“Is that any way to speak to a High Lord of Prythian?”

My heart stopped dead. That was why those faeries had run off on Fire Night. To cross him would have been suicide. And from the way darkness seemed to ripple from him, from those violet eyes that burned like stars …

“Come now, Tamlin,” Rhysand said. “Shouldn’t you reprimand your lackey for speaking to me like that?”

“I don’t enforce rank in my court,” Tamlin said.

“Still?” Rhysand crossed his arms. “But it’s so entertaining when they grovel. I suppose your father never bothered to show you.”

“This isn’t the Night Court,” Lucien hissed. “And you have no power here—so clear out. Amarantha’s bed is growing cold.”

I tried not to breathe too loudly. Rhysand— he’d been the one to send that head. As a gift. I flinched. Was the Night Court where this woman—this Amarantha—was located, too?

Rhysand snickered, but then he was upon Lucien, too fast for me to follow with my human eyes, growling in his face. Lucien pressed me into the wall with his back, hard enough that I stifled a cry as I was squished against the wood.

“I was slaughtering on the battlefield before you were even born,” Rhysand snarled. Then, as quickly as he had come, he withdrew, casual and careless. No, I would never dare to paint that dark, immortal grace—not in a hundred years. “Besides,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets, “who do you think taught your beloved Tamlin the finer aspects of swords and females? You

can’t truly believe he learned everything in his father’s little war-camps.”

Tamlin rubbed his temples. “Save it for another time, Rhys.

You’ll see me soon enough.”

Rhysand meandered toward the door. “She’s already preparing for you. Given your current state, I think I can safely report that you’ve already been broken and will reconsider her offer.” Lucien’s breath hitched as Rhysand passed the table. The High Lord of the Night Court ran a finger along the back of my chair—a casual gesture. “I’m looking forward to seeing your face when you—”

Rhysand studied the table.

Lucien went stick-straight, pressing me harder against the wall.

The table was still set for three, my half-eaten plate of food sitting right before him.

“Where’s your guest?” Rhysand asked, lifting my goblet and sniffing it before setting it down again.

“I sent them off when I sensed your arrival,” Tamlin lied coolly.

Rhysand now faced the High Lord, and his perfect face was void of emotion before his brows rose. A flicker of excitement—

perhaps even disbelief—flashed across his features, but he whipped his head to Lucien. Magic seared my nostrils, and I stared at Rhysand in undiluted terror as his face contorted with rage.

“You dare glamour me?” he growled, his violet eyes burning as they bore into my own. Lucien just pressed me harder into the wall.

Tamlin’s chair groaned as it was shoved back. He rose, claws at the ready, deadlier than any of the knives strapped to him.

Rhysand’s face became a mask of calm fury as he stared and stared at me. “I remember you,” he purred. “It seems like you ignored my warning to stay out of trouble.” He turned to Tamlin.

“Who, pray tell, is your guest?”

“My betrothed,” Lucien answered.

“Oh? Here I was, thinking you still mourned your commoner lover after all these centuries,” Rhysand said, stalking toward me.

The sunlight didn’t gleam on the metallic threads of his tunic, as if it balked from the darkness pulsing from him.

Lucien spat at Rhysand’s feet and shoved his sword between us.

Rhysand’s venom-coated smile grew. “You draw blood from me, Lucien, and you’ll learn how quickly Amarantha’s whore can make the entire Autumn Court bleed. Especially its darling Lady.”

The color leeched from Lucien’s face, but he held his ground.

It was Tamlin who answered. “Put your sword down, Lucien.”

Rhysand ran an eye over me. “I knew you liked to stoop low with your lovers, Lucien, but I never thought you’d actually dabble with mortal trash.” My face burned. Lucien was trembling—with rage or fear or sorrow, I couldn’t tell. “The Lady of the Autumn Court will be grieved indeed when she hears of her youngest son.

If I were you, I’d keep your new pet well away from your father.”

“Leave, Rhys,” Tamlin commanded, standing a few feet behind the High Lord of the Night Court. And yet he didn’t make a move to attack, despite the claws, despite Rhysand still approaching me. Perhaps a battle between two High Lords could tear this manor to its foundations—and leave only dust in its wake. Or perhaps, if Rhysand was indeed this woman’s lover, the retaliation from hurting him would be too great. Especially with the added burden of facing the blight.

Rhysand brushed Lucien aside as if he were a curtain.

There was nothing between us now, and the air was sharp and cold. But Tamlin remained where he was, and Lucien didn’t so much as blink as Rhysand, with horrific gentleness, pried the knife from my hands and sent it scattering across the room.

“That won’t do you any good, anyway,” Rhysand said to me. “If you were wise, you would be screaming and running from this place, from these people. It’s a wonder that you’re still here, actually.” My confusion must have been written across my face, for Rhysand laughed loudly. “Oh, she doesn’t know, does she?”

I trembled, unable to find words or courage.

“You have seconds, Rhys,” Tamlin warned. “Seconds to get out.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t speak to me like that.”

Against my volition, my body straightened, every muscle going taut, my bones straining. Magic, but deeper than that. Power that seized everything inside me and took control: even my blood flowed where he willed it.

I couldn’t move. An invisible, talon-tipped hand scraped against my mind. And I knew—one push, one swipe of those mental claws, and who I was would cease to exist.

“Let her go,” Tamlin said, bristling, but didn’t advance forward.

A kind of panic had entered his eyes, and he glanced from me to Rhysand. “Enough.”

“I’d forgotten that human minds are as easy to shatter as eggshells,” Rhysand said, and ran a finger across the base of my throat. I shuddered, my eyes burning. “Look at how delightful she is—look how she’s trying not to cry out in terror. It would be quick, I promise.”

Had I retained any semblance of control over my body, I might have vomited.

“She has the most delicious thoughts about you, Tamlin,” he said. “She’s wondered about the feeling of your fingers on her thighs—between them, too.” He chuckled. Even as he said my most private thoughts, even as I burned with outrage and shame, I trembled at the grip still on my mind. Rhysand turned to the High Lord. “I’m curious: Why did she wonder if it would feel good to have you bite her breast the way you bit her neck?”

“Let. Her. Go.” Tamlin’s face was twisted with such feral rage that it struck a different, deeper chord of terror in me.

“If it’s any consolation,” Rhysand confided to him, “she would have been the one for you—and you might have gotten away with it. A bit late, though. She’s more stubborn than you are.”

Those invisible claws lazily caressed my mind again—then vanished. I sank to the floor, curling over my knees as I reeled in everything that I was, as I tried to keep from sobbing, from screaming, from emptying my stomach onto the floor.

“Amarantha will enjoy breaking her,” Rhysand observed to Tamlin. “Almost as much as she’ll enjoy watching you as she shatters her bit by bit.”

Tamlin was frozen, his arms—his claws—hanging limply at his side. I’d never seen him look like that. “Please” was all that Tamlin said.

“Please what?” Rhysand said—gently, coaxingly. Like a lover.

“Don’t tell Amarantha about her,” Tamlin said, his voice strained.

“And why not? As her whore,” he said with a glance tossed in Lucien’s direction, “I should tell her everything.”

“Please,” Tamlin managed, as if it were difficult to breathe.

Rhysand pointed at the ground, and his smile became vicious.

“Beg, and I’ll consider not telling Amarantha.”

Tamlin dropped to his knees and bowed his head.

“Lower.”

Tamlin pressed his forehead to the floor, his hands sliding along the floor toward Rhysand’s boots. I could have wept with rage at the sight of Tamlin being forced to bow to someone, at the sight of my High Lord being put so low. Rhysand pointed at Lucien. “You too, fox-boy.”

Lucien’s face was dark, but he lowered himself to his knees, then touched his head to the ground. I wished for the knife Rhysand had chucked away, for anything with which to kill him.

I stopped shaking long enough to hear Rhys speak again. “Are you doing this for your sake, or for hers?” he pondered, then shrugged, as if he weren’t forcing a High Lord of Prythian to grovel. “You’re far too desperate, Tamlin. It’s off-putting. Becoming High Lord made you so boring.”

“Are you going to tell Amarantha?” Tamlin said, keeping his face on the floor.

Rhysand smirked. “Perhaps I’ll tell her, perhaps I won’t.”

In a flash of motion too fast for me to detect, Tamlin was on his feet, fangs dangerously close to Rhysand’s face.

“None of that,” Rhysand said, clicking his tongue and lightly shoving Tamlin away with a single hand. “Not with a lady present.”

His eyes shifted to my face. “What’s your name, love?”

Giving him my name—and my family name—would lead only to more pain and suffering. He might very well find my family and drag them into Prythian to torment, just to amuse himself. But he could steal my name from my mind if I hesitated for too long.

Keeping my mind blank and calm, I blurted the first name that came to mind, a village friend of my sisters’ whom I’d never spoken to and whose face I couldn’t recall. “Clare Beddor.” My voice was nothing more than a gasp.

Rhysand turned back to Tamlin, unfazed by the High Lord’s proximity. “Well, this was entertaining. The most fun I’ve had in

ages, actually. I’m looking forward to seeing you three Under the Mountain. I’ll give Amarantha your regards.”

Then Rhysand vanished into nothing—as if he’d stepped through a rip in the world—leaving us alone in horrible, trembling silence.

CHAPTER

27

I lay in bed, watching the pools of moonlight shift on the floor. It was an effort not to dwell on Tamlin’s face as he ordered me and Lucien to leave and shut the door to the dining room. Had I not been so bent on piecing myself together, I might have stayed.

Might have even asked Lucien about it—about everything. But, like the coward I was, I bolted to my room, where Alis was waiting with a cup of molten chocolate. It was even more of an effort not to recall the roaring that rattled the chandelier or the cracking of shattering furniture that echoed through the house.

I didn’t go to dinner. I didn’t want to know if there was a dining room to eat in. And I couldn’t bring myself to paint.

The house had been quiet for some time now, but the ripples of Tamlin’s rage echoed through it, reverberating in the wood and stone and glass.

I didn’t want to think about all that Rhysand had said—didn’t want to think about the looming storm of the blight, or Under the Mountain—whatever it was called—and why I might be forced to go there. And Amarantha—at last a name to go with the female presence that stalked their lives. I shuddered each time I considered how deadly she must be to command the High Lords of Prythian. To hold Rhysand’s leash and to make Tamlin beg to keep me hidden from her.

The door creaked, and I jerked upright. Moonlight glimmered on gold, but my heart didn’t ease as Tamlin shut the door and approached my bed. His steps were slow and heavy—and he didn’t speak until he’d taken a seat on the edge of the mattress.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was hoarse and empty.

“It’s fine,” I lied, clenching the sheets in my hands. If I thought too long about it, I could still feel the claw-tipped caresses of Rhysand’s power scraping against my mind.

“It’s not fine,” he growled, and grabbed one of my hands, wrenching my fingers from the sheets. “It’s …” He hung his head, sighing deeply as his hand tightened on mine. “Feyre … I wish …”

He shook his head and cleared his throat. “I’m sending you home, Feyre.”

Something inside me splintered. “What?”

“I’m sending you home,” he repeated, and though his words were stronger—louder—they trembled a bit.

“What about the terms of the Treaty—”

“I have taken on your life-debt. Should someone come inquiring after the broken laws, I’ll take responsibility for Andras’s death.”

“But you once said that there was no other loophole. The Suriel said there was no—”

A snarl. “If they have a problem with it, they can tell me.” And wind up in ribbons.

My chest caved in. Leaving— free. “Did I do something wrong

—”

He lifted my hand to press it to his lower cheek. He was so invitingly warm. “You did nothing wrong.” He turned his face to kiss my palm. “You were perfect,” he murmured onto my skin, then lowered my hand.

“Then why do I have to go?” I yanked my hand away.

“Because there are … there are people who would hurt you, Feyre. Hurt you because of what you are to me. I thought I would be able to handle them, to shield you from it, but after today … I can’t. So you need to go home—far from here. You’ll be safe there.”

“I can hold my own, and—”

“You can’t,” he said, and his voice wobbled. “Because I can’t.”

He seized my face in both hands. “I can’t even protect myself against them, against what’s happening in Prythian.” I felt every word as it passed from his mouth and onto my lips, a rush of hot, frantic air. “Even if we stood against the blight … they would hunt you down—she would find a way to kill you.”

“Amarantha.” He bristled at the name but nodded. “Who is—”

“When you get home,” he cut in, “don’t tell anyone the truth about where you were; let them believe the glamour. Don’t tell

them who I am; don’t tell them where you stayed. Her spies will be looking for you.”

“I don’t understand.” I grabbed his forearm and squeezed it tight. “Tell me—”

“You have to go home, Feyre.”

Home. It wasn’t my home—it was Hell. “I want to stay with you,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “Treaty or no treaty, blight or no blight.”

He ran a hand over his face. His fingers contracted when they met with his mask. “I know.”

“So let me—”

“There’s no debate,” he snarled, and I glared at him. “Don’t you understand?” He shot to his feet. “Rhys was the start of it. Do you want to be here when the Attor returns? Do you want to know what kind of creatures the Attor answers to? Things like the Bogge

—and worse.”

“Let me help you—”

No.” He paced before the bed. “Didn’t you read between the lines today?”

I hadn’t, but I lifted my chin and crossed my arms. “So you’re sending me away because I’m useless in a fight?”

“I’m sending you away because it makes me sick thinking about you in their hands!”

Silence fell, filled only by the sounds of his heavy breathing.

He sank onto the bed and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes.

His words echoed through me, melting my anger, turning everything inside me watery and frail. “How … how long do I have to go away for?”

He didn’t reply.

“A week?” No answer. “A month?” He shook his head slowly.

My upper lip curled, but I forced myself into neutrality. “A year?”

That much time away from him …

“I don’t know.”

“But not forever, right?” Even if the blight spread to the Spring Court again, even if it could shred me apart … I would come back.

He brushed the hair from my face. I shook him off. “I suppose it’ll

be easier if I’m gone,” I said, looking away from him. “Who wants someone around who’s so covered in thorns?”

“Thorns?”

“Thorny. Prickly. Sour. Contrary.”

He leaned forward and kissed me lightly. “Not forever,” he said onto my mouth.

And though I knew it was a lie, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him.

He pulled me onto his lap, holding me tightly against him as his lips parted mine. I became aware of every pore in my body when his tongue entered my mouth.

Though the horror of Rhysand’s magic still tore at me, I pushed Tamlin onto the bed, straddling him, pinning him as if it would somehow keep me from leaving, as if it would make time stop entirely.

