A Court of Mist and Fury

“I don’t want to marry a High Lord. I just want to marry him.”

As Feyre struggles to reconcile her love for Tamlin with the claustrophobia of his protectiveness, she tries to distinguish the man from the title. Gradually, Feyre realizes this distinction will never happen, Tamlin will always use his past trauma to keep a stranglehold on her, and her only recourse is to leave him.

“You look exactly like the doe-eyed damsel he and that simpering priestess want you to be.”

Rhys appeals to Feyre’s self-respect to shake her from Tamlin’s influence. In this moment, Rhys, understands Feyre better than she understands herself sensing the enormous power within her. She is a warrior and a lover, if only he can convince her to see herself as he sees her. 

“I’m his subject, and he is my High Lord—”

Feyre subjugates her will and freedom to the High Lord she no longer loves out of fear of Rhys and of her own potential power. Rhys angrily contradicts that assumption, arguing, “You are no one’s subject” (74). Feyre continues to see her predicament as one of Rhys versus Tamlin rather than one of her own autonomy, and only Rhys’s continual pushing and prodding will eventually force her to make her own choices. 

“Why do you need to know these things? Is it not enough for you to recover in peace? You earned that for yourself. You earned it. I relaxed the number of sentries here; I’ve been trying…trying to be better about it. So leave the rest of it—”

Tamlin refuses Feyre’s request to be included in strategy, unable to admit that rest is not what she needs. The more she pushes for freedom, the tighter he reins her in. The realization that this will never change ultimately impels her to take refuge with Rhys.

“That girl who had needed to be protected, who had craved stability and comfort…she had died Under the Mountain. I had died, and there had been no one to protect me from those horrors before my neck snapped.”

Feyre realizes she survived Under the Mountain by virtue of her own wits. She longs to reconnect with that inner strength and understands that the only way to overcome her past is to confront it, something she cannot do as long as Tamlin keeps her under his protection. He fears what she already knows: the old Feyre is dead, and she doesn’t need him anymore.

“There was something rough-hewn about his features—like he’d been made of wind and earth and flame and all these civilized trappings were little more than an inconvenience.”

Feyre’s first meeting with Cassian is her first exposure to a full-blooded Illyrian male, and he embodies the feral, elemental qualities of these fierce warriors. She senses that his courtly manners barely contain the destructive power beneath. Later, she learns of Illyrians’ Siphons, the enchanted stones Illyrians use to control their powers. While most Illyrians need one or two Siphons, Cassian needs seven.

“They were ancient, and cruel in a way I had never known, not even with Amarantha. They were infinite and patient, and had learned the language of darkness, of stone.”

As Feyre and Rhys enter the Prison, she senses the malevolence behind the stone walls of the mountain. Maas creates a terrifying by making these imprisoned creatures even worse than Amarantha whose sadism is legendary. Feyre’s fear comes not only from the lurking evil but from the darkness itself, a psychological terror that preys upon her past trauma Under the Mountain. 

“Nowadays, most women wed, bear children, and then plan their children’s marriages. Some of the poor might work in the fields, and a rare few are mercenaries or hired soldiers, but…the wealthier they are, the more restricted their freedoms and roles become.”

Feyre educates Mor on human culture. She highlights an inherent paradox: Money may buy freedom from hunger and the elements, but in other ways, wealth is restrictive. Without the social pressures of wealth, some poor women may be freer to pursue their own interests. 

“It’s become a term used for ease, but masks a long, bloody history of injustices. Many lesser faeries resent the term—and wish for us all to be called one thing.”

Rhys explains to Nesta the distinction between High and “lesser” Fae, a distinction he would like to abolish. Rhys is one of the few High Lords who sees the classicism inherent in this distinction, and his desire to eliminate it indicates his sense of justice. His inclusion of non-purebloods like Cassian and even otherworldly creatures like Amren in his Inner Circle demonstrate that his actions support his ethics. 

“No one was my master—but I might be master of everything, if I wished. If I dared.”

In the Summer Court, Feyre feels Tarquin’s water power and it gives her a small taste of her full potential. Feyre realizes that power requires courage. So far, she has been too damaged by her experience with Amarantha to take the risk, but as she begins to master her powers, she also begins to find the courage to accept the consequences.

“The issue isn’t whether he loved you, it’s how much. Too much. Love can be a poison.”

Rhys and Feyre debate if a war between Rhys and Tamlin over Feyre is worth it. Feyre doesn’t want to return to Tamlin’s court, but she would if it would prevent further killing. When she justifies her choice by arguing that Tamlin loves her still, Rhys counters that Tamlin’s love is one-sided and does not benefit both partners.

“Without magic, without power, money has become the only thing that matters.”

