Did she wonder where her lost son was now? Had she heard the rumors I’d crafted, the lies I’d spun? I couldn’t tell her that Lucien currently hunted the continent, dodging armies, for an enchanted queen. To find a scrap of salvation.
Beron—slender-faced and brown-haired—didn’t bother to look anywhere but at the High Lords assembled. But his remaining sons sneered at us. Sneered enough that the Peregryns ruffled their feathers. Even Varian flashed his teeth in warning at the leer Cresseida earned from one of them. Their father didn’t bother to check them.
But Eris did.
A step behind his father, Eris murmured, “Enough,” and his younger brothers fell into line. All three of them.
Whether Beron noticed or cared, he did not let on. No, he merely stopped halfway across the room, hands folded before him, and scowled—as if we were a pack of mongrels.
Beron, the oldest among us. The most awful.
Rhys smoothly greeted him, though his power was a dark mountain shuddering beneath us, “It’s no surprise that you’re tardy, given that your own sons were too slow to catch my mate. I suppose it runs in the family.”
Beron’s lips curled slightly as he looked to me, my crown. “Mate—and High Lady.”
I leveled a flat, bored stare at him. Turned it on his hateful sons. On—Eris.
Eris only smiled at me, amused and aloof. Would he wear that mask when he ended his father’s life and stole his throne?
Cassian was watching the would-be High Lord like a hawk studying his next meal. Eris deigned a glance at the Illyrian general and inclined his head in invitation, subtly patting his stomach. Ready for round two.
Then Eris’s attention shifted to Mor, sweeping over her with a disdain that made me see red. Mor only stared blankly at him. Bored.
Even Viviane was biting her lip. So she knew of what had been done to Mor—what Eris’s presence would trigger.
Unaware of the meeting that had already occurred, the unholy alliance struck. Azriel was so still I wasn’t sure he was breathing. Whether Mor noticed, whether she knew that though she’d tried to move past the bargain we’d made, the guilt of it still haunted Azriel, she didn’t let on.
They sat—filling in the final seats.
Not one empty chair left.
It said enough about Tamlin’s plans.
I tried not to sag in my chair as the attendants took care of the Autumn Court, as we all settled.
Thesan, as host, began. “Rhysand, you have called this meeting. Pushed us to gather sooner than we intended. Now would be the time to explain what is so urgent.”
Rhys blinked—slowly. “Surely the invading armies landing on our shores explain enough.”
“So you have called us to do what, exactly?” Helion challenged, bracing his forearms on his muscled, gleaming thighs. “Raise a unified army?”
“Among other things,” Rhys said mildly. “We—”
It was almost the same—the entrance.
Almost the same as that night in my family’s old cottage, when the door had shattered and a beast had charged in with the freezing cold and roared at us.
He did not bother with the landing balcony, or the escorts. He did not have an entourage.
Like a crack of lightning, vicious as a spring storm, he winnowed into the chamber itself.
And my blood went colder than Kallias’s ice as Tamlin appeared, and smiled like a wolf.
CHAPTER
44
Absolute silence. Absolute stillness.
I felt the tremor of magic slide through the room as shield after shield locked into place around each High Lord and his retinue. The one Rhysand had already snapped around us, now reinforcing … Rage laced its essence. Wrath and rage. Even if my mate’s face was bored—lazy.
I tried to school mine into the cold caution with which Nesta regarded him, or the vague distaste on Mor’s. I tried—and failed utterly.
I knew his moods, his temper.
Here was the High Lord who had shredded those naga into bloody ribbons; here was the High Lord who had impaled Amarantha on Lucien’s sword and ripped out her throat with his teeth.
All of it, gleaming in those green eyes as they fixed on me, on Rhys. Tamlin’s teeth were white as crow-picked bones as he smiled broadly.
Thesan rose, his captain remaining seated beside him—albeit with a hand on his sword. “We were not expecting you, Tamlin.” Thesan gestured with a slender hand toward his cringing attendants. “Fetch the High Lord a chair.”
Tamlin did not tear his gaze from me. From us.
His smile turned subdued—yet somehow more unnerving. More vicious.
He wore his usual green tunic—no crown, no adornments. No sign of another bandolier to replace the one I’d stolen.
Beron drawled, “I will admit, Tamlin, that I am surprised to see you here.” Tamlin didn’t alter his focus from me. From every breath I took. “Rumor claims your allegiance now lies elsewhere.”
Tamlin’s gaze shifted—but down. To the ring on my finger. To the tattoo adorning my right hand, flowing beneath the glittering, pale blue sleeve of my gown. Then it rose—right to that crown I’d picked for myself.
I didn’t know what to say. What to do with my body, my breathing.
No more masks, no more lies and deceptions. The truth, now sprawled bare and open before him. What I’d done in my rage, the lies I’d fed him. The people and land I’d laid vulnerable to Hybern. And now that I’d returned to my family, my mate …
My molten wrath had cooled into something sharp-edged and brittle.
The attendants hauled over a chair—setting it between one of Beron’s sons and Helion’s entourage. Neither looked thrilled about it, though they weren’t stupid enough to physically recoil as Tamlin sat.
He said nothing. Not a word.
Helion waved a scar-flecked hand. “Let’s get on with it, then.”
Thesan cleared his throat. No one looked toward him.
Not as Tamlin surveyed the hand Rhys had resting on my sparkling knee.
The loathing in Tamlin’s eyes practically simmered.
No one, not even Amarantha, had ever looked at me with such hatred.
No, Amarantha hadn’t really known me—her loathing had been superficial, driven from a personal history that poisoned everything. Tamlin … Tamlin knew me. And now hated every inch of what I was.
He opened his mouth, and I braced myself.
“It would seem congratulations are in order.”
The words were flat—flat and yet sharp as his claws, currently hidden beneath his golden skin.
I said nothing.
Rhys only held Tamlin’s stare. Held it with a face like ice, and yet utter rage roiled beneath it. Cataclysmic rage, surging and writhing down the bond between us.
But my mate addressed Thesan, who had reclaimed his seat, yet seemed far from any sort of ease, “We can discuss the matter at hand later.”
Tamlin said calmly, “Don’t stop on my account.”
The light in Rhysand’s eyes guttered, as if a hand of darkness wiped away those stars. But he reclined in his chair, withdrawing his hand from my knee to trace idle circles on his seat’s wooden arm. “I’m not in the business of discussing our plans with enemies.”
Helion, across the reflection pool, grinned like a lion.