His hands rested on my hips, and their heat singed me through the thin silk of my nightgown. My hair fell around our faces like a curtain. I couldn’t kiss him fast enough, hard enough to express the rushing need within me. He growled softly and deftly flipped us over, spreading me beneath him as he wrenched his lips from my mouth and made a trail of kisses down my neck.

My entire world constricted to the touch of his lips on my skin.

Everything beyond them, beyond him, was a void of darkness and moonlight. My back arched as he reached the spot he’d once bitten, and I dragged my hands through his hair, savoring the silken smoothness.

He traced the arc of my hipbones, lingering at the edge of my undergarments. My nightgown had become hitched around my waist, but I didn’t care. I hooked my bare legs around his, running my feet down the hard muscles of his calves.

He breathed my name onto my chest, one of his hands exploring the plane of my torso, rising up to the slope of my breast. I trembled, anticipating the feel of his hand there, and his mouth found mine again as his fingers stopped just below.

His kissing was slower this time—gentler. The fingertips of his other hand slipped beneath the waist of my undergarment, and I sucked in a breath.

He hesitated at the sound, pulling back slightly. But I bit his lip in a silent command that had him growling into my mouth. With

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one long claw, he shredded through silk and lace, and my undergarment fell away in pieces. The claw retracted, and his kiss deepened as his fingers slid between my legs, coaxing and teasing. I ground against his hand, yielding completely to the writhing wildness that had roared alive inside me, and breathed his name onto his skin.

He paused again—his fingers retracting—but I grabbed him, pulling him farther on top of me. I wanted him now—I wanted the barriers of our clothing to vanish, I wanted to taste his sweat, wanted to become full of him. “Don’t stop,” I gasped out.

“I—” he said thickly, resting his brow between my breasts as he shuddered. “If we keep going, I won’t be able to stop at all.”

I sat up and he watched me, hardly breathing. But I kept my eyes on his, my own breathing becoming steady as I raised my nightgown over my head and tossed it to the floor. Utterly naked before him, I watched his gaze travel to my bare breasts, peaked against the chill night, to my abdomen, to between my thighs. A ravenous, unyielding sort of hunger passed over his face. I bent a leg and slid it to the side, a silent invitation. He let out a low growl

—and slowly, with predatory intent, raised his gaze to mine again.

The full force of that wild, unrelenting High Lord’s power focused solely on me—and I felt the storm contained beneath his skin, so capable of sweeping away everything I was, even in its lessened state. But I could trust him, trust myself to weather that mighty power. I could throw all that I was at him and he wouldn’t balk. “Give me everything,” I breathed.

He lunged, a beast freed of its tether.

We were a tangle of limbs and teeth, and I tore at his clothes until they were on the floor, then tore at his skin until I marked him down his back, his arms. His claws were out, but devastatingly gentle on my hips as he slid down between my thighs and feasted on me, stopping only after I shuddered and fractured. I was moaning his name when he sheathed himself inside me in a powerful, slow thrust that had me splintering around him.

We moved together, unending and wild and burning, and when I went over the edge the next time, he roared and went with me.

I fell asleep in his arms, and when I awoke a few hours later, we made love again, lazily and intently, a slow-burning smolder to the wildfire of earlier. Once we were both spent, panting and sweat-slicked, we lay in silence for a time, and I breathed in the smell of him, earthy and crisp. I would never be able to capture that—

never be able to paint the feel and taste of him, no matter how many times I tried, no matter how many colors I used.

Tamlin traced idle circles on the plane of my stomach and murmured, “We should sleep. You have a long journey tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I sat upright, not at all minding my nakedness, not after he’d seen everything, tasted everything.

His mouth was a hard line. “At dawn.”

“But it’s—”

He sat up in a smooth motion. “Please, Feyre.”

Please. Tamlin had bowed before Rhysand. For my sake. He shifted toward the edge of the bed. “Where are you going?”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “If I stay, you won’t get any sleep.”

“Stay,” I said. “I promise to keep my hands to myself.” Lie—

such an outright lie.

He gave me a half smile that told me he knew it, too, but nestled down, tugging me into his arms. I wrapped an arm around his waist and rested my head in the hollow of his shoulder.

He idly stroked my hair. I didn’t want to sleep—didn’t want to lose a minute with him—but an immense exhaustion was pulling me away from consciousness, until all I knew was the touch of his fingers in my hair and the sounds of his breathing.

I was leaving. Just when this place had become more than a sanctuary, when the command of the Suriel had become a blessing and Tamlin far, far more than a savior or friend, I was leaving. It could be years until I saw this house again, years until I smelled his rose garden, until I saw those gold-flecked eyes.

Home—this was home.

As consciousness left me at last, I thought I heard him speak, his mouth close to my ear.

“I love you,” he whispered, and kissed my brow. “Thorns and all.”

He was gone when I awoke, and I was certain I had dreamed it.

CHAPTER

28

There wasn’t much to my packing and farewells. I was somewhat surprised when Alis clothed me in an outfit very unlike my usual garb—frilly and confining and binding in all the wrong places.

Some mortal fashion among the wealthy, no doubt. The dress was made up of layers of pale pink silk, accented with white and blue lace. Alis placed a short, lightweight jacket of white linen on me, and atop my head she angled an absurd little ivory hat, clearly for decoration. I half expected a parasol to go with it.

I said as much to Alis, who clicked her tongue. “Shouldn’t you be giving me a weepy farewell?”

I tugged at the lace gloves—useless and flimsy. “I don’t like good-byes. If I could, I’d just walk out and not say anything.”

Alis gave me a long look. “I don’t like them, either.”

I went to the door, but despite myself, I said, “I hope you get to be with your nephews again soon.”

“Make the most of your freedom” was all she said.

Downstairs, Lucien snorted at the sight of me. “Those clothes are enough to convince me I never want to enter the human realm.”

“I’m not sure the human realm would know what to do with you,” I said.

Lucien’s smile was edged, his shoulders tight as he gave a sharp look behind me to where Tam was waiting in front of a gilded carriage. When he turned back, that metal eye narrowed. “I thought you were smarter than this.”

“Good-bye to you, too,” I said. Friend indeed. It wasn’t my choice, or my fault that they’d kept the bulk of their conflict from me. Even if I could do nothing against the blight, or against the creatures, or against Amarantha—whoever she was.

Lucien shook his head, his scar stark in the bright sun, and stalked toward Tamlin, despite the High Lord’s warning growl.

“You’re not even going to give her a few more days? Just a few—

before you send her back to that human cesspit?” Lucien demanded.

“This isn’t up for debate,” Tamlin snapped, pointing at the house. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

Lucien stared him down for a moment, spat on the ground, and stormed up the stairs. Tamlin didn’t reprimand him.

I might have thought more on Lucien’s words, might have shouted a retort after him, but … My chest hollowed out as I faced Tamlin in front of the gilded carriage, my hands sweaty within the gloves.

“Remember what I told you,” he said. I nodded, too busy memorizing the lines of his face to reply. Had he meant what I thought he’d said last night—that he loved me? I shifted, already aching in the little white pumps into which Alis had stuffed my poor feet. “The mortal realm remains safe—for you, for your family.” I nodded, wondering whether he might have tried to persuade me to leave our territory, to sail south, but understood that I would have refused to be so far from the wall, from him. That going back to my family was as far as I would allow to be sent from his side.

“My paintings—they’re yours,” I said, unable to come up with anything better to express how I felt, what it did to me to be sent away, and how terrified I was of the carriage looming behind me.

He lifted my chin with a finger. “I will see you again.”

He kissed me, and pulled away too quickly. I swallowed hard, fighting the burning in my eyes. I love you, Feyre.

I turned before my vision blurred, but he was immediately there to help me into the opulent carriage. He watched me take my seat through the open door, his face a mask of calm. “Ready?”

No, no, I wasn’t ready, not after last night, not after all these months. But I nodded. If Rhysand came back, if this Amarantha person was indeed such a threat that I would only be another body for Tamlin to defend … I needed to go.

He shut the door, sealing me inside with a click that sounded through me. He leaned through the open window to caress my cheek—and I could have sworn that I felt my heart crack. The footman snapped the whip.

Tamlin’s fingers brushed my mouth. The carriage jolted as the six white horses started into a walk. I bit my lip to keep it from

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wobbling.

Tamlin smiled at me one last time. “I love you,” he said, and stepped away.

I should say it—I should say those words, but they got stuck in my throat, because … because of what he had to face, because he might not find me again despite his promise, because …

because beneath it all, he was an immortal, and I would grow old and die. And maybe he meant it now, and perhaps last night had been as altering for him as it had been for me, but … I would not become a burden to him. I would not become another weight pressing upon his shoulders.

So I said nothing as the carriage moved. And I did not look back as we passed through the manor gates and into the forest beyond.

Almost as soon as the carriage entered the woods, the sparkle of magic stuffed itself up my nose and I was dragged into a deep sleep. I was furious when I jerked awake, wondering why it had been at all necessary, but the air was full of the thunderous clopping of hooves against a flagstone path. Rubbing my eyes, I peered out the window to see a sloping drive lined with conical hedges and irises. I had never been here before.

I took in as many details as I could as the carriage came to a stop before a chateau of white marble and emerald roofs—nearly as large as Tamlin’s manor.

The faces of the approaching servants were unfamiliar, and I kept my face blank as I gripped the footman’s hand and stepped out of the carriage.

Human. He was utterly human, with his rounded ears, his ruddy face, his clothes.

The other servants were human, too—all of them restless, not at all like the utter stillness with which the High Fae held themselves. Unfinished, graceless creatures of earth and blood.

The servants were eyeing me but keeping back—shrinking away. Did I look so grand, then? I straightened at the flurry of motion and color that burst from the front doors.

I recognized my sisters before they saw me. They approached, smoothing their fine dresses, their brows rising at the gilded carriage.

That cracking, caved-in feeling in my chest worsened. Tamlin had said he’d taken care of my family, but this

Nesta spoke first, curtsying low. Elain followed suit. “Welcome to our home,” Nesta said a bit flatly, her eyes on the ground. “Lady

…”

I let out a stark laugh. “Nesta,” I said, and she went rigid. I laughed again. “Nesta, don’t you recognize your own sister?”

Elain gasped. “Feyre?” She reached for me, but paused.

“What of Aunt Ripleigh, then? Is she … dead?”

That was the story, I remembered—that I’d gone to care for a long-lost, wealthy aunt. I nodded slowly. Nesta took in my clothes and carriage, the pearls that were woven into her gold-brown hair gleaming in the sunlight. “She left you her fortune,” Nesta stated flatly. It wasn’t a question.

“Feyre, you should have told us!” Elain said, still gaping. “Oh, how awful—and you had to endure losing her all on your own, you poor thing. Father will be devastated that he didn’t get to pay his respects.”

Such … such simple things: relatives dying and fortunes being left and paying respect to the dead. And yet—yet … a weight I hadn’t realized I’d still been carrying eased. These were the only things that worried them now.

“Why are you being so quiet?” Nesta said, keeping her distance.

I’d forgotten how cunning her eyes were, how cold. She’d been made differently, from something harder and stronger than bone and blood. She was as different from the humans around us as I had become.

“I’m … glad to see how well your own fortunes have improved,” I managed. “What happened?” The driver—glamoured to look human, no mask in sight—began unloading trunks for the footmen. I hadn’t known Tamlin had sent me off with belongings.

Elain beamed. “Didn’t you get our letters?” She didn’t remember—or maybe she’d never actually known, then, that I wouldn’t have been able to read them, anyway. When I shook my head, she complained about the uselessness of the post and then

said, “Oh, you’ll never believe it! Almost a week after you went to care for Aunt Ripleigh, some stranger appeared at our door and asked Father to invest his money for him! Father was hesitant because the offer was so good, but the stranger insisted, so Father did it. He gave us a trunk of gold just for agreeing! Within a month, he’d doubled the man’s investment, and then money started pouring in. And you know what? All those ships we lost were found in Bharat, complete with Father’s profits!”

Tamlin—Tamlin had done that for them. I ignored the growing hollowness in my chest.

“Feyre, you look as dumbfounded as we were,” Elain said, hooking elbows with me. “Come inside. We’ll show you the house!

We don’t have a room decorated for you, because we thought you’d be with poor old Aunt Ripleigh for months yet, but we have so many bedrooms that you can sleep in a different one each night if you wish!”

I glanced over my shoulder at Nesta, who watched me with a carefully blank face. So she hadn’t married Tomas Mandray after all.

“Father will likely faint when he sees you,” Elain babbled on, patting my hand as she escorted me toward the main door. “Oh, maybe he’ll throw a ball in your honor, too!”

Nesta fell into step behind us, a quiet, stalking presence. I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I wasn’t certain whether I should be furious or relieved that they’d gotten on so well without me—and whether Nesta was wondering the same.

Horseshoes clopped, and the carriage began ambling down the driveway—away from me, back to my true home, back to Tamlin. It took all my will to keep from running after it.

He had said he loved me, and I’d felt the truth of it with our lovemaking, and he’d sent me away to keep me safe; he’d freed me from the Treaty to keep me safe. Because whatever storm was about to break in Prythian was brutal enough that even a High Lord couldn’t stand against it.

I had to stay; it was wise to stay here. But I couldn’t fight the sensation, like a darkening shadow within me, that I’d made a very, very big mistake in leaving, no matter Tamlin’s orders. Stay with the High Lord, the Suriel had said. Its only command.

I shoved the thought from my mind as my father wept at the sight of me and did indeed order a ball in my honor. And though I knew that the promise I had once made to my mother was fulfilled

—though I knew that I truly was free of it, and that my family was forever cared for … that growing, lengthening shadow blanketed my heart.

CHAPTER

29

Inventing stories about my time with Aunt Ripleigh required minimal effort: I read to her daily, she instructed me on deportment from her bedside, and I nursed her until she died in her sleep two weeks ago, leaving her fortune to me.

And what a tremendous fortune it was: the trunks that accompanied me hadn’t contained just clothing—several of them had been filled with gold and jewels. Not cut jewels, either, but enormous, raw jewels that would pay for a thousand estates.

My father was currently taking inventory of those jewels; he’d holed himself up in the office that overlooked the garden in which I was sitting beside Elain in the grass. Through the window, I spied my father hunched over his desk, a little scale before him as he weighed an uncut ruby the size of a duck’s egg. He was clear-eyed again, and moved with a sense of purpose, of vibrancy, that I hadn’t seen since before the downfall. Even his limp was improved—made miraculously better by some tonic and a salve a strange, passing healer had given him for free. I would have been forever grateful to Tamlin for that kindness alone.

Gone were his hunched shoulders and downcast, misty eyes.

My father smiled freely, laughed readily, and doted on Elain, who in turn doted on him. Nesta, though, had been quiet and watchful, only giving Elain answers not longer than a word or two.

