Chapter Text
From the vantage point of the House of the Wind, the sunset was glorious. A blaze of oranges and pinks below the encroaching indigo of night. I watched the first stars appear as I downed the rest of my drink and glanced over at the rest of the little party. Azriel and Cassian had fallen into a drinking game I hadn’t seen since our days in the war camps and was possibly more ridiculous now than it had been then. They’d had young and stupid to use an excuse back then. They were grown adults now flipping coins and pounding on tables and yelling at each other.
Cassian was a loud drunk. Really, Cassian was a loud anything. If it could be done a little louder, Cassian did it a little louder. I appreciated the distraction but even they were starting to lose their ability to push past my thoughts and pull me back to the world. I hadn't even been able to drink as much as I'd intended. I looked at the empty cup in my hand and considered trying harder. Truly black out drunk had to be a possibility if I just kept drinking long enough.
I was a miserable wreck and maybe explaining why out loud would make it better but Amren had already yelled at me once today and I didn't really want drunk Cassian adding to that or to watch Azriel go from jovial to quiet and careful and considering. I would just keep it to myself but I couldn’t do that here, not now that the sun was setting and the day was over.
I didn't say goodbye.
I just stood up and walked off the edge of the balcony and let myself free fall until that point where I wasn't sure I could pull myself out of it. The wind whistled in my ears and my wings shuddered with the impact when I snapped them open to stop myself before I splattered onto the rocks below. I flew in slow lazy circles around the city. I started to pick up speed with each pass. The cold air was washing away the ineffectual drunkenness I had been wallowing in and maybe if I pushed myself hard enough, I could trade in misery for exhaustion.
Not that I was likely going to sleep tonight. If I fell asleep there was too much risk of my shields slipping. That they hadn't slipped in centuries didn't really matter. I was going to let them slip. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t let myself get drunk enough to forget because I wouldn’t forget. I’d just do something stupid I would reach for her along that bond and that wasn't something I would survive. Not today.
She had been unhappy all day.
Nervous.
Miserable.
Frightened.
I stopped those thoughts in their tracks as I banked left and shot down to fly close enough to the Rainbow and the river to hear snippets of music and conversation. She wasn't frightened. I wanted her to be frightened so I would be justified in getting involved, so I would have a reason to hit her fiancé with all the anger and worry and jealousy that had been eating at me for the past three months.
No.
Husband.
The banquet and the dancing would be starting to wrap up around this time. Ceremonies complete, whatever passed as traditions in the Spring Court would have been observed. Not fiancé, not by this time in the night. Husband. She had married the bastard. She loved him and deserved the right to make that choice but he was still a bastard. They'd dance and eat and celebrate. Tamlin was a jackass but she deserved the celebration. I didn't have to like Tamlin. He wasn't my husband.
"No, he's your mate's husband and you can't see the issue with that?" a voice in the back of my head said in Amren's most irritated drawl.
I pushed up, catching an updraft and flapping hard to get as much height as I could out of it and once I was on level with the windows of the House of the Wind, I dropped into free fall again. I shut out every thought and just let the wind and the air and the rush of lights below me take over and I grinned in spite of everything and snapped my wings out in time to bank and spin and head for the town house.
If all else failed, I could still fly. I had the sky again. I could survive the rest. Even losing her.
I flew until I was tired and exhilarated and felt a little like myself again. I collapsed into the wide empty bed in the townhouse bedroom and stretched my wings out. I fell asleep without changing my clothes or taking off my shoes.
I don’t know how much later it was when I woke to a sensation that brought Amarantha swimming up through the mental boundaries I'd worked so hard to keep around those memories.
Red hair in my face.
Wrongness.
Nails down my back.
Invasion.
That sound she had always made right near my ear.
Violation.
The sensation built. I rolled up out of bed, forgetting I had my wings out, stumbling around them as they caught on the sheets. I made it to the bathroom before I vomited. It took me a few moments of staring at the porcelain to realize the feeling wasn't coming from a nightmare. It was dragging my memories along with it but this wasn't my nightmare. This was coming from her.
"Feyre," I said.
I hadn't said her name since I'd explained who she was to Mor. I hadn't said her name even to myself.
