Feyre spoke immediately without any room to trust me, her emotional fear for her family’s safety gutting her like a fish freshly hauled along a slick boat deck. And at once, I was the culprit holding the knife.

“Don’t invade,” she said, her voice coming in great, disheveled breaths. “Don’t invade - please.”

The level to which she was prepared to beg me to spare her and her sisters - already was begging me - tightened my throat with fear.

“You truly think I’m a monster, even after everything.”

A statement, not a question. But Feyre delivered the answer that flayed me alive nonetheless.

“Please,” and her voice dropped even lower. “They’re defenseless, they won’t stand a chance-”

“I’m not going to invade the mortal lands.”

I cut her off, unable to bear another word off her tongue as the disappointment crashed over me.

Three months under that rock together.

Three months she saw me torture her cruelly, parade her before her worst enemies, sneer at her love, and threaten her life if she did not commit to a bargain she would not have needed to survive in the end.

Had I really been so foolish to assume that pain would be erased by ten minutes of screaming for her on the throne room floor as Amarantha’s power - my power - knocked me down; as I bled for her and sobbed when I pulled her into myself to keep from hearing that awful sound of bone snapping from ringing in my ears...

Feyre’s sense of weightlessness as her mind started to dizzy and she felt the world let go so she could fall into fear and beggary at my feet was my condemnation.

“Put your damn shield up,” I growled, not even caring that it was harsh. I didn’t want to feel one more damned shred of proof from her that I deserved this villainy in spite of my miserable, continued hope. Not right now, at least. Not in front of her.

But all Feyre could think about were her sisters living unprotected and powerless in that mansion beyond the wall, how tired and weak she felt to do anything about it.

She still didn’t see herself as a soldier, as a weapon, as powerful or sleek as the billowing night - the way I saw her. That needed to change - immediately.

“Shield. Now.”

My voice was firm, halting even.

And it worked.

A momentary glimpse into her head of her family needing her to save them one more time and then... I saw and felt nothing from her. Her shields were replaced.

Good girl.

“Did you think it would end with Amarantha?” I asked.

“Tamlin hasn’t said...”

Of course he hadn’t said anything. I cursed inwardly and prepared to ready Feyre as one would a soldier on the battlefield staring the eye of death in the face.

“The King of Hybern has been planning his campaign to reclaim the world south of the wall for over a hundred years,” I said. “Amarantha was an experiment - a forty-nine-year test, to see how easily and how long a territory might fall and be controlled by one of his commanders.”

And it had given him all the bright, shining answers he’d longed for. In our blind, trusting ignorance, we’d fallen like dominoes, pawns across the chess table replaced by dirt and blood rather than queens.

“Will he attack Prythian first?”

I pointed to the map between us on that cold stone flat and Feyre followed my gesture, her fingers fidgeting a bit on the ends of the display.

“Prythian is all that stands between the King of Hybern and the continent. He wants to reclaim the human lands there - perhaps seize the faeries lands, too. If anyone is to intercept his conquering fleet before it reaches the continent, it would be us.”

Feyre didn’t wait even a moment when I’d finished before she passed to one of the chairs a few feet away and sunk down. Her knees shook horribly to the point that I was slightly surprised she’d managed to walk the short distance her trip took.

But the first lesson any soldier learns on the battlefield is that even when all seems lost and as dark and treacherous as it might go, there is always room for an ensuing blow.

And it is best to learn that lesson swiftly.

“He will seek to remove Prythian from his way swiftly and thoroughly. And shatter the wall at some point in the process.” From the chair, even with her shields perfectly in tact, I felt Feyre’s blood run cold. “There are already holes in it, though mercifully small enough to make it difficult to swiftly pass his armies through. He’ll want to bring the whole thing down - and likely use the ensuing panic to his advantage.”

Feyre wouldn’t look me in the eye when she spoke, which she did with a shaking stuttering breath I didn’t think she quite registered. She was lost inside that head realizing the reality at hand - even unto herself.