“These bulbs,” Elain said, pointing with a gloved hand to a cluster of purple-and-white flowers, “came all the way from the tulip fields of the continent. Father promised that next spring he’ll take me to see them. He claims that for mile after mile, there’s nothing but these flowers.” She patted the rich, dark soil. The little garden beneath the window was hers: every bloom and shrub had been picked and planted by her hand; she would allow no one else to care for it. Even the weeding and watering she did on her own.

Though the servants did help her carry over the heavy watering cans, she admitted. She would have marveled—likely wept—at the gardens I’d become so accustomed to, at the flowers in perpetual bloom at the Spring Court.

“You should come with me,” Elain went on. “Nesta won’t go, because she says she doesn’t want to risk the sea crossing, but you and I … Oh, we’d have fun, wouldn’t we?”

I glanced sidelong at her. My sister was beaming, content—

prettier than I’d ever seen her, even in her simple muslin gardening dress. Her cheeks were flushed beneath her large, floppy hat. “I think—I think I’d like to see the continent,” I said.

And it was true, I realized. There was so much of the world that I hadn’t seen, hadn’t ever thought about visiting. Hadn’t ever been able to dream of visiting.

“I’m surprised you’re so eager to go next spring,” I said. “Isn’t that right in the middle of the season?” The socialite season, which had ended a few weeks ago, apparently, full of parties and balls and luncheons and gossip, gossip, gossip. Elain had told me all about it at dinner the night before, hardly noticing that it was an effort for me to get down my food. So much of it was the same—

the meat, the bread, the vegetables, and yet … it was ash in my mouth compared to what I’d consumed in Prythian. “And I’m surprised you don’t have a line of suitors out the door, begging for your hand.”

Elain flushed but plunged her little shovel into the ground to dig out a weed. “Yes, well—there will always be other seasons. Nesta won’t tell you, but this season was somewhat … strange.”

“In what way?”

She shrugged her slim shoulders. “People acted as if we’d all just been ill for eight years, or had gone away to some distant country—not that we’d been a few villages over in that cottage.

You’d think we dreamed it all up, what happened to us over those years. No one said a word about it.”

“Did you think they would?” If we were as rich as this house suggested, there were surely plenty of families willing to overlook the stain of our poverty.

“No—but it made me … made me wish for those years again, even with the hunger and cold. This house feels so big sometimes, and father is always busy, and Nesta …” She looked

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over her shoulder to where my eldest sister stood by a gnarled mulberry tree, looking out over the flat expanse of our lands.

She’d barely spoken to me the night before, and not at all during breakfast. I’d been surprised when she joined us outside, even if she’d stayed by the tree this whole time. “Nesta didn’t finish the season. She wouldn’t tell me why. She began refusing every invitation. She hardly talks to anyone, and I feel wretched when my friends pay a visit, because she makes them so uncomfortable when she stares at them in that way of hers …” Elain sighed.

“Maybe you could talk to her.”

I contemplated telling Elain that Nesta and I hadn’t had a civil conversation in years, but then Elain added, “She went to see you, you know.”

I blinked, my blood going a bit cold. “What?”

“Well, she was gone for only about a week, and she said that her carriage broke down not halfway there, and it was easier to come back. But you wouldn’t know, since you never got any of our letters.”

I looked over at Nesta, standing so still under the branches, the summer breeze rustling the skirts of her dress. Had she gone to see me, only to be turned back by whatever glamour magic Tamlin had cast on her?

I turned back to the garden and caught Elain staring at me.

“What?”

Elain shook her head and went back to weeding. “You just look so … different. You sound so different, too.”

Indeed, I hadn’t quite believed my eyes when I’d passed a hall mirror last night. My face was still the same, but there was a …

glow about me, a kind of shimmering light that was nearly undetectable. I knew without a doubt that it was because of my time in Prythian, that all that magic had somehow rubbed off on me. I dreaded the day it would forever fade.

“Did something happen at Aunt Ripleigh’s house?” Elain asked. “Did you … meet someone?”

I shrugged and yanked at a weed nearby. “Just good food and rest.”

Days passed. The shadow within me didn’t lighten, and even the thought of painting was abhorrent. Instead I spent most of my time with Elain in her little garden. I was content to listen to her talk about every bud and bloom, about her plans to start another garden by the greenhouse, perhaps a vegetable garden, if she could learn enough about it over the next few months.

She had come alive here, and her joy was infectious. There wasn’t a servant or gardener who didn’t smile at her, and even the brusque head cook found excuses to bring her plates of cookies and tarts at various points in the day. I marveled at it, actually—

that those years of poverty hadn’t stripped away that light from Elain. Perhaps buried it a bit, but she was generous, loving, and kind—a woman I found myself proud to know, to call sister.

My father finished counting my jewels and gold; I was an extraordinarily wealthy woman. I invested a small percentage of it in his business, and when I looked at the remaining behemoth sum, I had him draw me up several bags of money and set out.

The manor was only three miles from our rundown cottage, and the road was familiar. I didn’t mind when my hem became coated in mud from the sodden path. I savored hearing the wind in the trees and the sighing of the high grasses. If I drifted far enough into my memories, I could imagine myself walking alongside Tamlin through his woods.

I had no reason to believe that I would see him anytime soon, but I went to bed each night praying that I’d awaken to find myself in his manor, or that I’d receive a message summoning me to his side. Even worse than my disappointment that no such thing had happened was the creeping, nagging fear that he was in danger—

that Amarantha, whoever she was, would somehow hurt him.

I love you. ” I could almost hear the words—almost hear him saying them, could almost see the sunlight glinting in his golden hair and the dazzling green of his eyes. I could almost feel his body pressed against mine, his fingers playing along my skin.

I reached a bend in the road that I could have navigated in the dark, and there it was.

So small—the cottage had been so small. Elain’s old flower garden was a wild tangle of weeds and blooms, and the ward-markings were still etched on the stone threshold. The front door

—shattered and broken the last time I’d seen it—had been

replaced, but one of the circular windowpanes had become cracked. The interior was dark, the land undisturbed.

I traced the invisible path I’d taken across the tall grass every morning from our front door, over the road, and then across the rolling field, all the way to that line of trees. The forest—my forest.

It had seemed so terrifying once—so lethal and hungry and brutal. And now it just seemed … plain. Ordinary.

I gazed again at that sad, dark house—the place that had been a prison. Elain had said she missed it, and I wondered what she saw when she looked at the cottage. If she beheld not a prison but a shelter—a shelter from a world that had possessed so little good, but she tried to find it anyway, even if it had seemed foolish and useless to me.

She had looked at that cottage with hope; I had looked at it with nothing but hatred. And I knew which one of us had been stronger.

CHAPTER

30

I had one task left to do before I returned to my father’s manor.

The villagers who had once sneered at or ignored me instead gaped now, and a few stepped into my path to ask about my aunt, my fortune, on and on. I firmly but politely refused to fall into conversation with them, to give them anything to gossip over. But it still took me so long to reach the poor part of our village that I was fully drained by the time I knocked on the first dilapidated door.

The impoverished of our village didn’t ask questions when I handed them the little bags of silver and gold. They tried to refuse, some of them not even recognizing me, but I left the money anyway. It was the least I could do.

As I walked back to my father’s manor, I passed Tomas Mandray and his cronies lurking by the village fountain, chatting about some house that had burned down with its family trapped inside a week before and whether there was anything to loot from it. He gave me a too-long look, his eyes roving freely over my body, with a half smile I’d seen him give to the village girls a hundred times before. Why had Nesta changed her mind? I just stared him down and continued along.

I was almost out of town when a woman’s laugh flitted over the stones, and I turned a corner to come face-to-face with Isaac Hale

—and a pretty, plump young woman who could only be his new wife. They were arm in arm, both smiling—both lit up from within.

His smile faltered as he beheld me.

Human—he seemed so human, with his gangly limbs, his simple handsomeness, but that smile he’d had moments before had transformed him into something more.

His wife looked between us, perhaps a bit nervously. As if whatever she felt for him—the love I’d already seen shining—was so new, so unexpected, that she was still worried it would vanish.

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Carefully, Isaac inclined his head to me in greeting. He’d been a boy when I left, and yet this person who now approached me …

whatever had blossomed with his wife, whatever was between them, it had made him into a man.

Nothing—there was nothing in my chest, my soul, for him beyond a vague sense of gratitude.

A few more steps had us passing each other. I smiled broadly at him, at them both, and bowed my head, wishing them well with my entire heart.

The ball my father was throwing in my honor was in two days, and the house was already a flurry of activity. Such money being thrown away on things we’d never dreamed of having again, even for a moment. I would have begged him not to host it, but Elain had taken charge of planning and finding me a last-minute dress, and … it would only be for an evening. An evening of enduring the people who had shunned us and let us starve for years.

The sun was near to setting as I stopped my work for the day: digging out a new square of earth for Elain’s next garden. The gardeners had been slightly horrified that another one of us had taken up the activity—as if we’d soon be doing all their work ourselves and would get rid of them. I reassured them I had no green thumb and just wanted something to do with my day.

But I hadn’t yet figured out what I would be doing with my week, or my month, or anything after that. If there was indeed a surge in the blight happening over the wall, if that Amarantha woman was sending out creatures to take advantage of it … It was hard not to dwell on that shadow in my heart, the shadow that trailed my every step. I hadn’t felt like painting since I’d arrived—

and that place inside me where all those colors and shapes and lights had come from had become still and quiet and dull. Soon, I told myself. Soon I would purchase some paints and start again.

I slid the shovel into the ground and set my foot atop it, resting for a moment. Perhaps the gardeners had just been horrified by the tunic and pants I’d scrounged up. One of them had even gone running to fetch me one of those big, floppy hats that Elain wore. I wore it for their sake; my skin had already become tan and freckled from months roaming the Spring Court lands.

I glanced at my hands, clutching the top of the shovel.

Callused and flecked with scars, arcs of dirt under my nails.

They’d surely be horrified when they beheld me splattered with paint.

“Even if you washed them, there’d be no hiding it,” Nesta said behind me, coming over from that tree she liked to sit by. “To fit in, you’d have to wear gloves and never take them off.”

She wore a simple, pale lavender muslin gown, her hair half-up and billowing behind her in a sheet of gold-brown. Beautiful, imperious, still as one of the High Fae.

“Maybe I don’t want to fit in with your social circles,” I said, turning back to the shovel.

“Then why are you bothering to stay here?” A sharp, cold question.

I plunged the shovel deeper, my arms and back straining as I heaved up a pile of dark soil and grass. “It’s my home, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not,” she said flatly. I slammed the shovel back into the earth. “I think your home is somewhere very far away.”

I paused.

I left the shovel in the ground and slowly turned to face her.

“Aunt Ripleigh’s house—”

“There is no Aunt Ripleigh.” Nesta reached into her pocket and tossed something onto the churned-up earth.

It was a chunk of wood, as if it had been ripped from something. Painted on its smooth surface was a pretty tangle of vines and—foxglove. Foxglove painted in the wrong shade of blue.

My breath hitched. All this time, all these months …

“Your beast’s little trick didn’t work on me,” she said with quiet steel. “Apparently, an iron will is all it takes to keep a glamour from digging in. So I had to watch as Father and Elain went from sobbing hysterics into nothing. I had to listen to them talk about how lucky it was for you to be taken to some made-up aunt’s house, how some winter wind had shattered our door. And I thought I’d gone mad—but every time I did, I would look at that painted part of the table, then at the claw marks farther down, and know it wasn’t in my head.”

I’d never heard of a glamour not working. But Nesta’s mind was so entirely her own; she had put up such strong walls—of

steel and iron and ash wood—that even a High Lord’s magic couldn’t pierce them.

“Elain said—said you went to visit me, though. That you tried.”

Nesta snorted, her face grave and full of that long-simmering anger that she could never master. “He stole you away into the night, claiming some nonsense about the Treaty. And then everything went on as if it had never happened. It wasn’t right.

None of it was right.”

My hands slackened at my sides. “You went after me,” I said.

“You went after me—to Prythian.”

“I got to the wall. I couldn’t find a way through.”

I raised a shaking hand to my throat. “You trekked two days there and two days back—through the winter woods?”

She shrugged, looking at the sliver she’d pried from the table.

“I hired that mercenary from town to bring me a week after you were taken. With the money from your pelt. She was the only one who seemed like she would believe me.”

“You did that—for me?”

Nesta’s eyes—my eyes, our mother’s eyes—met mine. “It wasn’t right,” she said again. Tamlin had been wrong when we’d discussed whether my father would have ever come after me—he didn’t possess the courage, the anger. If anything, he would have hired someone to do it for him. But Nesta had gone with that mercenary. My hateful, cold sister had been willing to brave Prythian to rescue me.

“What happened to Tomas Mandray?” I asked, the words strangled.

“I realized he wouldn’t have gone with me to save you from Prythian.”

And for her, with that raging, unrelenting heart, it would have been a line in the sand.

I looked at my sister, really looked at her, at this woman who couldn’t stomach the sycophants who now surrounded her, who had never spent a day in the forest but had gone into wolf territory

… Who had shrouded the loss of our mother, then our downfall, in icy rage and bitterness, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release. But she had cared—beneath it, she had cared, and perhaps loved more fiercely than I could comprehend, more

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deeply and loyally. “Tomas never deserved you anyway,” I said softly.

My sister didn’t smile, but a light shone in her blue-gray eyes.

“Tell me everything that happened,” she said—an order, not a request.

So I did.

And when I finished my story, Nesta merely stared at me for a long while before asking me to teach her how to paint.

Teaching Nesta to paint was about as pleasant as I had expected it to be, but at least it provided an excuse for us to avoid the busier parts of the house, which became more and more chaotic as my ball drew near. Supplies were easy enough to come by, but explaining how I painted, convincing Nesta to express what was in her mind, her heart … At the very least, she repeated my brushstrokes with a precise and solid hand.

When we emerged from the quiet room we’d commandeered, both of us splattered in paint and smeared with charcoal, the chateau was finishing up its preparations. Colored glass lanterns lined the long drive, and inside, wreaths and garlands of every flower and color decorated every rail, every surface, every archway. Beautiful. Elain had selected each flower herself and instructed the staff where to put them.

Nesta and I slipped up the stairs, but as we reached the landing, my father and Elain appeared below, arm in arm.

Nesta’s face tightened. My father murmured his praises to Elain, who beamed at him and rested her head on his shoulder.

And I was happy for them—for the comfort and ease of their lifestyle, for the contentment on both my father’s and my sister’s faces. Yes, they had their small sorrows, but both of them seemed so … relaxed.

