Previously: A wee dip in a star pool.
--

The art gallery has been cleaned and reopened, so Tamlin is escorting Feyre there.

""When he paused before a set of wooden doors, the slight smile he gave me was enough to make me blurt, “Why do anything—anything this kind?”
The smile faltered. “It’s been a long time since there was anyone here who appreciated these things. I like seeing them used again.” Especially when there was such blood and death in every other part of his life."

That last line was awful close to cheatery narration, but honestly, it's mostly just Feyre romanticizing her kidnapper. I don't know which one is worse.

Tamlin opens the doors to the gallery, and of course, it's stunning, beautiful, amazing. Feyre tells us the room is empty, except for all of the stuff in it, like chairs, benches, and all of the art. I absolutely love when rooms are empty except for the stuff in them. 😍

In stilted language, Feyre tells us how great and different all the paintings are.

"Some had been painted through eyes like mine, artists who saw in colors and shapes I understood. Some showcased colors I had not considered; these had a bend to the world that told me a different set of eyes had painted them."

If I exert myself here, fine, I get what she's saying, but it's so clunky that it doesn't make me want to be kind to this prose.

""I never knew,” Tamlin said from behind me, “that humans were capable of …” He trailed off..."

He never knew humans, sentient beings, were capable of appreciating art????? Jesus, Tamlin.

Feyre thanks him again, and he leaves her to admire the art alone.

After some hours, Feyre takes a lunch break, and then Alis shows her to the room that they set up so she could paint. It's awesome, amazing, the best, so much paint, etc.

Then we just jump ahead a few weeks? Feyre just paints and paints for weeks, but all her paintings are bad. Really a thrilling time here, 169 pages in. Sometimes, when she's not painting, Tamlin takes her to explore the Spring lands. Other times, Tamlin is called away to defend his lands, and Feyre stays home and worries.

The land around the manor remains quiet and safe, though Feyre never goes back to the woods where the scary creatures were. She does keep having weirdly prophetic dreams about a pale woman ripping her to shreds and being "watched over by a shadow" she can't see. I still have no idea why Feyre would be having prophetic dreams. Is it something in Tamlin's food?

Despite the dreams, Feyre feels safe. She reminds us (again, again, again) that the Suriel told her to stay "with the High Lord" and she would be safe, so she has.

And then she tells us again again again that the Spring lands are beautiful and that she can't paint them.

Feyre suddenly remembers that she forgot about her family. She thinks that maybe it's the magic (what magic, specifically? Again, is it in the food or something?) that made her entirely forget about her family. Yeah, Feyre, good guess, but if I had to present an alternative hypothesis, I would say maybe you are a terrible person.

One day, though, she feels a wind from the south, and she's reminded that it's springtime in the human realm. For weeks and weeks, there was never a wind from the south? Was this specific wind very human-like? Why would a spring wind in the Spring Court be like "Ah, yes, it's Spring for humans." What's going on here?

"My family, glamoured, cared for, safe, still had no idea where I was. The mortal world … it had moved on without me, as if I had never existed. A whisper of a miserable life—gone, unremembered by anyone whom I’d known or cared for.
I didn’t paint, nor did I go riding with Tamlin that day. Instead, I sat before a blank canvas, no colors at all in my mind.
No one would remember me back home—I was as good as dead to them. And Tamlin had let me forget them. Maybe the paints had even been a distraction—a way to get me to stop complaining, to stop being a pain in his ass about wanting to see my family. Or maybe they were a distraction from whatever was happening with the blight and Prythian.

1- That was stupidly repetitive.

2- Tamlin let her forget them??

3- Correct me if I'm wrong, but hadn't Feyre pretty much stopped mentioning her family even before this lazy passage of time? Tamlin told her he took care of her family, and the Suriel told her not to run away, and she was like, " Okay! And now all of a sudden she thinks that Tamlin giving her the paints SHE ASKED FOR was him distracting her so she would stop the complaining she had already stopped????