“When - when is he going to attack?”

“That is the question and why I brought you here.”

At that, Feyre did look up.

“I don’t know when or where he plans to attack Prythian. I don’t know who his allies here might be.”

“He’d have allies here?”

Genuine shock, but beneath it all, Feyre’s curiosity was a treasure that continued to pump a lifeblood into my hope that my plans were achievable, even if torn from the frays of lunacy.

“Cowards,” I said, nodding in reply, “who would bow and join him, rather than fight his armies again.”

Just as they had when Amarantha took power and half my wretched court had joined her.

My own court lost... forever damned on the pages of history to terror and torment...

“Did...” Feyre looked at me thoughtfully, although unsure whether this question was allowed. “Did you fight in the War?”

Such an honest question... and perhaps the first personal question she’d bothered to ask me. For a moment, I was struck speechless by it, the idea that she cared even that much to learn some trivial fact about my past amidst a backdrop of increasing loathing for me.

Or perhaps it was merely her curiosity getting the best of her again.

Either way, I would have that personal invasion at once. Let her take whatever pieces great or small of me that she would have.

I nodded and then stepped to the adjoining chair where I sat, removing my general’s helmet in the process so she could hear my story for what it really was. Back then, I was just a soldier too, like she was now.

“I was young - by our standards, at least. But my father had sent aid to the mortal-faeries alliance on the continent, and I convinced him to let me take a legion of our soldiers. I was stationed in the south, right where the fighting was thickest. The slaughter was...”

On some distant instinct of my past possibly, I stared at the map on the wall and traced the route I’d taken that day, away from the home I’d grown up in, towards the pin that still marked the southern city I’d fought in. Images - most of them violent and horrible and something worse than my nightmares flashed before my eyes. It was an effort not to shudder.

So many lost...

“I have no interest in ever seeing full-scale slaughter like that again.”

Feyre’s silence, her willingness to both learn and listen, was what reeled me back in and calmed the carnage inside me enough to return to simpler truths rooted in the here and now.

My mate, and I chuckled darkly to myself, who even without meaning to could temper my restless, wandering spirit with nothing more than her simple agreement to hear my pain and not flinch.

“But I don’t think the King of Hybern will strike that way,” I continued, “not at first. He’s too smart to waste his forces here, to give the continent time to rally while we fight him. If he makes his move to destroy Prythian and the wall, it’ll be through stealth and trickery. To weaken us. Amarantha was the first part of that plan. We now have several untested High Lords, broken courts with High Priestesses angling for control like wolves around a carcass, and a people who have realized how powerless they might truly be.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Feyre’s voice had grown very, very thin.

I schooled my features, into as much neutrality as I could beneath the cold casting my skin into stone as I stared at her and finally crested the peaks of what truths I needed to get out of her.

“I am telling you for two reasons. One, you’re... close to Tamlin.” That sentence alone tasted like ash in my mouth. “He has men - but he also has long-existing ties to Hybern-”

“He’d never help the king-”

I held up a hand, both out of further disappointment she thought I’d assume he would and because there was a very great chance she was wrong regardless of what I thought.

“I want to know if Tamlin is willing to fight with us. If he can use those connections to our advantage. As he and I have strained relations, you have the pleasure of being the go-between.”

“He doesn’t inform me of those things.”

“Perhaps it’s time he did. Perhaps it’s time you insisted.”

Our gazes went to the map hanging on the wall - the little village marked where Feyre’s sisters sat in dangerous territory waiting...

Feyre offered me no further objection. Some small seed of desperate hope it was that she would approach her once betrothed. I had confidence she would at least try.

“What is your other reason?”

I looked Feyre over, looked at how strong she was beneath her skin that had already lost a tinge of the pale color it carried from nights of throwing everything up. She was powerful. So, so very powerful.