Nesta walked down the hall, and I followed her. “There are days,” Nesta said as she paused in front of the door to her room, across from mine, “when I want to ask him if he remembers the years he almost let us starve to death.”

“You spent every copper I could get, too,” I reminded her.

“I knew you could always get more. And if you couldn’t, then I wanted to see if he would ever try to do it himself, instead of carving those bits of wood. If he would actually go out and fight for us. I couldn’t take care of us, not the way you did. I hated you for that. But I hated him more. I still do.”

“Does he know?”

“He’s always known I hate him, even before we became poor.

He let Mother die—he had a fleet of ships at his disposal to sail across the world for a cure, or he could have hired men to go into Prythian and beg them for help. But he let her waste away.”

“He loved her—he grieved for her.” I didn’t know what the truth was—perhaps both.

“He let her die. You would have gone to the ends of the earth to save your High Lord.”

My chest hollowed out again, but I merely said, “Yes, I would have,” and slipped inside my room to get ready.

CHAPTER

31

The ball was a blur of waltzing and preening, of bejeweled aristos, of wine and toasts in my honor. I lingered at Nesta’s side, because she seemed to do a good job of scaring off the too-curious suitors who wanted to know more about my fortune. But I tried to smile, if only for Elain, who flitted about the room, personally greeting each guest and dancing with all their important sons.

But I kept thinking about what Nesta had said—about saving Tamlin.

I’d known something was wrong. I’d known he was in trouble—

not just with the blight on Prythian, but also that the forces gathering to destroy him were deadly, and yet … and yet I’d stopped looking for answers, stopped fighting it, glad—so selfishly glad—to be able to set down that savage, wild part of me that had only survived hour to hour. I’d let him send me home. I hadn’t tried harder to piece together the information I’d gathered about the blight or Amarantha; I hadn’t tried to save him. I hadn’t even told him I loved him. And Lucien … Lucien had known it, too—and shown it in his bitter words on my last day, his disappointment in me.

Two in the morning, and yet the party was showing no signs of slowing. My father held court with several other merchants and aristo men to whom I had been introduced but whose names I’d instantly forgotten. Elain was laughing among a circle of beautiful friends, flushed and brilliant. Nesta had silently left at midnight, and I didn’t bother to say good-bye as I finally slipped upstairs.

The following afternoon, bleary-eyed and quiet, we all gathered at the lunch table. I thanked my sister and father for the party, and dodged my father’s inquiries regarding whether any of his friends’ sons had caught my eye.

The summer heat had arrived, and I propped my chin on a fist as I fanned myself. I’d slept fitfully in the heat last night. It was

never too hot or too cold at Tamlin’s estate.

“I’m thinking of buying the Beddor land,” my father was saying to Elain, who was the only one of us listening to him. “I heard a rumor it’ll go up for sale soon, since none of the family survived, and it would be a good investment property. Perhaps one of you girls might build a house on it when you’re ready.”

Elain nodded interestedly, but I blinked. “What happened to the Beddors?”

“Oh, it was awful,” Elain said. “Their house burned down, and everyone died. Well, they couldn’t find Clare’s body, but …” She looked down at her plate. “It happened in the dead of night—the family, their servants, everyone. The day before you came home to us, actually.”

“Clare Beddor,” I said slowly.

“Our friend, remember?” Elain said.

I nodded, feeling Nesta’s eyes on me.

No—no, it couldn’t be possible. It had to be a coincidence—

had to be a coincidence, because the alternative …

I had given that name to Rhysand.

And he had not forgotten it.

My stomach turned over, and I fought against the nausea that roiled within me.

“Feyre?” my father asked.

I put a shaking hand over my eyes, breathing in. What had happened? Not just at the Beddors’, but at home, in Prythian?

“Feyre,” my father said again, and Nesta hissed at him,

“Quiet.”

I pushed back against the guilt, the disgust and terror. I had to get answers—had to know if it had been a coincidence, or if I might yet be able to save Clare. And if something had happened here, in the mortal realm, then the Spring Court … then those creatures Tamlin had been so frightened of … the blight that had infected magic, their lands …

Faeries. They had come over the wall and left no trace behind.

I lowered my hand and looked at Nesta. “You must listen very carefully,” I said to her, swallowing hard. “Everything I have told you must remain a secret. You do not come looking for me. You do not speak my name again to anyone.”

“What are you talking about, Feyre?” My father gaped at me from the end of the table. Elain glanced between us, shifting in her seat.

But Nesta held my gaze. Unflinching.

“I think something very bad might be happening in Prythian,” I said softly. I’d never learned what warning signs Tamlin had instilled in their glamours to prod my family to run, but I wasn’t going to risk relying solely on them. Not when Clare had been taken, her family murdered … because of me. Bile burned my throat.

“Prythian!” my father and Elain blurted. But Nesta held up a hand to silence them.

I went on, “If you won’t leave, then hire guards—hire scouts to watch the wall, the forest. The village, too.” I rose from my seat.

“The first sign of danger, the first rumor you hear of the wall being breached or even something being strange, you get on a ship and go. You sail far away, as far south as you can get, to someplace the faeries would never desire.”

My father and Elain began blinking, as if clearing some fog from their minds—as if emerging from a deep sleep. But Nesta followed me into the hall, up the stairs.

“The Beddors,” she said. “That was meant to be us. But you gave them a fake name—those wicked faeries who threatened your High Lord.” I nodded. I could see the plans calculating in her eyes. “Is there going to be an invasion?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. I was told that there was a kind of sickness that had made their powers weaken or go wild, a blight on the land that had damaged the safety of their borders and could kill people if it struck badly enough. They

—they said it was surging again … on the move. The last I heard, it wasn’t near enough to harm our lands. But if the Spring Court is about to fall, then the blight has to be getting close, and Tamlin …

Tamlin was one of the last bastions keeping the other courts in check—the deadly courts. And I think he’s in danger.”

I entered my room and began peeling off my gown. My sister helped me, then opened the wardrobe to pull out a heavy tunic and pants and boots. I slipped into them and was braiding back my hair when she said, “We don’t need you here, Feyre. Do not look back.”

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I tugged on my boots and went for the hunting knives I’d discreetly acquired while here.

“Father once told you to never come back,” Nesta said, “and I’m telling you now. We can take care of ourselves.”

Once I might have thought it was an insult, but now I understood—understood what a gift she was offering me. I sheathed the knives at my side and slung a quiver of arrows across my back—none of them ash—before scooping up my bow.

“They can lie,” I said, giving her information I hoped she would never need. “Faeries can lie, and iron doesn’t bother them one bit.

But ash wood—that seems to work. Take my money and buy a damned grove of it for Elain to tend.”

Nesta shook her head, clutching her wrist, the bracelet of iron still there. “What do you think you can even do to help? He’s a High Lord—you’re just a human.” That wasn’t an insult, either. A question from a coolly calculating mind.

“I don’t care,” I admitted, at the door now, which I flung open.

“But I’ve got to try.”

Nesta remained in my room. She would not say good-bye—

she hated farewells as much as I did.

But I turned to my sister and said, “There is a better world, Nesta. There is a better world out there, waiting for you to find it.

And if I ever get the chance, if things are ever better, safer … I will find you again.”

It was all I could offer her.

But Nesta squared her shoulders. “Don’t bother. I don’t think I’d be particularly fond of faeries.” I raised a brow. She went on with a slight shrug. “Try to send word once it’s safe. And if it ever is … Father and Elain can have this place. I think I’d like to see what else is out there, what a woman might do with a fortune and a good name.”

No limits, I thought. There were no limits to what Nesta might do, what she might make of herself once she found a place to call her own. I prayed I would be lucky enough to someday see it.

Elain, to my surprise, had a horse, a satchel of food, and supplies ready when I hurried down the stairs. My father was nowhere in

sight. But Elain threw her arms around me, and, holding tightly, said, “I remember—I remember all of it now.”

I wrapped my arms around her. “Be on your guard. All of you.”

She nodded, tears in her eyes. “I would have liked to see the continent with you, Feyre.”

I smiled at my sister, memorizing her lovely face, and wiped her tears away. “Maybe someday,” I said. Another promise that I’d be lucky to keep.

Elain was still crying as I spurred my horse and galloped down the drive. I didn’t have it in me to say good-bye to my father once more.

I rode all day and stopped only when it was too dark for me to see. Due north—that’s where I would start and go until I hit the wall. I had to get back—had to see what had happened, had to tell Tamlin everything that was in my heart before it was too late.

I rode all of the second day, slept fitfully, and was off before first light.

On and on, through the summer forest, lush and dense and humming.

Until an absolute silence fell. I slowed my horse to a careful walk and scanned the brush and trees ahead for any sign, any ripple. There was nothing. Nothing, and then—

My horse bucked and shook her head, and it was all I could do to stay in the saddle as she refused to go forward. But still, there was nothing—no marker. Yet when I dismounted, hardly breathing as I put a hand out, I found that I could not pass.

There, cleaving through the forest, was an invisible wall.

But the faeries came and went through it—through holes, rumor claimed. So I led my horse down the line, tapping the wall every so often to make sure I hadn’t veered away.

It took me two days—and the night between them was more terrifying than any I’d experienced at the Spring Court. Two days, before I spied the mossy stones placed across from each other, a faint whorl carved into them both. A gate.

This time, when I mounted my horse and steered her between them, she obeyed.

Magic stung my nostrils, zapping until my horse bucked again, but we were through.

I knew these trees.

I rode in silence, an arrow nocked and ready, the threats lurking in the forest far greater than those in the woods I’d just left.

Tamlin might be furious—he might command me to turn around and go home. But I would tell him that I was going to help, tell him that I loved him and would fight for him however I could, even if I had to tie him down to make him listen.

I became so intent on contemplating how I might convince him not to start roaring that I didn’t immediately notice the quiet—how the birds didn’t sing, even as I drew closer to the manor itself, how the hedges of the estate looked in need of a trim.

By the time I reached the gates, my mouth had gone dry. The gates were open, but the iron had been bent out of shape, as if mighty hands had wrenched them apart.

Every step of the horse’s hooves was too loud on the gravel path, and my stomach dropped further when I beheld the wide-open front doors. One of them hung at an angle, ripped off its top hinge.

I dismounted, arrow still at the ready. But there was no need.

Empty—it was utterly empty here. Like a tomb.

“Tam?” I called. I bounded up the front steps and into the house. I rushed inside, swearing as I slid on a piece of broken porcelain—the remnants of a vase. Slowly, I turned in the front hall.

It looked as if an army had marched through. Tapestries hung in shreds, the marble banister was fractured, and the chandeliers lay broken on the ground, reduced to mounds of shattered crystal.

“Tamlin?” I shouted. Nothing.

The windows had all been blown out. “Lucien?”

No one answered.

“Tam?” My voice echoed through the house, mocking me.

Alone in the wreckage of the manor, I sank to my knees.

He was gone.

CHAPTER

32

I gave myself a minute—just one minute—to kneel in the remnants of the entry hall.

Then I eased to my feet, careful not to disturb any of the shattered glass or wood or—blood. There were splatters of it everywhere, along with small puddles and smears down the gouged walls.

Another forest, I told myself. Another set of tracks.

Slowly, I moved across the floor, tracing the information left. It had been a vicious fight—and from the blood patterns, most of the damage to the house had been done during the fight, not afterward. The crushed glass and footprints came and went from the front and back of the house, as if the whole place had been surrounded. The intruders had needed to force their way in through the front door; they’d just completely shattered the doors to the garden.

No bodies, I kept repeating to myself. There were no bodies, and not much gore. They had to be alive. Tamlin had to be alive.

Because if he were dead …

I rubbed my face, taking a shuddering breath. I wouldn’t let myself get that far. My hands shook as I paused before the dining room doors, both barely hanging on their hinges.

I couldn’t tell if the damage was from his lashing out after Rhysand’s arrival the day before my departure or if someone else had caused it. The giant table was in pieces, the windows smashed, the curtains in shreds. But no blood—there was no blood here. And from the prints in the shards of glass …

I studied the trail across the floor. It had been disturbed, but I could make out two sets—large and side by side—leading from where the table had been. As if Tamlin and Lucien had been sitting in here as the attack happened, and walked out without a fight.

If I was right … then they were alive. I traced the steps to the doorway, squatting for a moment to work through the churned-up shards, dirt, and blood. They’d been met here—by multiple sets of prints. And headed toward the garden—

Debris crunched from down the hall. I drew my hunting knife and ducked farther into the dining room, scanning for a place to hide. But everything was in pieces. With no other option, I lunged behind the open door. I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep from breathing too loudly and peered through the crack between the door and the wall.

Something limped into the room and sniffed. I could only see its back—cloaked in a plain cape, medium height … All it had to do to find me was shut the door. Perhaps if it came far enough into the dining room, I could slip out—but that would require leaving my hiding spot. Perhaps it would just look around and then leave.

The figure sniffed again, and my stomach clenched. It could smell me. I dared a better glance at it, hoping to find a weakness, a spot for my knife, if things came down to it.

The figure turned slightly toward me.

I cried out, and the figure screeched as I shoved away the door. “Alis.”

She gaped at me, a hand on her heart, her usual brown dress torn and dirty, her apron gone entirely. Not bloodied, though—

nothing save for the slight limp that favored her right ankle as she rushed for me, her tree-bark skin bleaching birch white. “You can’t be here.” She took in my knife, the bow and quiver. “You were told to stay away.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, but—”

My knees buckled at the onslaught of relief. “And Lucien?”

“Alive as well. But—.”

“Tell me what happened—tell me everything.” I kept an eye on the window, listening to the manor and grounds around us. Not a sound.

Alis grasped my arm and pulled me from the room. She didn’t speak as we hurried through the empty, too-quiet halls—all of them wrecked and bloodied, but … no bodies. Either they’d been

hauled away, or—I didn’t let myself consider it as we entered the kitchen.

A fire had scorched the giant room, and it was little more than cinders and blackened stone. After sniffing about and listening for any signs of danger, Alis released me. “What are you doing here?”

“I had to come back. I thought something had gone wrong—I couldn’t stay away. I had to help.”

“He told you not to come back,” Alis snapped.

“Where is he?”

Alis covered her face with her long, bony hands, her fingertips grappling into the upper edge of her mask as if trying to tear it from her face. But the mask remained, and Alis sighed as she lowered her tree-bark hands. “She took him,” she said, and my blood went cold. “She took him to her court Under the Mountain.”

“Who?” But I already knew the answer.

“Amarantha,” Alis whispered, and glanced again around the kitchen as if fearful that speaking her name would summon her.

“Why? And who is she— what is she? Please, please just tell me—just give me the truth.”

