After getting treated like a guest of honor for no particular reason that I can see, Feyre returns to the…dining room? where the other two High Fae are still hanging out.

They no longer had plates before them, but still sipped from golden goblets. Real gold—not paint or foil.

Why is fantasy so obsessed with gold? That shit’s super heavy and easily dented. Like, I get that gold goblets exist/existed, but still. Other stuff existed, too. Chill out.

Our mismatched cutlery flashed through my mind as I paused in the middle of the room. Such wealth—such staggering wealth, when we had nothing.

A half-wild beast, Nesta had called me. But compared to him, compared to this place, compared to the elegant, easy way they held their goblets, the way the golden-haired one had called me human … we were all half-wild beasts to the High Fae. Even if they were the ones who could don fur and claws.

The juxtaposition of wealth and … literal humanity in this passage makes me deeply uncomfortable. Like, damn, she just said that poor people are halfway to being animals, and fuck that shit.

So many foods, piping hot and wafting those enticing spices. The servants had probably brought out new food while I’d washed. So much wasted. I clenched my hands into fists.

But those poor people, they’re half wild beasts, right?

Also, why? Why all the food waste? Why literal piles of food, and where is it all coming from? The speed at which it’s being cooked and served up (I mean, it was ready as soon as he got home) makes me think magic, and in that case…how do we know the rest is being wasted? How do we know it’s not being preserved, or eaten by someone else, or that it wasn’t conjured from the aether?

The host/owner Fae/Hot Blond Boy is named Tamlin, and he convinces her to sit and eat finally. At least Feyre is hanging onto her nerves and hostility, even if nothing about the fairy world makes a lick of sense so far.

“What do you plan to do with me now that I’m here?”

Tamlin’s eyes didn’t leave my face. “Nothing. Do whatever you want.”

THEN WHY THE FUCK IS SHE HERE?

Furthermore, what purpose does this serve to the story? Like, is it really imperative to the narrative that she be a pampered guest instead of a servant, or any other role that serves a purpose? What about this book is made better by the fact that Feyre gets to be a pretty pretty princess, instead of literally anything else? It feels like a convoluted way to have a pampered noble character without having to deal with the American culture’s weird feelings on actual nobility. That is all I can think of to explain it; there’s no internal reason, there’s no storytelling reason, there’s just an appeal to easy, guilt-free wealth-porn.

Feyre asks what she’s to do with her life and her time, and the guys tell her “eh, whatever you want.” She then brings up the fact that she’s her family’s only source of income, and they’ll starve without her.

Tamlin’s jaw tightened. “Your family is alive and well-cared for. You think so low of faeries that you believe I’d take their only source of income and nourishment and not replace it?”

BUT

WHY ?

This does not jive with anything else we’ve heard about fairies. They used to keep humans as slaves, they do frequent raids, they take ‘tributes’ a la Children of the Blessed, there’s a treaty concerning when they can kill humans, Feyre has never mentioned anything about any wealth coming out of Prythia to take care of families, Tamlin showed up ready to do murder. This was all creating a very specific image of the Fae as cruel, contentious, or at least unconcerned with the value of human life. And I get the desire to set up contrast between expectations and reality, but “randomly doing the opposite” is not the right way to go about things. Those expectations had to come from somewhere, people didn’t just wholly invent the fear of fairies in this world. To have them be so divorced from anything we were expecting isn’t a twist, it’s an ass-pull that MAKES NO GODDAMNED SENSE.

Twists still have to make sense after their sprung. If your twist doesn’t make sense and still jive with previous information, you are doing things wrong.

They banter a bit, Feyre knee-jerk acts like she’s going to attack, so she gets magicked back to her seat and told she has to behave “or else.” JFC, just kill her already, why is any of this even happening, it makes no sense.

Side note: I’d be all over a ghost Feyre fucking some shit up. Just sayin.

but as I reached for a second helping of chocolate torte, the food vanished. Just—vanished, as if it had never existed, not a crumb left behind.

See, magic. Who knows where that food goes. Who knows if it was even food.

After eating, Feyre tries to leave, and Lucien basically says “hey, how come you’re not all over us for being Super Hot Boys? ‘Cause, like, all human women are the same and only care about Hot Boys, don’tchaknow.”

I am not even kidding.

He literally says that all women care about hotness and therefore it’s such a mystery why Feyre doesn’t want to be around the very powerful magical beings who kidnapped her and also who her entire culture is afraid of.

The book is trying to convince me that, for all those other weakminded females, Hotness Trumps All, and Feyre is just so very special for not being like that.

Also, what a horrifically awkward way to bring up Feyre’s dating life here. Like…just…what?

