My mouth went paper-dry as Alis fluffed out the sparkling train of my gown in the shadow of the garden doors. Silk and gossamer rustled and sighed, and I gripped the pale bouquet in my gloved hands, nearly snapping the stems.
Elbow-length silk gloves—to hide the markings. Ianthe had delivered them herself this morning in a velvet-lined box.
“Don’t be nervous,” Alis clucked, her tree-bark skin rich and flushed in the honey-gold evening light.
“I’m not,” I rasped.
“You’re fidgeting like my youngest nephew during a haircut.” She finished fussing over my dress, shooing away some servants who’d come to spy on me before the ceremony. I pretended I didn’t see them, or the glittering, sunset-gilded crowd seated in the courtyard ahead, and toyed with some invisible fleck of dust on my skirts.
“You look beautiful,” Alis said quietly. I was fairly certain her thoughts on the dress were the same as my own, but I believed her.
“Thank you.”
“And you sound like you’re going to your funeral.”
I plastered a grin on my face. Alis rolled her eyes. But she nudged me toward the doors as they opened on some immortal wind, lilting music streaming in. “It’ll be over faster than you can blink,” she promised, and gently pushed me into the last of the sunlight.
Three hundred people rose to their feet and pivoted toward me.
Not since my last trial had so many gathered to watch me, judge me. All in finery so similar to what they’d worn Under the Mountain. Their faces blurred, melded.
Alis coughed from the shadows of the house, and I remembered to start walking, to look toward the dais—
At Tamlin.
The breath knocked from me, and it was an effort to keep going down the stairs, to keep my knees from buckling. He was resplendent in a tunic of green and gold, a crown of burnished laurel leaves gleaming on his head. He’d loosened the grip on his glamour, letting that immortal light and beauty shine through—for me.
My vision narrowed on him, on my High Lord, his wide eyes glistening as I stepped onto the soft grass, white rose petals scattered down it—
And red ones.
Like drops of blood amongst the white, red petals had been sprayed across the path ahead.
I forced my gaze up, to Tamlin, his shoulders back, head high.
So unaware of the true extent of how broken and dark I was inside. How unfit I was to be clothed in white when my hands were so filthy.
Everyone else was thinking it. They had to be.
Every step was too fast, propelling me toward the dais and Tamlin. And toward Ianthe, clothed in dark blue robes tonight, beaming beneath that hood and silver crown.
As if I were good—as if I hadn’t murdered two of their kind.
I was a murderer and a liar.
A cluster of red petals loomed ahead—just like that Fae youth’s blood had pooled at my feet.
Ten steps from the dais, at the edge of that splatter of red, I slowed.
Then stopped.
Everyone was watching, exactly as they had when I’d nearly died, spectators to my torment.
Tamlin extended a broad hand, brows narrowing slightly. My heart beat so fast, too fast.
I was going to vomit.
Right over those rose petals; right over the grass and ribbons trailing into the aisle from the chairs flanking it.
And between my skin and bones, something thrummed and pounded, rising and pushing, lashing through my blood—
So many eyes, too many eyes, pressed on me, witnesses to every crime I’d committed, every humiliation—
I don’t know why I’d even bothered to wear gloves, why I’d let Ianthe convince me.
The fading sun was too hot, the garden too hedged in. As inescapable as the vow I was about to make, binding me to him forever, shackling him to my broken and weary soul. The thing inside me was roiling now, my body shaking with the building force of it as it hunted for a way out—
Forever—I would never get better, never get free of myself, of that dungeon where I’d spent three months—
“Feyre,” Tamlin said, his hand steady as he continued to reach for mine. The sun sank past the lip of the western garden wall; shadows pooled, chilling the air.
If I turned away, they’d start talking, but I couldn’t make the last few steps, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t—
I was going to fall apart, right there, right then—and they’d see precisely how ruined I was.
Help me, help me, help me, I begged someone, anyone. Begged Lucien, standing in the front row, his metal eye fixed on me. Begged Ianthe, face serene and patient and lovely within that hood. Save me—please, save me. Get me out. End this.
Tamlin took a step toward me—concern shading those eyes.
I retreated a step. No.
Tamlin’s mouth tightened. The crowd murmured. Silk streamers laden with globes of gold faelight twinkled into life above and around us.
Ianthe said smoothly, “Come, Bride, and be joined with your true love. Come, Bride, and let good triumph at last.”
Good. I was not good. I was nothing, and my soul, my eternal soul, was damned—
I tried to get my traitorous lungs to draw air so I could voice the word. No—no.
But I didn’t have to say it.
Thunder cracked behind me, as if two boulders had been hurled against each other.
People screamed, falling back, a few vanishing outright as darkness erupted.
I whirled, and through the night drifting away like smoke on a wind, I found Rhysand straightening the lapels of his black jacket.
“Hello, Feyre darling,” he purred.
CHAPTER
5
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Not when Rhysand liked to make a spectacle of everything. And found pissing off Tamlin to be an art form.