Alis shuddered. “You want the truth, girl? Then here it is: she took him for the curse—because the seven times seven years were over, and he hadn’t shattered her curse. She’s summoned all the High Lords to her court this time—to make them watch her break him.”

“What is she— wh-what curse? ” A curse—the curse she had put on this place. A curse that I had failed to even see.

“Amarantha is High Queen of this land. The High Queen of Prythian,” Alis breathed, her eyes wide with some memory of horror.

“But the seven High Lords rule Prythian—equally. There’s no High Queen.”

“That’s how it used to be—how it’s always been. Until a hundred years ago, when she appeared in these lands as an emissary from Hybern.” Alis grabbed a large satchel that she must have left by the door. It was already half full of what looked like clothes and supplies.

As she began sifting through the ruined kitchen, gathering up knives and any food that had survived, I wondered at the information the Suriel had given me—of a wicked faerie king who

had spent centuries resenting the Treaty he’d been forced to sign, and who had sent out his deadliest commanders to infiltrate the other faerie kingdoms and courts to see if they felt as he did—to see if they might consider reclaiming the human lands for themselves. I leaned against one of the soot-stained walls.

“She went from court to court,” Alis went on, turning an apple over in her hands as she inspected it, deemed it good enough, and stuffed it into the bag, “charming the High Lords with talk of more trade between Hybern and Prythian, more communication, more sharing of assets. The Never-Fading Flower, they called her.

And for fifty years, she lived here as a courtier bound to no court, making amends, she claimed, for her own actions and the actions of Hybern during the War.”

“She fought in the War against mortals?”

Alis paused her gathering. “Her story is legend among our kind

—legend, and nightmare. She was the King of Hybern’s most lethal general—she fought on the front lines, slaughtering humans and any High Fae and faeries who dared defend them. But she had a younger sister, Clythia, who fought at her side, as vicious and wretched as she … until Clythia fell in love with a mortal warrior. Jurian.” Alis loosed a shaking sigh. “Jurian commanded mighty human armies, but Clythia still secretly sought him out, still loved him with an unrelenting madness. She was too blind to realize that Jurian was using her for information about Amarantha’s forces. Amarantha suspected, but could not persuade Clythia to leave him—and could not bring herself to kill him, not when it would cause her sister such pain.” Alis clicked her tongue and began opening the cabinets, scanning their ravaged insides. “Amarantha delighted in torture and killing, and yet she loved her sister enough to stay her hand.”

“What happened?” I breathed.

“Oh, Jurian betrayed Clythia. After months of stomaching being her lover, he got the information he needed, then tortured and butchered her, crucifying her with ash wood so she couldn’t move while he did it. He left the pieces of her for Amarantha to find.

They say Amarantha’s wrath could have brought down the skies themselves, had her king not ordered her to stand down. But she and Jurian had their final confrontation later—and since then, Amarantha has hated humans with a rage you cannot imagine.”

Alis found what looked to be a jar of preserves and added it to the satchel.

“After the two sides made the Treaty,” Alis said, now going through the drawers, “she butchered her own slaves, rather than free them.” I blanched. “But centuries later, the High Lords believed her when she told them that the death of her sister had changed her—especially when she opened trade lines between our two territories. The High Lords never knew that those same ships that brought over Hybernian goods also brought over her own personal forces. The King of Hybern didn’t know, either. But we all soon learned that, in those fifty years she was here, she had decided she wanted Prythian for her own, to begin amassing power and use our lands as a launching point to one day destroy your world once and for all, with or without her king’s blessing. So forty-nine years ago, she struck.

“She knew—knew that even with her personal army, she could never conquer the seven High Lords by numbers or power alone.

But she was also cunning and cruel, and she waited until they absolutely trusted her, until they gathered at a ball in her honor, and that night she slipped a potion stolen from the King of Hybern’s unholy spell book into their wine. Once they drank, the High Lords were prone, their magic laid bare—and she stole their powers from where they originated inside their bodies—plucked them out as if she were taking an apple from its branch, leaving them with only the basest elements of their magic. Your Tamlin—

what you saw of him here was a shade of what he used to be, the power that he used to command. And with the High Lords’ power so greatly decreased, Amarantha wrested control of Prythian from them in a matter of days. For forty-nine years, we have been her slaves. For forty-nine years, she has been biding her time, waiting for the right moment to break the Treaty and take your lands—and all human territories beyond it.”

I wished there were a stool, a bench, a chair for me to slump into. Alis slammed shut the final drawer and limped for the pantry.

“Now they call her the Deceiver—she who trapped the seven High Lords and built her palace beneath the sacred Mountain in the heart of our land.” Alis paused before the pantry door and covered her face again, taking a few steadying breaths.

The sacred mountain—that bald, monstrous peak I’d spotted in the mural in the library all those months ago. “But … the sickness in the lands … Tamlin said that the blight took their power—”

She is the sickness in these lands,” Alis snapped, lowering her hands and entering the pantry. “There is no blight but her. The borders were collapsing because she laid them to rubble. She found it amusing to send her creatures to attack our lands, to test whatever strength Tamlin had left.”

If the blight was Amarantha, then the threat to the human realm … She was the threat to the human realm.

Alis emerged from the pantry, her arms full of various root vegetables. “You could have been the one to stop her.” Her eyes were hard upon me, and she bared her teeth. They were alarmingly sharp. She shoved the turnips and beets into the bag.

“You could have been the one to free him and his power, had you not been so blind to your own heart. Humans,” she spat.

“I—I …” I lifted my hands, exposing my palms to her. “I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t know,” Alis said bitterly, her laugh harsh as she entered the pantry again. “It was part of Tamlin’s curse.”

My head swam, and I pressed myself further against the wall.

“What was?” I fought the rising hitch in my voice. “What was his curse? What did she do to him?”

Alis yanked remaining spice jars off the pantry shelf. “Tamlin and Amarantha knew each other before—his family had long been tied to Hybern. During the War, the Spring Court allied with Hybern to keep the humans enslaved. So his father—his father, who was a fickle and vicious Lord—was very close with the King of Hybern, to Amarantha. Tamlin as a child often accompanied him on trips to Hybern. And he met Amarantha in the process.”

Tamlin had once said to me that he would fight to protect someone’s freedom—that he would never allow slavery. Had it been solely because of shame for his own legacy, or because he

… he’d come to somehow know what it was to be enslaved?

“Amarantha eventually grew to desire Tamlin—to lust for him with her entire wicked heart. But he’d heard the stories from others about the War, and knew what Amarantha and his father and the Hybern king had done to faeries and humans alike. What she did to Jurian as punishment for her sister’s death. He was

wary of her when she came here, despite her attempts to lure him into her bed—and kept his distance, right up until she stole his powers. Lucien … Lucien was sent to her as Tamlin’s emissary, to try to treat for peace between them.”

Bile rose in my throat.

“She refused, and … Lucien told her to go back to the shit-hole she’d crawled out of. She took his eye as punishment. Carved it out with her own fingernail, then scarred his face. She sent him back so bloody that Tamlin … The High Lord vomited when he saw his friend.”

I couldn’t let myself imagine what state Lucien had been in, then, if it had made Tamlin sick.

Alis tapped on her mask, the metal pinging beneath her nails.

“After that, she hosted a masquerade Under the Mountain for herself. All the courts were present. A party, she said—to make amends for what she’d done to Lucien, and a masquerade so he didn’t have to reveal the horrible scarring on his face. The entire Spring Court was to attend, even the servants, and to wear masks

—to honor Tamlin’s shape-shifting powers, she said. He was willing to try to end the conflict without slaughter, and he agreed to go—to bring all of us.”

I pressed my hands against the stone wall behind me, savoring its coolness, its steadiness.

Pausing in the center of the kitchen, Alis set down her satchel, now full of food and supplies. “When all were assembled, she claimed that peace could be had—if Tamlin joined her as her lover and consort. But when she tried to touch him, he refused to let her near. Not after what she’d done to Lucien. He said—in front of everyone that night—that he would sooner take a human to his bed, sooner marry a human, than ever touch her. She might have let it go, had he not then said that her own sister had preferred a human’s company to hers, that her own sister had chosen Jurian over her.”

I winced, already knowing what Alis would say as she braced her hands on her hips and went on. “You can guess how well that went over with Amarantha. But she told Tamlin that she was in a generous mood—told him she’d give him a chance to break the spell she’d put upon him to steal his power.

“He spat in her face, and she laughed. She said he had seven times seven years before she claimed him, before he had to join her Under the Mountain. If he wanted to break her curse, he need only find a human girl willing to marry him. But not any girl—a human with ice in her heart, with hatred for our kind. A human girl willing to kill a faerie.” The ground rocked beneath me, and I was grateful for the wall I leaned against. “Worse, the faerie she killed had to be one of his men, sent across the wall by him like lambs to slaughter. The girl could only be brought here to be courted if she killed one of his men in an unprovoked attack—killed him for hatred alone, just as Jurian had done to Clythia … So he could understand her sister’s pain.”

“The Treaty—”

“That was all a lie. There was no provision for that in the Treaty. You can kill as many innocent faeries as you want and never suffer the consequences. You just killed Andras, sent out by Tamlin as that day’s sacrifice.” Andras was looking for a cure, Tamlin had said. Not for some magical blight—but a cure to save Prythian from Amarantha, a cure for this curse.

The wolf—Andras had just … stared at me before I killed him.

Let me kill him. So it could begin this chain of events, so that Tamlin might stand a chance of breaking the spell. And if Tamlin had sent Andras across the wall, knowing he might very well die

Oh, Tamlin.

Alis stooped to gather up a butter knife, twisted and bent, and carefully straightened out the blade. “It was all a cruel joke, a clever punishment, to Amarantha. You humans loathe and fear faeries so much it would be impossible—impossible for the same girl who slaughtered a faerie in cold blood to then fall in love with one. But the spell on Tamlin could only be broken if she did just that before the forty-nine years were over—if that girl said to his face that she loved him, and meant it with her entire heart.

Amarantha knows humans are preoccupied with beauty, and thus bound the masks to all our faces, to his face, so it would be more difficult to find a girl willing to look beyond the mask, beyond his faerie nature, and to the soul beneath. Then she bound us so we couldn’t say a word about the curse. Not a single word. We could hardly tell you a thing about our world, about our fate. He couldn’t tell you—none of us properly could. The lies about the blight—that was the best he could do, the best we could all do. That I can tell

you now … it means the game is over, to her.” She pocketed the knife.

“When she first cursed him, Tamlin sent one of his men across the wall every day. To the woods, to farms, all disguised as wolves to make it more likely for one of your kind to want to kill them. If they came back, it was with stories of human girls who ran and screamed and begged, who didn’t even lift a hand. When they didn’t come back—Tamlin’s bond with them as their Lord and master told him they’d been killed by others. Human hunters, older women, perhaps. For two years he sent them out, day after day, having to pick who crossed the wall. When all but a dozen of them were left, it broke him so badly he stopped. Called it all off.

And since then, Tamlin has been here, defending his borders as chaos and disorder ruled in the other courts under Amarantha’s thumb. The other High Lords fought back, too. Forty years ago, she executed three of them and most of their families for banding together against her.”

“Open rebellion? What courts?” I straightened, taking a step away from the wall. Perhaps I might find allies among them to help me save Tamlin.

“The Day Court, Summer Court, and Winter Court. And no—it didn’t even get far enough to be considered an open rebellion.

She used the High Lords’ powers to bind us to the land. So the rebel lords tried calling for aid from the other Fae territories using as messengers whatever humans were foolish enough to enter our lands—most of them young women who worshipped us like gods.” The Children of the Blessed. They had indeed made it over the wall—but not to be brides. I was too battered by what I’d heard to grieve for them, rage for them.

“But Amarantha caught them all before they left these shores, and … you can imagine how it ended for those girls. Afterward, once Amarantha also butchered the rebellious High Lords, their successors were too terrified to tempt her wrath again.”

“And where are they now? Are they allowed to live on their lands, like Tamlin was?”

“No. She keeps them and their entire courts Under the Mountain, where she can torment them as she pleases. Others—

others, if they swear allegiance, if they grovel and serve her, she allows them a bit more freedom to come and go Under the

Mountain as they will. Our court was only allowed to remain here until Tamlin’s curse ran out, but …” Alis shivered.

“That’s why you keep your nephews in hiding—to keep them away from this,” I said, glancing at the full satchel at her feet.

Alis nodded, and as she went to right the overturned worktable, I moved to help her, both of us grunting at the weight.

“My sister and I served in the Summer Court—and she and her mate were among those put down for spite when Amarantha first invaded. I took the boys and ran before Amarantha had everyone dragged Under the Mountain. I came here because it was the only place to go, and asked Tamlin to hide my boys. He did—and when I begged him to let me help, in whatever small way, he gave me a position here, days before the masque that put this wretched thing on my face. So I’ve been here for nearly fifty years, watching as Amarantha’s noose grew tighter around his neck.”

We set the table upright again, and both of us panted a bit as we slumped against it.

“He tried,” Alis said. “Even with her spies, he tried finding ways to break the curse, to do anything against it, against having to send his men out again to be slaughtered by humans. He thought that if the human girl loved true, then bringing her here to free him was another form of slavery. And he thought that if he did indeed fall in love with her, Amarantha would do everything she could to destroy her, as her sister had been destroyed. So he spent decades refusing to do it, to even risk it. But this winter, with months to go, he just … snapped. He sent the last of his men out, one by one. And they were willing—they had begged him to go, all these years. Tamlin was desperate to save his people, desperate enough to risk the lives of his men, risk that human girl’s life to save us. Three days in, Andras finally ran into a human girl in a clearing—and you killed him with hate in your heart.”

But I had failed them. And in so doing, I’d damned them all.

I had damned each and every person on this estate, damned Prythian itself.

I was glad I was leaning against the table’s edge—or else I might have slid to the floor.

“You could have broken it,” Alis snarled, those sharp teeth mere inches from my face. “All you had to do was say that you loved him—say that you loved him and mean it with your whole

useless human heart, and his power would have been freed. You stupid, stupid girl.”

No wonder Lucien had resented me and yet still tolerated my presence—no wonder he’d been so bitterly disappointed when I left, had argued with Tamlin to let me stay longer. “I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes burning.

Alis snorted. “Tell that to Tamlin. He had only three days after you left before the forty-nine years were over. Three days, and he let you go. She came here with her cronies at the exact moment the seven times seven years were over and seized him, along with most of the court, and brought them Under the Mountain to be her subjects. Creatures like me are too lowly for her—though she’s not above murdering us for sport.”

I tried not to visualize it. “But what of the King of Hybern—if she’s conquered Prythian for herself and stolen his spells, then does he see her as insubordinate or as an ally?”