“You have a skill set that I need. Rumor has it you caught a Suriel.”

Feyre’s lips twitched and I had the distinct impression she wished to roll her eyes, shrug off the observation. “It wasn’t that hard.”

“I’ve tried and failed. Twice. But that’s a discussion for another day. I saw you trap the Middengard Wyrm like a rabbit,” and look damned fierce and brave and beautiful doing it, I wanted to add, enough to make me feel - I shook the memory off. Not now.

“I need you to help me. To use those skills of yours to track down what I need.”

“What do you need? Whatever was tied to my reading and shielding, I’m guessing?”

I could have told her then. About the War. About how it had ended and who had done it, what a mess was left in its wake that might very well ruin us all still.

About the lost magical objects causing uprising and mayhem all across Prythian that nearly always resulted in the death of more fae - my fae.

But...

She’s not your ma t e, she’s not your anything.

My mind twisted away longing for those caves of darkness and despair where I had only shadows for friends.

“You’ll learn of that later,” I said simply and Feyre didn’t protest, seeming used to my vagueness by now. But she was on to the next argument, the next way out.

“There have to be at least a dozen other hunters more experienced and skilled-”

“Maybe there are. But you’re the only one I trust.”

Feyre blinked, momentarily stunned I would trust her. Truly, I could see she didn’t want to believe it was real that I would feel that for her. Again I watched three months of lost time burn behind my eyes.

“I could betray you,” she said, slowly and addled with frustration, “whenever I feel like it.”

“You could. But you won’t.” And I believed it. Word for word. Despite her hatred for me. She was too smart to let the world burn over petty differences and personal sins. “And then there’s the matter of your powers.”

Feyre glowered at once, a whole new form of anger. “I don’t have any powers.”

“Don’t you? The strength, the speed... If I didn’t know better, I’d say you and Tamlin were doing a very good job of pretending you’re normal. That the powers you’re displaying aren’t usually the first indications among our kind that a High Lord’s son might become his Heir.”

“I’m not a High Lord.”

Fact in her mind, not opinion.

But a lie nonetheless.

A greedy, selfish kind of joy rolled through me as visions took shape, visions I’d had planted there for weeks since I’d seen her on that balcony and felt the bond between us snap me in two. The depth of the roots those images had taken in my mind were toxic and alluring, one of the few that once I allowed myself the immeasurable pleasure of birthing them, I could hardly tear myself away.

Feyre kneeling on the dais, head bowed low, never in submission, but in preparedness for the glory and majesty to come...

“No, but you were given life by all seven of us. Your very essence is tied to us, born of us. What if we gave you more than we expected?”

Her dress a sweeping, stunning drapery clinging to her skin before fanning out behind her in sworls of shadow and smoke, power dripping from her pores...

“What if you could stand against us - hold your own, a High Lady?”

The blue of her eyes sparkling like diamonds swept across the heavens, none above her to crush her down ever again as the crown is placed upon her head and she swears the words that bind her to her court forever... a High Lady among us.

“There are no High Ladies,” Feyre says at once, but too late. I see her now, even sitting in the chair next to me, I already see the future she could have if she wanted it, willed it with the blood gifted to her.

“We’ll talk about that later, too,” I said, shaking my head to dismiss the ridiculous notion she was resigned to her present state, never to be lifted up. “But yes, Feyre - there can be High Ladies. And perhaps you aren’t one of them, but...”

The crown would touch her head and unending, triumphant Night would gleam from her hair, her skin, her every piece of soul she possessed as I lifted her up hand to hand and proclaimed her sacred and eternal for the entire world to see.

My mate.

My everything from once ‘not anything .’

To me and Prythian both. The savior who bound us all together with infinite power and existence. The key not just to our surviving, but to our living as well.

“What if you were something similar? What if you were able to wield the power of seven High Lords at once? What if you could blend into darkness, or shape-shift, or freeze over an entire room - an entire army?”