I reached for her, pushing down the bond just like I'd promised myself I wouldn't do tonight and that violation hit me harder. I didn't wretch again but it took effort and I slammed all my barriers back into place. I was pretty sure it wasn't a memory or a nightmare pulling those feelings out of her. It was too strong for that. There was a persistent misery in her that seemed to press in around my shields. She was strong, not broken but miserable and the pounding sensation of violation made my skin crawl even with the shields in place.
I swore.
I was up and moving before I'd fully let the thought take form. My clothes shifted, the wings vanished, and I ran my fingers through my hair. I decided that I didn't really care if it looked like I had rolled out of bed. I had rolled out of bed. This was against every rule I had set for myself but there was something wrong. So wrong. I couldn't push it out and I could leave her to endure it. I wasn’t going to be able to live with myself if I left her to endure this.
I didn't have a handle on my power. I wasn't aware of how angry I was, how furiously angry, until I tried to gather my magic to winnow. I let out a noise between a growl and a hiss. Far from civilized. I snapped the talons threatening to escape from my fingers back into place and winnowed before I could change my mind.
I did not expect them to be in bed. I hit the dark room, in the middle of the manor house, in the most tightly warded corner of the Spring Court without more than flicking the barriers out of the way. The anger crested as I realized that I'd winnowed to her and found her in his bedroom. Her bedroom. Their bedroom. If I'd been half sane, if I wasn't already skating on the thin ice of all those memories of Amarantha, if that sense of invasion wasn't stronger now that I was closer, I might have been able to talk myself down from what I did next.
"Feyre, it’s time to leave," I said before Tamlin had even pulled himself fully up out of the blankets.
He was fast but I was more than ready to blow him into tiny little pieces if he touched either of us. I hadn't figured out what was going on yet but that lack of clarity just made the anger and the need to take her away from it worse. I needed her someplace safe so that we could fix this, whatever this was and she wasn't safe here. She couldn't be safe and be sending that much revulsion and discomfort down the bond.
Tamlin growled.
He was on his feet now, stalking toward me and his fingers sharpened to claws. Either you controlled the beast or it controlled you. It appeared that no one had ever taught Tamlin that particular lesson. Naked and clawed with fur rippling up his arms as well. I felt my rage try to shiver into talons of my own in answer and willed them back down. My very human hands adjusted my jacket and I watched him with the same cold vicious eyes that I usually saved for the Court of Nightmares.
He didn't attack. I would have attacked. Maybe it was just my mood talking but if an enemy had shown up in my bedroom, on my wedding night, I would have gone for their throat first and asked questions later. He didn't. Which meant I didn't kill him immediately. That cold anger in me regretted that he didn't give me the chance.
"What are you doing in here?" he snarled from only about a foot away from me.
"Calling in a bargain," I said finally remembering that this wasn't an act of war. I had the bargain to lean on. I was perfectly happy for it to be an act of war but I could just imagine Cassian's face if I told him I started a war over a woman. He'd never let me live it down. Millennia. It would be the story that dragged on for millennia.
Feyre’s emotions were shifting along the bond and I wasn’t shielding against her so I could feel each one like it was my own. That sensation of violation was becoming fear. Fine. She could be afraid of me as long as she was safe. I didn't look at her. I wasn't quite sure what I would do if I did. Was her expression terrified or nauseous? I couldn't let myself look, let myself know until we were far, far away from here. I flicked a finger and slammed the wardrobe door open and said, "Put on something."
Tamlin was talking and I flicked another hand. The bedroom door opened and I slowly pushed him through it. I did it slowly enough that he was very aware of what I was doing and very aware that he couldn’t stop me. I held him still in the hallway and then slammed the door on his furious face.
That was petty.
I was being petty now.
I rolled my shoulders and looked at the door. I could hear him pound a few times before there was a scrape of claws and a low growl. I kept my eyes on the door even though the magic didn't need my attention to hold him. Maybe I should start a war, wipe Tamlin and his entire stupid court off the face of Prythian and install Mor as the High Lady of Spring, she was stronger than the shape-shifting bastard and she'd probably enjoy all the flowers.
"You chose now to call in the bargain?" Feyre hissed when she appeared at my side wearing a gown of draped pink fabric that probably wasn't meant to be worn with nothing underneath. Her hair was still half up in pins and ribbons from her wedding ceremony. She was disheveled and thin and something like horror was still beating in her. Horror at whatever had happened and not a small amount of horror at the fact that I was standing in front of her.
