Tamlin and Feyre are sitting around being shippy, and he offers to give her fae senses for a little bit. Feyre waxes poetic for a while about how awesome everything looks, but…the description just sounds like an old movie with the soft focus turned up to max. I’m not really sure why everything being all hazy is supposed to be the height of magicality. But then, apparently I’m a rotten old codger for thinking a nice bit of scenery is plenty magical enough without needing “better than human” senses to appreciate it.

Oh yeah, and it makes Tamlin extra hot, too. Because that was necessary.

“Being a High Lord, even one with … limited powers, comes with physical markers [presumably he means the extra gold glow], too. It’s why I couldn’t hide what I was becoming from my brothers—from anyone. It’s still easier to blend in.”

…wait, I thought he became High Lord after the rest of his family was slaughtered? Like, it’s an inherited title? He had a whole angst session about how the title came to him unexpectedly and he wasn’t trained for it and all his nonexistent subjects were upset about it. But now he was…fuck it I know, magically chosen? While his family was still alive? I’m so confused, but that’s par for the course ‘round these parts.

Feyre spontaneously decides she needs to take a nap, I guess from the overwhelming amount of magic going on. She wakes up later in her own bed, only to see Alis as a short woman with tree bark for skin, and she realizes she’s been seeing everything glamoured until now.

Things only got worse when I made my way downstairs to find the High Lord. The hallways were bustling with masked faeries I’d never seen before. Some were tall and humanoid—High Fae like Tamlin—others were … not. Faeries. I tried to avoid looking at those ones, as they seemed the most surprised to notice my attention.

Apparently, the place has been full of fairies this whole time and Feyre was just magicked to only see and hear a few so that she wouldn’t freak out while getting used to the place.

Oh…oh where to begin.

This doesn’t make a single lick of sense. She’s been wandering these halls for weeks, possibly months, and in all this time has never even bumped into one of these apparently dozens of fairies? Are they all intangible to her, too? Furthermore, it’s not just that Feyre can’t see, hear, taste, smell, or touch them. Tamlin and Lucien haven’t been interacting with them, either. They’ve spent scads of time around Feyre and invited her to roam around at her leisure, but she’s never seen one of them talking to a random spot of air? There’s never been a meeting or an audience that she’s stumbled across? Tamlin hasn’t ever had to greet any guests in the middle of the day or do literally anything leaderly? They’ve never had to have dinner with the other residents? Yeah, they’ve been eating dinner with her every night, and…what, shunting everyone else to the lesser dining rooms? Letting everyone else join the big table, but studiously avoided talking to anyone but Feyre and each other?

This doesn’t work because Tamlin’s house hasn’t been functioning as a center of government or even as a residence for this many others. That’s not something you can just declare invisible or separate someone out of, not if that someone also gets to wander freely all over the place. Not if Tamlin and Lucien aren’t also being kept separate. For something like this to work, we need a lot more than just Feyre once hearing some odd giggling in the garden and occasionally commenting on how empty the place looks. We’d need weirdness related to this place functioning and Lucien and Tamlin running an invisible household. We haven’t had that. We’ve had calm gentlemen of leisure, through and through, and the sudden switch isn’t a twist, it’s just something entirely different.

Doing something entirely different isn’t a twist. Twists have to be set up, not dumped.

And why the sudden change? Because reasons. Literally, Tamlin brought up this magic sight thing out of the blue. The book was bored an empty castle, so time to do something different, because why not.

The blight is acting up again—and more of these creatures are being freed from their tethers.”

[…]

“The … the blight is growing again?”

“So far, only in other territories. You’re safe here.”

So the plot is happening…of page. In another place. How riveting.

The next morning, I found a head in the garden.

I want to be encouraged by the discover of bloody body parts, like maybe we’ll get something interesting finally, but mostly I’m just thrown off by the jarring change in tone so far. All this coming out of the clear blue nothing.

Tamlin and Lucien show up, because the rest of the court is suddenly visible but why should that mean they’re involved in anything at all? They surmise the head is from someone at the Night Court, and we’re informed the Night Court is full of sadistic turdnuggets who are just generally your usual boring fictional sadistic turdnuggets.

“To get in and out of our defenses, to possibly commit the crime nearby, with the blood this fresh …” A splash as Lucien landed in the water again. “It’s exactly what the High Lord of the Night Court would find amusing. The bastard.”

I’m just finding it a little hard to get any amount of worked up over a villain who shows up this late in the game, with no build-up, and then is just evil for shits and giggles. It’s so random that it has no emotion attached to it.

Talk gets around to when the humans were enslaved to the Fae, and how bad things must have been if leaving severed heads around for LITERALLY NO REASON is what they do to their peers. Then Feyre asks possible the weirdest question we’ve had all book.

“Do you remember if [the human slaves] were happy to leave?”

…

… … …

You just go done with a whole paragraph of introspection about how horrible and brutal life must have been with Fae masters and then…???????????????? Why is this even a question?