His head. I had been inside his head, had slid through his mental walls—
I stood, chucking my napkin on the table with hands that were unnervingly steady.
I knew who that gift had come from. My dinner rose in my throat, but I willed it down.
“We’re not finished with this meal,” Tamlin growled.
“Oh, get over yourself,” I barked, and left.
I could have sworn I beheld two burned handprints on the wood, peeking out from beneath my napkin. I prayed neither of them noticed.
And that Lucien remained ignorant to the violation I’d just committed.
CHAPTER
9
I paced my room for a good while. Maybe I’d been mistaken when I’d spotted those burns—maybe they’d been there before. Maybe I hadn’t somehow summoned heat and branded the wood. Maybe I hadn’t slid into Lucien’s mind as if I were moving from one room to another.
Just as she always did, Alis appeared to help me change for bed. As I sat before the vanity, letting her comb my hair, I cringed at my reflection. The purple beneath my eyes seemed permanent now—my face wan. Even my lips were a bit pale, and I sighed as I closed my eyes.
“You gave your jewels to a water-wraith,” Alis mused, and I found her reflection in the mirror. Her brown skin looked like crushed leather, and her dark eyes gleamed for a moment before she focused on my hair. “They’re a slippery sort.”
“She said they were starving—that they had no food,” I murmured.
Alis gently coaxed out a tangle. “Not one faerie in that line today would have given her the money. Not one would have dared. Too many have gone to a watery grave because of their hunger. Insatiable appetite—it is their curse. Your jewels won’t last her a week.”
I tapped a foot on the floor.
“But,” Alis went on, setting down the brush to braid my hair into a single plait. Her long, spindly fingers scratched against my scalp. “She will never forget it. So long as she lives, no matter what you said, she is in your debt.” Alis finished the braid and patted my shoulder. “Too many faeries have tasted hunger these past fifty years. Don’t think word of this won’t spread.”
I was afraid of that perhaps more than anything.
It was after midnight when I gave up waiting, walked down the dark, silent corridors, and found him in his study, alone for once.
A wooden box wrapped with a fat pink bow sat on the small table between the twin armchairs. “I was just about to come up,” he said, lifting his head to do a quick scan over my body to make sure all was right, all was fine. “You should be asleep.”
I shut the door behind me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep—not with the words we’d shouted ringing in my ears. “So should you,” I said, my voice as tenuous as the peace between us. “You work too hard.” I crossed the room to lean against the armchair, eyeing the present as Tamlin had eyed me.
“Why do you think I had such little interest in being High Lord?” he said, rising from his seat to round the desk. He kissed my brow, the tip of my nose, my mouth. “So much paperwork,” he grumbled onto my lips. I chuckled, but he pressed his mouth to the bare spot between my neck and shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and my spine tingled. He kissed my neck again. “I’m sorry.”
I ran a hand down his arm. “Tamlin,” I started.
“I shouldn’t have said those things,” he breathed onto my skin. “To you or Lucien. I didn’t mean any of them.”
“I know,” I said, and his body relaxed against mine. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“You had every right,” he said, though I technically didn’t. “I was wrong.”
What he said had been true—if he made exceptions, then other faeries would demand the same treatment. And what I had done could be construed as undermining. “Maybe I was—”
“No. You were right. I don’t understand what it’s like to be starving—or any of it.”
I pulled back a bit to incline my head toward the present waiting there, more than willing to let this be the last of it. I gave a small, wry smile. “For you?”
He nipped at my ear in answer. “For you. From me.” An apology.
Feeling lighter than I had in days, I tugged the ribbon loose, and examined the pale wood box beneath. It was perhaps two feet high and three feet wide, a solid iron handle anchored in the top—no crest or lettering to indicate what might be within. Certainly not a dress, but …
Please not a crown.
Though surely, a crown or diadem would be in something less … rudimentary.
I unlatched the small brass lock and flipped open the broad lid.
It was worse than a crown, actually.
Built into the box were compartments and sleeves and holders, all full of brushes and paints and charcoal and sheets of paper. A traveling painting kit.
Red—the red paint inside the glass vial was so bright, the blue as stunning as the eyes of that faerie woman I’d slaughtered—
“I thought you might want it to take around the grounds with you. Rather than lug all those bags like you always do.”
The brushes were fresh, gleaming—the bristles soft and clean.
Looking at that box, at what was inside, felt like examining a crow-picked corpse.
I tried to smile. Tried to will some brightness to my eyes.
He said, “You don’t like it.”
“No,” I managed to say. “No—it’s wonderful.” And it was. It really was.
“I thought if you started painting again … ” I waited for him to finish.
He didn’t.
My face heated.
“And what about you?” I asked quietly. “Will the paperwork help with anything at all?”
I dared meet his eyes. Temper flared in them. But he said, “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking—about you.”
I studied the box and its contents again. “Will I even be allowed to roam where I wish to paint? Or will there be an escort, too?”
Silence.
A no—and a yes, then.