"Yes," I said.
I was afraid if I let out too many words and I'd open the floodgates of questions and accusations and demands for answers and that would only lead to declarations and promises and explanations that no one wanted to hear, least of all her. She was seething and she was terrified. I terrified her. My power swirled around us and I knew the anger in it had to be palpable.
I held out a hand.
“I am not going anywhere with you,” she said.
“You’d rather get back in that bed?” I asked.
I was too close to the memories of Amarantha. I hadn’t been able to get them back into the deep dark little box where they belonged in the back of my mind. That was a question I had asked myself too many times. I had always done it, it had always been worth it.
Feyre’s lip curled at me but it wasn't really a choice I was making any more. The choice was already made. I had started it now. I’d said the words, I’d activated the bargain and magic had rules. She was coming with me or we’d all pay the price for a violated bargain.
She hated me so much and I could feel it and I think if I endured it for too long, I would start to hate myself too.
I fully expected that I'd have to grab for her but she glanced at the door and the bed and swallowed like she was swallowing back the same nausea that had awoken me and said, "A week."
"A week," I confirmed.
She looked at the door again and neither of us moved as Tamlin growled from behind it. Goddamn it, he was probably going to try and find a pretense to start a war regardless of the bargain. He sounded pissed.
She lifted her tattooed hand and held it just above mine. Now that she had come this far, I was loathe to snatch that hand out of the air and winnow us away. Choose it. Choose to come with me. Don’t make me steal you. I kept my hand still and smoothed some of my emotions off my expression. I didn't give her the High Lord of the Night Court smile that I had given Tamlin with all its mocking rage. I just held her gaze and waited.
She placed her hand in mine.
Something like relief slid down the bond and I didn't ask any questions. I pulled her in closer and coiled my power back in around us and almost winnowed us back to the townhouse in Velaris by habit. It was where I had come from, it was where I would return to. I remembered at the last minute all the reasons I could not do that and brought her to the palace above the Hewn City instead.
She stepped back from me but didn't let go of my hand as we landed. I kept my hand still as I watched her stare in awe at the building around us with its fluttering curtains and views of the night over the mountains. Her surprise lasted only a moment before she snatched her hand back and took two quick steps away from me and crumpled to her knees. I thought she was going to retch and I felt the second hand roil of her nausea.
"Care to explain what happened?" I asked in a flat voice.
She was looking at the floor, her hair a tangle around her head and her dress looking insubstantial on her thin frame. Still beautiful. Like this when she was thin and terrified, when she was feverish and bleeding, when she was mud splattered and armed with nothing but broken bones. She was always beautiful.
She was also nauseous and shaking like we were in a snow storm. I crossed the space to her and dropped my jacket around her shoulders without touching her.
I sat down on the floor in front of her, crossed my feet like a child at lessons and conjured a pair of teacups. I drank out of mine and waited. She didn't move. She was folded over herself so that her forehead was pressed to her knees and she was breathing slowly and evenly. I needed answers but maybe she needed privacy more. I bit back every question and put all my attention on the tea.
She straightened slowly as though every inch was a battle and shrugged into the jacket. The black made her look even paler but she was regal in it as she drew herself up and set her jaw.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
"I wanted that nausea and sense of," I waved my hand rather than name it, "To stop. Now that that's done, I'm content. Perhaps you could avoid it in the future."
She watched me with hard eyes as though calculating. She had tucked the jacket in around herself and it made her look tiny but not any less fierce. So goddamn beautiful. I was not at all prepared for having her this close. Near feral instinct was weaving its way through the tightly held threads of my rage and I was prepared to rip anyone to shreds if that’s what it took to protect her. The feeling was stronger than I remembered it.
“It won’t happen again,” she said with venom in her voice.
I didn’t ask again though that wasn’t an answer.
She picked up her tea cup and pushed the sleeves of my jacket back away from her hands so she could hold it cradled between her palms. She looked at it but didn’t drink it.
“Are you going to lock me away in a dungeon somewhere?”
“No.”
I wanted to shake her and demand to know what had happened but I didn’t. I waited. I turned up the lights in the lanterns up and down the hall as she swirled the tea in the mug. At this time of night, even the servants would be asleep. We might as well have been the only people in existence. Alone on a mountain top. The wind beyond the barriers howled but in here all that felt as distant as the moon.
