The next afternoon I lay on my back in the grass, savoring the warmth of the sunshine filtering through the canopy of leaves, noting how I might incorporate it into my next painting. Lucien, claiming that he had miserable emissary business to attend to, had left Tamlin and me to our own devices, and the High Lord had taken me to yet another beautiful spot in his enchanted forest.
I wished Rhysand could see this. The bond was mostly dormant since I'd last seen him, the newness and the distance making it weak, but I knew even without his playful pulls that he would find it funny the way they played matchmaker in the Spring Court - forcing Tamlin and I alone together as much as possible. Though I would laugh along with Rhysand, I also wouldn't say I was complaining. I was enjoying Tamlin's friendship, despite knowing I was riding a fine line.
There were no enchantments here - no pools of starlight and no rainbow waterfalls like the other stops on Tamlin's romantic tour of his homeland. It was just a grassy glen watched over by a weeping willow, with a clear brook running through it. We lounged in comfortable silence, and I glanced at Tamlin, who dozed beside me. His golden mask glistened bright against the emerald carpet. The delicate arch of his pointed ears made me pause.
He opened an eye and smiled lazily at me. "That willow's singing always puts me to sleep."
"The what of what?" I said, propping myself on my elbows to stare at the tree above us.
Tamlin pointed toward the willow tree. The branches sighed as they moved in the breeze. "It sings."
"I suppose it performs limericks, too?"
He smiled and half sat up, twisting to look at me. "You're human," he said, and I rolled my eyes. "Your senses are still sealed off from everything."
I made a face. "Just another one of my many shortcomings."
He plucked a strand of grass from my hair. Heat radiated from my face as his fingers grazed my cheek. "I could make you able to see it," he said. His fingers lingered at the end of my braid, twirling the curl of hair around. I thought of Rhysand holding my hair back while I wretched and tugged at the bond in my chest. "See my world - hear it, smell it." My breathing became shallow as I sat up. "Taste it." His eyes flicked to the fading bruise on my neck.
My pull was returned by a soft squeeze. I exhaled deeply. "How?" I asked, heat blooming as he crouched before me.
"Every gift comes with a price." I frowned, and he grinned. "A kiss."
"Absolutely not!" The bond went slack, but my blood raced. I had to clench my hands in the grass to keep from touching him. "Don't you think it puts me at a disadvantage to not be able to see all this?"
"I'm one of the High Fae - we don't give anything without gaining something from it."
I thought of Rhysand, of what he might think of this. Part of me felt wrong, so wrong, for being here enjoying Tamlin's company so much when I knew I had a mate. A mate who was under the thumb of a woman who let people spit at him and grope him in a crowd. And then I was cold. I reached for the bond and pulled, but there was no response.
Steadying my resolve, sticking to the plan, I said, "Fine."
He blinked, probably expecting me to have fought much harder. I sat up so I faced him, our knees touching as we knelt in the grass. "Close your eyes," he said, and I obeyed, my fingers grappling into the grass. The birds chattered, and the willow branches sighed. The grass crunched as Tamlin rose up on his knees. I braced myself at the brush of his mouth on one of my eyelids, then on the other. He pulled away, and I was left breathless, the kisses still lingering on my skin.
The singing of the birds became an orchestra - a symphony of gossip and mirth. I'd never heard so many layers of music, never heard the variations and themes that wove between their arpeggios. And beyond the birdsong, there was an ethereal melody - a woman, melancholy and weary... the willow. Gasping, I opened my eyes.
The world had become richer, clearer. The brook was a near-invisible rainbow of water that flowed over the stones as invitingly smooth as silk. The trees were clothed in a faith shimmer than radiated from their centers and danced along the edges of their leaves. There was no tangy metallic stench - no, the smell of magic had become like jasmine, like lilac, like roses. I would never be able to paint it, the richness, the feel... Maybe fractions of it, but not the whole thing.
Magic - everything was magic, and it broke my heart.
I looked to Tamlin, and my heart cracked entirely.
It was Tamlin, but not. Rather, it was the Tamlin I'd dreamed of. His skin gleamed with a golden sheen, and around his head glowed a circlet of sunshine. And his eyes...
Not merely green and gold, but every hue and variation that could be imagined, as though every leaf in the forest had bled into one shade. This was a High Lord of Prythian - devastatingly handsome, captivating, powerful beyond belief.
What it would be like to see Rhysand this way.
Then suddenly, the golden, glowing Tamlin vanished, and the one I knew returned. I could still hear the singing of the willow and the birds, but...
"Why can't I see you anymore?"
"Because I willed my glamour back into place."
"Glamour for what?"
