The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2)

by Holly Black

  Vulciber comes toward me, and I recognize the hairy soldier who opened the door. He looks to be at least part troll, heavy-browed and long-limbed.

  “Lead on,” I say.

  He gives me a hard look in return. I am not sure what he dislikes about me—my mortality, my position, my intruding on his evening. I don’t ask. I just follow him down stone stairs into the wet, mineral-scented darkness. The bloom of soil is heavy in the air, and there is a rotten, mushroomy odor I cannot place.

  I stop when the dark grows too deep and I fear I am going to stumble. “Light the lamps,” I say.

  Vulciber moves in close, his breath on my face, carrying with it the scent of wet leaves. “And if I will not?”

  A thin knife comes easily into my hand, slipping down out of a sleeve holster. I press the point against his side, just under the ribs. “Best you don’t find out.”

  “But you can’t see,” he insists, as though I have played some kind of dirty trick on him by not being as intimidated as he’d hoped.

  “Maybe I just prefer a little more light,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, though my heart is beating wildly, my palms starting to sweat. If we have to fight on the stairs, I better strike fast and true, because I’ll probably have only that one shot.

  Vulciber moves away from me and my knife. I hear his heavy footfalls on the steps and start counting in case I have to follow blind. But then a torch flares to life, emitting green fire.

  “Well?” he demands. “Are you coming?”

  The stairs pass several cells, some empty and some whose occupants sit far enough from the bars that the torchlight does not illuminate them. None do I recognize until the last.

  Prince Balekin’s black hair is held by a circlet, a reminder of his royalty. Despite being imprisoned, he barely looks discomfited. Three rugs cover the damp stone of the floor. He sits in a carved armchair, watching me with hooded, owl-bright eyes. A golden samovar rests on a small, elegant table. Balekin turns a handle, and steaming, fragrant tea spills into fragile porcelain. The scent of it makes me think of seaweed.

  But no matter how elegant he appears, he is still in the Tower of Forgetting, a few ruddy moths alighting on the wall above him. When he spilled the old High King’s blood, the droplets turned into moths, which fluttered through the air for a few stunning moments before seeming to die. I thought they were all gone, but it seems that a few follow him still, a reminder of his sins.

  “Our Lady Jude of the Court of Shadows,” he says, as though he believes that will charm me. “May I offer you a cup?”

  There is a movement in one of the other cells. I consider what his tea parties are like when I’m not around.

  I’m not pleased he’s aware of the Court of Shadows or my association with them, but I can’t be entirely surprised, either—Prince Dain, our spymaster and employer, was Balekin’s brother. And if Balekin knew about the Court of Shadows, he probably recognized one of them as they stole the Blood Crown and got it into my brother’s hands so he could place it on Cardan’s head.

  Balekin has good reason to not be entirely pleased to see me.

  “I must regretfully refuse tea,” I say. “I won’t be here long. You sent the High King some correspondence. Something about a deal? A bargain? I am here on his behalf to hear whatever it is you wish to say to him.”

  His smile seems to twist in on itself, to grow ugly. “You think me diminished,” Balekin says. “But I am still a prince of Faerie, even here. Vulciber, won’t you take my brother’s seneschal and give her a smack in her pretty, little face?”

  The strike comes openhanded, faster than I would have guessed, the sound of the slap shockingly loud as his palm connects with my skin. It leaves my cheek stinging and me furious.

  My knife is back in my right hand, its twin in my left.

  Vulciber wears an eager expression.

  My pride urges me to fight, but he’s bigger than me and in a space familiar to him. This would be no mere sparring contest. Still, the urge to best him, the urge to wipe the expression from his smug face, is overwhelming.

  Almost overwhelming. Pride is for knights, I remind myself, not for spies.

  “My pretty face,” I murmur to Balekin, putting away my knives slowly. I stretch my fingers to touch my cheek. Vulciber hit me hard enough for my own teeth to have cut the inside of my mouth. I spit blood onto the stone floor. “Such flattery. I cheated you out of a crown, so I guess I can allow for some hard feelings. Especially when they come with a compliment. Just don’t try me again.”

