73 pages • 2 hours read
Sarah J. MaasA Court of Thorns and Roses
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 32-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 32 Summary
Feyre finds Alis, who explains everything: Amarantha is the King of Hybern’s most lethal general. During the ancient war between faeries and humans, Amarantha’s sister Clythia was betrayed and murdered by Clythia’s human lover, Jurian. After the treaty, Amarantha killed her human slaves instead of freeing them. Amarantha arrived in Prythian 100 years ago as the King of Hybern’s emissary but decided to conquer Prythian for herself. Amarantha held a ball where she poisoned the seven High Lords of Prythian and stole their powers. Amarantha is the blight on magic, and she keeps court Under the Mountain, a formerly sacred place. Amarantha lusts after Tamlin, whose family was allied with Hybern in the ancient war against humans. Tamlin sent Lucien to negotiate with Amarantha, but Amarantha took Lucien’s eye. She held a masquerade in apology, promising peace if Tamlin agreed to be her lover. Tamlin refused, declaring he would sooner take a human lover and that even Clythia “preferred a human’s company to [Amarantha’s]” (282). Amarantha put a curse on Tamlin: Unless he convinced a human woman to marry him within 49 years, she would claim him as her consort. First, the human girl had to kill one of his men in an “unprovoked attack.” Tamlin lied about the rules of the treaty. He purposefully sent nearly all of his men across the wall to be killed, but he never had a chance to break the curse until Feyre killed Andras. Amarantha enchanted the Spring Court so no one could tell Feyre about the curse. Now, Amarantha keeps the other High Lords with her Under the Mountain, and she is responsible for the recent attacks on humans by faeries. Tamlin sent Feyre home days before the terms of the curse ended; if she had told him she loved him, the Spring Court would have been freed. Feyre convinces Alis to take her Under the Mountain.
Chapter 33 Summary
Alis brings Feyre to an ancient shortcut through a cave to Under the Mountain. Alis warns Feyre not to trust her senses, make deals, or drink the wine, and to listen carefully. Alis says there is still one part of the curse she is not allowed to tell Feyre. Feyre is caught by the Attor in the passageway.
Chapter 34 Summary
The Attor brings Feyre to Amarantha’s throne room. Feyre declares she has come to claim Tamlin, who is seated next to Amarantha. Amarantha laughs, and shows Feyre Clare Beddor’s mutilated corpse, which is nailed to the wall of the throne room. Amarantha realizes that Tamlin and Feyre truly love each other, and Tamlin pretended Clare Beddor was Feyre to protect her. Amarantha wears Jurian’s eye in a ring and his finger bone on a necklace, keeping him artificially alive to witness her cruelty. Amarantha offers Feyre a deal: If Feyre completes three tasks to prove her love, then Tamlin and the Spring Court will be freed. Amarantha also gives Feyre a riddle. If Feyre solves the riddle at any point, then the curse will be broken immediately. Feyre will complete each task during a full moon and will otherwise be imprisoned or do work for Amarantha. Tamlin tries to silently warn Feyre, but she agrees. Amarantha has Feyre beaten unconscious.
Chapter 35 Summary
Feyre awakes in a dungeon cell. Lucien visits and heals her wounds. Lucien tells Feyre that all the High Lords of Prythian have been summoned Under the Mountain for her trials, but the guards interrupt before he can tell her anything about Tamlin.
Amarantha summons Feyre to the throne room. Rhysand denies that he knew Clare Beddor was not the woman he saw at Tamlin’s estate. Amarantha orders Rhysand to possess Lucien’s mind and force Lucien to reveal Feyre’s name. Feyre tells Amarantha her true name to save Lucien. Amarantha tells Feyre her riddle, describing a mysterious entity: People search for this thing but never find it; it offers itself to others, but these people misuse or discard it; it sometimes seems available only to people who are beautiful or smart, but it actually gives itself to anyone who seeks it courageously; it is gentle, but if derided, it will become fierce; it is powerful, but when it kills, it does so slowly.
Feyre cannot solve the riddle. She waits in her cell, terrified, until summoned for her first task.