I began shaking, but for me, for us, I made myself say, “Tamlin—Tamlin, I can’t … I can’t live my life with guards around me day and night. I can’t live with that … suffocation. Just let me help you—let me work with you.”
“You’ve given enough, Feyre.”
“I know. But … ” I faced him. Met his stare—the full power of the High Lord of the Spring Court. “I’m harder to kill now. I’m faster, stronger—”
“My family was faster and stronger than you. And they were murdered quite easily.”
“Then marry someone who can put up with this.”
He blinked. Slowly. Then he said with terrible softness, “Do you not want to marry me, then?”
I tried not to look at the ring on my finger, at that emerald. “Of course I do. Of course I do.” My voice broke. “But you … Tamlin … ” The walls pushed in on me. The quiet, the guards, the stares. What I’d seen at the Tithe today. “I’m drowning,” I managed to say. “I am drowning. And the more you do this, the more guards … You might as well be shoving my head under the water.”
Nothing in those eyes, that face.
But then—
I cried out, instinct taking over as his power blasted through the room.
The windows shattered.
The furniture splintered.
And that box of paints and brushes and paper …
It exploded into dust and glass and wood.
CHAPTER
10
One breath, the study was intact.
The next, it was shards of nothing, a shell of a room.
None of it had touched me from where I had dropped to the floor, my hands over my head.
Tamlin was panting, the ragged breaths almost like sobs.
I was shaking—shaking so hard I thought my bones would splinter as the furniture had—but I made myself lower my arms and look at him.
There was devastation on that face. And pain. And fear. An
d grief.
Around me, no debris had fallen—as if he had shielded me.
Tamlin took a step toward me, over that invisible demarcation.
He recoiled as if he’d hit something solid.
“Feyre,” he rasped.
He stepped again—and that line held.
“Feyre, please,” he breathed.
And I realized that the line, that bubble of protection …
It was from me.
A shield. Not just a mental one—but a physical one, too.
I didn’t know what High Lord it had come from, who controlled air or wind or any of that. Perhaps one of the Solar Courts. I didn’t care.
“Feyre,” Tamlin groaned a third time, pushing a hand against what indeed looked like an invisible, curved wall of hardened air. “Please. Please.”
Those words cracked something in me. Cracked me open.
Perhaps they cracked that shield of solid wind as well, for his hand shot through it.
Then he stepped over that line between chaos and order, danger and safety.
He dropped to his knees, taking my face in his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I couldn’t stop trembling.
“I’ll try,” he breathed. “I’ll try to be better. I don’t … I can’t control it sometimes. The rage. Today was just … today was bad. With the Tithe, with all of it. Today—let’s forget it, let’s just move past it. Please.”
I didn’t fight as he slid his arms around me, tucking me in tightly enough that his warmth soaked through me. He buried his face in my neck and said onto my nape, as if the words would be absorbed by my body, as if he could only say it the way we’d always been good at communicating—skin to skin, “I couldn’t save you before. I couldn’t protect you from them. And when you said that, about … about me drowning you … Am I any better than they were?”
I should have told him it wasn’t true, but … I had spoken with my heart. Or what was left of it.
“I’ll try to be better,” he said again. “Please—give me more time. Let me … let me get through this. Please.”
Get through what? I wanted to ask. But words had abandoned me. I realized I hadn’t spoken yet.
Realized he was waiting for an answer—and that I didn’t have one.
So I put my arms around him, because body to body was the only way I could speak, too.
It was answer enough. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He didn’t stop murmuring it for minutes.
You’ve given enough, Feyre.
Perhaps he was right. And perhaps I didn’t have anything left to give, anyway.
I looked over his shoulder as I held him.
The red paint had splattered on the wall behind us. And as I watched it slide down the cracked wood paneling, I thought it looked like blood.
Tamlin didn’t stop apologizing for days. He made love to me, morning and night. He worshipped my body with his hands, his tongue, his teeth. But that had never been the hard part. We just got tripped up with the rest.
But he was good for his word.
There were fewer guards as I walked the grounds. Some remained, but no one haunted my steps. I even went on a ride through the wood without an escort.
Though I knew the stable hands had reported to Tamlin the moment I’d left—and returned.
Tamlin never mentioned that shield of solid wind I’d used against him. And things were good enough that I didn’t dare bring it up, either.
The days passed in a blur. Tamlin was away more often than not, and whenever he returned, he didn’t tell me anything. I’d long since stopped pestering him for answers. A protector—that’s who he was, and would always be. What I had wanted when I was cold and hard and joyless; what I had needed to melt the ice of bitter years on the cusp of starvation.
I didn’t have the nerve to wonder what I wanted or needed now. Who I had become.
So with idleness my only option, I spent my days in the library. Practicing my reading and writing. Adding to that mental shield, brick by brick, layer by layer. Sometimes seeing if I could summon that physical wall of solid air, too. Savoring the silence, even as it crept into my veins, my head.
Some days, I didn’t speak to anyone at all. Even Alis.
I awoke each night, shaking and panting. And became glad when Tamlin wasn’t there to witness it. When I, too, didn’t witness him being yanked from his dreams, cold sweat coating his body. Or shifting into that beast and staying awake until dawn, monitoring the estate for threats. What could I say to calm those fears, when I was the source of so many of them?
