Chapter Text
"I told Amarantha the name of that girl, thinking you’d invented it. I had no idea … I had no idea she’d send her cronies to retrieve Clare. But if I admitted my lie … I broke into Clare’s head when they brought her Under the Mountain. I took away her pain, and told her to scream when expected to. So they … they did those things to her, and I tried to make it right, but … After a week, I couldn’t let them do it. Hurt her like that anymore. So while they tortured her, I slipped into her mind again and ended it. She didn’t feel any pain. She felt none of what they did to her, even at the end. But … But I still see her. And my men. And the others that I killed for Amarantha.” - Chapter 54, A Court of Mist and Fury
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I was damned.
Whatever waited for me in death, whatever succeeded existence in this gods-less world – If there was any ultimate justice, any arbiter of vengeance, I deserved whatever punishment they would mete out.
There was no other conclusion to be drawn from the crushing wave of relief that swept through me when that brown-haired human head lifted from the throne room’s stone floor to reveal eyes of deep brown – not blue. My fingers scrabbled at the rough-cut wall behind me, the finest grains of loose soil working their way under my fingernails.
Not her.
Thank the Cauldron – it wasn’t her.
It was wrong to think that there could be any redemption for me after that moment – after I whole-heartedly accepted that I could so easily welcome the death of a complete innocent in place of another. But after so many years in this stale mountain tomb and so many gut-wrenching losses, here was a victory – however slight.
“Well?” The female Fae voice to my right was impatient, jarring, rattling around inside my head until it threatened to shake me apart.
I ignored the question and held the terrified brown-eyed gaze in front of me for a heartbeat longer – enough to clearly demonstrate who held the power here in this moment; an object lesson for a court that would better have been served by being wiped off the face of the world. Slowly, light as a breath of a non-existent breeze, I extended my consciousness toward the shaking human woman sprawled on the floor before the throne, the Attor’s claws at her back pressing her lower in a mockery of a bow.
The woman’s terror was tangible – everyone even remotely near could smell it, practically taste it in the air. And I could feel it pouring off her mind, rendering her mute, incapable of thought. An ensnared rabbit. Helpless.
“Rhys!” Amarantha hissed, drawing out the syllables of my nickname unpleasantly. Someone in the group of assembled fairies snickered. Her court was always like that – always lurking, whispering, rustling, never a single blasted moment of peaceful silence.
Amarantha would not tolerate much more of my insubordination.
Without bothering to straighten from my half-slouch against the wall or even to turn my head, I flicked my gaze over to her and raised an eyebrow.
“Well? Is this Clare Beddor?” she demanded coolly, a flicker of rage stifled too late for her court to miss.
I had no doubt it was. For all his faults, the Attor was without peer in exactly three things: espionage, cruelty, and sheer dogged persistence. If he said this was Clare, it was.
Which meant that the mortal woman I had met in the Spring Court had slipped – had thought quickly enough to lie about her name despite my hold on her mind, but not quite quickly enough to craft a name from scratch – and which meant that in passing on the name, I’d betrayed another innocent for Amarantha to destroy.
Fuck.
“Yes,” I said, carelessly, glancing down at myself to smooth an already perfectly-pressed corner of my black jacket. “It would seem to be.”
I was very, very careful about lying in this court. I’d seen too many attempt and fail to risk it. Perhaps something in the essence of our own stolen power imbued in Amarantha a sort of prescience, an ability to sense lies from truth. The same power that warned her of assassination attempts before they were more than a half-formed thought in a High Fae’s mind. The only thing that prevented me from a no-doubt doomed attempt to reach into her mind and smash it like ripe fruit.
Far from satisfied by my pithy answer, Amarantha looked me over, eyes scraping down my face and chest, lingering as her gaze dropped lower. I was going to pay dearly for my power play later tonight, I realized.
But in this world, there was nothing that was free. And my delaying action had bought enough time for my magic – pathetic, weakened, fragmented as it was – to wrap around Clare’s undefended mind, to weave itself in alongside her very understanding of herself, to soothe down to her very cells and nerves and to hold tight in every direction: an impenetrable and undetectable mental shield.
Because I knew there was only one way this was going to end. The only question was how long it would last.
“Well!” Amarantha rallied and clasped her hands together with a smile, skimming her gaze back to Clare. “I delight in welcoming such an illustrious guest to my humble court.” She turned to the throne next to her – the one that, despite everything that had happened over the past 49 years, I’d flatly refused to sit in – and smiled at the blonde male seated there.
“I admit, Tamlin dear, I don’t know what you see in her,” she said, her voice assuming the slightly rougher tone that she usually reserved for her bedchamber. I think she thought it made her sound sultry.
I had, more than once, wondered what she’d sound like if I choked the life from her lungs with my bare hands around her neck.
