High Priestess of the Spring Court · The Hand at the Altar
Ianthe
Holiness worn like a knife behind the back.
Pale blue-grey robes, a hooded circlet. Beautiful, ambitious, rotten all the way down. She made herself indispensable to Tamlin and a traitor to everyone who trusted her. We saw the knife coming. Tamlin didn't.
The Hand at the Altar
Devotion as a ladder.
She came to Tamlin trailing an old friendship and wore that intimacy like a credential. After Amarantha, she returned to the Spring Court and installed herself at his side — High Priestess, advisor, confessor, all serenity and pale blue-grey robes — and made his grief her instrument. Feyre came back hollow from Under the Mountain, and Ianthe was right there with ritual and reassurance, steering the wedding, the days, the silences. Feyre was too numb to clock it. We weren't. Every blessing bent toward her own ascent, and the holiness was false all the way down.
The Betrayer
What she sold, and to whom.
By the time Hybern moved on Prythian, she was already theirs. She handed up Feyre's family — Nesta and Elain among them — to the King, and the Archeron sisters were dragged to a fate she helped arrange: forced into the Cauldron, Made against their will. And in her youth she'd turned that same appetite on the males of Rhysand's Inner Circle — an old predation Mor and the others never forgave, and neither did we. The faith was always a costume for hunger.
The Reckoning
The altar collapses.
Ambition outran her at the last. Treachery laid bare, Hybern's cause failing, her flight ended at the cottage of the Weaver of the Wood — Stryga, the ancient death-dealing thing in the heart of Prythian who is no one's instrument. The priestess who used everyone got used up: the Weaver took her, kept the silver circlet for a trophy, and the cold sanctified light that hid the rot for so long went out with her. She died the way she lived — overreaching, certain to the last that holiness would protect her. It didn't. We're at peace with it.
Bound to
The threads of the priestess.
Swipe to meet them all
Also in the story
Connected
Allies, rivals and enemies — the ones this story crossed.
Iconography
How to know her.
The signs of the High Priestess. Sanctity made ornament — and we know exactly what it was hiding.
The File
- Title
- High Priestess of the Spring Court · one of the twelve High Priestesses of Prythian
- Court
- born to the Spring Court — and sold it to Hybern
- Look
- Pale blue-grey priestess robes and hood, a silver circlet, a moon-phase tattoo across her brow
- Allegiance
- only ever herself — and whatever power served her
- Crime
- manipulated Feyre, betrayed the Archerons to Hybern, preyed on the Inner Circle
- End
- killed by the Weaver of the Wood when Hybern's pursuit drove her to the creature's door
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A Court of Thorns and Roses, ©2015-2021, Sarah J. Maas. Artwork © Caffeine and Curses.