“If they are on bad terms, he has made no move to punish her.

For forty-nine years now, she’s held these lands in her grip.

Worse, after the High Lords fell, all the wicked ones in our lands—

the ones too awful even for the Night Court—flocked to her. They still do. She’s offered them sanctuary. But we know—we know she’s building her army, biding her time before launching an attack on your world, armed with the most lethal and vicious faeries in Prythian and Hybern.”

“Like the Attor,” I said, horror and dread twisting in my gut, and Alis nodded. “In the human territory,” I said, “rumor claims more and more faeries have been sneaking over the wall to attack humans. And if no faeries can cross the wall without her permission, then that has to mean she’s been sanctioning those attacks.”

And if I was right about what had happened to Clare Beddor and her family, then Amarantha had given the order for that, too.

Alis swiped some dirt I couldn’t see from the table we leaned against. “I would not be surprised if she has sent her minions into the human realm to investigate your strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of the destruction she one day hopes to cause.”

This was worse—so much worse than I had thought when I warned Nesta and my family to stay on alert and leave at the slightest sign of trouble. I felt sick to think of what kind of company

Tamlin was keeping—sick at the thought of him being so desperate, so stricken by guilt and grief over having to sacrifice his sentries and never being able to tell me … And he’d let me go.

Let all their sacrifices, let Andras’s sacrifice, be in vain.

He’d known that if I remained, I would be at risk of Amarantha’s wrath, even if I freed him.

“I can’t even protect myself against them, against what’s happening in Prythian … Even if we stood against the blight, they would hunt you down—she would find a way to kill you.”

I remembered that pathetic effort to flatter me upon my arrival

—and then he’d given up on it, on any attempt to win me when I’d seemed so desperate to get away, to never talk to him. But he’d fallen in love with me despite all that—known I’d loved him, and let me go with days to spare. He had put me before his entire court, before all of Prythian.

“If Tamlin were freed—if he had his full powers,” I said, staring at a blackened bit of wall, “would he be able to destroy Amarantha?”

“I don’t know. She tricked the High Lords through cunning, not force. Magic’s a specific kind of thing—it likes rules, and she manipulated them too well. She keeps their powers locked up inside herself, as if she can’t use them, or can access very little of them, at least. She has her own deadly powers, yes, so if it came down to a fight—”

“But is he stronger?” I started wringing my hands.

“He’s a High Lord,” Alis replied, as if that were answer enough.

“But none of that matters now. He’s to be her slave, and we’re all to wear these masks until he agrees to become her lover—even then, he’ll never regain his full powers. And she’ll never let those Under the Mountain go.”

I pushed off the table and squared my shoulders. “How do I get Under the Mountain?”

She clicked her tongue. “You can’t go Under the Mountain. No human who goes in ever comes out.”

I squeezed my fists so hard that my nails bit into my flesh.

“How. Do. I. Get. There.”

“It’s suicide—she’ll kill you, even if you get close enough to see her.”

Amarantha had tricked him—she had hurt him so badly. Hurt them all so badly.

“You’re a human,” Alis went on, standing as well. “Your flesh is paper-thin.”

Amarantha must also have taken Lucien—she had carved out Lucien’s eye and scarred him like that. Did his mother grieve for him?

“You were too blind to see Tamlin’s curse,” Alis continued.

“How do you expect to face Amarantha? You’ll make things worse.”

Amarantha had taken everything I wanted, everything I finally dared desire. “Show me the way,” I said, my voice trembling, but not with tears.

“No.” Alis slung her satchel over a shoulder. “Go home. I’ll take you as far as the wall. There’s naught to be done now. Tamlin will remain her slave forever, and Prythian will stay under her rule.

That’s what Fate dealt, that was what the Eddies of the Cauldron decided.”

“I don’t believe in Fate. Nor do I believe in some ridiculous Cauldron.”

She shook her head again, her wild brown hair like glistening mud in the dim light.

“Take me to her,” I insisted.

If Amarantha ripped out my throat, at least I would die doing something for him—at least I would die trying to fix the destruction I hadn’t prevented, trying to save the people I’d doomed. At least Tamlin would know it was for him, and that I loved him.

Alis studied me for a moment before her eyes softened. “As you wish.”

CHAPTER

33

I might have been going to my death, but I wouldn’t arrive unarmed.

I tightened the strap of the quiver across my chest and then grazed my fingers over the arrow feathers peeking over my shoulder. Of course, there were no ash arrows. But I would make do with what I’d found scattered throughout the manor. I could have taken more, but weapons would only weigh me down, and I didn’t know how to use most of them anyway. So I wore a full quiver, two daggers at my waist, and a bow slung over a shoulder.

Better than nothing, even if I was up against faeries who’d been born knowing how to kill.

Alis led me through the silent woods and foothills, pausing every so often to listen, to alter our course. I didn’t want to know what she heard or smelled out there, not when such stillness blanketed the lands. Stay with the High Lord, the Suriel had said.

Stay with him, fall in love with him, and all would be righted. If I had stayed, if I had admitted what I’d felt … None of this would have happened.

The world steadily filled with night, and my legs ached from the steep slopes of the hills, but Alis pressed on—never once looking back to see that I followed.

I was beginning to wonder whether I should have brought more than a day’s worth of food when she stopped in the hollow between two hills. The air was cold—far colder than the air at the top of the hill, and I shivered as my eyes fell upon a slender cave mouth. There was no way this was the entrance—not when that mural had painted Under the Mountain to be in the center of Prythian. It was weeks of travel away.

“All dark and miserable roads lead Under the Mountain,” Alis said so quietly that her voice was nothing more than the rustling of

leaves. She pointed to the cave. “It’s an ancient shortcut—once considered sacred, but no more.”

This was the cave Lucien had ordered the Attor not to use that day. I tried to master my trembling. I loved Tamlin, and I would go to the ends of the earth to make it right, to save him, but if Amarantha was worse than the Attor … if the Attor wasn’t the wickedest of her cronies … if even Tamlin had been scared of her

“I reckon you’re regretting your hotheadedness right now.”

I straightened. “I will free him.”

“You’ll be lucky if she gives you a clean death. You’ll be lucky if you even get brought before her.” I must have turned pale, because she pursed her lips and patted me on the shoulder. “A few rules to remember, girl,” she said, and we both stared at the cave mouth. The darkness reeked from its maw to poison the fresh night air. “Don’t drink the wine—it’s not like what we had at the Solstice, and will do more harm than good. Don’t make deals with anyone unless your life depends on it—and even then, consider whether it’s worth it. And most of all: don’t trust a soul in there—not even your Tamlin. Your senses are your greatest enemies; they will be waiting to betray you.”

I fought the urge to touch one of my daggers and nodded my thanks instead.

“Do you have a plan?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Don’t expect that steel to do you any good,” she said with a glance at my weapons.

“I don’t.” I faced her, biting the inside of my lip.

“There was one part of the curse. One part we can’t tell you.

Even now, my bones are crying out just for mentioning it. One part you have to figure out … on your own, one part she … she …”

She swallowed loudly. “That she still doesn’t want you to know, if I can’t say it,” she gasped out. “But keep—keep your ears open, girl. Listen to what you hear.”

I touched her arm. “I will. Thank you for bringing me.” For wasting precious hours, when that satchel of supplies—for herself, for her boys—said enough about where she was going.

“It’s a rare day indeed when someone thanks you for bringing them to their death.” If I thought about the danger too long, I might

Image 42

lose my nerve, Tamlin or no. She wasn’t helping. “I’ll wish you luck nonetheless,” Alis added.

“Once you retrieve them, if you and your nephews need somewhere to flee,” I said, “cross the wall. Go to my family’s house.” I told her the location. “Ask for Nesta—my eldest sister.

She knows who you are, knows everything. She will shelter you in any way she can.”

Nesta would do it, too, I knew now, even if Alis and her boys terrified her. She would keep them safe. Alis patted my hand.

“Stay alive,” she said.

I looked at her one last time, then at the night sky that was unfurling above us, and at the deep green of the hills. The color of Tamlin’s eyes.

I walked into the cave.

The only sounds were my shallow breathing and the crunch of my boots on stone. Stumbling through the frigid dark, I inched onward. I kept close to the wall, and my hand soon turned numb as the cold, wet stone bit into my skin. I took small steps, fearful of some invisible pit that might send me tumbling to my doom.

After what felt like an eternity, a crack of orange light cleaved through the dark. And then came the voices.

Hissing and braying, eloquent and guttural—a cacophony bursting the silence like a firecracker. I pressed myself against the cave wall, but the sounds passed and faded.

I crept toward the light, blinking back my blindness when I found the source: a slight fissure in the rock. It opened onto a crudely carved, fire-lit subterranean passageway. I lingered in the shadows, my heart wild in my chest. The crack in the cave wall was large enough for one person to squeeze through—so jagged and rough that it was obviously not often used. A glance at the dirt revealed no tracks, no sign of anyone else using this entrance.

The hallway beyond was clear, but it veered off, obscuring my view.

The passage was deathly quiet, but I remembered Alis’s warning and didn’t trust my ears, not when faeries could be silent as cats.

Still, I had to leave this cave. Tamlin had been here for weeks already. I had to find where Amarantha kept him. And hopefully not run into anyone in the process. Killing animals and the naga had been one thing, but killing any others …

I took several deep breaths, bracing myself. It was the same as hunting. Only this time the animals were faeries. Faeries who could torture me endlessly—torture me until I begged for death.

Torture me the way they tormented that Summer Court faerie whose wings had been ripped off.

I didn’t let myself think about those bleeding stumps as I eased toward the tiny opening, sucking in my stomach to squeeze through. My weapons scraped against the stone, and I winced at the hiss of falling pebbles. Keep moving, keep moving. Hurrying across the open hallway, I pressed into an alcove in the opposite wall. It didn’t provide much cover.

I slunk along the wall, pausing at the bend in the hall. This was a mistake—only an idiot would come here. I could be anywhere in Amarantha’s court. Alis should have given me more information. I should have been smart enough to ask. Or smart enough to think of another way— any way but this.

I risked a glance around the corner and almost sobbed in frustration. Another hallway carved out of the mountain’s pale stone, lined on either side by torches. No shadowy spots for concealment, and at its other end, my view was yet again obscured by a sharp turn. It was wide open. I was as good as a starving doe, ripping bark off a tree in a clearing.

But the halls were silent—the voices I’d heard earlier were gone. And if I heard anyone, I could sprint back to that cave mouth. I could do reconnaissance for a time, gather information, find out where Tamlin was—

No. A second opportunity might not arise for a while. I had to act now. If I stopped for too long, I’d never work up the nerve again. I made to slip around the corner.

Long, bony fingers wrapped around my arm, and I went rigid.

A pointed, leathery gray face came into view, and its silver fangs glistened as it smiled at me. “Hello,” it hissed. “What’s something like you doing here?”

I knew that voice. It still haunted my nightmares.

So it was all I could do to keep from screaming as its bat-like ears cocked, and I realized that I stood before the Attor.

CHAPTER

34

The Attor kept its icy grip on my upper arm as it half dragged me to the throne room. It didn’t bother to strip me of my weapons. We both knew they were of little use.

Tamlin. Alis and her boys. My sisters. Lucien. I silently chanted their names again and again as the Attor loomed above me, a demon of malice. Its leathery wings rustled occasionally—and had I been able to speak without screaming, I might have asked why it hadn’t killed me outright. The Attor just tugged me onward with that slithering gait, its clawed feet making leisurely scratches on the cave floor. It looked unnervingly identical to how I had painted it.

Leering faces—cruel and harsh—watched me go by, none of them looking remotely concerned or disturbed that I was in the claws of the Attor. Faeries—lots of them—but few High Fae to be seen.

We strode through two ancient, enormous stone doors—taller than Tamlin’s manor—and into a vast chamber carved from pale rock, upheld by countless carved pillars. That small part of me that had again become trivial and useless noted that the carvings weren’t just ornate designs, but actually depicted faeries and High Fae and animals in various environments and states of movement. Countless stories of Prythian were etched on them.

Chandeliers of jewels hung between the pillars, staining the red marble floor with color. Here—here were the High Fae.

An assembled crowd took up most of the space, some of them dancing to strange, off-kilter music, some milling about chatting—

a party of sorts. I thought I spied some glittering masks among the attendees, but everything was a blur of sharp teeth and fine clothing. The Attor hurled me forward, and the world spun.

The cold marble floor was unyielding as I slammed into it, my bones groaning and barking. I pushed myself up, sparks dancing

in my eyes, but stayed on the ground, kept low, as I beheld the dais before me. A few steps led onto the platform. I lifted my head higher.

There, lounging on a black throne, was Amarantha.

Though lovely, she wasn’t as devastatingly beautiful as I had imagined, wasn’t some goddess of darkness and spite. It made her all the more petrifying. Her red-gold hair was neatly braided and woven through her golden crown, the deep color enriching her snow-white skin, which, in turn, set off her ruby lips. But while her ebony eyes shone, there was … something that sucked at her beauty, some kind of permanent sneer to her features that made her allure seem contrived and cold. To paint her would have driven me to madness.

The highest commander of the King of Hybern. She’d slaughtered human armies centuries ago, had murdered her slaves rather than free them. And she’d captured all of Prythian in a matter of days.

Then I looked to the black rock throne beside her, and my arms buckled beneath me.

He was still wearing that golden mask, still wearing his warrior’s clothes, that baldric—even though there were no knives sheathed along it, not a single weapon anywhere on him. His eyes didn’t widen; his mouth didn’t tighten. No claws, no fangs. He just stared at me, unfeeling—unmoved. Unimpressed.

“What’s this?” Amarantha said, her voice lilting despite the adder’s smile she gave me. From her slender, creamy neck hung a long, thin chain—and from it dangled a single, age-worn bone the size of a finger. I didn’t want to consider whom it might have belonged to as I remained on the floor. If I shifted my arm, I could draw my dagger—

“Just a human thing I found downstairs,” the Attor hissed, and a forked tongue darted out between its razor-sharp teeth. It flapped its wings once, blasting foul-smelling air at me, and then neatly tucked them behind its skeletal body.

“Obviously,” Amarantha purred. I avoided meeting her eyes, focusing on Tamlin’s brown boots. He was ten feet from me—ten feet, and not saying a word, not even looking horrified or angry.

“But why should I bother with her?”

The Attor chuckled, the sound like sizzling water on a griddle, and a taloned foot jabbed my side. “Tell Her Majesty why you were sneaking around the catacombs—why you came out of the old cave that leads to the Spring Court.”

