Extraits

His eyes danced with feline amusement. “Cruel, beautiful thing.”

I snorted. The idea that he found me beautiful at all—

“You are,” he said. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I thought that from the first moment I saw you on Calanmai.”

And it was stupid, stupid for beauty to mean anything at all, but … My eyes burned.

“Which is good,” he added, “because you thought I was the most beautiful male you’d ever seen. So it makes us even.”

“I landed at the Night Court, right as Mor was waiting for me, and I was so frantic, so … unhinged, that I told her everything. I hadn’t seen her in fifty years, and my first words to her were, ‘She’s my mate.’

And I knew as I picked up that knife to kill her … I knew right then what you were. I knew that you were my mate, and you were in love with another male, and had destroyed yourself to save him, and that … that I didn’t care. If you were going to die, I was going to die with you.

“You painted us.”

“I hope you don’t mind.”

He studied the threshold to the bedroom hallway. “Azriel, Mor, Amren, and Cassian,” he said, marking the eyes I’d painted. “You do know that one of them is going to paint a moustache under the eyes of whoever pisses them off that day.”

Brief as a glimmering spindrift, I saw myself there: running through the meadow that slumbered beneath the thin crust of snow, splashing through the little streams already littering the floor, feasting on fat summer berries as the sun set over the mountains …

And then I would go home to Velaris, where I would finally walk through the artists’ quarter, and enter those shops and galleries and learn what they knew, and maybe—maybe one day—I would open my own shop. Not to sell my work, but to teach others.

Maybe teach the others who were like me: broken in places and trying to fight it—trying to learn who they were around the dark and pain. And I would go home at the end of every day exhausted but content—fulfilled.

Happy.

“You gave up,” I breathed.

I felt even Rhys go still.

“You gave up on me,” I said a bit more loudly. “You were my friend. And you picked him—picked obeying him, even when you saw what his orders and his rules did to me. Even when you saw me wasting away day by day.”

“You have no idea how volatile those first few months were,” Lucien snapped. “We needed to present a unified, obedient front, and I was supposed to be the example to which all others in our court were held.”

“You saw what was happening to me. But you were too afraid of him to truly do anything about it.”

It was fear. Lucien had pushed Tamlin, but to a point. He’d always yielded at the end.

“I begged you,” I said, the words sharp and breathless. “I begged you so many times to help me, to get me out of the house, even for an hour. And you left me alone, or shoved me into a room with Ianthe, or told me to stick it out.”

Lucien said too quietly, “And I suppose the Night Court is so much better?”

I remembered—remembered what I was supposed to know, to have experienced. What Lucien and the others could never know, not even if it meant forfeiting my own life.

And I would. To keep Velaris safe, to keep Mor and Amren and Cassian and Azriel and … Rhys safe.

I said to Lucien, low and quiet and as vicious as the talons that formed at the tips of my fingers, as vicious as the wondrous weight between my shoulder blades, “When you spend so long trapped in darkness, Lucien, you find that the darkness begins to stare back.”

A pulse of surprise, of wicked delight against my mental shields, at the dark, membranous wings I knew were now poking over my shoulders. Every icy kiss of rain sent jolts of cold through me. Sensitive—so sensitive, these Illryian wings.

Lucien backed up a step. “What did you do to yourself?”

I gave him a little smile. “The human girl you knew died Under the Mountain. I have no interest in spending immortality as a High Lord’s pet.”

Lucien started shaking his head. “Feyre—”

“Tell Tamlin,” I said, choking on his name, on the thought of what he’d done to Rhys, to his family, “if he sends anyone else into these lands, I will hunt each and every one of you down. And I will demonstrate exactly what the darkness taught me.”

The painting—I could see it; feel it. I wanted to paint it.

I wanted to paint.

I didn’t wait for him to stretch out his hand before I went to him. And looking up into his face I said, “I want to paint you.”

He gently lifted me into his arms. “Nude would be best,” he said in my ear.”

“Of course I’ll dance with you,” Rhys said, his voice still raw. “All night, if you wish.”

“Even if I step on your toes?”

“Even then.”

He leaned in, brushing his mouth against my heated cheek. I closed my eyes at the whisper of a kiss, at the hunger that ravaged me in its wake, that might ravage Prythian. And all around us, as if the world itself were indeed falling apart, stars rained down.

Bits of stardust glowed on his lips as he pulled away, as I stared up at him, breathless, while he smiled. The smile the world would likely never see, the smile he’d given up for the sake of his people, his lands. He said softly, “I am … very glad I met you, Feyre.”

Rhys was examining his hands, covered in the dust, and I stepped toward him, peering at the way it glowed and glittered.

He went still as death as I took one of his hands in my own and traced a star shape on the top of his palm, playing with the glimmer and shadows, until it looked like one of the stars that had hit us.

His fingers tightened on mine, and I looked up. He was smiling at me. And looked so un-High-Lord-like with the glowing dust on the side of his face that I grinned back.

I hadn’t even realized what I’d done until his own smile faded, and his mouth parted slightly.

“Smile again,” he whispered.

And as I turned to him more fully, something blinding and tinkling slammed into my face.

I reeled back, crying out as I bent over, shielding my face against the light that I could still see against my shut eyes.

Rhys let out a startled laugh.

A laugh.

And when I realized that my eyes hadn’t been singed out of their sockets, I whirled on him. “I could have been blinded!” I hissed, shoving him. He took a look at my face and burst out laughing again. Real laughter, open and delighted and lovely.