"To look normal. Or as normal as I can look with this damned thing," he added, gesturing to the mask. "Being a High Lord, even one with... limited powers, comes with physical markers, too. It's why I couldn't hide what I was becoming from my brothers - from anyone. It's easier to blend in with a glamour."
"Do you only glamour yourself?" I asked.
"For you, I've glamoured everything. I felt it would be easier not to overwhelm you that way."
"Everything?" I held my voice steady, trying not to growl. He'd hidden the music of the world from me? He'd kept me in the dark when there was so much light around me...
"What about your part of the bargain?" he asked, changing the subject.
A yawn crept from me as a sudden weight pressed on my eyelids. "What?"
He leaned closer, his smile turning wicked. "What about my kiss?"
I grabbed his fingers. "Here," I said and slammed my mouth against the back of his hand. "There's your kiss."
Tamlin roared with laughter, but the world blurred lulling me to sleep. The willow beckoned me to lie down, and I obliged. I felt a slight thud in the earth, and the spring rain and new grass scent of him cloyed in my nose as he lay beside me. I tingled with pleasure as he stroked my hair.
This was such a lovely dream. I'd never slept so wonderfully before. So warm, nestled beside him. Calm. Faintly, echoing into my world of slumber, he spoke again his breath caressing my ear. "You're exactly as I dreamed you'd be."
Darkness swallowed everything.
I was furious. I'd awoken the next morning to a complete stranger in my room who turned out to be the same woman who had been caring for me since I'd arrived months ago. I hadn't recognized her because she had been glamoured. Everything had been glamoured. The moment I left my room there were people - faeries - everywhere. The hallways were bustling with masked faeries I'd never seen before. Some were tall and humanoid - High Fae like Tamlin - and others were... not. I tried to avoid looking at those ones, as they seemed the most surprised to notice my attention.
I was almost shaking by the time I reached the dining room. Lucien, mercifully, appeared like Lucien. I didn't ask whether that was because Tamlin had informed him to put up a better glamour or because he didn't bother trying to be something he wasn't.
Tamlin lounged in his usual chair but straightened as I lingered in the doorway. I could have spat on him from across the room. "What's wrong?"
"Tell me all these faeries just arrived last night." I'd almost yelped when I looked out my bedroom window and spotted all the faeries in the garden. Many of them - all with insect masks - pruned the hedges and tended the flowers. Those faeries had been the strangest of all, with their iridescent, buzzing wings sprouting from their backs. And, of course, then there was the green-and-brown skin, and their unnaturally long limbs, and -
Tamlin bit his lip as if to keep from smiling. "They've been here all along."
I clenched my teeth so hard I thought I'd break at least one. "But I never heard anything."
"Of course you didn't," Lucien drawled, and twirled one of his daggers between his hands. "We made sure you couldn't see or hear anyone but those who were necessary."
I could burn them alive with the rage puddling in my gut. I closed my eyes and took a breath thinking back to the night a creature that made you see what you wanted most had come to the manor in the shape of my limping father, come to rescue me. I'd sprinted from my room and barrelled down the stairs only for Tamlin to stop me from walking straight into a trap. The creature, the puca, had fled and I was left shaken to my core. After a second breath I opened my eyes and adjusted the lapels of my tunic. "So you mean to tell me that when I ran after the puca that night..."
"You had an audience," Lucien finished for me.
All this time I'd thought I'd been so stealthy. Meanwhile, I'd been tip-toeing past faeries who had probably laughed their heads off at the blind human.
I was mortified.
Tamlin's lips twitched and he clamped them tightly together, but the amusement still danced in his eyes as he nodded. "It was a valiant effort."
Valiant effort. I could barely see straight. I wanted to rip the cheeky grins right off their faerie faces. Without another word I turned from the room and decided to spend the entire day alone in my room.
The next morning I found a head in the garden.
A bleeding male High Fae head - spiked atop a fountain statue of a great heron flapping its wings. The stone was soaked in enough blood to suggest that the head had been fresh when someone had impaled it on the heron's upraised bill.
I had been hauling my paints and easel out to the garden to paint one of the beds of irises when I stumbled across it. My tins and brushes had clattered to the gravel. A small scrap of paper appeared before me. Floating in the air. I wasn't sure if it was more or less shocking than the ruby blood rushing down from the severed head onto the gray stone. I seized it immediately and saw the scribbles on it. I knew I wouldn't be able to make sense of them, my greatest shortcoming showing its ugly head, but I would try to find a way to decode the shapes into letters and words. Tamlin would never involve me, so I would involve myself. I stuffed the parchment into my pocket and beheld the maskless face contorted into a gruesome, unnatural shape.
I backed away a step - and slammed into something warm and hard.