Feyre did not utter a single word, but I could see it in her eyes, that creeping chill that took hold in her heart and whispered the possibilities to which she might reply with some small flicker of honest desire.

Even just that brief promise, it was radiant to behold.

“Do you understand what that might mean in an oncoming war? Do you understand how it might destroy you if you don’t learn to control it?”

“One, stop asking so many rhetorical questions,” Feyre said, jerking her out of her quiet contemplation. “Two, we don’t know if I do have these powers-”

“You do. But you need to start mastering them. To learn what you inherited from us.”

“And I suppose you’re the one to teach me, too? Reading and shielding aren’t enough?”

“While you hunt with me for what I need, yes.”

She shook her head equal parts amused and affronted, but I was unabashed. Work with me. Use me. Save me - and Prythian. I’d waited three very long months to offer her that place.

And of course, it all came crashing back to this one horrifying mentality of hers that would plague me to the ends of the earth if it didn’t kill me first.

“Tamlin won’t allow it.”

“Tamlin isn’t your keeper, and you know it.”

“I’m in his subject, and he is my High Lord-”

“You are no one’s subject.”

Power rippled off my body in thick, black shadows that flashed what I knew were the threat of wings at my back. I hadn’t shown them to her since I fled the mountain, but when it came to Tamlin and his death grip over Feyre’s free will, it was hard not to... break hold completely.

“I will say this once - and only once,” I said with a deadly purr meant just as much for that fool who caged my mate just as much as I did for Feyre who I left behind at her seat while I stalked to that map on the wall. “You can be a pawn, be someone’s reward, and spend the rest of your immortal life bowing and scraping and pretending you’re less than him, than Ianthe, than any of us. If you want to pick that road, then fine. A shame, but it’s your choice.”

It was more than a shame really, but no one gave Feyre the option of doing anything but that, so rather than be accused of doing the same to her - shoving her into one type of person even if my disdain was obvious for the alternative - I gave her the freedom to choose regardless of what it meant for me.

I had to.

And it was threatening to kill me to do it.

“But I know you - more than you realize, I think.” Cauldron, so much more.

A flash of hands in a wooded patch, in a dimly lit room smudged with paint, or chasing fire on a dark night in Spring all flashed behind my eyes.

The huntress.

The artist.

The adventurer.

All of these magnificent things she’d lost.

“And I don’t believe for one damn minute that you’re remotely fine with being a pretty trophy for someone who sat on his ass for nearly fifty years, then sat on his ass while you were shredded apart-”

“Stop it-”

“Or you’ve got another choice. You can master whatever powers we gave to you, and make it count. You can play a role in this war. Because war is coming one way or another, and do not try to delude yourself that any of the Fae will give a shit about your family across the wall when our whole territory is likely to become a charnel house.

“You want to save the mortal realm?” I turned to find Feyre staring at the map, right at that pin that damned her family to hell. “Then become someone Prythian listens to. Become vital. Become a weapon. Because there might be a day, Feyre, when only you stand between the King of Hybern and your human family. And you do not want to be unprepared.”

She was deadly still. Preternaturally quiet.

But inside, I could hear her body rage, her breath come to her out of the barest necessity.

“Think it over. Take the week. Ask Tamlin, if it’ll make you sleep better. See what charming Ianthe says about it. But it’s your choice to make - no one else’s.”

It wasn’t even hard to say.

For I was done playing games.

---

I didn’t see Feyre for the rest of the week. Made it a point not to.

Not until the morning before her week was up and I would have to take her back. The anxiety over that departure roiled through my gut with disturbing levels of destruction.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d soon be entirely unhinged and that was a risk I couldn’t take.

I’d offered her a partnership, something I hoped she would consider neutral middle ground where we could come together, eventually without the bargain forcing us to, and put our considerable powers together.

Tamlin included.