But he returned for an extended stay about two weeks after the Tithe—and I’d decided to try to talk, to interact. I owed it to him to try. Owed it to myself.
He seemed to have the same idea. And the first time in a while … things felt normal. Or as normal as they could be.
I awoke one morning to the sound of low, deep voices in the hallway outside my bedroom. Closing my eyes, I nestled into the pillow and pulled the blankets higher. Despite our morning roll in the sheets, I’d been rising later every day—sometimes not bothering to get out of bed until lunch.
A growl cut through the walls, and I opened my eyes again.
“Get out,” Tamlin warned.
There was a quiet response—too soft for me to make out beyond basic mumbling.
“I’ll say it one last time—”
He was interrupted by that voice, and the hair on my arms rose. I studied the tattoo on my forearm as I did a tally. No—no, today couldn’t have come so quickly.
Kicking back the covers, I rushed to the door, realizing halfway there that I was naked. Thanks to Tamlin, my clothes had been shredded and flung across the other side of the room, and I had no robe in sight. I grabbed a blanket from a nearby chair and wrapped it around me before opening the door a crack.
Sure enough, Tamlin and Rhysand stood in the hallway. Upon hearing the door open, Rhys turned toward me. The grin that had been on his face faltered.
“Feyre.” Rhys’s eyes lingered, taking in every detail. “Are you running low on food here?”
“What?” Tamlin demanded.
Those violet eyes had gone cold. Rhys extended a hand toward me. “Let’s go.”
Tamlin was in Rhysand’s face in an instant, and I flinched. “Get out.” He pointed toward the staircase. “She’ll come to you when she’s ready.”
Rhysand just brushed an invisible fleck of dust off Tamlin’s sleeve. Part of me admired the sheer nerve it must have taken. Had Tamlin’s teeth been inches from my throat, I would have bleated in panic.
Rhys cut a glance at me. “No, you wouldn’t have. As far as your memory serves me, the last time Tamlin’s teeth were near your throat, you slapped him across the face.” I snapped up my forgotten shields, scowling.
“Shut your mouth,” Tamlin said, stepping further between us. “And get out.”
The High Lord conceded a step toward the stairs and slid his hands into his pockets. “You really should have your wards inspected. Cauldron knows what other sort of riffraff might stroll in here as easily as I did.” Again, Rhys assessed me, his gaze hard. “Put some clothes on.”
I bared my teeth at him as I stepped back into my room. Tamlin followed after me, slamming the door hard enough that the chandeliers shuddered, sending shards of light shivering over the walls.
I dropped the blanket and strode for the armoire across the room, the mattress groaning behind me as Tamlin sank onto the bed. “How did he get in here?” I asked, throwing open the doors and rifling through the clothes until I found the turquoise Night Court attire I’d asked Alis to keep. I knew she’d wanted to burn them, but I told her I’d wind up coming home with another set anyway.
“I don’t know,” Tamlin said. I slipped on my pants, twisting to find him running a hand through his hair. I felt the lie beneath his words. “He just—it’s just part of whatever game he’s playing.”
I tugged the short shirt over my head. “If war is coming, maybe
we’d be better served trying to mend things.” We hadn’t spoken of that subject since my first day back. I dug through the bottom of the armoire for the matching silk shoes, and turned to him as I slid them on.
“I’ll start mending things the day he releases you from your bargain.”
“Maybe he’s keeping the bargain so that you’ll attempt to listen to him.” I strode to where he sat on the bed, my pants a bit looser around the waist than last month.
“Feyre,” he said, reaching for me, but I stepped out of range. “Why do you need to know these things? Is it not enough for you to recover in peace? You earned that for yourself. You earned it. I relaxed the number of sentries here; I’ve been trying … trying to be better about it. So leave the rest of it—” He took a steadying breath. “This isn’t the time for this conversation.”
It was never the time for this conversation, or that conversation. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t have the energy to say it, and all the words dried up and blew away. So I memorized the lines of Tamlin’s face, and didn’t fight him as he pulled me to his chest and held me tightly.
Someone coughed from the hall, and Tamlin’s body seized up around me.
But I’d had enough fighting, and snarling, and going back to that open, serene place atop that mountain … It seemed better than hiding in the library.
I pulled away, and Tamlin lingered as I walked back into the hall.
Rhys frowned at me. I debated barking something nasty at him, but it would have required more fire than I had—and would have required caring what he thought.
Rhys’s face became unreadable as he extended a hand.
Only for Tamlin to appear behind me, and shove that hand down. “You end her bargain right here, right now, and I’ll give you anything you want. Anything.”
My heart stopped dead. “Are you out of your mind?”
Tamlin didn’t so much as blink in my direction.
Rhysand merely raised a brow. “I already have everything I want.” He stepped around Tamlin as if he were a piece of furniture and took my hand. Before I could say good-bye, a black wind gathered us up, and we were gone.
A Court of Mist and Fury Page 10