In the dead of winter near Prythian’s border, Feyre Archeron hunts to keep her starving family alive. She kills a massive wolf with an ash-and-iron arrow and claims a doe, a choice that weighs survival against the mortal fear of faeries. Returning to her crumbling cottage, Feyre manages rations while clashing with her sisters—practical Elain and scathing Nesta—and their injured, disengaged father. At market, a mercenary warns that faeries and worse creatures are slipping through the Wall. That night, a golden-furred, horned beast smashes into the cottage, demanding payment for the slain wolf. Citing the Treaty’s life-for-a-life, he offers Feyre a choice: death, or a life spent in Prythian on his lands. To protect her family, Feyre chooses exile.

The beast brings her to a breathtaking, spring-bright estate and then reveals himself as Tamlin, a masked High Fae. His court—kept eerily quiet and glamoured—houses the sardonic, fox-masked Lucien and the servant Alis, who warns Feyre to listen and be cautious. Tamlin promises her family’s welfare but binds it to Feyre’s compliance. He hints at a decades-long “blight” that fixed their masks and is weakening borders and wards, letting horrors like the puca and the Bogge roam. When Feyre attempts escape, a puca lures her with illusions of her father; Tamlin stops it and insists she honors her vow by staying, since he now provides for her family.

As Feyre explores the manor’s art and grounds, she weighs escape against growing curiosity. She spars verbally with Tamlin and Lucien, rigs crude defenses, and learns Tamlin alone can shape-shift others. Determined to find answers, she coaxes Suriel lore from Lucien, hunts and traps a Suriel, and learns the truth: Tamlin is the High Lord of the Spring Court, and the safest place for her is at his side while a deeper, unnamed power moves behind the blight. Naga ambush them, and Tamlin’s ferocity saves Feyre. He heals her wounds with magic and begins to lower his guard; Alis, meanwhile, scolds Feyre’s recklessness and counsels vigilance.

Tamlin softens further. He glamours Feyre’s family with safety, wealth, and a false aunt to erase their fear and to prepare them to flee if danger crosses the Wall. Feyre asks for paint and is given a studio and an unopened gallery of masterpieces that rekindle her long-buried creativity. Yet the threat is real: a wingless Summer Court faerie dies in her arms after “she” took his wings, and Tamlin buries him alone. In a secluded glen and a pool that gleams like starlight, Tamlin and Feyre share playfulness and quiet confession, and Lucien’s harrowing Autumn Court past reframes his barbed edges.

The estate hums with ritual and danger. During the spring rite of Calanmai, Feyre defies orders to stay inside and is saved from predatory revelers first by a beautiful, menacing stranger and then by Lucien, who rushes her home and explains the primal magic of the Great Rite. Later, still thrumming with its power, Tamlin corners and bites Feyre in a heated, fraught encounter; they reconcile, and intimacy grows. When Tamlin shrinks the dinner table with effort and shares his violent family history, Feyre senses how the blight drains him. A chilling messenger—the Attor—arrives with talk of a hidden “she,” and a severed head branded with a night-sky sigil is left in the garden. Even the Solstice’s music and will-o’-the-wisps can’t eclipse the tightening noose.

At lunch, news arrives that a court of children has been slaughtered by the blight. The beautiful stranger returns—unmasked as Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court—who shreds Lucien’s glamour, invades Feyre’s mind, and forces Tamlin and Lucien to kneel, toying with the threat of a ruler named Amarantha. To shield Tamlin, Feyre lies and gives a mortal girl’s name. Shaken, Tamlin sends Feyre home for her safety after a final night together and a whispered confession of love. Feyre awakens among her newly wealthy family, their fortune secretly secured by Tamlin’s aid, but she is restless. Nesta reveals she resisted the glamour and even tried to reach Prythian to rescue Feyre. When news breaks that the Beddor family died in a fire and Clare’s body is missing, Feyre realizes Rhysand seized the wrong girl because of her lie. Urged by guilt and love, she warns her family to be ready to flee, then rides north.

She finds the Spring Court ravaged and deserted. Alis reveals the truth: the “blight” is Amarantha, Hybern’s ruthless former general who drugged the High Lords, stole most of their power, enslaved Prythian, and cursed Tamlin’s court at a masquerade. Only the love of a human who hated faeries could break the spell—first by killing one of his men, then by confessing love before a deadline. Andras died to set the first condition, but Feyre never spoke her love in time. Three days after Feyre left, Amarantha seized Tamlin and took the courts Under the Mountain. Despite Alis’s warnings, Feyre insists on going after him.

Dragged before Amarantha, Feyre claims Tamlin and is shown the tortured corpse of Clare Beddor. Amarantha offers a bargain: survive three monthly trials or solve a riddle to free Tamlin and break the curse; failure means death. After a brutal “greeting,” Lucien secretly resets Feyre’s broken nose and warns that all High Lords are trapped until the trials end. The first task drops Feyre into a mud labyrinth with a massive, blind worm. Using bone spikes, mud to mask her scent, and a crucial shouted warning from Lucien, she lures the creature to its death but tears her arm open. Fevered and dying in her cell, she bargains with Rhysand: one week each month in his Night Court in exchange for healing. He cures her and marks the pact with a black, eye-inked tattoo on her left hand and forearm.

Amarantha piles on humiliations. Feyre is assigned impossible chores until Lucien’s mother—the Lady of the Autumn Court—repays a debt by enchanting water to help Feyre finish the first task. Rhysand then claims Feyre as his nightly escort: painted to reveal any touch and drugged with faerie wine, she is displayed as his plaything. In public, he mercy-kills a captured Summer faerie instead of mind-shattering him. The second trial presents an unreadable lever riddle while heated spiked grates descend toward Feyre and a chained Lucien; sensing pain flare in her tattoo as a cue, she chooses the only safe lever and saves them both. Later, she overhears the Attor and a Hybern emissary discuss the King of Hybern’s displeasure and looming war. Days of despair end only when distant, exquisite music reaches her cell and rekindles her resolve.

On the eve of the final trial, Tamlin steals a desperate moment with Feyre. Rhysand catches them and, to protect them, publicly reframes the tryst as his own. Exhausted, he later admits he is the Night Court’s High Lord forced to serve Amarantha and that he has stoked Tamlin’s fury to end her once the curse breaks. The last task is cruelly simple: three ash daggers, three bound faeries to stab. Feyre kills two pleading innocents, then faces the third—Tamlin. Remembering taunts about his “heart of stone,” she gambles that the blade cannot kill him and stabs. After darkness, Feyre awakens transformed into High Fae. Amarantha lies dead, the masks are gone, and Tamlin’s face is free; the curse has lifted. Riven by guilt for the two fae she killed, Feyre nonetheless reunites with Tamlin. On a balcony, Rhysand says farewell, acknowledges their standing bargain, and vanishes startled by something he senses in her.

The allied courts seal Amarantha’s lair; Jurian’s bound relics are missing. Tamlin brings Feyre home to the Spring Court, where Alis and her boys live in peace again. Though immortal now, Feyre carries a human heart’s grief—and the cost of the choices that saved Prythian.