There was no such thing as forgiveness between him and I. There never would be. But we had one thing in common that made an alliance not only plausible, but imperative: we both loved Feyre, dearly and possibly to the point of death.

Where there was blood and feuding between us stood a war ripping the fabric of our mutual hatred for one another to pieces. I always knew that Feyre would refuse to work with me alone, so I asked a great burden of her, one more to rest atop the pile I placed upon her shoulders the second I met her on Calanmai.

Fill the gap between her great love and myself, the one left in place of our feud that war would wipe out.

I’d asked her to think about it, to take the week alone with her work and her thoughts. I wasn’t going to disturb that or allow further fuel to be added to the fire that might incline her towards refusing.

Even after I took her back...

Even after I took her back, there was an overwhelming chance she would still say no, that the scars between us were too insurmountable to heal and I would be more vulnerable than I wanted to be.

But I had to try.

So I let her be and threw myself into my work in the process.

The week passed by sluggishly. I left Mor to confines of the palace lest Feyre call for company; I could have heard her call for me even from another court if she’d tugged hard enough, though I sincerely doubted at every moment that she would ever willingly want for my company.

But Feyre never called and her nightmares never consumed her so horribly that she didn’t wake of her own accord and soothe herself back to sleep.

It wasn’t until that morning before she was to leave that I finally saw her again. Always before she took up her place at her study table, I left her day’s work without lingering long enough for her to catch me.

“Azriel would want to know that,” Mor said, lounging on the sofa that sat lovingly in the cool breeze floating inside from the wide open balcony over which I paced.

That scent of her - Feyre - tickled over my nose. A sharp cut of grass and pine with a hint of acrylic lurking just behind it, likely from her many paints long ago, hung loosely in the air, but she might as well have been standing inches in front of me, the scent was that potent to my blood.

Yes, Azriel would want to know. About Keir. About the murmurings in the Hewn City, the whispers of secrets and betrayals. About all of it.

Azriel who knew everything including what I last ate for dinner and what time I woke in the morning. My brother knew everything and with good reason to.

But right now with war rising up on one side and my mate decaying on the other, I didn’t care one damn bit about Azriel.

“Azriel can go to hell,” I said with a bite cutting my words. Feyre was leaving soon. “He likely already knows, anyway.”

“We played games the last time,” Mor replied, trying to keep a level calm. She knew where my agitations came from on both ends. “And we lost. Badly. We’re not going to do that again.”

“You should be working. I gave you control for a reason, you know.”

I didn’t hear Morrigan say anything and realized as Feyre’s scent picked up that my cousin had spotted her. I wanted to look at Feyre and feel hope - just for once, some inkling that it was okay. But Feyre stared at me with her own skepticism and doubt. “Say what it is you came here to say, Mor.”

Morrigan offered none of her usual optimism for me. Just that cool, queenly address that won her allegiances in every court and blood on every battlefield the world over.

“There was another attack - at a temple in Cesere. Almost every priestess slain, the trove looted.”

My blood turned to oil within my veins, Mor’s words the match that would light them on fire. And when I demanded answers of her, the lone word passing my lips was no mere ember, but a towering pillar of smoke and fire and destruction burning towards the skies.

“Who.”

“We don’t know,” Mor answered without leveling. “Same tracks as last time: small group, bodies that showed signs of wounds from large blades, and no trace of where the came from and how they disappeared. No survivors. The bodies weren’t even found until a day later, when a group of pilgrims came by.”

All I heard before the darkness took hold was Feyre’s cracked squeak of shock and revulsion.

Hybern.

Hybern had done this. He hadn’t even taken prisoners or hostages. Nothing but unending carnage in his quest to win the world. He’d already done it several times over, hopping from temple to temple and not just in the time since Amarantha’s demise. When I’d come home from her court, Azriel had given me a list a mile long of different temples and holy cities that had been burned, hidden caves and islands trashed that no man nor fae would ever have found or dared disturb excepting a fearless, limitless shadowsinger and a bloodthirsty madman from the east.

