A Court of Thorns and Roses

  My mouth stopped working.

  “Unless,” Amarantha went on, “you think it would be more appropriate to forfeit your life. After all: What’s the point? To survive only to lose him?” Her words were like poison. “Imagine all those years you were going to spend together … suddenly alone. Tragic, really. Though a few months ago, you hated our kind enough to butcher us—surely you’ll move on easily enough.” She patted her ring. “Jurian’s human lover did.”

  Still on his knees, Tamlin’s eyes turned so bright—defiant.

  “So,” Amarantha said, but I didn’t look at her. “What will it be, Feyre?”

  Kill him and save his court and my life, or kill myself and let them all live as Amarantha’s slaves, let her and the King of Hybern wage their final war against the human realm. There was no bargain to get out of this—no part of me to sell to avoid this choice.

  I stared at the ash dagger on that pillow. Alis had been right all those weeks ago: no human who came here ever walked out again. I was no exception. If I were smart, I would indeed stab my own heart before they could grab me. At least then I would die quickly—I wouldn’t endure the torture that surely awaited me, possibly a fate like Jurian’s. Alis had been right. But—

  Alis—Alis had said something … something to help me. A final part of the curse, a part they couldn’t tell me, a part that would aid me … And all she’d been able to do was tell me to listen. To listen to what I’d heard—as if I’d already learned everything I needed.

  I slowly faced Tamlin again. Memories flashed, one after another, blurs of color and words. Tamlin was High Lord of the Spring Court—what did that do to help me? The Great Rite was performed—no.

  He lied to me about everything—about why I’d been brought to the manor, about what was happening on his lands. The curse—he hadn’t been allowed to tell me the truth, but he hadn’t exactly pretended that everything was fine. No—he’d lied and explained as best he could and made it painfully obvious to me at every turn that something was very, very wrong.

  The Attor in the garden—as hidden from me as I was from it. But Tamlin had hidden me—he’d told me to stay put and then led the Attor right toward me, let me overhear them.

  He’d left the dining room doors open when he’d spoken with Lucien about—about the curse, even if I hadn’t realized it at the time. He’d spoken in public places. He’d wanted me to eavesdrop.

  Because he wanted me to know, to listen—because this knowledge … I ransacked each conversation, turning over words like stones. A part of the curse I hadn’t grasped, that they couldn’t explicitly tell me, but Tamlin had needed me to know …

  Milady makes no bargains that are not advantageous to her.

  She would never kill what she desired most—not when she wanted Tamlin as much as I did. But if I killed him … she either knew I couldn’t do it, or she was playing a very, very dangerous game.

  Conversation after conversation echoed in my memory, until I heard Lucien’s words, and everything froze. And that was when I knew.

  I couldn’t breathe, not as I replayed the memory, not as I recalled the conversation I’d overheard one day. Lucien and Tamlin in the dining room, the door wide open for all to hear—for me to hear.

  “For someone with a heart of stone, yours is certainly soft these days.”

  I looked at Tamlin, my eyes flicking to his chest as another memory flashed. The Attor in the garden, laughing.

  “Though you have a heart of stone, Tamlin,” the Attor said, “you certainly keep a host of fear inside it.”

  Amarantha would never risk me killing him—because she knew I couldn’t kill him.

  Not if his heart couldn’t be pierced by a blade. Not if his heart had been turned to stone.

  I scanned his face, searching for any glimmer of truth. There was only that bold rebellion within his gaze.

  Perhaps I was wrong—perhaps it was just a faerie turn of phrase. But all those times I’d held Tamlin … I’d never felt his heartbeat. I’d been blind to everything until it came back to smack me in the face, but not this time.

  That was how she controlled him and his magic. How she controlled all the High Lords, dominating and leashing them just as she kept Jurian’s soul tethered to that eye and bone.

  Trust no one, Alis had told me. But I trusted Tamlin—and more than that, I trusted myself. I trusted that I had heard correctly—I trusted that Tamlin had been smarter than Amarantha, I trusted that all I had sacrificed was not in vain.

