A Court of Thorns and Roses Summary & ending explained

The forest was dying of winter, and so were we.

I had been crouched in the frozen brush since dawn, bow across my knees, when the doe stepped into the clearing. Thin, like everything that winter. Enough meat for my father and my two sisters for days, if I didn't miss.

Then I saw the wolf.

It was too big. Far too big, with eyes that tracked the doe the way mine did, patient and clever. If it took her, my family went hungry. If it turned on me, I was dead. I told myself it was only an animal, the way I told myself many things.

I put an arrow of ash wood into it before it could move, and a second into the doe. I skinned the wolf in the snow, because a pelt sells, and I didn't let myself wonder why my hands shook.

We had been rich once, before my mother died and my father lost his fortune and his debts swallowed everything. Now we lived in a cottage at the edge of the village, and I was the only one who would go into the woods.

At home, Nesta sneered at the blood on my boots and Elain thanked me sweetly, and my father sat by the fire, carving little figures that no one bought. Years ago I had promised our dying mother I'd keep them together. Some nights, that promise was all that kept me going back into the woods.

The pelt fetched a good price at the market. For one night, we were warm.

The next night, something smashed through our front door.

It filled the room. A huge, golden-furred beast, with fangs as long as my fingers and a voice that was terribly, horribly human. It wanted the one who had killed its friend.

"I did it," I said, before anyone else could speak. My knife was useless in my hand.

The treaty between humans and faeries was old, the beast growled. A life for a life. I could die right there on our floor, or I could cross the wall into Prythian and live out my days on its lands.

My father didn't argue. My sisters didn't move.

I went out into the snow with the monster, and I didn't look back.