My god, this woman is an idiot.

Of course, Feyre takes this opportunity to talk to Tamlin about the frustration she feels over forgetting her own family.

Just kidding, she fumes through dinner and then storms out to walk aimlessly around the rose garden. Tamlin finds her out there and explains that his father had the rose garden planted for his mother as a mating gift.

"My nails pricked the skin of my palms. Tamlin providing for them or no, glamouring their memories or no, I’d been … erased from their lives. Forgotten. I’d let him erase me. He’d offered me paints and the space and time to practice; he’d shown me pools of starlight; he’d saved my life like some kind of feral knight in a legend, and I’d gulped it down like faerie wine. I was no better than those zealot Children of the Blessed.

This is such a wild, inflated conflict, particularly considering that we had presumably progressed past this point in their relationship. WHY ARE WE HAVING THIS FIGHT?

Tamlin notes that Feyre seems upset, so as an adult who should definitely be in a relationship with a man who is centuries old, she stomps over to one of the bushes and rips off a rose, causing herself to bleed.

"I could never paint it accurately—never render it the way those artists had in the gallery pieces. I would never be able to paint Elain’s little garden outside the cottage the way I remembered it, even if my family didn’t remember me."

If she tells me ONE MORE TIME she can't paint something, I'm going to lose my shit.

After her little temper tantrum, Feyre tells Tamlin that she feels ashamed of herself for leaving her family. She says it feels selfish to paint. She says that after all of those years of what she did for them, they didn't even try to stop Tamlin from taking her. Now that is actually something she can be brooding over, even if, logically, I'm not sure what she expected her family to do in front of a magical giant wolf.

I also get her misplacing her anger and blaming Tamlin, but she also doesn't acknowledge it. We just get whiplash from TAMLIN LET ME FORGET to Tamlin now comforting her because her family didn't come after her????

I genuinely hate this book so much.

Tamlin lifts Feyre's hand and kisses it in a way that makes Feyre horny. He also cures the wound, but the blood ends up all over his lips as he tells Feyre not to feel bad about what brings her joy. It would bring me joy if he wiped his lips off or something.

Feyre asks (again again again) why he's doing any of this. Tamlin admits that he finds her little mortal life fascinating, or whatever. That is such a creepy answer to give in this situation, to be honest, but what am I expecting from a kidnapper?

He kisses her on the cheek and promises to give her answers... one day... when it's safe. I'm sure this is a totally good plan that will not backfire at all.

Tamlin leaves, and Feyre releases a breath she didn't realize she was holding.

We cut to the next morning, I think, and Feyre fleeing the manor once again to explore. An hour into her walk, she feels something coming closer, but she knows it's Tamlin, and she laid out a trap for him. And they just have playful banter? Like if the whole last scene didn't happen or Tamlin's kiss on the cheek changed everything between them again again again again again.

Tamlin followed her out here to deliver some poems he wrote her. Feyre starts panicking because she won't be able to read them, but Tamlin reads them out loud to her. He made a bunch of dirty limericks with the list of words that Feyre wrote down that she didn't recognize. Feyre finds it hilarious. It's actually a genuinely nice gesture. Maybe? I don't know, my perception of all of this is so off. Tamlin is a kidnapper, but Feyre is so insufferable, I can't ever tell who is being the bigger weirdo.

We cut AGAIN, this time to Feyre and Tamlin walking and talking. She asks him about what he said about the rose garden being a mating gift. Tamlin explains mating:

“High Fae wed without the mating bond, but if you find your mate, the bond is so deep that marriage is … insignificant in comparison."

File that away for later, I guess.

Feyre asks where Tamlin's parents are. He gives a half-story about how bad his father and brothers were. They kept slaves, which is why Tamlin knew he wouldn't bring harm to her family or subject them to faerie whims. I mean, wasn't the whole thing that Tamlin was gonna kill Feyre if she didn't come with him? No?