  Vulciber looks abruptly unsure of himself.

  Balekin takes a sip of his tea. “You speak very freely, mortal girl.”

  “And why shouldn’t I?” I say. “I speak with the High King’s voice. Do you think he’s interested in coming all the way down here, away from the palace and its pleasures, to treat with the elder brother at whose hands he suffered?”

  Prince Balekin leans forward in his chair. “I wonder what you think you mean.”

  “And I wonder what message you’d like me to give the High King.”

  Balekin regards me—no doubt one of my cheeks must be flushed. He takes another careful sip of tea. “I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your heart beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy.” He looks at me. “Is that right? It would explain much about your kind if it’s possible to mistake the two.”

  “I’ve never been in love,” I tell him, refusing to be rattled.

  “And of course, you can lie,” he says. “I can see why Cardan would find that helpful. Why Dain would have, too. It was clever of him to have brought you into his little gang of misfits. Clever to see that Madoc would spare you. Whatever else you could say about my brother, he was marvelously unsentimental.

  “For my part, I barely thought of you at all, and when I did, it was only to goad Cardan with your accomplishments. But you have what Cardan never did: ambition. Had I only seen that, I would have a crown now. But I think you’ve misjudged me, too.”

  “Oh?” I know I am not going to like this.

  “I won’t give you the message I meant for Cardan. It will come to him another way, and it will come to him soon.”

  “Then you waste both our time,” I say, annoyed. I have come all the way here, been hit, and frightened for nothing.

  “Ah, time,” he says. “You’re the only one short on that, mortal.” He nods at Vulciber. “You may escort her out.”

  “Let’s go,” the guard says, giving me a none-too-gentle shove toward the steps. As I ascend, I glance back at Balekin’s face, severe in the green torchlight. He resembles Cardan too much for my comfort.

  I am partway up when a long-fingered hand reaches out from between the bars and grips my ankle. Startled, I slip, scraping my palms and banging my knees as I go sprawling on the stairs. The old stab wound at the center of my left hand throbs suddenly. I barely catch myself before I tumble all the way down the steps.

  Beside me is the thin face of a faerie woman. Her tail curls around one of the bars. Short horns sweep back from her brow. “I knew your Eva,” she says to me, eyes glittering in the gloom. “I knew your mother. Knew so many of her little secrets.”

  I push myself to my feet and climb the steps as quickly as I can, my heart racing faster than when I thought I was going to have to fight Vulciber in the dark. My breath comes in short, rapid gasps that make my lungs hurt.

  At the top of the stairs, I pause to wipe my stinging palms against my doublet and try to get myself under control.

  “Ah,” I say to Vulciber when my breathing has calmed a little. “I nearly forgot. The High King gave me a scroll of commands. There are a few changes in how he wishes his brother to be treated. They’re outside in my saddlebags. If you could just follow me—”

  Vulciber looks a question at the guard who sent him to guide me to Balekin.

  “Go quickly,” the shadowy figure says.

&nb
sp; And so Vulciber accompanies me through the great door of the Tower of Forgetting. Illuminated by the moon, the black rocks shine with salt spray, a glittering coating, like that on sugared fruit. I try to focus on the guard and not the sound of my mother’s name, which I haven’t heard in so many years that, for a moment, I didn’t know why it was important to me.

  Eva.

  “That horse has only a bit and bridle,” Vulciber says, frowning at the black steed tied to the wall. “But you said—”

  I stab him in the arm with a little pin I kept hidden in the lining of my doublet. “I lied.”

  It takes some doing to haul him up and sling him over the back of the horse. She is trained with familiar military commands, including kneeling, which helps. I move as quickly as I can, for fear that one of the guards will come to check on us, but I am lucky. No one comes before we are up and moving.

  Another reason to ride to Insweal, rather than walk—you never know what you might be bringing back with you.