I whirled, hands rising out of instinct, but Tamlin's voice said, "It's me," and I stopped cold. Had he seen the note? Lucien stood beside him, pale and grim.
"Not Autumn Court," Lucien said. "I don't recognize him at all."
Tamlin's hands clamped on my shoulders as I turned back toward the head. "Neither do I." A soft, vicious growl laced his words, but no claws pricked my skin as he kept gripping me. His hands tightened, though, while Lucien stepped into the small pool in which the statue stood - striding through the red water until he peered up at the anguished face.
"They branded him behind the ear with a sigil," Lucien said, swearing. "A mountain with three stars -"
"Night Court," Tamlin said too quietly.
My mouth went dry. The Night Court - the northernmost bit of Prythian, if I recalled the mural's map from within Tamlin's study correctly. A land of darkness and starlight. Rhysand's land. "Why... why would they do this?" I breathed.
I've done many things that I'm not proud of to keep the people I love safe, he'd said to me. A warning. Did he know something like this would happen? Was this what the Night Court was like? What Rhysand was like? You might see things from me that you do not like or that don't seem right, but you'll be able to feel me through the bond. You can speak to me there, always.
Yet I'd never been able to speak to him through the bond. Not really. We'd exchanged a handful of tugs since I'd last seen him, but that felt so far off now.
Tamlin let go of me, coming to stand at my side as Lucien climbed the statue to remove the head. I looked toward a blossoming crabapple tree instead.
"The Night Court does what it wants," Tamlin said. "They live by their own codes, their own corrupt morals."
"They're all sadistic killers," Lucien said. I dared a glance at him; he was now perched on the heron's stone wing. I looked away again. "They delight in torture of every kind - and would find this sort of stunt to be amusing."
I scanned the garden for Rhysand, part of me terrified and another part hoping to see my mate in the shadows. "Amusing, but not a message?"
"Oh, it's a message," Lucien said, and I cringed at the thick, wet sounds of flesh and bone on stone as he yanked the head off. I'd skinned enough animals, but this... Tamlin put another hand on my shoulder. "To get in and out of our defences, to possibly commit the crime nearby, with the blood this fresh..." A splash as Lucien landed in the water again. "It's exactly what the High Lord of the Night Court would find amusing. The bastard."
Despite my disgust over the head, I had to hold back a growl from deep in the bond for the insult. I'd never felt so conflicted. Maybe when it came to Nesta, my eldest sister, whom I both loved and hated with her bitter snarling ways - three years my elder but couldn't seem to be bothered to help me provide for us all. Always ready to snap at me for any minor crime. My big sister, my biggest antagonist.
Now here I was wanting to defend my mate after he'd murdered someone and staked their head on a fountain. Who was I anymore?
I looked to the house, knowing this wasn't the first time Rhysand had snuck in unbeknownst to Tamlin. I couldn't imagine what they'd do if they knew what he'd done the last time he was here - how easily he'd incapacitated Tamlin without him even noticing his presence. He could have probably killed him. I shivered.
Tamlin brushed a thumb against my shoulder. "You're still safe here. This was just their idea of a prank."
"This isn't connected to the... blight?" I asked.
"Only in that they know the blight is awakening - and want us to know they're circling the Spring Court like vultures, should our wards fall further." I don't know what Tamlin saw on my face but he added, "I won't let that happen."
I didn't have the heart to tell them nothing could be done, but they knew that. They knew Amarantha was coming for them and if this was a warning then perhaps that meant time was running out. I wondered if my plan would work with such a limited time frame. I looked to Tamlin and wondered if he felt strongly enough about me already for this to work.
Lucien splashed out of the fountain, but I couldn't look at him, not with the head he bore, the blood surely on his hands and clothes. "They'll get what's coming to them soon enough. Hopefully the blight will wreck them, too." I cringed, knowing the blight was already wrecking them, judging from Rhysand's words. Tamlin growled at Lucien to take care of the head, and the gravel crunched as Lucien departed.
I crouched to pick up my paints and my brushes, my hands shaking as I fumbled for a large brush. What are you doing, Rhysand? Tamlin knelt next to me, but his hands closed around mine, squeezing.
"You're still safe," he said again. The Suriel's command echoed through my mind again. Stay with the High Lord. You will be safe.
I nodded.
"It's court posturing," he said. "The Night Court is deadly, but this was only their lord's idea of a joke. Attacking anyone here - attacking you - would cause more trouble than it's worth for him." I didn't bother mentioning the conflict on Fire Night as I wondered how that seemed to have been swept under the rug. Perhaps that was Rhysand's doing as well. What a puppetmaster my mate seemed to be. I started to sweat while Tamlin continued, "If the blight truly does harm these lands, and the Night Court enters our borders, we'll be ready."
I doubted it, but okay.