“Drink something, it will make you feel better, I can have food brought up as well as they apparently don’t have any in the Spring Court.”
“That’s what started it,” she said rolling the tea cup between her hands.
“The lack of food available in Tamlin’s household?”
She didn’t rise to the bait. She didn’t even sneer at me, she kept staring at her cup and breathing evenly. I realized too late that she was fighting for every breath. Each one was careful and measured because otherwise she was either going to hold it or hyperventilate. I bit my tongue to keep anything else from slipping out. I didn’t know what it was that she did need but perhaps mocking condescension and poorly maintained rage were not on the top of the list.
“No, a drink,” she said.
“Ah,” I said as though I understood anything. The smug all-knowing act had won me more arguments than I was willing to admit. If people thought I already knew, they would volunteer the most interesting information and save me the trouble of burrowing into their minds. I understood nothing but the panic and the revulsion was retreating, even when I reach out along that bond, the emotions were calming. I did not get any closer to her mind than the edge of that bond. I would not do that too her.
“Ianthe had said that it could hasten the mating bond. She was so sure of it, that our bond just hadn’t settled yet but that it would. I didn’t expect it to feel like that,” her lip curled.
“It’s over,” I said with a little more force than I had intended. I had reeled the anger in but having it tightly controlled didn’t mean it wouldn’t explode if I wasn’t careful.
“It’s not, I can still feel it. It’s not as bad without,” she paused and waved her hand in a mocking imitation of me that made me smile, “But it’s there. I don’t know how long it will last.”
“Damiana?” I asked as the details slotted together in my head. It was a herb that the Priestesses kept a very close eye on. It only grew in their gardens. It was sacred to a few different rituals involving mating bonds but had no place being given out like candy at weddings.
She nodded.
“It really depends on how much you took. I knew a mated pair once who took enough to last a week, found a cabin in the woods somewhere and didn’t come out until it had worn off. Usually it lasts about a day from what I know.”
“A week, like that?” she asked spitting the last word like it was vulgar.
“No,” I said. “That, as you so eloquently put it, was because the draught is intended to heighten a mating bond and as Tamlin is, evidently, not your mate, your body reacted badly to it. I suppose it could work the way the way Ianthe wanted it to if he was but even that seems unlikely. A mating bond is fate, a Cauldron granted gift. It is not something that we, not the Priestesses with all their magic and herb gardens nor High Lords nor resurrected mortals are able to change. You don’t get to force what the Cauldron has or has not willed.”
I stopped talking, my anger was leaking into my tone again. Ianthe was arrogant and manipulative and I hadn’t even considered that Feyre might be one of her targets. A piece of me felt responsible for having left her alone with that woman. I could have sent a warning perhaps. But I already knew what would have happened if I had. She would have ripped that warning up and tossed in the fire because Feyre trusted me about as much as she trusted a poisonous snake.
Feyre pulled herself up, leaving the tea on the floor and moving towards the balcony on bare feet that I could just catch glimpses of through the swirl of pink fabric. Her distance gave me a moment to collect myself. With the mountain range spread out below us and a soaring wind whistling across the star flecked sky, I could get my anger back in check. I followed her once it was reeled in and leaned against the white stone rail. She was too far away to touch but close enough that I could make it to her if she needed me.
“It’s usually used by mated pairs who have struggled to produce children. The things it does to the mating bond is a side effect,” I added because if they hadn’t explained the rest of it, they likely hadn’t explained that either.
Anger spiked and I thought it was mine until she hurled the china cup out into the abyss of blackness and swirling winds.
“Hey, I liked that mug,” I said.
She whirled on me and I thought she’d slap me. She was flushed and her hands were tight fists and I could feel magic roil in her. Some very stupid part of me was drawn to that roil of power like a moth to flame. I wanted to know what she could do, I wanted to stand in the eye of the hurricane that I could feel building in her and watch it destroy the world around us. I wanted to push my own magic up against it and see if they would fit together like two pieces of the same whole.
“Fine, if you need to you can throw this one too,” I held out my cup.
