Chapter Text
When Elain first sets foot in the Spring Court, she feels her heart truly break.
It is everything Velaris isn’t; wild and overgrown and cozy, with tall birch trees woven into a high arching bough above the cobblestone road. Wisteria hangs from the trellis of branches, and the scent of jasmine is heavy on the air around her, a smell so bright and vivid it nearly sparkles in the corners of her vision.
She loves it immediately. She loves it as much as her sister despises it. Though she doesn’t hate Velaris, and has even come to think of the Night city as home, she feels at her ease here.
Rhysand is not at his ease, even mere moments after he winnows her to the pathway. As she marvels at the dappled sunshine that filters through the verdure, he shuffles his weight from foot to foot, picks at the cuffs of his sleek black coat. He’s uncharacteristically uncertain.
“You don’t have to do this,” Rhys says. She knows he means well by it, but it’s all she can do to not roll her eyes. He’s so concerned with personal choice, with freedom. It is of utmost importance to him. She understands; he’s been deprived of it in his life. But she doesn’t have a choice in any of this. None of them do. Elain is a cog in the grand machine of fate, same as the rest of them are. She’s just the only one who can clearly see its workings.
“I want to do this,” she says, though. She has a part to play. “I’m honored to represent my court.”
“Well. If you ever want to come home,” he says. “I’m just a thought away.”
It’s not quite true, she knows. Feyre and Rhys can’t pierce her mind the way they can with nearly everyone else. Another gift from the Cauldron, perhaps, or just a remnant of the signature Archeron obstinance. But what is true is that he’s at her beck and call nearly as much as he is Feyre’s. Rhys is a man who takes the responsibility of family seriously, and Elain has easily come to think of him as a trusted brother in the few short years she’s known him.
“I know,” she says, resting a hand on his shoulder in a small gesture of reassurance. He pauses his fidgeting at the contact, and observes her with a critical eye before a small smile tugs at one corner of his mouth.
“They are not prepared for you,” he says, a little wicked delight in his tone. She swats him lightly, but smiles nonetheless. This is a mission of diplomacy, of grace, and everyone had agreed Elain would be best-suited for it. Feyre had flatly refused to come; Tamlin likely wouldn’t want to see her anyway. Nesta was never considered. Mor volunteered, even knowing the Vanserras were likely guests. But despite her bravery in offering, Elain had easily marked the reluctance in her voice.
Besides, she’s Seen herself here. Really, she had no choice at all.
A little flock of birds alights on the treetops, chirping and twittering as they settle. It disrupts the serene silence like a stone tossed in a lake, and Rhys’s shoulders tighten in anticipation.
“I should go,” he says. Before Tamlin sees me, he doesn’t say, but Elain knows it’s what he fears. A spat between the two High Lords would certainly put a damper on her peace mission.
“Go, then,” she says, shooing him on. He hesitates just a second longer before he vanishes from view, and then she is alone.
Finally unobserved, she lingers on the cobblestone path, bathing in the late afternoon glow and woodland air. For the first time in months, she feels like she’s really breathing, like she’s seeing in color instead of black and white.
She understands it now — the way Feyre feels about Velaris.
This is a place that was made for her.
At the end of the pathway, the rampant foliage crumbles away into barren ruin.
Tamlin’s manor was beautiful once, Elain can tell. She can see it underneath the neglect and destruction. But the gardens have been torn up by their roots, the grass is withered beneath her silk slippers, and the hedges are overgrown. It looks haunted — and, Elain supposes, it is haunted — by the High Lord of Spring.
Just as she thinks of him, a twig snaps behind her.
She thinks she’s prepared to lay eyes on a monster as she spins around, but she still feels her stomach drop as she actually sees him, a revenant of his former golden self. His cornsilk fur hangs limp and long off his lean frame, and greening moss drips off his shoulders and antlers, as if he’s been laying dormant in the woods for centuries.
Elain remembers now — the beast in the cabin, that brief eternity ago when she was still human. Tamlin’s glamour lingers over her mind like a gauzey veil, and she can see herself cower against the cabin wall, like she is a distant observer. Now, she will not let herself shrink away.