  The entire room was silent, but my attention was upon only Tamlin. The revelation must have been clear on my face, for his breathing became a bit quicker, and he lifted his chin.

  I took a step toward him, then another. I was right. I had to be.

  I sucked in a breath as I grabbed the dagger off the outstretched pillow. I could be wrong—I could be painfully, tragically wrong.

  But there was a faint smile on Tamlin’s lips as I stood over him, ash dagger in hand.

  There was such a thing as Fate—because Fate had made sure I was there to eavesdrop when they’d spoken in private, because Fate had whispered to Tamlin that the cold, contrary girl he’d dragged to his home would be the one to break his spell, because Fate had kept me alive just to get to this point, just to see if I had been listening.

  And there he was—my High Lord, my beloved, kneeling before me.

  “I love you,” I said, and stabbed him.

  Chapter 44

  Tamlin cried out as my blade pierced his flesh, breaking bone. For a sickening moment, when his blood rushed onto my hand, I thought the ash dagger would go clean through him.

  But then there was a faint thud—and a stinging reverberation in my hand as the dagger struck something hard and unyielding. Tamlin lurched forward, his face going pale, and I yanked the dagger from his chest. As the blood drained away from the polished wood, I lifted the blade.

  Its tip had been nicked, turned inward on itself.

  Tamlin clutched his chest as he panted, the wound already healing. Rhysand, at the foot of the dais, grinned from ear to ear. Amarantha climbed to her feet.

  The faeries murmured to one another. I dropped the blade, sending it clattering across the red marble.

  Kill her now, I wanted to bark at Tamlin, but he didn’t move as he pushed his hand against his wound, blood dribbling out. Too slowly—he was healing too slowly. The mask didn’t fall off. Kill her now.

  “She won,” someone in the crowd said. “Free them,” another echoed.

  But Amarantha’s face blanched, her features contorting until she looked truly serpentine. “I’ll free them whenever I see fit. Feyre didn’t specify when I had to free them—just that I had to. At some point. Perhaps when you’re dead,” she finished with a hateful smile. “You assumed that when I said instantaneous freedom regarding the riddle, it applied to the trials, too, didn’t you? Foolish, stupid human.”

  I stepped back as she descended the steps of the dais. Her fingers curled into claws—Jurian’s eye was going wild within the ring, his pupil dilating and shrinking. “And you,” she hissed at me. “You.” Her teeth gleamed—turning sharp. “I’m going to kill you.”

  Someone cried out, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t even try to get out of the way as something far more violent than lightning struck me, and I crashed to the floor.

  “I’m going to make you pay for your insolence,” Amarantha snarled, and a scream ravaged my throat as pain like nothing I had known erupted through me.

  My very bones were shattering as my body rose and then slammed onto the hard floor, and I was crushed beneath another wave of torturous agony.

  “Admit you don’t really love him, and I’ll spare you,” Amarantha breathed, and through my fractured vision, I saw her prowl toward me. “Admit what a cowardly, lying, inconstant bit of human garbage you are.”

  I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t say that even if she splattered me across the ground.

  But I was being ripped apart from the inside out,
and I thrashed, unable to out-scream the pain.

  “Feyre!” someone roared. No, not someone—Rhysand.

  But Amarantha still neared. “You think you’re worthy of him? A High Lord? You think you deserve anything at all, human?” My back arched, and my ribs cracked, one by one.

  Rhysand yelled my name again—yelled it as though he cared. I blacked out, but she brought me back, ensuring that I felt everything, ensuring that I screamed every time a bone broke.

  “What are you but mud and bones and worm meat?” Amarantha raged. “What are you, compared to our kind, that you think you’re worthy of us?”

  Faeries began calling foul play, demanding Tamlin be released from the curse, calling her a cheating liar. Through the haze, I saw Rhysand crouching by Tamlin. Not to help him, but to grab the—

  “You are all pigs—all scheming, filthy pigs.”