For several long moments, I was engulfed in the rich black of Night, the darkness that shreds and pains, before the skin at my back tore painlessly in two clean slits and for the first time all week, I gave form to those great membranous wings that bore me across the sky. And it felt like some missing piece of the puzzle had come back to me even if other pieces were missing. The wings grounded me into the earth with purpose. I took one look off that balcony and knew what I needed, needed in a way nothing and no one could ever give me.

“What did Azriel have to say about it?” I asked knowing that he was likely the one who delivered the news in the first place.

“He’s pissed,” Mor said while Feyre sat silently by listening. I was glad she was here for this, to hear evidence give weight to the arguments I’d lain at her feet earlier this week. “Cassian even more so - he’s convinced it must be one of the rogue Illyrian war-bands, intent on winning new territory.”

“It’s something to consider,” I said, even if it wasn’t entirely true. “Some of the Illyrian clans gleefully bowed to Amarantha during those years. Trying to expand their borders could be their way of seeing how far they can push me and get away with it.”

Mor stood and cast an apologetic look at Feyre before turning to me. “Cassian and Az are waiting - they’re waiting in the usual spot for your orders.” I watched the clouds roll by the mountain peaks in great thunderous heads, wind chasing them on and I too longed to hunt them. Needed it. “Winnowing in would be easier,” Mor concluded, tailing my gaze.

“Tell the pricks I’ll be there in a few hours,” I said.

Mor didn’t bother arguing. My cousin vanished and I knew I’d find her waiting for the three of us in Velaris this evening when we got back from Cesere’s ruins and possibly the Illyrian mountains too if it was in fact needed as Cassian suspected.

While I knew Hybern was behind the temple, the Illyrians had been restless.

“How does that... vanishing work?”

Feyre’s soft voice was full of that wondrous curiosity again I so loved to hear. My soul quieted, but I knew one look at her and I might shatter from the thought of tomorrow promised in her eyes.

“Winnowing?” I said, finding the words came easily to me. “Think of it as... two different points on a piece of cloth. One point is your current place in the world. The other one across the cloth is where you want to go. Winnowing... it’s like folding that cloth so the two spots align. The magic does the folding - and all we do is take a step to get from one place to another. Sometimes it’s a long step, and you can feel the dark fabric of the world as you pass through it. A shorter step, let’s say from one end of the room to the other, would barely register. It’s a rare gift, and a helpful one. Though only the stronger Fae can do it. The more powerful you are, the farther you can jump between places in one go.”

And then, despite the technicalities and the anxiety threading between us, despite everything, Feyre offered me that endless, brilliant compassion she served so freely to any and all who came to her, a rare gem that I treasured in that shattering moment of dismay.

“I’m sorry about the temple,” she said gently, “and the priestesses.”

When I turned around to look at her, there was no distaste, no fight. Only a shared understanding of loss and something that was broken.

“Plenty more people are going to die soon enough, anyway,” I said.

“What are... What are Illyrian war-bands?”

My outright frustration with the pricks of my youth masked my amusement at how she tried to distract me from pain, almost as though she...

“Arrogant bastards, that’s what.” My wings flexed rigidly behind me in the sunlight as though taking my reply as a personal offense against their heritage. “They’re a warrior-race within my lands. And general pains in my ass.”

“Some of them supported Amarantha?”

“Some. But me and mine have enjoyed ourselves hunting them down these past few months. And ending them.”

And we had. It was enough to keep Azriel and Cassian off the real scent of war coming and it provided a welcome distraction for me while the three of us took care of unruly problems within those cursed mountains that needed dealing with anyway.

“That’s why you stayed away - you were busy with that?”

Part of me wanted to read into that, to dare wish she asked because she liked the idea that I was forced away from her rather than chose it, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Tomorrow, though... Tomorrow, I would be forced away from her whether I liked it or not.

