THE DREAMERS IN THE DAYLIGHT: HOPE
Scene: After Feyre's testimony concludes, Tamlin experiences some emotions - both familiar and unfamiliar.
WARNING: This fic is highly Feysand-critical, and contains OCs who do not have their backstories explicitly described in the below scene.
Taglist: @kitkat-writes-stuff
I'm thrilled you all liked the original snippet! TBH I haven't updated my fic in months but I promise I'm still working (hence the snippets) so I'll be glad to share them here while I hammer out the kinks for the next chapters.
It was like he was emerging from the mists. Out of the dark and into the sun.
He had not felt this much present in his own, male body for years.
His heart was pounding wildly with an emotion he barely recognized, because the last time he’d felt it, it had blown up spectacularly in his face.
Hope.
There were a lot of things he’d done wrong, and those he would accept, and he’d take the hatred, because he’d never given a single solitary shit what most of these vain lords and preening courtiers thought of him anyway – but this. The villages. All of those children.
Feyre had done that to him. Feyre.
She had lied through her teeth. Lied with smiles and sweetness.
Like Rhys.
Like her.
And when he had run ragged, from village to village, half the time on his own, shielding those faeries with his own monstrous body –
Eunomia of the Day Court was his savior, and Tamlin seriously considered marching himself down onto the floor of this tribunal and kissing her directly on the mouth, and damn how it would look to anyone else if he did.
For a few minutes after the trial, he didn’t move. Many people, he considered, underestimated his intelligence because he’d openly admitted that he couldn’t manage the flowery pretensions of court etiquette and that he had no patience for diplomacy. But he was observant.
He saw Feyre rise shakily from the bench, even though she tried valiantly to hide it. She was always good like that – she made reckless decisions like it was her job, and then when she faced consequences, covered it up with a cold bravado. But Eunomia’s questioning had unnerved her. She’d gotten under Feyre’s skin. He felt a vicious gladness so profound that it was almost shocking. Now you understand, he thought. Do you finally understand?
He used to love that girl.
Used to.
He cast his gaze once again to the doors, where one of the guards had poked her head in to chat. Helion had assigned at least one guard to Eunomia, since Tamlin’s own meeting with her. Probably, this was on the off chance that Rhys was in the mood to make trouble, or rather, that it was a day ending in ‘y.’ But clearly, Eunomia didn’t mind; she even smiled faintly at the guard, and accepted a friendly slap on the back as they filed out together. Feyre’s eyes were wide and icy – frozen pools. That was what he’d thought when he’d first looked into her eyes, in the cramped little hovel they'd called a house.
She had been so small and so brave back then.
Who was this person that was clinging to Rhys’s arm, curling into his side as if she needed protection, as if she needed comfort?
Perhaps Feyre really had died Under the Mountain.
Rhys, of course, was looking as he always did, flanked by his loyal Illyrian brothers, who uniformly despised Tamlin, and the creature Rhys had insanely decided to release from the Prison. He decided to ignore them.
He also saw Feyre’s sister – the nice one, the one whose name he always forgot. When he placed the glamour over the Archeron family, her mind had been as open as a new bud, and he’d almost felt sorry to have to intrude. She was also looking at Eunomia’s retreating back. But her eyes were noticeably less hostile. She looked curious, almost.
Her eyes drifted upwards towards where he sat.
Tamlin slid his eyes away, and pretended that he was not watching. He regarded Helion, who was chatting with Thesan still. It was a neutral conversation. One could even say it was boring, as far as conversations with Helion Spell-cleaver could be called boring.
Three of us, he thought dully. Three stupid, arrogant Lords in a room.
A miracle, really, that they were all still alive.
Nothing else of interest was happening, as the Courts filed out. After all, Keeper Eunomia had left the room.
But Tamlin thought he could catch her quickly enough. He breathed deep, and closed his eyes, picking out the different scents of the room – until he found the only one that was fresh and unfamiliar to him.
Like citrus.
Tamlin rose from his seat.
