I was going to vomit; I was going to fall to my knees and weep.
But Rhys looked at the menagerie of water-animals I’d crafted and said, “What else?”
Perhaps it was the cold, perhaps it was his story, but hoarfrost cracked in my veins, and the wild song of a winter wind howled in my heart. I felt it then—how easy it would be to jump between them, join them together, my powers.
Each one of my animals halted mid-air … and froze into perfectly carved bits of ice.
One by one, they dropped to the earth. And shattered.
They were one. They had come from the same, dark origin, the same eternal well of power. Once, long ago—before language was invented and the world was new.
Rhys merely continued, “When I heard, when my father heard … I wasn’t wholly truthful to you when I told you Under the Mountain that my father killed Tamlin’s father and brothers. I went with him. Helped him. We winnowed to the edge of the Spring Court that night, then went the rest of the way on foot—to the manor. I slew Tamlin’s brothers on sight. I held their minds, and rendered them helpless while I cut them into pieces, then melted their brains inside their skulls. And when I got to the High Lord’s bedroom—he was dead. And my father … my father had killed Tamlin’s mother as well.”
I couldn’t stop shaking my head.
“My father had promised not to touch her. That we weren’t the kind of males who would do that. But he lied to me, and he did it, anyway. And then he went for Tamlin’s room.”
I couldn’t breathe—couldn’t breathe as Rhys said, “I tried to stop him. He didn’t listen. He was going to kill him, too. And I couldn’t … After all the death, I was done. I didn’t care that Tamlin had been there, had allowed them to kill my mother and sister, that he’d come to kill me because he didn’t want to risk standing against them. I was done with death. So I stopped my father before the door. He tried to go through me. Tamlin opened the door, saw us—smelled the blood already leaking into the hallway. And I didn’t even get to say a word before Tamlin killed my father in one blow.
“I felt the power shift to me, even as I saw it shift to him. And we just looked at each other, as we were both suddenly crowned High Lord—and then I ran.”
He’d murdered Rhysand’s family. The High Lord I’d loved—he’d murdered his friend’s family, and when I’d asked how his family died, he’d merely told me a rival court had done it. Rhysand had done it, and—
“He didn’t tell you any of that.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I breathed, my voice hoarse.
“What do you possibly have to be sorry for?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know that he’d done that—”
And Rhys thought I’d been comparing him—comparing him against Tamlin, as if I held him to be some paragon …
“Why did you stop?” he said, motioning to the ice shards on the pine-needle carpet.
The people he’d loved most—gone. Slaughtered in cold blood. Slaughtered by Tamlin.
The clearing exploded in flame.
The pine needles vanished, the trees groaned, and even Rhys swore as fire swept through the clearing, my heart, and devoured everything in its path.
No wonder he’d made Tamlin beg that day I’d been formally introduced to him. No wonder he’d relished every chance to taunt Tamlin. Maybe my presence here was just to—
No. I knew that wasn’t true. I knew my being here had nothing to do with what was between him and Tamlin, though he no doubt enjoyed interrupting our wedding day. Saved me from that wedding day, actually.
“Feyre,” Rhys said as the fire died.
But there it was—crackling inside my veins. Crackling beside veins of ice, and water.
And darkness.
Embers flared around us, floating in the air, and I sent out a breath of soothing dark, a breath of ice and water, as if it were a wind—a wind at dawn, sweeping clean the world.
The power did not belong to the High Lords. Not any longer.
It belonged to me—as I belonged only to me, as my future was mine to decide, to forge.
Once I discovered and mastered what the others had given me, I could weave them together—into something new, something of every court and none of them.
Flame hissed as it was extinguished so thoroughly that no smoke remained.
But I met Rhys’s stare, his eyes a bit wide as he watched me work. I rasped, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
The sight of him in his Illyrian fighting gear, wings spread across the entire width of the clearing, his blade peeking over his shoulder …
There, in that hole in my chest—I saw the image there. At first interpretation, he’d look terrifying, vengeance and wrath incarnate. But if you came closer … the painting would show the beauty on his face, the wings flared not to hurt, but to carry me from danger, to shield me.
“I didn’t want you to think I was trying to turn you against him,” he said.
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.
CHAPTER
46
I was so cold I might never be warm again. Even during winter in the mortal realm, I’d managed to find some kernel of heat, but after nearly emptying my cache of magic that afternoon, even the roaring hearth fire couldn’t thaw the chill around my bones. Did spring ever come to this blasted place?