Would it be better to kill the Attor, or to try to make it to Amarantha? The Attor kicked me again, and I winced as its claws bit into my ribs. “Tell Her Majesty, you human filth.”

I needed time—I needed to figure out my surroundings. If Tamlin was under some kind of spell, then I would have to worry about grabbing him. I eased to my feet, keeping my hands within casual reach of my daggers. I stared at Amarantha’s glittering golden gown rather than meet her eyes.

“I came to claim the one I love,” I said quietly. Perhaps the curse could still be broken. Again I looked at him, and the sight of those emerald eyes was a balm.

“Oh?” Amarantha said, leaning forward.

“I’ve come to claim Tamlin, High Lord of the Spring Court.”

A gasp rippled through the assembled court. But Amarantha tipped back her head and laughed—a raven’s caw.

The High Queen turned to Tamlin, and her lips pulled back in a wicked smile. “You certainly were busy all those years. Developed a taste for human beasts, did you?”

He said nothing, his face impassive. What had she done? He didn’t move—her curse had worked, then. I was too late. I’d failed him, damned him.

“But,” Amarantha said slowly. I could sense the Attor and the entire court looming behind me. “It makes me wonder—if only one human girl could be taken once she killed your sentinel …” Her eyes sparked. “Oh, you are delicious. You let me torture that innocent girl to keep this one safe? You lovely thing! You actually made a human worm love you. Marvelous.” She clapped her hands, and Tamlin merely looked away from her, the only reaction I’d seen from him.

Tortured. She’d tortured—

“Let him go,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

Amarantha laughed again. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t destroy you where you stand, human.” Her teeth were so straight and white—almost glowing.

My blood pounded in my veins, but I kept my chin high as I said, “You tricked him—he is bound unfairly.” Tamlin had gone very, very still.

Amarantha clicked her tongue and looked at one of her slender white hands—at the ring on her index finger. A ring, I noticed as she lowered her hand again, set with what looked like

… like a human eye encased in crystal. I could have sworn it swiveled inside. “You human beasts are so uncreative. We spent years teaching you poetry and fine speech, and that is all you can come up with? I should rip out your tongue for letting it go to waste.”

I clamped my teeth together.

“But I’m curious: What eloquence will pour from your lips when you behold what you should have been?” My brows narrowed as Amarantha pointed behind me, that hideous eye ring indeed looking with her, and I turned.

There, nailed high on the wall of the enormous cavern, was the mangled corpse of a young woman. Her skin was burned in places, her fingers were bent at odd angles, and garish red lines crisscrossed her naked body. I could hardly hear Amarantha over the roar in my ears.

“Perhaps I should have listened when she said she’d never seen Tamlin before,” Amarantha mused. “Or when she insisted she’d never killed a faerie, never hunted a day in her life. Though her screaming was delightful. I haven’t heard such lovely music in ages.” Her next words were directed at me. “I should thank you for giving Rhysand her name instead of yours.”

Clare Beddor.

This was where they’d taken her, what they’d done to her after they burned her family alive in their house. This was what I’d done to her, by giving Rhysand her name to protect my family.

My insides twisted; it was a concentrated effort not to empty my stomach onto the stones.

The Attor’s talons dug into my shoulders as it shoved me around to face Amarantha, who was still giving me that snake’s smile. I had as good as killed Clare. I’d saved my own life and damned her. That rotting body on the wall should be mine. Mine.

Mine.

“Come now, precious,” Amarantha said. “What have you to say to that?”

I wanted to spit that she deserved to burn in Hell for eternity, but I could only see Clare’s body nailed there, even as I stared blankly at Tamlin. He’d let them kill Clare like that—to keep them from knowing that I was alive. My eyes stung as bile burned my throat.

“Do you still wish to claim someone who would do that to an innocent?” Amarantha said softly—consolingly.

I snapped my gaze to her. I wouldn’t let Clare’s death be in vain. I wasn’t going down without a fight. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

Her lip curled back, revealing too-sharp canines. And as I stared into her black eyes, I realized I was going to die.

But Amarantha leaned back in her throne and crossed her legs. “Well, Tamlin,” she said, putting a proprietary hand on his arm, “I don’t suppose you ever expected this to occur.” She waved a hand in my general direction. A murmur of laughter from those assembled echoed around me, hitting me like stones. “What do you have to say, High Lord?”

I looked at the face I loved so dearly, and his next words almost sent me to my knees. “I’ve never seen her before.

Someone must have glamoured her as a joke. Probably Rhysand.” Still trying to protect me, even now, even here.

“Oh, that’s not even a halfway decent lie.” Amarantha angled her head. “Could it be—could it be that you, despite your words so many years ago, return the human’s feelings? A girl with hate in her heart for our kind has managed to fall in love with a faerie.

And a faerie whose father once slaughtered the human masses by my side has actually fallen in love with her, too?” She let out that crow’s laugh again. “Oh, this is too good—this is too fun.” She fingered the bone hanging from her necklace and looked at the encased eye upon her hand. “I suppose if anyone can appreciate the moment,” she said to the ring, “it would be you, Jurian.” She smiled prettily. “A pity your human whore on the side never bothered to save you, though.”

Jurian—that was his eye, his finger bone. Horror coiled in my gut. Through whatever evil, whatever power, she somehow held his soul, his consciousness, to the ring, the bone.

Tamlin still looked at me without recognition, without a flicker of feeling. Perhaps she had used that same power to glamour him; perhaps she’d taken all his memories.

The queen picked at her nails. “Things have been awfully boring since Clare decided to die on me. Killing you outright, human, would be dull.” She flicked her gaze to me, then back to her nails—to the ring on her finger. “But Fate stirs the Cauldron in strange ways. Perhaps my darling Clare had to die in order for me to have some true amusement with you.”

My bowels turned watery—I couldn’t help it.

“You came to claim Tamlin?” Amarantha said—it wasn’t a question, but a challenge. “Well, as it happens, I’m bored to tears of his sullen silence. I was worried when he didn’t flinch while I played with darling Clare, when he didn’t even show those lovely claws …

“But I’ll make a bargain with you, human,” she said, and warning bells pealed in my mind. Unless your life depends on it, Alis had said. “You complete three tasks of my choosing—three tasks to prove how deep that human sense of loyalty and love runs, and Tamlin is yours. Just three little challenges to prove your dedication, to prove to me, to darling Jurian, that your kind can indeed love true, and you can have your High Lord.” She turned to Tamlin. “Consider it a favor, High Lord—these human dogs can make our kind so lust-blind that we lose all common sense. Better for you to see her true nature now.”

“I want his curse broken, too,” I blurted. She raised a brow, her smile growing, revealing far too many of those white teeth. “I complete all three of your tasks, and his curse is broken, and we

—and all his court—can leave here. And remain free forever,” I added. Magic was specific, Alis had said—that was how Amarantha had tricked them. I wouldn’t let loopholes be my downfall.

“Of course,” Amarantha purred. “I’ll throw in another element, if you don’t mind—just to see if you’re worthy of one of our kind, if you’re smart enough to deserve him.” Jurian’s eye swiveled wildly, and she clicked her tongue at it. The eye stopped moving. “I’ll give you a way out, girl,” she went on. “You’ll complete all the tasks—

or, when you can’t stand it anymore, all you have to do is answer one question.” I could barely hear her above the blood pounding

in my ears. “A riddle. You solve the riddle, and his curse will be broken. Instantaneously. I won’t even need to lift my finger and he’ll be free. Say the right answer, and he’s yours. You can answer it at any time—but if you answer incorrectly …” She pointed, and I didn’t need to turn to know she gestured to Clare.

I turned her words over, looking for traps and loopholes within her phrasing. But it all sounded right. “And what if I fail your tasks?”

Her smile became almost grotesque, and she rubbed a thumb across the dome of her ring. “If you fail a task, there won’t be anything left of you for me to play with.”

A chill slithered down my spine. Alis had warned me—warned me against bargains. But Amarantha would kill me in an instant if I said no. “What is the nature of my tasks?”

“Oh, revealing that would take all the fun out of it. But I’ll tell you that you’ll have one task every month—at the full moon.”

“And in the meantime?” I dared a glance at Tamlin. The gold in his eyes was brighter than I remembered.

“In the meantime,” Amarantha said a bit sharply, “you shall either remain in your cell or do whatever additional work I require.”

“If you run me ragged, won’t that put me at a disadvantage?” I knew she was losing interest—that she hadn’t expected me to question her so much. But I had to try to gain some kind of edge.

“Nothing beyond basic housework. It’s only fair for you to earn your keep.” I could have strangled her for that, but I nodded.

“Then we are agreed.”

I knew she waited for me to echo her response, but I had to make sure. “If I complete your three tasks or solve your riddle, you’ll do as I request?”

“Of course,” Amarantha said. “Is it agreed?”

His face ghastly white, Tamlin’s eyes met with mine, and they almost imperceptibly widened. No.

But it was either this or death—death like Clare’s, slow and brutal. The Attor hissed behind me, a warning to reply. I didn’t believe in Fate or the Cauldron—and I had no other choice.

Because when I looked into Tamlin’s eyes, even now, seated beside Amarantha as her slave or worse, I loved him with a fierceness that swept up my whole heart. Because when he had widened his eyes, I’d known he still loved me.

I had nothing left but that, but the shred of fool’s hope that I might win—that I might outwit and defeat a Faerie Queen as ancient as the stone beneath me.

“Well?” Amarantha demanded. Behind me, I sensed the Attor preparing to pounce, to beat the answer from me, if need be.

She’d tricked them all, but I hadn’t survived poverty and years in the woods for naught. My best chance lay in revealing nothing about myself, or what I knew. What was her court but another forest, another hunting ground?

I glanced at Tamlin one last time before I said “Agreed.”

Amarantha gave me a small, horrible smile, and magic sizzled in the air between us as she snapped her fingers. She nestled back in her throne. “Give her a greeting worthy of my hall,” she said to someone behind me.

The Attor’s hiss was my only warning as something rock-hard collided with my jaw.

I was thrown sideways, stunned from the pain, but another brutal blow to my face awaited. Bones crunched— my bones. My legs twisted beneath me, and the Attor’s leathery skin grated against my cheek as it punched me again. I ricocheted away, but met with the fist of another—a twisted, lesser faerie whose face I didn’t glimpse. It was like being slugged with a brick. Crunch, crack. I think there were three of them, and I became their punching bag—passed off from blow to blow, my bones screaming in agony. Maybe I was screaming in agony, too.

Blood sprayed from my mouth, and its metallic tang coated my tongue before I knew no more.

CHAPTER

35

My senses slowly returned to me, each one more painful than the last. The sound of dripping water first, then the fading echo of heavy footsteps. A lingering coppery taste coated my mouth—

blood. Above the wheezing of what had to be my clogged nostrils, the tang of mold and the reek of mildew scented the damp, cold air. Sharp bits of hay jabbed my cheek. My tongue probed the makings of a split lip, and the movement set my face on fire.

Wincing, I opened my eyes, but could only manage to widen them a little—swelling. What I beheld through my undoubtedly black eyes didn’t do much for my spirits.

I was in a prison cell. My weapons were gone, and my only sources of light were the torches beyond the door. Amarantha had said a cell was to be where I would spend my time, but even as I sat up—my head so dizzy I almost blacked out again—my heartbeat quickened. A dungeon. I examined the slants of light that crept in through the cracks between the door and the wall, then gingerly touched my face.

It ached—ached worse than anything I’d ever endured. I bit down on a cry as my fingers grazed my nose, flakes of blood crumbling from my nostrils. It was broken. Broken. I would have clenched my teeth had my jaw not been a throbbing mess of agony, too.

I couldn’t panic. No, I had to keep my tears in check, had to keep my wits together. I had to survey the damage as best I could, then figure out what to do. Maybe my shirt could be used for bandages—maybe they would give me water at some point to wash out the injuries. Taking a breath that was all too shallow, I explored the rest of my face. My jaw wasn’t broken, and though my eyes were swollen and my lip was split, the worst damage was to my nose.

I curled my knees to my chest, grasping them tightly as I reined in my breathing. I’d violated one of Alis’s rules. I’d had no choice, though. Seeing Tamlin seated beside Amarantha …

My jaw protested, but I ground my teeth anyway. The full moon

—it had been a half moon when I left my father’s home. How long had I been unconscious down here? I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that any amount of time would prepare me for Amarantha’s first task.

I didn’t allow myself to imagine what she had in mind for me. It was enough to know that she expected me to die—that there wouldn’t be enough left of me for her to torture.

I gripped my legs harder to keep my hands from shaking.

Somewhere—not too far off—screaming began. A high-pitched, pleading bleat, accentuated with crescendos of shrieking that made bile sting in my throat. I might sound like that when faced with Amarantha’s first task.

A whip cracked, and the screaming built, hardly pausing for a breath. Clare had probably cried similarly. I had as good as tortured her myself. What had she made of all this—all these faeries lusting after her blood and misery? I deserved this—

deserved whatever pain and suffering was in store—if only for what she had endured. But … but I would make it right. Somehow.

I must have drifted off at some point, because I awoke to the scrape of my cell door against stone. Forgetting the cascading pain in my face, I scrambled to duck into the shadows of the nearest corner. Someone slipped into my cell and swiftly shut the door—leaving it just a bit ajar.

“Feyre?”

I tried to stand, but my legs shook so badly that I couldn’t move. “Lucien?” I breathed, and the hay crunched as he dropped to the ground before me.

“By the Cauldron, are you all right?”

“My face—”

A small light flared by his head, and as his eyes swam into view, the metal one narrowed. He hissed. “Have you lost your mind? What are you doing here?”

I fought the tears—they were pointless, anyway. “I went back to the manor … Alis told me … told me about the curse, and I couldn’t let Amarantha—”

“You shouldn’t have come, Feyre,” he said sharply. “You weren’t meant to be here. Don’t you understand what he sacrificed in getting you out? How could you be so foolish?”

“Well, I’m here now!” I said, louder than was wise. “I’m here, and there’s nothing that can be done about it, so don’t bother telling me about my weak human flesh and my stupidity! I know all that, and I …” I wanted to cover my face in my hands, but it hurt too much. “I just … I had to tell him that I love him. To see if it wasn’t too late.”

Lucien sat back on his heels. “So you know everything, then.” I managed to nod without blacking out from the pain. My agony must have shown, because he winced. “Well, at least we don’t have to lie to you anymore. Let’s clean you up a bit.”

“I think my nose is broken. But nothing else.” As I said it, I looked around him for any signs of water or bandages—and found none. It would be magic, then.