I was busy staying away from you lest I drown and never come back .

“I was busy with many things.”

I didn’t say goodbye before I plunged myself off that ledge and flew through the thick of the oncoming storm to join my brothers in the cold of the Illyrian Steppes.

---

The temple had been a disaster. Enough that I didn’t indulge Azriel and Cassian on a trip to hunt down potential war-bands on our flight back to camp.

We landed in the middle of the night as storm clouds settled over the mountains peppering them with fresh layers of snow, and spent a half an hour discussing the ruins we’d found, the bodies that had been strewn about the dirt and stone like trampled weeds. There had been blood everywhere.

Whatever prize the ran-sackers had sought, they’d found it and left no stone untouched in the process. Everything about the temple had been destroyed beyond recognition.

It burned a hole inside my soul to see something so sacred to our realms and in the northern heart of my court ripped to shreds.

My brothers wanted me to stay the night or at least winnow back to the palace to avoid the storm. Even Cassian threw a wary eye out the window once the rain started to fall and the winds howled through the cabin. The front door burst open without me so much as touching the handle.

But Feyre.

Feyre, Feyre, Feyre.

She was waiting and she was leaving.

I flew all night to get to her.

I wasn’t stupid enough to think I couldn’t winnow if the wind and elements became too much for me to handle, but by the time I reached the outer ridges of Illyrian territory, most of the storm had passed. I wondered if the temple would be washed clean by morning with the direction the clouds were rolling, further and further north.

And the whole time I flew, it was an effort not to think of what was coming, what I was flying back to.

The disgusted looks. The biting remarks. And one million questions about what would play out in the next three weeks as I waited to go to her again.

She was so brave. So beautiful. But Tamlin had her at his mercy every second. There was not a thought in her head that didn’t pass his inspection first before she let it past her lips.

There was no need to ask if he would love her, care for her, give her the basics she needed to survive. But now all I wondered was how she would respond. Was what I offered her enough to make her live ?

The palace glimmered in the waking sunlight far below me, the snow along the rooftops glinting. My wings snapped at my back, tucking in tight against the muscles rippling beneath my open wrinkled shirt.

And I fell. Fell so far and so hard with an empty sensation rattling through me that when my wings snapped back open to stop me crashing hard against the rocky cliffside, I thought they nearly broke off from the impact.

Silently, I glided onto that open balcony Feyre had seen me fall from hours before and crashed into one of the chairs.

The remaining hours ticked silently by as I stared out at my court. The drink I’d summoned which was the last thing anyone should have been drinking for breakfast did nothing to soothe the dull ache thudding in my chest. That miserable, icy depression that sunk me down.

For the first time, I wasn’t even foolish enough to think we could part amicably the way we had Amarantha’s court. For the first time, I didn’t hope there was some small portion of me she’d see as an enemy or that she might have found something of her time here worth coming back for.

Feyre’s feet shuffled lightly on the marble floor. I listened to her all the way from her bedroom.

“It’s been a week,” she said, a bold demand, no hesitations whatsoever. “Take me home.”

My cup went straight to my lips for a long sip. “Good morning, Feyre.”

“Take me home.”

Beneath my skin, my muscles, I felt my bones chip with shards of glass carving against them.

Feyre wore a set of teal and gold clothes set in a similar style to what she’d worn all week. She looked right at home in them even if she didn’t feel as such. The color pulled out the blue in her eyes. With the morning sun streaming through the open air ways, dancing on her skin and playing with the gold cuffs to her wrists and ankles... she was stunning.

Not your anything.

“That color suits you.”

“Do you want me to say please? Is that it?”

The scowl on her face was what set me off.

“I want you to talk to me like a person. Start with ‘good morning’ and let’s see where it gets us.”

“Good morning.” It was the most obvious, dismissive goodbye I’d ever heard in my life.

I smiled, having no other way to deal with it and Feyre seethed.

Good.