Chapter 36 Summary
Feyre is brought to an arena with a maze of trenches at its center. She is pushed into the maze, which is the home of a vicious giant worm and made of the worm’s own filth. Feyre flees through the maze until she falls into a pit of bones—the worm’s previous meals. Feyre realizes that the worm is blind and navigates by smell. She builds a trap in the pit with sharp bones and covers herself in filth to mask her smell. In the crowd, Rhysand recognizes what she is doing. Feyre cuts her hand to lure the worm. She loses track of the worm, but Lucien shouts a warning to her. The worm pursues Feyre and bites her before it falls into the pit and is impaled. Amarantha is dismissive of Feyre’s victory and has Feyre sent back to her cell.
Chapter 37 Summary
Feyre develops a fever and is dying of her wounds. She worries Lucien will be punished for helping her during the trial and won’t be able to heal her again. Rhysand visits her and reveals that he was the only one who bet on her to win against the worm. Rhysand offers to heal Feyre if she agrees to spend two weeks out of every month with him for the rest of her life. Feyre negotiates him down to one week but agrees, desperate to survive and save Tamlin and his court. Rhysand heals her, but he marks her left arm with a lacy blue-black tattoo featuring an eye in the center of her palm to indicate their bargain. Feyre worries what Tamlin will think.
Chapter 38 Summary
Feyre is summoned to wash a marble hallway. If it isn’t clean by dinner, she will be punished, but the washing water she is given only makes the floor dirtier. Lucien’s mother, the High Lady of the Autumn Court, arrives and enchants the water in gratitude for Feyre revealing her name to save Lucien.
The next day, Feyre is ordered to clean lentils out of a bedroom fireplace before the inhabitant returns. Rhysand arrives before Feyre has finished, and she asks him why he didn’t tell Amarantha that Clare wasn’t Feyre. Rhysand evades the question but reveals that all High Lords can shape-shift, and he shows Feyre his bat wings and talons. Rhysand says that Amarantha has forbidden anyone to help Feyre answer the riddle, but he magically cleans the fireplace to help her. When the guards arrive, Rhysand commands them to stop assigning tasks to Feyre.
Chapters 32-38 Analysis
Maas delivers a large amount of exposition late in the novel, as Alis provides necessary context for Feyre’s trials Under the Mountain. To help the reader acclimate to the influx of new information, Maas again participates in traditions of the adventure genre with a new set of mini-adventures in the form of magical tasks assigned by Amarantha. Though Alis warns Feyre not to make a deal with Amarantha, and though Feyre is aware of some faeries’ duplicitous nature, she has little choice but to agree to Amarantha’s game. Maas entices the reader with Amarantha’s riddle, and Feyre’s failure to immediately understand the riddle challenges the reader to solve the mystery ahead of the character.
Impossible tasks are a frequent feature of myths, fairy tales, and hero stories. Impossible tasks indicate bad faith on the part of the task-setter, who often intends to trick or eliminate the hero, as Amarantha wishes to kill Feyre. Impossible tasks also reveal the extraordinary nature of the hero and test the abilities and strengths the protagonist gained through previous adversity. Maas explicitly references the Cinderella fairy tale in Feyre’s assignments to wash the floors and pick lentils from the fireplace. Instead of one fairy godmother to help Feyre, however, Maas gives her protagonist several High Fae helpers: Lucien, Lucien’s mother, and Rhysand. Feyre’s self-sacrificing nature and friendship with Lucien become her salvation, as Lucien warns Feyre during the worm task, and his mother enchants her washing water.
Rhysand’s motives are less clear—both to the reader and to Feyre. Maas complicates Rhysand’s impression as purely villainous, making him a symbol for the theme of Hidden Truths and Subverted Expectations by transforming him into Feyre’s unlikely ally. Rhysand violates Feyre’s agency again by forcing her into their bargain, yet he also saves Feyre from death, cleans the fireplace for her, and reveals his true form to her. Feyre’s and Tamlin’s arrival Under the Mountain allows Rhysand to enact his secret plotting against Amarantha in earnest, and the proximity of success allows Rhysand to begin to show a more vulnerable side, however incongruent with his malicious earlier actions. The eyeball in the tattoo Rhysand gives Feyre, Jurian’s eyeball, and Lucien’s magic eye all reference a threat made by the faerie queen in some versions of the ballad of Tam Lin. In the ballad, the queen wishes she had removed Tam Lin’s eyes so he couldn’t see his human rescuer, a play on folklore warnings about humans who can see faeries.
Related Titles
By Sarah J. Maas