Fiacha jumped up at once. “High Lord!”
A grimace – he’d forgotten about this stupid child. “You’re dismissed for the day,” he said, waving his hand. “I have some matters to finish on my own.”
“Do you require me to accompany you?”
“No.”
Fiacha was disappointed, but Tamlin couldn’t bring himself to feel entirely bad about it. So far, the child had proved himself moderately useful, but the fact that he stuck to Tamlin’s side like a burr was so deeply, completely annoying that he could’ve wrung out the boy’s neck for the trouble.
As the thought crossed his mind, so did an image of Lucien’s disappointed face.
Make an effort, Tam.
“Oh, fuck it,” he muttered.
“Sir?” said Fiacha.
“Nothing,” Tamlin replied. “I’ll meet you back at the embassy.”
And he went after Eunomia.
The halls cleared quickly after trial, which he liked, because it made his current work easier. Her scent was not strong, because she had no magic other than the authority of the tribunal, but it was distinctive enough that he had no trouble following it. And he moved quickly – hunting – until at last he came upon a small side room that was stacked with massive pots of sweet coffee and mint tea, little jars of honey and sugar. There were small plates of fruits and even little cakes and flaky pastry, with long cushioned benches for lounging. Despite his focus, he experienced a faint vision of his father, cursing: Lush Day Court bastards.
Eunomia and her guard were in there, and Tamlin was focused on tracking them that he didn’t hear their conversation entirely, but he did hear how it stopped when he approached, and when he opened the door.
Too late, it occurred to him that he hadn’t knocked.
The guard had removed her helmet, revealing bobbed red hair – a more shocking and fiery shade than Lucien’s warm auburn. At once, she stepped ahead of Eunomia – who was seated on one of the benches, with a little round pastry dusted with pistachio in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other – and made to guard her.
You are a beast.
Tamlin knew that the guard was merely doing her duty. Of course, she would make to defend her charge against the High Lord who had quite literally chased them out of the courtroom and barged in on their private breakroom without so much as a warning. He looked at Eunomia, who merely stared back. Her eyes were a cloudy gray. A part of him could not help but compare her to Feyre, all angles and sharpness. Eunomia’s face was round, her hair a nest of dark curls that made her appear, slightly, to have a lion’s mane.
While he stared at her, she merely stared back without saying anything.
It was difficult to tell what she was thinking, even now.
“State your business, my lord.”
The guard’s prompting jolted him suddenly back to the ground. He had to think of something to say, and quickly.
“The records you showed,” he said.
His voice was rough. Nomi’s eyes widened slightly.
“Yes,” she told him. “They’re accurate. I verified each one with the assistance of my peers. I apologize, my lord, if I overstepped. I sent a formal request and someone got back to me. I should not have assumed –”
Why in the world was she always apologizing to him? He had already told her once that he would support her with his full strength. Did she not believe him? Was she frightened of him?
“Who?” he asked.
“Hart is the name that I was given. He did not say his family name, but Hart was the source.”
Hart. They used to get drunk and he would sing while Tamlin played, always a song about an adventure. He’d thought that Hart had gone back to his father’s estates, or worse, to the Summer Court, in rebellion after what had happened.
But Hart had given Eunomia the records. And Bronn was testifying on his behalf. Reluctantly, but still.
“I see,” he said. He fixed his eyes somewhere near his shoes, so that she wouldn’t see that was becoming emotional. I am still High Lord. “Thank you for telling me. And thank you,” he added, “for your work today.”
“Please, don’t thank me, my lord. I should be the one thanking you. If it were not for your generous support, then this trial would not be possible.”
She gave all the niceties that she was expected to, and minded her rank – as expected of one of Helion’s scholars – but there was no fear or resentment in her deference at all. Rather, she was completely earnest in her dedication to service. It was – well, it was sweet. At least, her deference to him as a High Lord didn’t make him chafe.
“I’m hardly generous. I think I stood up just to be petty.”
Both her and the guardswoman wore matched, muted expressions of surprise. Tamlin realized that he had smiled on accident.