Feyre suggests that Fae society is less money-focused, but she misreads the dynamics at play within the world of Fae. Money may not play as central a role, but lineage and bloodlines certainly do. “Lesser” faeries are not accorded the same privilege as High Fae. The economics of the two worlds may differ, but the social division is the same. 

“The gleam in his eyes turned into something predatory. A thrill went through me as he braced his powerful arms on the table and purred, ‘Is that a challenge, Feyre?’”

This brief bit of dialogue encapsulates the Feyre-Rhys dynamic. She sees him as animalistic, he the predator, she the prey, and she enjoys the cat-and-mouse game. Their flirtatious foreplay takes on an animalistic excitement as Feyre dodges and feints, evading his advances but, all the while, hoping he will catch her.

“Rhys drawled, ‘Surely the loss of even one innocent life would be abhorrent.’”

When the mortal queens seem willing to cede territory adjacent to the wall to Hybern’s assault—territory which includes Feyre, Nesta, and Elain’s home—Rhys argues that these kinds of value judgments are immoral, and that to sacrifice a single life is just as bad as sacrificing a hundred. His argument falls on deaf ears, however, as the queens make the utilitarian counterargument that “war is war,” and there is inherent value in a sacrifice that saves more lives than it loses.

“I wondered, then, with his hands beneath my breasts and between my legs, what Rhys wouldn’t give of himself. Wondered if…if perhaps the arrogance and swagger…if they masked a male who perhaps thought he wasn’t worth very much at all.”

As Rhys and Feyre play their dominant/submissive game of deception before the Court of Nightmares, Feyre posits that Rhys’s bravado is a façade to cover up insecurities. Characters in fantasy tales are often archetypically drawn—good and evil, heroes and villains. Maas modernizes her characters with more complex notions of morality and psychological motivations.

“I am the dark lord, who stole away the bride of spring. I am a demon, and a nightmare, and I will meet a bad end.”

Rhys understands how history is written and fears being remembered as the villain. Here, Maas references the myth of Hades and Persephone, in which the god of the underworld kidnaps the goddess of spring and forces her to become his bride. Persephone spends half the year with Hades and half on earth, which Maas references in Feyre and Rhys’s bargain of one week a month.

“The power did not belong to the High Lords. Not any longer. It belonged to me—as I belonged only to me, as my future was mine to decide, to forge.”

When Feyre discovers Rhys’s father was murdered by Tamlin, her powers flare to life: fire, ice, darkness. She begins to sense the enormity of her potential. For Feyre, her future is hers, finally. She is the agent of her own destiny, a startling revelation to someone who has been treated as helpless for so long.

“Home. Home had been at the end of the bond, I’d told the Bone Carver. Not Tamlin, not the spring Court, but…Rhysand.”

Feyre sees what she really wants: a place and a people to call home. This realization confirms that her love for Tamlin was rooted in her own past trauma, not genuine compatibility. Rhys, despite their conflicts, embodies what a true mate should be—someone who loves her enough to give her freedom.

“And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.”

Following Rhys’s emotionally tortured account of his past, Feyre offers him a meal, a sacred ritual cementing the bond between two mates. She has demanded he earn this privilege, and he does so. “Love,” cannot, for Feyre, adequately express the feeling she has for Rhys.

“I scribbled, You Illyrian males are insufferable. Rhys had just said, Good thing we make up for it with impressive wingspans.” 

When Rhys and Feyre are apart, they send messages back and forth on a magical parchment. The modern tone of sexual innuendo tone reflects Maas’s contemporary style and her choice to make her characters unafraid to express their sexuality. 

“No lights burned on it. But it felt…old. As if it were a spider that had been waiting in its web for a long, long time.”

As Feyre, Azriel, Cassian, and Mor approach Hybern, Feyre is struck by its lurking menace made all the more foreboding by its stillness and quiet. Maas portrays silence as the fear of the unknown. The silence of Hybern is the silence of an evil Feyre has yet to confront.

“I had never seen something so hideous—and alluring.”

When Feyre first lays eyes on the Cauldron, she perceives the inherent contradiction in its power. Feyre flirts with darkness despite her loathing of death. There is, however, beauty in darkness, as embodied by Rhys, High Lord of Night, and Velaris, the City of Starlight. She is able to see that beauty, to look beyond the stereotype of treachery and malice to the goodness nestled inside the dark. 

“Tamlin’s eyes were on Rhysand, his face near-feral. ‘You,’ he snarled, the sound more animal than Fae. ‘What did you do to her?’”

Tamlin reveals the fatal flaw which caused Feyre to leave him: He refuses to give her agency over her own choices. Feyre has left willingly, but Tamlin cannot accept it.