Lucien glanced over his shoulder, checking the door. “The guards are drunk, but their replacements will be here soon,” he said, and then studied my nose. I braced myself as I allowed him to gently touch it. Even the graze of his fingertips sent flashes of burning pain through me. “I’m going to have to set it before I can heal it.”

I clamped down on my blind panic. “Do it. Right now.” Before I could wallow in my cowardice and tell him to forget about it. He hesitated. “Now,” I panted.

Too swift for me to follow, his fingers latched onto my nose.

Pain lanced through me, and a crack burst through my ears, my head, before I fainted.

When I came to, I could open both eyes fully, and my nose—

my nose was clear, and didn’t throb or send agony splintering through my face. Lucien was crouched over me, frowning. “I couldn’t heal you completely—they would know someone helped you. The bruises are there, along with a hideous black eye, but …

all the swelling’s gone.”

“And my nose?” I said, feeling it before he answered.

“Fixed—as pert and pretty as before.” He smirked at me. The familiar gesture made my chest tighten to the point of pain.

“I thought she’d taken most of your power,” I managed to say.

I’d barely seen him handle magic at all while at the estate.

He nodded to the little light bobbing over his shoulder. “She gave me back a fraction—to entice Tamlin to accept her offer. But he still refuses her.” He jerked his chin to my healed face. “I knew some good would come of being down here.”

“So you’re trapped Under the Mountain, too?”

A grim nod. “She’s summoned all the High Lords to her now—

and even those who swore obedience are now forbidden to leave until … until your trials are over.”

Until I was dead was probably what he truly meant. “That ring,”

I said. “Is it—is it actually Jurian’s eye?”

Lucien cringed. “Indeed. So you really know everything, then?”

“Alis didn’t say what happened after Jurian and Amarantha faced each other.”

“They wrecked an entire battlefield, using their soldiers as shields, until their forces were nearly all dead. Jurian had been gifted some protection against her, but once they entered into single combat … It didn’t take her long to render him prone. Then she dragged him back to her camp and took weeks— weeks—to torture and kill him. She refused orders to march to the King of Hybern’s aid—cost him armies and the War; she refused to do anything until she’d finished Jurian’s demise. All that she kept was his finger bone and his eye. Clythia promised him that he would never die—and so long as Amarantha keeps that eye of his preserved through her magic, keeps his soul and consciousness bound to it, he’ll remain trapped, watching through it. A fitting punishment for what he did, but”—Lucien tapped his own missing eye—“I’m glad she didn’t do the same to me. She seems to have an obsession with that sort of thing.”

I shuddered. A huntress—she was little more than an immortal, cruel huntress, collecting trophies from her kills and conquests to gloat over through the ages. The rage and despair and horror Jurian must endure every day, for eternity … Deserved, perhaps, but worse than anything I could imagine. I shook the thought from me. “Is Tamlin—”

“He’s—” But Lucien shot to his feet at a sound my human ears couldn’t hear. “The guards are about to change rotations and are headed this way. Try not to die, will you? I already have a long list of faeries to kill—I don’t need to add more to it, if only for Tamlin’s sake.”

Image 43

Which was no doubt why he’d even come down here.

Lucien vanished—just vanished into the dim light. A moment later, a yellowish eye tinged with red appeared at the peephole in the door, glared at me, and continued onward.

I dozed on and off for what could have been hours or days. They gave me three miserable meals of stale bread and water at no regular interval that I could detect. All I knew when the door to my cell swung open was that my relentless hunger no longer mattered, and it would be wise not to struggle when the two squat, red-skinned faeries half dragged me to the throne room. I marked the path, picking out details in the hall—interesting cracks in the walls, features in the tapestries, an odd bend—anything to remind me of the way out of the dungeons.

I observed more of Amarantha’s throne room this time, too, noting the exits. No windows, as we were underground. And the mountain I’d seen depicted on that map at the manor was in the heart of the land—far from the Spring Court, even farther from the wall. If I were to escape with Tamlin, my best chance would be to run for that cave in the belly of the mountain.

A crowd of faeries stood along a far wall. Over their heads, I could make out the arch of a doorway. I tried not to look up at Clare’s rotting body as we passed, and instead focused on the assembled court. Everyone was clad in rich, colorful clothing—all of them seeming clean and fed. Dispersed among them were faeries with masks. The Spring Court. If I had any chance of finding allies, it would be with them.

I scanned the crowd for Lucien but didn’t find him before I was thrown at the foot of the dais. Amarantha wore a gown of rubies, drawing attention to her red-gold hair and to her lips, which spread in a serpentine smile as I looked up at her.

The Faerie Queen clicked her tongue. “You look positively dreadful.” She turned to Tamlin, still at her side. His expression remained distant. “Wouldn’t you say she’s taken a turn for the worse?”

He didn’t reply; he didn’t even meet my gaze.

“You know,” Amarantha mused, leaning against an arm of her throne, “I couldn’t sleep last night, and I realized why this morning.” She ran an eye over me. “I don’t know your name. If you and I are going to be such close friends for the next three months, I should know your name, shouldn’t I?”

I prevented myself from nodding. There was something charming and inviting about her—a part of me began to understand why the High Lords had fallen under her thrall, believed in her lies. I hated her for it.

When I didn’t reply, Amarantha frowned. “Come, now, pet. You know my name—isn’t it fair that I know yours?” There was movement to my right, and I tensed as the Attor appeared through the parted crowd, grinning at me with row after row of teeth. “After all”—Amarantha waved an elegant hand to the space behind me, the crystal casing around Jurian’s eye catching the light—“you’ve already learned the consequences of giving false names.” A black cloud wrapped around me as I sensed Clare’s nailed form on the wall behind me. Still, I kept my mouth shut.

“Rhysand,” Amarantha said—not needing to raise her voice to summon him. My heart became a leaden weight as those casual, strolling steps sounded from behind. They stopped when they were beside me—far too close for my liking.

From the corner of my eye, I studied the High Lord of the Night Court as he bowed at the waist. Night still seemed to ripple off him, like some near-invisible cloak.

Amarantha lifted her brows. “Is this the girl you saw at Tamlin’s estate?”

He brushed some invisible fleck of dust off his black tunic before he surveyed me. His violet eyes held boredom—and disdain. “I suppose.”

“But did you or did you not tell me that girl,” Amarantha said, her tone sharpening as she pointed to Clare, “was the one you saw?”

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Humans all look alike to me.”

Amarantha gave him a saccharine smile. “And what about faeries?”

Rhysand bowed again—so smooth it looked like a dance.

“Among a sea of mundane faces, yours is a work of art.”

Had I not been straddling the line between life and death, I might have snorted.

Humans all look alike … I didn’t believe him for a second.

Rhysand knew exactly how I looked—he’d recognized me that day at the manor. I willed my features into neutrality as Amarantha’s attention again returned to me.

“What’s her name?” she demanded of Rhysand.

“How would I know? She lied to me.” Either toying with Amarantha was a joke to him—as much of a joke as impaling a head in Tamlin’s garden—or … it was just more court scheming.

I braced myself for the scrape of those talons against my mind, braced myself for the order I was sure she was to give next.

Still, I kept my lips sealed. I prayed Nesta had hired those scouts and guards—prayed she’d persuaded my father to take the precautions.

“If you’re inclined to play games, girl, then I suppose we can do this the fun way,” Amarantha said. She snapped her fingers at the Attor, who reached into the crowd and grabbed someone. Red hair glinted, and I jolted a step as the Attor yanked Lucien forward by the collar of his green tunic. No. No.

Lucien thrashed against the Attor but could do nothing against those needlelike nails as it forced him to his knees. The Attor smiled, releasing his tunic, but kept close.

Amarantha flicked a finger in Rhysand’s direction. The High Lord of the Night Court lifted a groomed brow. “Hold his mind,”

she commanded.

My heart dropped to the floor. Lucien went utterly still, sweat gleaming on his neck as Rhysand bowed his head to the queen and faced him.

Behind them, pressing to the front of the crowd, came four tall, red-haired High Fae. Toned and muscled, some of them looking like warriors about to set foot on a battlefield, some like pretty courtiers, they all stared at Lucien—and grinned. The four remaining sons of the High Lord of the Autumn Court.

“Her name, Emissary?” Amarantha asked of Lucien. But Lucien only glanced at Tamlin before closing his eyes and squaring his shoulders. Rhysand began smiling faintly, and I shuddered at the memory of what those invisible claws had felt

like as they gripped my mind. How easy it would have been for him to crush it.

Lucien’s brothers lurked on the edges of the crowd—no remorse, no fear on their handsome faces.

Amarantha sighed. “I thought you would have learned your lesson, Lucien. Though this time your silence will damn you as much as your tongue.” Lucien kept his eyes shut. Ready—he was ready for Rhysand to wipe out everything he was, to turn his mind, his self, into dust.

“Her name?” she asked Tamlin, who didn’t reply. His eyes were fixed on Lucien’s brothers, as if marking who was smiling the broadest.

Amarantha ran a nail down the arm of her throne. “I don’t suppose your handsome brothers know, Lucien,” she purred.

“If we did, Lady, we would be the first to tell you,” said the tallest. He was lean, well dressed, every inch of him a court-trained bastard. Probably the eldest, given the way even the ones who looked like born warriors stared at him with deference and calculation—and fear.

Amarantha gave him a considering smile and lifted her hand.

Rhysand cocked his head, his eyes narrowing slightly on Lucien.

Lucien stiffened. A groan slipped out of him, and—

“Feyre!” I shouted. “My name is Feyre.”

It was all I could do to keep from sinking to my knees as Amarantha nodded and Rhysand stepped back. He hadn’t even removed his hands from his pockets.

She must have allowed him more power than the others, then, if he could still inflict such harm while leashed to her. Or else his power before she’d stolen it had been … extraordinary, for this to be considered the basest remnants.

Lucien sagged on the ground, trembling. His brothers frowned

—the eldest going so far as to bare his teeth at me in a silent snarl. I ignored him.

“Feyre,” Amarantha said, testing my name, the taste of the two syllables on her tongue. “An old name—from our earlier dialects.

Well, Feyre,” she said. I could have wept with relief when she didn’t ask for my family name. “I promised you a riddle.”

Everything became thick and murky. Why did Tamlin do nothing, say nothing? What had Lucien been about to say before

he’d fled my cell?

“Solve this, Feyre, and you and your High Lord, and all his court, may immediately leave with my blessing. Let’s see if you are indeed clever enough to deserve one of our kind.” Her dark eyes shone, and I cleared my mind as best I could as she spoke.

There are those who seek me a lifetime but never we meet, And those I kiss but who trample me beneath ungrateful feet.

At times I seem to favor the clever and the fair, But I bless all those who are brave enough to dare.

By large, my ministrations are soft-handed and sweet, But scorned, I become a difficult beast to defeat.

For though each of my strikes lands a powerful blow, When I kill, I do it slow …

I blinked, and she repeated herself, smiling when she finished, smug as a cat. My mind was void, a blank mass of uselessness.

Could it be some sort of disease? My mother had died of typhus, and her cousin had died of malaria after going to Bharat … But none of those symptoms seemed to match the riddle. Maybe it was a person?

A ripple of laughter spread across those assembled behind us, the loudest from Lucien’s brothers. Rhysand was watching me, wreathed in night and smiling faintly.

The answer was so close—one little answer and we could all be free. Immediately, she’d said—as opposed to … wait, had the conditions of my trials been different from those of the riddle?

She’d emphasized immediately only when talking about solving the riddle. No, I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to solve this riddle. We could all be free. Free.

But I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t even come up with a possibility.

I’d be better off slitting my own throat and ending my suffering there, before she could rip me to shreds. I was a fool—a common human idiot. I looked to Tamlin. The gold in his eyes flickered, but his face betrayed nothing.

Image 44

“Think on it,” Amarantha said consolingly, and flicked a grin down at her ring—at the eye swiveling within. “When it comes to you, I’ll be waiting.”

I gazed at Tamlin even as I was pulled away to the dungeons, my vacant mind reeling.

As they locked me in my cell once more, I knew I was going to lose.

I spent two days in that cell, or at least I figured it was two days, based on the meal pattern I’d begun to work out. I ate the decent parts of the half-moldy food, and though I hoped for it, Lucien never came to see me. I knew better than to wish for Tamlin.

I had little to do other than ponder Amarantha’s riddle. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I dwelled on various kinds of poisons and venomous animals—and that yielded nothing beyond my growing sense of stupidity. Not to mention the nagging feeling that she might have wound up tricking me with this bargain when she’d emphasized immediately regarding the riddle. Maybe she meant she would not free us immediately after I finished her trials. That she could take however long she wanted.

No—no, I was just being paranoid. I was overthinking it. But the riddle could free us all—instantaneously. I had to solve it.

While I’d sworn not to think too long on what tasks awaited me, I didn’t doubt Amarantha’s imagination, and I often awoke sweating and panting from my restless dreams—dreams in which I was trapped within a crystal ring, forever silent and forced to witness their bloodthirsty, cruel world, cleaved from everything I’d ever loved. Amarantha had claimed there wouldn’t be enough left of me to play with if I failed a trial—and I prayed that she hadn’t lied. Better to be obliterated than to endure Jurian’s fate.

Still, fear like nothing I had ever known swallowed me whole when my cell door opened and the red-skinned guards told me that the full moon had arisen.

CHAPTER

36

The sounds of a teeming crowd reverberated against the passageway. My armed escort didn’t bother with drawn weapons as they tugged me forward. I wasn’t even shackled. Someone or something would catch me before I moved three feet and gut me where I stood.

The cacophony of laughter, shouting, and unearthly howls worsened when the hall opened into what had to be a massive arena. There had been no attempts to decorate the torch-lit cavern—and I couldn’t tell if it had been hewn from the rock or if it was formed by nature. The floor was slick and muddy, and I struggled to keep my footing as we walked.

But it was the enormous, riotous crowd that turned my insides cold as they stared at me. I couldn’t decipher what they were shouting, but I had a good-enough idea. Their cruel, ethereal faces and wide grins told me everything I needed to know. Not just lesser faeries but High Fae, too, their excitement making their faces almost as feral as their more unearthly brethren.

I was hauled toward a wooden platform erected above the crowd. Atop it sat Amarantha and Tamlin, and before it …

I did my best to keep my chin high as I beheld the exposed labyrinth of tunnels and trenches running along the floor. The crowd stood along the banks, blocking my view of what lay within as I was thrown to my knees before Amarantha’s platform. The half-frozen mud seeped into my pants.

I rose on trembling legs. Around the platform stood a group of six males, secluded from the main crowd. From their cold, beautiful faces, from that echo of power still about them, I knew they were the other High Lords of Prythian. I ignored Rhysand as soon as I noticed his feline smile, the corona of darkness around him.