“Forgive me, my lord,” Nomi replied, with a slight frown. “I do not think that is true. Even though I struggle to understand your – personal connection –” That was a very, very polite way of putting it, Tamlin thought, “– with the High Lady of Night, and your personal feelings towards that matter, I have no doubt in my mind that her actions against you constituted a crime. And I believe, firmly, with all my heart, that the children of the Spring Court deserve to see justice done. Both the living and the dead.”
They’d run from him in some of the villages, because he had arrived as a beast, choosing to forgo winnowing in favor of power and speed, in case he ran across any threats. Some of those burned towns had been places where he'd had friends, lovers. The Hybernian units had burned out sections of his forests, and snared the faeries who fled from that fire, and threw their bodies into pits dug into the earth, like they were merely the carcasses of animals. He wasn’t even planning to go to that ridiculous war council in Dawn, because he had no Court to bring with him, and because he had spent the last three days beforehand digging graves with his own two hands.
Even now, the ghost of that particular anger stirred a fire in his chest.
He trusted her. He was going to marry her.
But she had come back wrong. She had gone into the dark, and she was never coming out of it.
And he should have known that. It was the whole reason he’d tried to send her away in the first place. Because once that darkness got into your head, it wasn’t coming out. There was nothing he could have done to prevent it, even if he’d wanted to.
He had buried his people, and with them, all his hopes.
“Justice,” he muttered. “When it was my fault anyhow.”
“As I said, I do not believe that is the case, my lord. I intend to prove it.”
She was so confident that he almost believed her. In a way, she really was like her brother. She did look remarkably similar to him as well, but there were slight differences in the set of their jaws. And of course, Thales’s eyes had been his most distinctive feature. That beautiful blue did not exist anywhere in Eunomia’s eyes.
Tamlin, whose brothers had merely seen him as an obstacle or a rival on the best of days, finally understood. This was what it meant to actually have a sibling. Eunomia was the sort of person who could make you feel more at ease with the day-to-day minutia of a chaotic world - a rock, which Thales had clung to with all his might.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“That strongly depends on the nature of the question, my lord.”
She did not seem like she was joking, which was fine, because he wasn’t either.
“Would it be alright if I visited your brother’s grave?”
The guardswoman made an audible sound of surprise – not anger.
Tamlin explained, “I didn’t know him very well, so I would understand if you refuse. But I think he deserves some credit for today, especially. When we spoke for the last time, before we really understood what we were about to do, I –”
He happened to look up, and see the expression on Eunomia’s face.
Of course, he should have known.
“I apologize, Keeper Eunomia,” he started to say.
“Did he say anything before?”
Her voice came out strained, as if she were physically holding it back somehow.
Tamlin closed his eyes. Amarantha had suddenly had him moved to a small, stale room, and for a few minutes, he wondered if he was being imprisoned as a precaution, because if Feyre won her final trial, they would be freed, and his powers would return in full, and he had spent fifty years imagining how he would kill Amarantha for poisoning this world, for treating them like toys, for hurting Lucien, and now for hurting Feyre.
That, or Feyre would be killed, and they would be doomed.
But then the other two were brought in. The woman was called Sacha, and she was of Dawn. Tamlin learned that Sacha was training to be a priestess before she had been imprisoned. In retrospect, she had more awareness of what was about to happen than either of her companions. She had a distant look in her eyes, and kept thumbing a ring against her finger, which may have been a token from someone she once cared about.
Thales, even then, was talking as if this was just a temporary thing.
“You seem confident,” Sacha had said, softly. “You really think we’ll be freed?”
“Of course, we will!” And he’d actually patted Tamlin heartily on the shoulder as he said this. “I’ve got it all the things I want to do planned out – the only trouble is putting them in order. Obviously, the first thing to do is to introduce Nomi and Daphne.”
Tamlin said, “You think that will go well?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he replied, with supreme confidence. “I mean, they’ll be nervous around each other, and it’ll be awkward at first – Nomi doesn’t always like meeting new people but she’ll love Daphne once she gets to know her. And after that...”