  You’re styling yourself as a spymaster,” the Roach says, looking over me and then my prisoner. “That ought to include being shrewd. Relying only on yourself is a good way to get got. Next time, take a member of the royal guard. Take one of us. Take a cloud of sprites or a drunken spriggan. Just take someone.”

  “Watching my back is the perfect opportunity to stick a knife in it,” I remind him.

  “Spoken like Madoc himself,” says the Roach with an irritated sniff of his long, twisted nose. He sits at the wooden table in the Court of Shadows, the lair of spies deep in the tunnels under the Palace of Elfhame. He is burning the tips of crossbow bolts in a flame, then liberally coating them with a sticky tar. “If you don’t trust us, just say so. We came to one arrangement, we can come to another.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I say, putting my head down on my hands for a long moment. I do trust them. I wouldn’t have spoken so freely if I didn’t, but I am letting my irritation show.

  I am sitting across from the Roach, eating cheese and buttered bread with apples. It’s the first food I’ve had that day, and my belly is making hungry noises, another reminder of the way my body is unlike theirs. Faerie stomachs don’t gurgle.

  Perhaps hunger is why I am being snappish. My cheek is stinging, and though I turned the situation on its head, it was a nearer thing than I’d like to admit. Plus, I still don’t know what Balekin wanted to tell Cardan.

  The more exhausted I let myself get, the more I’ll slip up. Human bodies betray us. They get starved and sick and run down. I know it, and yet there is always so much more to do.

  Beside us, Vulciber sits, tied to a chair and blindfolded.

  “Do you want some cheese?” I ask him.

  The guard grunts noncommittally but pulls against his bindings at the attention. He’s been awake for several minutes and grown visibly more worried the longer we haven’t spoken to him.

  “What am I doing here?” he finally shouts, rocking his chair back and forth. “Let me go!” The chair goes over, slamming him against the ground, where he lies on his side. He begins to struggle against the ropes in earnest.

  The Roach shrugs, gets up, and pulls off Vulciber’s blindfold. “Greetings,” he says.

  On the other side of the room, the Bomb is cleaning beneath her fingernails with a long, half-moon knife. The Ghost is sitting in a corner so quietly that occasionally he seems not to be there at all. A few more of the new recruits look on, interested in the proceedings—a boy with sparrow wings, three spriggans, a sluagh girl. I am not used to an audience.

  Vulciber stares at the Roach, at his goblin-green skin and eyes that reflect orange, his long nose and the single tuft of hair on his head. He takes in the room.

  “The High King won’t allow this,” Vulciber says.

  I give him a sad smile. “The High King doesn’t know, and you’re unlikely to tell him once I cut out your tongue.”

  Watching his fear ripen fills me with an almost voluptuous satisfaction. I, who have had little power in my life, must be on guard against that feeling. Power goes to my head too quickly, like faerie wine.

  “Let me guess,” I say, turning backward in my chair to face him, calculated coolness in my gaze. “You thought you could strike me, and there would be no consequences.”

  He shrinks a bit at my words. “What do you want?”

  “Who says I want anything particular?” I counter. “Maybe just a little payback…”

  As if we rehearsed it, the Roach pulls out a particularly nasty blade from his belt and holds it over Vulciber. He grins down at the guard.

  The Bomb looks up from her nails, a small smile on her lips as she watches the Roach. “I guess the show is about to start.”

  Vulciber fights against his bonds, head lashing back and forth. I hear the wood of the chair crack, but he doesn’t get free. After several heavy breaths, he slumps.

  “Please,” he whispers.

  I touch my chin as though a thought has just occurred to me. “Or you could help us. Balekin wanted to make a bargain with Cardan. You could tell me about that.”

  “I know nothing of it,” he says desperately.

  “Too bad.” I shrug and pick up another piece of cheese, shoving it into my mouth.

  He takes a look at the Roach and the ugly knife. “But I know a secret. It’s worth more than my life, more than whatever Balekin wanted with Cardan. If I tell it, will you give me your oath that I will leave here tonight unharmed?”

  The Roach looks at me, and I shrug. “Well enough,” the Roach says. “If the secret is all you claim, and if you’ll swear never to reveal you had a visit to the Court of Shadows, then tell us and we’ll send you on your way.”