But Tamlin must see the apprehension in her stance, because he crumples into his high fae form just seconds after meeting eyes with her. His long blonde hair snags on itself, and he’s clad in a olive green house robe that hangs open, exposing the still-muscled planes of his chest. A blush rises to Elain’s cheeks, but preserving his dignity seems more important than her own propriety, so she doesn’t look away. Pretending he isn’t a shambles is the smallest kindness she can offer him.
“I… didn’t know the Night Court was sending a delegation,” he admits by way of greeting.
“Oh,” Elain says, the breathy sound catching in her throat. Her cheeks are properly burning now; she’d assumed someone would send a response to the invitation. She wonders if Feyre and Rhys shirked the duty as some petty revenge against Tamlin. But the embarrasment of being an unexpected guest far outweighs any tiny wound they might’ve inflicted here, and she finds herself resenting them even for the possibility. “It’s only me,” she says, trying to soothe the tension.
“We’ll find you a room…” Tamlin begins, brow creasing like he’s trying to solve some intricate puzzle. He wanders past her, towards the manor house, and says something under his breath she can’t quite hear. Then he turns back to her, and offers her a hollow smile that sets the hair of her neck on end. “But… ah, forgive my manners. Welcome to the Spring Court.”
“Thank you,” Elain says, following him down the path. “You have a beautiful home.”
He seems to feel that she means this genuinely, and offers her another tight smile and nod in response. “You’re a gardener, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Elain says. She wonders idly whether this information came from Feyre or Lucien; she knows she exists in both their minds, but still finds the prospect of either of them describing her to Tamlin to be uncomfortable, like an itchy wool sweater at her throat. Feyre knows her so well, and Lucien not at all. She’s certain, though, that this is the first thing either of them would say when describing her.
“These were my mother’s gardens once,” Tamlin says as they approach the manor. “This is the thing I regret most.”
He says the last part so softly that she isn’t sure she was meant to hear it at all. It’s a simple, selfish sentiment that would’ve stoked hot indignation in Feyre, but it only makes Elain’s chest ache with pity.
That, she knows, is exactly why she’s meant to be here.
Elain is the second delegation to arrive, preceded only by the Vanserra brothers. Because Tamlin had no room specifically prepared for her, she has no sanctuary to retreat to; her only option for the long afternoon is to spend it in the grand library with the pack of vicious hounds that pass for Autumn heirs. She likes none of them, and feels her resolve waning by the hour.
But, she reminds herself, there will be others eventually. Viviane means to attend the summit, she knows, and Tamlin told her of a cohort of Day scholars who arrive tomorrow morning. This is a temporary torture, and she can survive it by retreating into her own mind, as she has so many times before.
Many horrid stories from the brothers later, it is finally dinner time, and she has the mild balm of red wine and Tamlin’s company, which seems more enticing than it ever has before. She’s even beginning to relax when a shiver runs down her spine.
Lucien.
She notices just seconds before his brothers and Tamlin do, the smell of him hitting her like a physical thing.
What is he doing here already? Elain turns her face downwards, staring at her lap as the conversation comes to a rolling halt. She’d had no doubt he would turn up eventually; according to Azriel, he still spends half of every month in the Spring Court. But she’d thought she’d have a little more time. It’s hardly been hours, and he loathes his brothers.
When the doors to the dining room finally open a short eternity later, visions begin to flicker across her mind like painful sparks. Each is a small jolt to her system, a little twinge of adrenaline surging in her gut. Visions of his lips on her neck, her hand on his thigh, his thumb on her clit. She blushes straight to her neck as the visions press in, more vivid with each passing moment. With a little effort, she can tamp them down, but they’ve always been overwhelming. Even when she had shunned her power entirely, the mere sight of Lucien had been enough to unmoor her, fling her into some future yet to exist.
“Lucien,” Tamlin says. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“Tamlin,” he replies. Then, with some genuine shock in his tone: “You have your face on.”
“Only for the lady’s benefit,” Eris says. Elain glances up at him, and sees him offer her a smirk from behind the rim of his wine glass. “I suppose we don’t count as polite company.”
“Have you tried being polite?” Lucien asks, sharp and sarcastic. The venom in his voice catches Elain so much by surprise that she looks over to him. He’s looking right at her, of course, and she feels the world drop out from under her at the sight of his gold-and-copper gaze.
