A Court of Chaos and Confusion - An ACOTAR Rewrite

Chapter 39

Tamlin cried out as my blade pierced his flesh, breaking bone. For a sickening moment, when his blood rushed onto my hand, I thought the ash dagger would go clean through him.

But there was a faint thud – and a stinging reverberation in my hand as the dagger struck something hard and unyielding. Tamlin lurched forward, his face growing pale, and I yanked the dagger from his chest. As the blood drained away from the polished wood, I lifted the blade.

Its tip had been nicked, turned inward on itself.

Tamlin clutched his chest as he panted, the wound already healing. Rhysand, at the foot of the dais, grinned from ear to ear. Amarantha climbed to her feet.

The faeries murmured to one another. I dropped the blade, sending it clattering across the red marble.

Kill her now, I wanted to bark at Tamlin, but he didn't move as he pushed his hand against his wound, blood dribbling out. Too slowly – he was healing too slowly. The mask didn't fall off. Kill her now.

A sense of dread began to build up in me, as a memory from a dream long ago surfaced again. I couldn't remember the details, I'd been so young...

"She won," someone in the crowd said. "Free them," another echoed.

But Amarantha's face blanched, her features contorting until she looked truly serpentine. "I'll free them whenever I see fit. Feyre didn't specify when I had to free them – just that I had to, at some point. Perhaps when you're dead," she finished with a hateful smile. "You assumed that when I said instantaneous freedom regarding the riddle, it applied to the trials, too, didn't you? Foolish, stupid human."

I stepped back as she descended the steps of the dais. Her fingers curled into claws – Jurian's eye was going wild within the ring, his pupil dilating and shrinking. "And you," she hissed at me. "You." Her teeth gleamed – turning sharp. "I'm going to kill you."

That dream memory tugged at me again as someone cried out, but I couldn't move, couldn't even try to get out of the way as something far more violent than lightning struck me, and I crashed to the floor.

"I'm going to make you pay for your insolence," Amarantha snarled, and I screamed as pain like nothing I'd known erupted through me. As my body rose and then slammed onto the hard floor, and I was crushed beneath another wave of torturous agony, it came to me.

I'd done this before. Long ago, in a dream, as a little girl I'd fought three trials against an evil faerie queen, she'd given me a riddle that I couldn't figure out that caused me to die screaming. When I woke up and had told my father, -one of the few times he'd been home - he'd told me the answer...

My very bones were shattering as my body was being ripped apart from the inside out. "Admit you don't really love him, and I'll spare you," Amarantha breathed, and through my fractured vision, I saw her prowl toward me. "Admit what a cowardly, lying, inconsistent bit of human garbage you are."

I wouldn't – I wouldn't say it even if she splattered me across the ground. All I had ever truly owned was my ability to love; to choose who to share that love with and how to love them. She couldn't take that from me.

"Feyre!" someone roared. No, not someone – Rhysand.

It sounds like the faerie queen in your dream was a clever one indeed. But you don't need to be clever to solve this riddle. You only need to have seen all facets of the most beautiful magic our world has to offer - the good, and the bad; the beautiful and the heartbreaking, my father had said as he handed me a cup of warm milk to soothe me.

But Amarantha still neared. "You think you're worthy of him? A High Lord? You think you deserve anything at all, human?" My back arched, and my ribs cracked, one by one.