A Court of Thorns and Roses

Once it had been second nature to savor the contrast of new grass against dark, tilled soil, or an amethyst brooch nestled in folds of emerald silk; once I’d dreamed and breathed and thought in color and light and shape. Sometimes I would even indulge in envisioning a day when my sisters were married and it was only me and Father, with enough food to go around, enough money to buy some paint, and enough time to put those colors and shapes down on paper and canvas or the cottage walls.

The few stories I’d heard had been wrong—or five hundred years of separation had muddled them. Yes, I was still prey, born weak and useless compared to them, but this place was…peaceful. Calm. Unless that was an illusion, too, and the loophole in the Treaty was a lie—a trick to set me at ease before they destroyed me. The High Fae liked to play with their food.

A half-wild beast, Nesta had called me. But compared to him, compared to this place, compared to the elegant, easy way they held their goblets, the way the golden-haired one had called me human…we were all half-wild beasts to the High Fae. Even if they were the ones who could don fur and claws.

I swallowed hard. Andras had a place here, and friends here—he hadn’t been just some nameless, faceless faerie. No doubt he was more missed than I was. “I’m…sorry,” I said—and meant it. “I didn’t know what—what he meant to you all.”

“And there’s no one who can help him at all?”

“He would probably shred them for disobeying his order to stay away.”

A brush of ice slithered across my nape. “He would be that brutal?”

Lucien studied the wine in his goblet. “You don’t hold on to power by being everyone’s friend. And among the faeries, lesser and High Fae alike, a firm hand is needed. We’re too powerful, and too bored with immortality, to be checked by anything else.”

It seemed like a cold, lonely position to have, especially when you didn’t particularly want it. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much.

I truly had nothing to fret about, save for the fact that they’d probably forget me sooner than expected. I couldn’t entirely blame them. My vow fulfilled, my task complete—what was left for me?

The firelight danced on his mask, warming the gold, setting the emeralds glinting. Such color and variation—color I didn’t know the names of, colors I wanted to catalog and weave together. Colors I had no reason not to explore now.

“Paint,” I said, barely more than a breath. He cocked his head and I swallowed, squaring my shoulders. “If—if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like some paint, and brushes.”

I studied the faerie’s face—so unearthly, so inhuman. Who could be so cruel to him like that?

“Feyre,” Tamlin said, squeezing my shoulder. I brushed the faerie’s hair behind his long, pointed ear, wishing I’d known his name, and let him go.

He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wouldn’t reply. Just as I was about to move ahead, he spoke. “Tam told me that your first shot was to save the Suriel’s life. Not your own.”

“It seemed like the right thing to do.”

The look he gave me was more contemplative than any he’d given me before. “I know far too many High Fae and lesser faeries who wouldn’t have seen it that way—or bothered.”

Some had been painted through eyes like mine, artists who saw in colors and shapes I understood. Some showcased colors I had not considered; these had a bend to the world that told me a different set of eyes had painted them. A portal into the mind of a creature so unlike me, and yet…and yet I looked at its work and understood, and felt, and cared.

“I never knew,” Tamlin said from behind me, “that humans were capable of…” He trailed off as I turned, the hand I’d put on my throat sliding down to my chest, where my heart roared with a fierce sort of joy and grief and overwhelming humility—humility before that magnificent art.

“My mother—she loved my father deeply. Too deeply, but they were mated, and…even if she saw what a tyrant he was, she wouldn’t say an ill word against him. I never expected—never wanted—my father’s title. My brothers would have never let me live to adolescence if they had suspected that I did. So the moment I was old enough, I joined my father’s war-band and trained so that I might someday serve my father, or whichever of my brothers inherited his title.” He flexed his hands, as if imagining the claws beneath. “I’d realized from an early age that fighting and killing were about the only things I was good at.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

He gave me a wry smile. “Oh, I can play a mean fiddle, but High Lords’ sons don’t become traveling minstrels.”

“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 possible.” I swallowed, lowering my hand. “Until now.”

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.

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.

“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. “[…] I had to listen to [Father and Elain] 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.”

“She was the King of Hybern’s most lethal general […] 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.”

“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 had damned them all.

“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.”

[…]

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 was dying. I’d known it for some time now. And Lucien had underestimated my abilities in the past—had never quite grasped my limitations as a human. He’d sent me to hunt the Suriel with a few knives and a bow. He’d even admitted to hesitating that day, when I had screamed for help. And he might not even know how bad off I was. Might not understand the gravity of an infection like this. He might come a day, an hour, a minute too late.

Rhysand’s moon-white skin began to darken into nothing but shadow.

“Wait.”

“Did—did Tamlin see it?”

Lucien nodded. “Rhys was only doing it to get a rise out of him.”

“Did it work?” I still couldn’t look Lucien in the face. I knew, at least, that I hadn’t been violated beyond touching my sides. The paint told me that much.

“No,” Lucien said, and I smiled grimly.

“Wait,” I said. “Is—is Tamlin all right? I mean…I mean that spell Amarantha has him under to make him so silent…”

“There’s no spell. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Tamlin is keeping quiet to avoid telling Amarantha which form of your torment affects him the most?”

No, it hadn’t.

Rhysand didn’t deign to acknowledge any of them, his shoulders still loose, his footsteps unhurried. I wondered whether anyone but he and the High Lord of the Summer Court knew that the killing had been a mercy. I was willing to bet that there had been others involved in that escape plan, perhaps even the High Lord of the Summer Court himself.

But maybe keeping those secrets had only been done in aid of whatever games Rhysand liked to play. Maybe sparing that faerie male by killing him swiftly, rather than shattering his mind and leaving him a drooling husk, had been another calculated move, too.

I wanted to fade into it, wanted the light of that sun to burn me away, to fill me with such joy that I would become a ray of sunshine myself. This wasn’t music to dance to—it was music to worship, music to fill in the gaps of my soul, to bring me to a place where there was no pain.

I didn’t realize I was weeping until the wet warmth of a tear splashed upon my arm. But even then I clung to the music, gripping it like a ledge that kept me from falling. I hadn’t realized how badly I didn’t want to tumble into that deep dark—how much I wanted to stay here among the clouds and color and light.

“Why do you think I’m doing this?” He waved a hand to me.

“Because you’re a monster.”

He laughed. “True, but I’m also a pragmatist. Working Tamlin into a senseless fury is the best weapon we have against her. Seeing you enter into a fool’s bargain with Amarantha was one thing, but when Tamlin saw my tattoo on your arm…Oh, you should have been born with my abilities, if only to have felt the rage that seeped from him.”

For so long, I had run from it. But opening myself to him, to my sisters—that had been a test of bravery as harrowing as any of my trials.

“Say it, you vile beast,” Amarantha hissed. She might have lied her way out of our bargain, but she’d sworn differently with the riddle—instantaneous freedom, regardless of her will.

Blood filled my mouth, warm as it dribbled out between my lips. I gazed at Tamlin’s masked face one last time.

“Love,” I breathed, the world crumbling into a blackness with no end. A pause in Amarantha’s magic. “The answer to the riddle…,” I got out, choking on my own blood, “is…love.”

“Be glad of your human heart, Feyre. Pity those who don’t feel anything at all.”