This is an old vision, a familiar vision. For a time, before she’d understood her power fully, she’d thought it some consequence of the mating bond. It had struck her like a bolt of lightning the first time she’d laid eyes on him, just moments out of the Cauldron. It haunted her nightly for weeks. She’d still been engaged to Graysen when this vision had wracked her with such guilt she hadn’t been able to eat or sleep.
It plays out now in front of her, a scripted scene she knows by heart. Dully, she is aware of the conversation carrying on, though it feels more like a dream than her vision does. As Lucien exchanges curt greetings with his family, she’s sprawled on a sea of satin, an endless and impossibly soft bed with an emerald-green duvet. She’s naked, sated, supremely relaxed. She can feel the cool slick fabric of the bedsheets against her breasts and her stomach, feel herself angle her hips into the mattress to chase the pleasure which still pulsates through her body.
“Sit down and eat with us,” Tamlin says in the real world. In her vision, Elain feels Lucien’s hand wrap around her ankle, tugging her toward him. She’s still wrongways on the bed, her hair splayed out around Lucien’s feet, too much a puddle of contentment to right herself. Lucien’s fingers trace up the muscle of her calf, running along a jagged scar that crosses her shin and knee.
“I shouldn’t stay,” Lucien says, wholly eclipsed by her vision of him. What did this? he asks, and she wonders for the first time at the total lack of tension in his voice, made stark by how he strains to contain his emotions now.
“Why did you come, then?” Arion asks, pure petulance. Elain pulls herself to her knees, braces her weight on Lucien’s chest as her loose hair falls over them like a curtain. It’s not an exciting story, she promises. The Cauldron had Made her new; all her scars are the result of mundane mishaps in the gardens or kitchens. She has the one on her knee already, from an encounter with a pair of shears not months after she was Made.
“To make sure we haven’t spoiled his lady,” Renard says. She runs her thumb over Lucien’s scarred cheek and a knot of emotion ties itself into her throat. She can’t speak, can’t ask the question she means to. Instead, she hitches her leg over his waist to straddle him and leans in, breath catching as his eyes flutter shut in anticipation. “To make sure her pretty head is still where it’s meant to be.”
Tamlin’s clawed hand slams into the table, yanking Elain from her vision and back to reality. Perversely, she finds herself disappointed. The next part is her favorite.
“Enough!” Tamlin snaps, his face taking on a bestial quality. She understands now what Feyre meant when she called him ill-tempered, a thing Elain might have thought to call Rhys until just this moment. Tamlin looks like he may paint the walls with Vanserra blood.
“Come now, brothers,” Eris says. “Lady Elain is worthy of our respect and she’s shown us nothing but friendship and kindness. We might take a leaf out of her book. We’re here to mend bridges, after all. Shall we drink and be merry, Elain?” He lifts his drink to her.
Perhaps it’s only because she’s known him the longest, but of all Lucien’s brothers, Elain likes him the least. Even having spent only an afternoon with them, she knows there’s plenty to dislike in each brother. Arion is stupid, Renard is cruel, Ermes is vulgar. Eris, worst of all, is clever. He’s the only truly dangerous one among them. So even though he is an ally, Elain can’t bring herself to trust him in the slightest.
Still, she lifts her glass in return. “To new beginnings,” she says, risking another glance at her mate as everyone else matches her toast.
He’s devastating to look at. His mouth has fallen open to the slightest degree, and she can see his tongue pressed against his teeth. Burning with anger and damp with grief, his russet eye is still fixed on her. She’s impulsed to smooth away the crease in his brow, to kiss his scarred lips and run her hands through his hair. But as she tips her wine glass to her mouth with one hand, the other clenches the edge of her seat.
Mercifully, he doesn’t stay.
The rest of dinner is a blur to her, obscured by the sweet haze of wine and the thrum of pleasure that rests in the pit of her stomach as if she had actually been fucked. By the time the table is cleared and a servant arrives to guide her to her room, she is wholly exhausted and doesn’t bother to light a lamp before collapsing into the bed.
It’s only when she wakes in the twinkling light of dawn that she finds herself surrounded by familiar emerald satin.