“Are you ready to face the consequences of your departure?”

Feyre went rigid like she hadn’t thought about the bad things that might be waiting for her in the flowery fields of Spring. But I had. I had thought of just about everything when it came to Feyre while I flew home.

The danger she was in.

The fight she riled in herself to keep what and whom she loved safe.

The glint in her eyes when she swore at me that made her whole face light up, even if it was born of anger.

The way her hair played against her neck and her fingers swam softly over her skin when she tucked a lock behind her ear.

The countless freckles on her face...

“It’s none of your business,” she said.

“Right. You’ll probably ignore it, anyway. Sweep it under the rug, like everything else.”

“No one asked for your opinion, Rhysand.”

“Rhysand?” It was worth a chuckle. I’d once said in front of her that only my enemies called me Rhysand. I wondered if she remembered or if it was just my ill-fated life led by the Cauldron that made her say it. “I give you a week of luxury and you call me Rhysand?”

“I didn’t ask to be here, or be given that week.”

“And yet look at you. Your face has some color - and those marks under your eyes are almost gone. Your mental shield is stellar, by the way.”

Look at you as I do. Look at you and see the brilliance, I beg you.

Feyre looked at me, a crack in her eyes as if she could read the thoughts I hoarded away from her like gold. “Please take me home.”

I shrugged to hide the immeasurable pain aching inside me as I stood.

You’re giving her back. Back to that beast. She’ll be paraded and pampered and bred for slaughter...

“I’ll tell Mor you said good-bye.”

“I barely saw her all week.”

“She was waiting for an invitation - she didn’t want to pester you. I wish she extended me the same courtesy.”

And it was true. Mor had kept a careful distance all week, but she was never more than a few doors away from Feyre wherever she decided to reside each day as she woke and did her lessons. Mor whined about her isolation every night over dinner in between politics and the Illyrian pricks at our backs.

“No one told me,” Feyre said, but she looked slightly crestfallen.

“You didn’t ask. And why bother? Better to be miserable and alone.” I stepped forward as Feyre’s eyes swept over me. It was the most disheveled she’d ever seen me, even including the Mountain perhaps, and I doubted she had any idea why. I begged of her one final time. “Have you thought about my offer?”

“I’ll let you know next month.”

More than I’d expected. More than I deserved.

“I told you once, and I’ll tell you again.” I swallowed tightly. “I am not your enemy.”

Feyre met my gaze with steely determination dead set in her eyes. “And I told you once, so I’ll tell you again. You’re Tamlin’s enemy. So I suppose that makes you mine.”

“Does it?”

We stepped nearer each other with every word.

“Free me from my bargain and let’s find out.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

Both.

I held out my hand. “Shall we?”

Barely a heartbeat after she grabbed my hand, her enthusiasm slipping through cracked shields I didn’t feel like reprimanding her on, we were engulfed in darkness, carried by the fabric of the world towards the bright, sunny days of Spring. Feyre reached for me through the turbulence and though it was just as agonizing for her to cling to me as it has been when I’d winnowed her the first time, I savored those few moments holding her close. The only touches I might ever be allowed to spend with her.

She bolted the moment we touched down on those perfect little flagstones surrounded by perfectly manicured acres. Birds chirped in the branches of the huge oak looming over us.

This court could have been lovely, once.

But I grabbed Feyre’s wrist before she got more than a step away. My thumb ran over her wrist as Feyre looked up at me with confusion that threatened to boil over into something else if I didn’t let go soon.

I glanced at the mansion.

Then back to my mate and all that I was relinquishing her to.

Not your anything .

“Good luck,” I said.

“Get your hand off me,” she said a near snarl.

I chuckled at that raging spirit only I seemed to elicit from her and let go. “I’ll see you next month.”

And with that, I let her be, and found myself once more ensconced in clouds of darkness and wind and smoke until I was dropped out of the skies and flying free over my city - my home.

Velaris.