She took it and threw it at the wall behind my head where it shattered into a rain of tiny shards. Tea splattered my back and I grimaced as I stepped around the spray on the floor so it didn’t get on my shoes. She’d thrown it hard enough that it was almost dust where the pieces landed on my shoulders. I brushed them off and we watched each other.
“You’re stronger than you look,” I said.
“He’s never going to tell me anything is he?” she said as though I hadn’t said anything at all.
“He’s Tamlin,” I said which wasn’t really an answer.
“He’s the High Lord and as his wife, it’s my task to produce an heir,” she said in a soft voice.
“He’s your husband, not your keeper,” I said and managed not to choke on any of the words.
“Isn’t he?”
“Is that what you want him to be?”
“It’s too late for that question now.”
“We’re immortal, all we have is time. It’s never too late, Feyre.”
I felt an echo of her revulsion down the bond, a memory of that sensation of magic and violation and everything that went with it. These were people she loved who had made choices on her behalf that they didn’t have a right to consult on. It wasn’t just the magic that left her trembling but the magic made it worse, the damiana pushed the emotion into a physical sensation that I felt along with her as it rushed through her.
It wasn’t a surprise when she screamed. Not with pain. With a rage that shot out of her and through me. She collapsed to her knees again and I knelt beside her without considering whether or not it was a good idea. She was shaking and held the silk of my jacket in a white knuckled grip and kept it close to her body. I reached out like she would accept it if I offered her comfort and hesitated with my hand floating above her shoulder.
I didn’t pull her closer. That would have been unforgivable.
Instead I reached for the tangled mess of her hair and started pulling out pins and little crumpled bits of flowers. I barely touched her hair as I picked them out by hand. Magic would have been faster but I didn’t want it to be fast. I carefully touched her as little as I could as I unwound curls and a piece of ribbon so the soft brown strands fell around her face and shoulders, lying against the black of the jacket and tickling my palms as I reached for another sprig of flowers caught in an errant curl.
She exhaled and I didn’t look at her face. I could feel her attention on me and if I looked at her, I was sure that everything would be written on my face. The draught she had taken was calling for me. I could feel it through our bond but I didn’t think she understood it yet. She was calming because the magic had fought Tamlin but it wasn’t going to fight me. Someone else’s nearness, anyone else’s nearness would spark that same sense of revulsion that had left her pouring horror down the bond on her wedding night.
But she was my mate and I was hers.
I’d worked so hard to keep that thought from crossing my mind and now that it was in, it ran circles around everything else. I picked out pin after pin and dropped them into a neat pile on the floor beside us and didn’t look at her, didn’t think about the way she smelled or that I could smell Tamlin on her.
I didn’t realize that she had leaned forward until her voice came from just below my ear, “He’s going to be so angry.”
“He does get a bit testy at times.”
“Is all this just to piss him off?”
“This is about you.”
That was too honest. I’d gotten just about everything out of her long hair but it was still tangled and I was falling into the soft rightness of having her this close. I was about to start running my fingers through her hair to smooth out the snarls and that was not going to make anything better tomorrow when she woke up with the drug and the anger out of her system and remembered how much she hated me.
I put on a sarcastic smile and started to sit back but she was watching me and I got caught in her eyes.
Fuck.
I needed more space if I was going to keep any semblance of my sanity or who I was supposed to be intact.
“I’m glad to have left. I thought it was going to kill me. I don’t care why you did it. I don’t care if this is all part of some elaborate game you’re playing. I don’t care,” she said.
“You will when the drugs all pass, you always liked me just fine when you drunk too,” I said because I couldn’t figure out how to force myself to back away when I could feel the warmth of her body so close to me. If I couldn’t have physical space, there were other ways to push her back.
She glared at me with something like disgust on her face. She drew away from me and that little bit of distance between us was enough of a reprieve for me to get to my feet and walk away.
I paused halfway across the room and told her where to find her bedroom on the floor below us.
Staying there was a risk I couldn’t take. She was Feyre but she was also Tamlin’s wife and who I was when I was with her needed to be someone she could report on without ruining centuries of carefully constructed reputation. I winnowed out of the hall and opened my eyes on my bedroom in the townhouse in Velaris. It was about as far from her as I could be and even still I was almost painfully aware of how much calmer she was after being close to me.
I could have chased that moment of calm to the ends of the earth if I could have been sure she wanted to be there with me.