He gave a distant nod and motioned for me to leave. Dismissed. Like the lowly human I was.

You got a pretty pretty princess room and a servant to give you a bath. I’m pretty sure the point at which the other fairies are serving you, you don’t get to say this line with a straight face.

Nesta must be stretching her legs and smiling at the extra room. She was probably content imagining me in the belly of a faerie—probably using the news as a chance to be fussed over by the villagers.

Why are you so full of malice, book? Just…why?

Alis comes in the next morning and runs into a little tripwire that Feyre set up, uses it as an excuse to boast about how very, very helpless Feyre would be against a fairy. Then serves her breakfast and runs a bath for her. These two things put together are really starting to bother me. There’s obviously a power structure going on in this fairy society, enough that they have dedicated servants and nobility, and even the servants have heightened physical abilities over humans (which they think highly enough about for Alis to brag here). So WHY is Feyre – a completely useless human with exactly zero purpose – being placed above them in the power structure? It’s not like there’s some belief in her innate…nobility or whatever like we had with peerage in our own history, there’s no wealth or power giving her status, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

I guess Tamlin just declaring her under protection works as a reason…to a certain extent, though I’d still expect a lot more bitterness about the situation from the servants. Oh, yes, and Tamlin doesn’t have a good reason to be doing this, either.

Feyre gets ready to go for a walk outside, gets distracted by some pretty paintings. At least her interest in art is remaining consistent.

Tamlin shows up, and they talk yet again about how he’s not going to kill her. She tries to find out why the big wolf guy was out in the forest to begin with, but Tamlin is dodgy.

“That Treaty,” he said quietly, “doesn’t ban us from doing anything, except for enslaving you. The wall is an inconvenience. If we cared to, we could shatter it and march through to kill you all.”

I might be forced to live in Prythian forever, but my family … I dared ask, “And do you care to destroy the wall?”

He looked me up and down, as if deciding whether I was worth the effort of explaining. “I have no interest in the mortal lands, though I can’t speak for my kind.”

…but…but…what about…the whole…rebellion thing? You used to be rulers of the whole island then got pushed back? Why would you…voluntarily stick to half an island when you used to have a whole one? Or is that not how it happened? Or did the book just forget its own history?

Probably that last one. The worldbuilding, which started out fun and interesting, is really starting to feel like something that was made up as it went along, with parts picked up or dropped as they become irrelevant or inconvenient or forgotten.

Tamlin mentions that there’s a sickness in Prythia that is affecting everyone’s magic, and that some complication with it 49 years ago during a masquerade made everyone’s masks get stuck in place. (And there weren’t, like, at least a dozen de-masked people making out in corners at the time?) Anyway, Wolf Guy was across the wall looking for a cure.

I guess he thought the deer had great medicinal value?

A magical blight that might one day spread to the human world. After so many centuries without magic, we’d be defenseless against it—against whatever it could do to humans.

So, he said it’s a thing that only affects their magic, but also it might affect humans who have no magic? It’s a blight against magic, but you need magic to protect against it?

Did any thought go into this at all?

After leaving Tamlin, Feyre walks around the gardens, mentally making escape/hide contingency plans. On the one hand, this is getting old and repetitive because I know she’s not going to leave. On the other, it makes sense for her character and I’m glad she’s not just giving in to her situation. I’m not sure how reconcile those two thoughts. Maybe there is no way, and if the rest of the book were less annoying I just wouldn’t care so much.

It turned out that dinner was the only meal I was invited to attend, which was fine. Three meals a day with Tamlin and Lucien would have been torturous. I could endure an hour of sitting at their fancy table if it made them think I was docile and had no plans to change my fate.

If they profess to not care about you or what you do, why are you eating any meals with them?

“So is this what you do with your lives?

Spare humans from the Treaty and have fine meals?” I gave a pointed glance toward Tamlin’s baldric, the warrior’s clothes, Lucien’s sword.

Lucien smirked. “We also dance with the spirits under the full moon and snatch human babes from their cradles to replace them with changelings—”

“Didn’t …,” Tamlin interrupted, his deep voice surprisingly gentle, “didn’t your mother tell you anything about us?”

I prodded the table with my forefinger, digging my short nails into the wood. “My mother didn’t have the time to tell me stories.”

Sigh.

So, this is a world where fairies are real, demonstrably real, an involved part of human history within recorded history…why are they going on as if everything the humans know about them is myths and legends? Feyre should have learned about them from history books, not ‘mother’s stories,’ and changeling myths shouldn’t be a thing at all unless it’s something fairies actually do, considering they’re, ya know, real in this world and all.

If you’re going to make a world where myths are openly real, you can’t treat them like myths anymore. Myths and actual history are different things.