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Summary
Chapter 47
Lucien says they’ve been hunting Feyre for two months. She knows that if he touches her, he will winnow her away somewhere. Rhysand appears at her side, his wings hidden by magic. She accuses Lucien of giving up on her, and not interceding when he could see she was wasting away. Then, she surprises them all by growing dark Illyrian wings. She tells Lucien to warn Tamlin not to send anyone else into these lands or she will hunt them down and show what the darkness taught her. Lucien tells Rhysand that he and everyone else at the Night Court are as good as dead, then leaves. Rhysand strokes Feyre’s wings and asks her how she did it. She says she used shape-shifting magic—Tamlin’s power.
Chapter 48
Feyre and Rhysand spend the night at an inn above a tavern, and Rhysand manages to disguise himself as an ordinary Illyrian warrior. They take the last room, a tiny space in the attic with a bed they’re forced to share. Feyre tells Rhysand that she wants fun and distraction, and he pleasures her, but they don’t sleep together, even though she wants to.
Chapter 49
The next morning Feyre asks why Rhysand made the bargain with her, and he says he needed to keep her alive in a way that didn’t look merciful. As they fly back to camp, he starts to tell her something important, but he is hit by multiple poisoned ash arrows. She manages to winnow to the spot where he fell, and then tracks him. The tracks split in two, so she follows her own scent on Rhysand and comes to a cave, where Rhysand is chained by Hybern soldiers. She manages to winnow him into another cave and cuts the arrows from his wings, telling him stories to distract him from the pain. She tells him how she painted their furniture with paint Elain bought her and that she painted stars and the moon for herself.
Chapter 50
Not knowing how to heal Rhysand, she snares the Suriel and asks it for a cure. The Suriel says she needs to give Rhysand a few mouthfuls of her own blood and have him chew a weed. Then, the Suriel reveals that Rhysand is her mate, and that he knows it. Furious with Rhysand for not sharing this information, Feyre feeds him her blood and the weed, then she asks how long he has known that she is his mate. He says he was certain when Amarantha was killing her, but that he didn’t tell her because she was in love with Tamlin. He reminds her that she said she was interested in him for fun and a distraction. Even realizing the truth in that, she feels betrayed by his secrecy, and the fact that the rest of the Inner Circle knows compounds her anger.
Chapter 51
They arrive at the camp, and Feyre asks Mor to winnow her someplace she can be alone. Mor takes her to a cabin in the mountains that only Mor’s family members can enter. As Rhysand’s mate, Feyre is allowed inside. Mor says it killed Rhysand to keep their bond a secret, and attests that she’s never seen him as happy as he is with Feyre, but this isn’t enough to break through Feyre’s feelings of anger and betrayal.
Analysis
Feyre confronts her past directly as she faces her old friend Lucien and is forced to choose her path. Feyre has claimed that she is trying to decide what to do next, even though she has become more and more aligned with the Night Court. Although Rhysand has said that she can return to the Spring Court at any time, she has not faced a decision until this moment. Hunting her with armed guards from the Spring Court, Lucien is an extension of Tamlin, so facing him gives Feyre a chance to confront someone who disappointed her. When Feyre accuses Lucien of giving up on her, he instead blames her, saying that she was imprisoned because she gave up on herself. This serves as a reminder of how her agency was constantly undermined when she was at the Spring Court.
When Lucien tells Feyre that Tamlin will never stop waiting for her to come home, Feyre resists the lure of her past and demonstrates to Lucien how much she has changed by using her powers to create dark Illyrian wings, a visual symbol of her new home. These wings symbolize Feyre’s transformation, both physically and emotionally, and provide a visual representation of her evolution since her experiences Under the Mountain. The wings are meant to show Lucien that she has gone over to the dark side, but in reality she is donning evil as a mask, just as Rhysand does. Ironically, she is only able to grow the wicked-looking wings because of the shape-shifting power she acquired from Tamlin when he gave a kernel of his power to remake her. The decision to remain with the Night Court comes naturally, and even Feyre is surprised by how easy it was.
Feyre puts her newfound powers to the test when Rhysand falls victim to an ambush, and she finds herself alone in the forest and needs to play rescuer, a role traditionally assigned to males in fairy tales. Her own smell on Rhysand after their night together enables her to avoid a trap, making her sexual desire and satisfaction a key element in his rescue. In her rage and grief at seeing Rhysand shot down with arrows and held in chains, Feyre finds herself able to kill the Hybern guards easily. She now has the dexterity of a hunter and none of the qualms that made it so difficult for her to kill when she was Under the Mountain. As the rescuer, Feyre draws power from the strong emotions she has, including fear and love, which are traditionally feminine feelings associated with weakness. Instead, Feyre is able to harness the power of these feelings to save Rhysand, the most powerful High Lord in history, on her own.
Upon learning from the Suriel that she and Rhysand are mates, Feyre feels angry and betrayed. These emotions are a reaction to the fact that she has been condemning herself as fickle, disloyal, and morally corrupt for wanting to be with Rhysand so soon after her romance with Tamlin. Realizing that her attraction to Rhysand is in reality a deep and permanent bond in which she has no conscious choice, Feyre finds it outrageous that Rhysand never shared such key information with her. In doing so, he chose to let her suffer for months over a decision that could have been simple and straightforward. While most High Fae may have been aware that the bond between her and Rhysand was a mating bond, Feyre’s inexperience leads her to believe it is connected to the bargain they made. Even though Rhysand defends himself by pointing out that Feyre was initially still in love with Tamlin, and subsequently in a traumatized mental state, she finds it intolerable that he decided what was best for her, exhibiting behavior that echoes Tamlin’s overprotective treatment. Feyre wants to be treated as an equal, and she expects honesty and transparency in a relationship, making it ironic that the mating bond, something meant to inspire intimacy and trust, becomes evidence of Rhysand’s betrayal.
