Queen, weapon, exile

Origin

Sold for a whisper

She ruled Scythia, youngest of the six Mortal Queens — and the only one who saw clearly. Refused to ally with Hybern, and for that clarity the others, threatened by her, sold her to the death-lord Koschei. He cursed her into a firebird and bound her to his lake. The cruellest turn lands later: the queens didn't even scheme it themselves. As she tells it, they sold her "not through their devices, but his — by words he planted in their courts, whispered on the winds." We're not over it.

The curse

Fire by day, woman by night

By day, the firebird — fast as a shooting star, red and gold and white, vibrant as molten metal, trailing sparks across the waves and burning as hot as the heart of a forge. As the daytime change nears, flames flicker in her eyes. By night, a woman again. The spell is woven into her very blood, which is why neither Feyre nor Helion can unravel it, and why she stays tethered to Koschei's lake, where she rages the skies above water she cannot leave.

After the war

The Band of Exiles

Freed temporarily by a bargain Feyre's father struck with Koschei, she fought the war against Hybern as a weapon of fire, then grieved the man who'd been, she said, a better father to her than her own. Curse unbroken, she settled into the Mortal Lands with Lucien and Jurian — the Band of Exiles, a found family with a vision for the human territories. She and Jurian forever "at each other's throats, as they like to be," while the debt to the lake, and Koschei's hunger to free himself, hangs over everything still to come. We need her free.