Feyre thanks Tamlin for not enslaving her.

Tamlin's mother loved his father so much that she never said an ill word against his tyranny. His brothers never expected him to inherit the title, because he trained for war, but it doesn't matter because they were all killed by some other court anyway.

So, Tamlin became High Lord, but it was a rough transition because usually High Lords are trained in manners, laws, and court politics. A bunch of his father's courtiers defected because they didn't want to serve a "warrior-beast."

Feyre thinks about how Nesta called her a half-wild beast, and she's like, " Wow, Tamlin and I are the same. 🫶🏽

Feyre says the courtiers who left were idiots because Tamlin has been so good at protecting his land from the blight. Tamlin kind of cringes at that sentiment, but before we can stop to wonder why, Feyre notices that some nearby faeries are setting up bonfires.

Tamlin tells her that it's for Calanmai, a holiday Feyre knows nothing about because apparently humans just don't celebrate any holidays post-Fae invasion, since the humans don't serve any of the fae gods, and... listen, I don't know. I don't believe in a world where humans wouldn't celebrate a single holiday. Have you met humans?

Tamlin explains that it's a spring ceremony where they light fires and generate magic to help regenerate the land for the year ahead. Tamlin is very sketchy about how, exactly, they regenerate this magic, but I have some ideas.

Tamlin says there will be more faeries around than usual, and Feyre should just ignore them. She asks if she's not invited to the party, and Tamlin says she's definitely not, and it makes things awkward.

When they enter the gardens again, Tamlin gets all tense. Feyre notes that it feels still like it does before one of the monster fae shows up. Tamlin snarls at Feyre to hide and stay hidden, no matter what she overhears. "Then he was gone." I don't know if this means that Tamlin teleports or if he just ran away really quickly.

Feyre hesitates long enough that she's just ducking behind a hedge when Tamlin and Lucien walk back into the garden. She thinks about making a run for it, but figures running would give her away and be the opposite of staying hidden.

Tamlin and Lucien carry on a conversation with a fae we can't see. Tam says he knows what day it is, and Invisible Fae replies that his continued behavior is garnering a lot of interest in court. The big bad "she" that keeps being referenced is wondering why Tamlin hasn't given up and why four naga wound up dead not too long ago.

Lucien snaps that Tamlin's not like the "other fools" and that Big Bad She shouldn't expect bowed heads from them, or else she's a bigger idiot than they thought.

Invisible Fae can't believe Lucien would say a bad word against Big Bad She, since she holds all of their fates in her hand. Tamlin says he's getting sick of cleaning up the trash Big Bad She is dumping on his land. Invisible Fae laughs and says that they are sent as reminders of what will happen if Tam is caught breaking the terms of--

Lucien cuts her off to say they aren't breaking the terms and that Invisible Fae should get out and stay out. Invisible Fae laughs and tells Tamlin that though he has a heart of stone (have we literally seen any evidence of that at all?), he keeps a lot of fear inside of it. Lucien snaps again, telling the thing to burn in hell because apparently, the gods the fae serve have a hell. Invisible Fae laughs and flies away.

Tamlin pulls Feyre out of her hiding spot. Lucien demands to know what she heard. Feyre says it was nothing she understood. She asks who that was, and Tamlin just says some vague stuff about being the scary kind of fae from human stories.

Lucien is worried that something called the Attor saw Invisible Fae, but Tamlin insists that he didn't. Tam dismisses Feyre, who heads back to her room, wondering what the heck just happened.

Not me, though. I continue to just be happy when each new chapter is over.

That was 13 Kindle pages and an amazing 65 em dashes. There were also 24 mentions of paint in this chapter, so I spared you the 24 shot gifs, but they happened in my heart. At least three of those mentions were Feyre talking about how she couldn't paint something, with a few additional ones being about how bad she was at painting. Truly, this book is a thrill a minute.

Next time: The drums do be drumming in Chapter 20.

♥️

Marines