  I sobbed between screams as her foot connected with my broken ribs. Again. And again. “Your mortal heart is nothing to us.”

  Then Rhysand was on his feet, my bloody knife in his hands. He launched himself at Amarantha, swift as a shadow, the ash dagger aimed at her throat.

  She lifted a hand—not even bothering to look—and he was blasted back by a wall of white light.

  But the pain paused for a second, long enough for me to see him hit the ground and rise again and lunge for her—with hands that now ended in talons. He slammed into the invisible wall Amarantha had raised around herself, and my pain flickered as she turned to him.

  “You traitorous piece of filth,” she seethed at Rhysand. “You’re just as bad as these human beasts.” One by one, as if a hand were shoving them in, his talons pushed back into his skin, leaving blood in their wake. He swore, low and vicious. “You were planning this all along.”

  Her magic sent him sprawling, and it then hurled into Rhysand again—so hard that his head cracked against the stones and the knife dropped from his splayed fingers. No one made a move to help him, and she struck him once more with her power. The red marble splintered where he hit it, spiderwebbing toward me. With wave after wave she hit him. Rhys groaned.

  “Stop,” I breathed, blood filling my mouth as I strained a hand to reach her feet. “Please.”

  Rhys’s arms buckled as he fought to rise, and blood dripped from his nose, splattering on the marble. His eyes met mine.

  The bond between us went taut. I flashed between my body and his, seeing myself through his eyes, bleeding and broken and sobbing.

  I snapped back into my own mind as Amarantha turned to me again. “Stop? Stop? Don’t pretend you care, human,” she crooned, and curled her finger. I arched my back, my spine straining to the point of cracking, and Rhysand bellowed my name as I lost my grip on the room.

  Then the memories began—a compilation of the worst moments of my life, a storybook of despair and darkness. The final page came, and I wept, not entirely feeling the agony of my body as I saw that young rabbit, bleeding out in that forest clearing, my knife through her throat. My first kill—the first life I’d taken.

  I’d been starving, desperate. Yet afterward, once my family had devoured it, I had crept back into the woods and wept for hours, knowing a line had been crossed, my soul stained.

  “Say that you don’t love him!” Amarantha shrieked, and the blood on my hands became the blood of that rabbit—became the blood of what I had lost.

  But I wouldn’t say it. Because loving Tamlin was the only thing I had left, the only thing I couldn’t sacrifice.

  A path cleared through my red-and-black vision. I found Tamlin’s eyes—wide as he crawled toward Amarantha, watching me die, and unable to save me while his wound slowly healed, while she still gripped his power.

  Amarantha had never intended for me to live, never intended to let him go.

  “Amarantha, stop this,” Tamlin begged at her feet as he clutched the gaping wound in his chest. “Stop. I’m sorry—I’m sorry for what I said about Clythia all those years ago. Please.”

  Amarantha ignored him, but I couldn’t look away. Tamlin’s eyes were so green—green like the meadows of his estate. A shade that washed away the memories flooding through me, that pushed aside the evil breaking me apart bone by bone. I screamed again as my kneecaps strained, threatening to crack in two, but I saw that enchanted forest, saw that afternoon we’d lain in the grass, saw that morning we’d watched the sunrise, when for a moment—just one moment—I’d known true happiness.

  “Say that you don’t truly love him,” Amarantha spat, and my body twisted, breaking bit by bit. “Admit to your inconstant heart.”

  “Amarantha, please,” Tamlin moaned, his blood spilling onto the floor. “I’ll do anything.”

  “I’ll deal with you later,” she snarled at him, and sent me falling into a fiery pit of pain.

  I would never say it—never let her hear that, even if she killed me. And if it was to be my downfall, so be it. If it would be the weakness that would break me, I would embrace it with all my heart. If this was—

  For though each of my strikes lands a powerful blow,

  When I kill, I do it slow …

  That’s what these three months had been—a slow, horrible death. What I felt for Tamlin was the cause of this. There was no cure—not pain, or absence, or happiness.