But her court smiled, rustled, some of them inching closer; drawn by the vicious delight in her voice, compelled by the cruelty. Tamlin’s face was utterly blank – the one and only thing he’d managed to do thus far to actually help.
Terror spiked again from Clare’s direction, and on instinct I reached out mentally, soothed. Shhhh…
That, at least, broken through some of the incoherent panic. Clare’s eyes flicked wide and darting around the room, trying to identify the voice in her mind. Who are you?
A friend.
A lie.
I want to go home. Please, let me go home!
Shh… I whispered as she continued to beg, sending a flare of reassurance pulsing down her spine. Just do exactly what I tell you to do, and we’ll get through this.
Beside me, Amarantha continued to taunt Tamlin. Before me, the sea of rustling and giggling flowed, the contents of the assembled Fae and faerie minds ranging from a constant jumble of barely-there rebellion to ardent defenders of Amarantha.
It was, I mused, truly a wonder that they all believed I was loyal to the queen, when not more than half of them could shield their minds with even half a sense of self-preservation. I could easily betray any one of them at any moment.
Promise? Clare pleaded with me: her nameless, faceless defender. Her betrayer.
Yes.
Another lie, of sorts. There was only one way through this. That her death would be messy, drawn-out, and humiliating was already guaranteed.
But it could be painless. I owed Clare that much.
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Most of the court was sound asleep by the time that I slipped into my own chambers, the darkness nearly absolute. For a moment as I stood before the bed, the silence I’d long yearned for throughout that long day settled around me, heavy, comforting.
Without warning, the tenor changed – the dark becoming oppressive, stifling, choking. I couldn’t breathe as Amarantha's hands slipped into my mind’s eye, the long fingers that had taken a saw-edged blade to Clare’s skin the same ones running down my chest, my shoulders, my scalp as she pushed me lower in her bed.
I snapped.
The next moment I breathed in the bitterness of the cold night air, the stars above pale dots that had never seemed more unobtainable. I jammed the heels of my hands hard into my eyes.
She would have felt me winnow from her court, would have felt the unique shape of my own power matching the power that now resided in her. It was a risk, to be sure, but a calculated one. She indulged me in my occasional idiosyncrasies… so long as I didn’t make a habit of them.
My hands dropped to my sides and I stared down the side of the mountain to the plains below – just as unobtainable as the stars from my current position. Fifty years ago, even twenty years ago, I would have given anything for the ability to free my wings and leap from the ledge. Today, I didn’t even feel the slightest temptation to soar into the skies.
Amarantha hadn’t even made it her object to “break” me. It had just seemingly happened. So how could Tamlin, with all the combined force of her powers against him, succeed where I had failed? Tamlin – who’d so frequently proven himself willing to betray, who’d sat on his ass for 49 years while his most loyal soldiers were slain one after the other, who’d never mastered his own temper let alone the demands of leadership.
But I knew I was in a dearly precarious position. If she threw me aside to take Tamlin as her lover, my privileges would slip away as well. My access to the intelligence from her spies, my freedom to leave Under the Mountain at discrete intervals, my leverage. My ability to protect my Court from the inside-out.
The consequences of failing were… Too great to contemplate.
I shut my eyes and sat down right there on the ground, leaned back up against the side of the mountain. Finally, the stillness wasn’t smothering.
My mind quieted, expanding, shifting, reaching out for the comforting presence I knew was out there, a thousand leagues south, past the Wall. Tonight, however, there was very little. A flash of cool earth, a sense of soft familial joy, the scent of flowers. She’d been quiet, subdued, even, for the last several days. But as always, the thinnest of golden threads hummed a connection between us.
I wondered how much she’d guessed… if she knew she would never, could never, safely return to Prythian. That just as she’d been exiled from her human home months before, so now was she to be exiled again. I wondered at the Cauldron – at the inexplicable, inconstant linkage between her mind and my own – and if she’d been meant to be something else to me, in a different world, in a different time.
In my mind, her face blurred, shifting, merging with the human woman still in Amarantha’s dungeons.
If she had been in Clare’s place, I would have had no choice either but to protect her mind, to calm her as her body slipped away and the light from her eyes faded.
And even with my full power in hand, I didn’t think I would have had the strength for that.
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The truth was, we Fae were all in an untenable situation. And I, for all my age, power, and experience, couldn’t see a way out.
Now that Tamlin had been defeated, we were counting down the days until Amarantha could muster a force strong and agile enough to conquer the human lands – even if they had to send their forces through cracks in the wall one Fae at a time. Even had Tamlin defeated the curse against him – and returned to his full powers – I still doubted it would have been enough on its own to snap Amarantha’s grasp over our lands.
But it would have been something.
Instead we had nothing – or rather, almost nothing. That thin gold thread, so very far away, gave me inexplicable hope.