  “The Queen of the Undersea,” Vulciber says, eager to speak now. “Her people crawl up the rocks at night and whisper to Balekin. They slip into the Tower, although we don’t know how, and leave him shells and shark teeth. Messages are being exchanged, but we can’t decipher them. There are whispers Orlagh intends to break her treaty with the land and use the information Balekin is giving her to ruin Cardan.”

  Of all the threats to Cardan’s reign, the Undersea wasn’t one I was expecting. The Queen of the Undersea has a single daughter—Nicasia, fostered on land and one of Cardan’s awful friends. Like Locke, Nicasia and I have a history. Also like Locke, it isn’t a good one.

  But I thought that Cardan’s friendship with Nicasia meant Orlagh was happy he was on the throne.

  “Next time one of these exchanges happen,” I say, “come straight to me. And if you hear anything else you think I’d be interested in, you come and tell me that, too.”

  “That’s not what we agreed,” Vulciber protests.

  “True enough,” I tell him. “You’ve told us a tale, and it is a good one. We’ll let you go tonight. But I can reward you better than some murderous prince who does not and will never have the High King’s favor. There are better positions than guarding the Tower of Forgetting—yours for the taking. There’s gold. There’re all the rewards that Balekin can promise but is unlikely to deliver.”

  He gives me a strange look, probably trying to judge whether, given that he hit me and I poisoned him, it is still possible for us to be allies. “You can lie,” he says finally.

  “I’ll guarantee the rewards,” the Roach says. He reaches over and cuts Vulciber’s bindings with his scary knife.

  “Promise me a post other than in the Tower,” says Vulciber, rubbing his wrists and pushing himself to his feet, “and I shall obey you as though you were the High King himself.”

  The Bomb laughs at that, with a wink in my direction. They do not explicitly know that I have the power to command Cardan, but they know we have a bargain that involves my doing most of the work and the Court of Shadows acting directly for the crown and getting paid directly, too.

  I’m playing the High King in her little pageant, Cardan said once in my hearing. The Roach and the Bomb laughed; the Ghost didn’t.

  Once Vulciber exchanges
promises with us, and the Roach leads him, blindfolded, into the passageways out of the Nest, the Ghost comes to sit beside me.

  “Come spar,” he says, taking a piece of apple off my plate. “Burn off some of that simmering rage.”

  I give a little laugh. “Don’t disparage. It’s not easy to keep the temperature so consistent,” I tell him.

  “Nor so high,” he returns, watching me carefully with hazel eyes. I know there’s human in his lineage—I can see it in the shape of his ears and his sandy hair, unusual in Faerie. But he hasn’t told me his story, and here, in this place of secrets, I feel uncomfortable asking.

  Although the Court of Shadows does not follow me, the four of us have made a vow together. We have promised to protect the person and office of the High King, to ensure the safety and prosperity of Elfhame for the hope of less bloodshed and more gold. So we’ve sworn. So they let me swear, even though my words don’t bind me the way theirs do, by magic. I am bound by honor and by their faith in my having some.

  “The king himself has had audience with the Roach thrice in this last fortnight. He’s learning to pick pockets. If you’re not careful, he’ll make a better slyfoot than you.” The Ghost has been added to the High King’s personal guard, which allows him to keep Cardan safe but also to know his habits.

  I sigh. It’s full dark, and I have much I ought to do before dawn. And yet it is hard to ignore this invitation, which pricks at my pride.

  Especially now, with the new spies overhearing my answer. We recruited more members, displaced after the royal murders. Every prince and princess employed a few, and now we employ them all. The spriggans are as cagey as cats but excellent at ferreting out scandal. The sparrow boy is as green as I once was. I would like the expanding Court of Shadows to believe I don’t back down from a challenge.

  “The real difficulty will come when someone tries to teach our king his way around a blade,” I say, thinking of Balekin’s frustrations on that front, of Cardan’s declaration that his one virtue was that he was no murderer.