  But scorned, I become a difficult beast to defeat.

  She could torture me all she liked, but it would never destroy what I felt for him. It would never make Tamlin want her—never ease the sting of his rejection.

  The world became dark at the borders of my vision, taking the edge off the pain.

  But I bless all those who are brave enough to dare.

  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.”

  Tamlin’s eyes went wide before something forever cracked in my spine.

  Chapter 45

  I was far away but still seeing—seeing through eyes that weren’t mine, eyes attached to a person who slowly rose from his position on a cracked, bloodied floor.

  Amarantha’s face slackened. There my body was, prostrate on the ground, my head snapped to one side at a horribly wrong angle. A flash of red hair in the crowd. Lucien.

  Tears shone in Lucien’s remaining eye as he raised his hands and removed the fox mask.

  The brutally scarred face beneath was still handsome—his features sharp and elegant. But my host was looking at Tamlin now, who slowly faced my dead body.

  Tamlin’s still-masked face twisted into something truly lupine as he raised his eyes to the queen and snarled. Fangs lengthened.

  Amarantha backed away—away from my corpse. She only whispered “Please” before golden light exploded.

  The queen was blasted back, thrown against the far wall, and Tamlin let out a roar that shook the mountain as he launched himself at her. He shifted into his beast form faster than I could see—fur and claws and pound upon pound of lethal muscle.

  She had no sooner hit the wall than he gripped her by the neck, and the stones cracked as he shoved her against it with a clawed paw.

  She thrashed but could do nothing against the brutal onslaught of Tamlin’s beast. Blood ran down his furred arm from where she scratched.

  The Attor and the guards rushed for the queen, but several faeries and High Fae, their masks clattering to the ground, jumped into their path, tackling them. Amarantha screeched, kicking at Tamlin, lashing at him with her dark magic, but a wall of gold encompas
sed his fur like a second skin. She couldn’t touch him.

  “Tam!” Lucien cried over the chaos.

  A sword hurtled through the air, a shooting star of steel.

  Tamlin caught it in a massive paw. Amarantha’s scream was cut short as he drove the sword through her head and into the stone beneath.

  And then closed his powerful jaws around her throat—and ripped it out.

  Silence fell.

  It wasn’t until I was again staring down at my own broken body that I realized whose eyes I’d been seeing through. But Rhysand didn’t come any closer to my corpse, not as rushing paws—then a flash of light, then footsteps—filled the air. The beast was already gone.

  Amarantha’s blood had vanished from his face, his tunic, as Tamlin slammed to his knees.

  He scooped up my limp, broken body, cradling me to his chest. He hadn’t removed his mask, but I saw the tears that fell onto my filthy tunic, and I heard the shuddering sobs that broke from him as he rocked me, stroking my hair.

  “No,” someone breathed—Lucien, his sword dangling from his hand. Indeed, there were many High Fae and faeries who watched with damp eyes as Tamlin held me.

  I wanted to get to Tamlin. I wanted to touch him, to beg for his forgiveness for what I’d done, for the other bodies on the floor, but I was so far away.

  Someone appeared beside Lucien—a tall, handsome brown-haired man with a face similar to his own. Lucien didn’t look at his father, though he stiffened as the High Lord of the Autumn Court approached Tamlin and extended a clenched hand to him.

  Tamlin glanced up only when the High Lord opened his fingers and tipped over his hand. A glittering spark fell upon me. It flared and vanished as it touched my chest.

  Two more figures approached—both handsome and young. Through my host’s eyes, I knew them instantly. The brown-skinned one on the left wore a tunic of blue and green, and atop his white-blond head was a garland of roses—the High Lord of the Summer Court. His pale-skinned companion, clad in colors of white and gray, possessed a crown of shimmering ice. The High Lord of the Winter Court.