He’d had so many dreams. That was how he’d survived Under the Mountain for so many decades. Tamlin listened to him beg for mercy, and known that he would get none from Feyre. She had murdered Andras with hate in her heart, and she would kill Thales out of love for Tamlin.
Ruthless. That was her nature. As cold and bitter as an empty night sky.
And that was the worst of it all.
To Eunomia, he said, “He never lost hope. He was sure that the curse would be broken and we’d all be freed. And he also… He said that the first thing he’d do when he returned to Rhodes was to tell you he was sorry for keeping you up all night with that horn before your aptitude test, and for the time he switched out your lotion for itching cream, and that he’d tell you that he was proud of you.”
It felt ridiculous repeating those things, told to him in confidence by Thales, who had befriended him without reasoning that Tamlin was going to be the cause of his death. Eunomia was far cleverer than any of them, so she probably understood that fact already. The curse, and the war that followed, was his fault, after all. Because he had run out his time. He had not been strong enough.
He straightened his back, and lifted his chin. Get on with it, then.
At least, if she cut him down with a curse or even if she got right up and slapped him, he would deserve the blow. He would take it.
A faint sniff broke his train of thought – and Tamlin noticed for the first time that the guardswoman’s eyes were full of tears.
Eunomia, too, was looking emotional. Her gaze seemed far away, and her smile faint. But there was a light in her expression now that hadn’t been there before. She seemed almost lost in a memory – a happy memory, though. Some pain had gone from her when he spoke.
“That is the exact kind of stupid thing he’d say,” said Eunomia. “Thank you for telling me that, my lord. Of course, you can visit his grave anytime. I don’t think anyone would question it, but if anyone does, just tell the undertakers that I gave permission.”
Somehow, he had made her happy.
Words failed him. He felt suddenly exhausted, and just left without saying anything else. He didn’t know if he could bear looking in her eyes anymore.
When he returned to the main foyer, Fiacha was there, looking like an absolute nervous wreck as he paced back and forth between the pillars, weaving a strange circular pattern with his steps.
“My lord!” he gasped out, straightening at attention only when Tamlin deliberately approached him and stepped into his path. “You went off so suddenly – I waited!”
For a few surprisingly pleasant minutes, Tamlin had forgotten all about him. But he couldn’t really muster up any harsher emotions than the vague annoyance of an older male naturally felt towards a persistent, upbeat younger one.
“I know. We’re finished. Let’s go.”
“Yes, sir! Right away, sir!”
But he did feel better, he realized, stepping out of the hall and into the still burning afternoon sun. He blinked a few times to have his eyes adjust. The light had always invigorated him, but the Day Court’s fierce summers were known to cause veritable heatstroke, and honestly, it was all a bit overwhelming. The myriad of scents – perfumes and spices and cooked food and so many individual bodies all moving around, and stray cats, and gardens, and fountains, and traders on horseback, and fruit trees etc., etc., etc. – tended to give him a migraine if he focused on it.
Today, there was none of that. His heart beat calmly. There were a few hours of light left in their day, yet, and he felt no need to hole himself up in his room.
“Fiacha.”
The boy straightened. “Yes, lord?”
“Is there something you want to eat?”
“Me?” came the baffled, almost-whispered, and entirely pedestrian shock. “Really?”
Tamlin rolled his eyes. “That’s why I asked.”
“I…”
For a minute or two, Tamlin thought he wasn’t even going to answer and started to lose patience.
“There was a place that we passed on our way here this morning,” said Fiacha timidly, “that had a smell coming from the kitchen. I don’t know exactly what it was but I remember the spot.”
Seemed that the Mother had at last seen fit to bless Her child with a lick of sense.
Tamlin said, “Great. We’ll eat there. Lead the way.”
The boy paused for a minute, staring at him in utter confusion – before an enormous smile spread across his face.
“Of course, my lord! Follow me!”
