by Holly Black
I feel those words, feel them like a kick to the stomach. He sees my expression and laughs, a sound full of mockery. I can’t tell which of us he’s laughing at.
He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you.
Maybe he hates you the more for it.
After a moment, his eyes flutter closed. His voice falls to a whisper, as though he’s talking to himself. “If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”
He drifts off to sleep, but I am wide awake.
All through the morning I sit on a chair tipped back against the wall of my own bedroom. My father’s sword is across my lap. My mind keeps going over her words.
You don’t understand. She wants us to be married. She wants me to be queen.
Though I am across the floor from him, my gaze strays often to the bed and to the boy sleeping there.
His black eyes closed, his dark hair spilling over my pillow. At first, he could not seem to get comfortable, tangling his feet in the sheets, but eventually his breathing smoothed out and so did his movements. He is as ridiculously beautiful as ever, mouth soft, lips slightly parted, lashes so long that when his eyes are closed they rest against his cheek.
I am used to Cardan’s beauty, but not to any vulnerability. It feels uncomfortable to see him without his fanciful clothes, without his acid tongue, and malicious gaze for armor.
Over the five months of our arrangement, I have tried to anticipate the worst. I have issued commands to prevent him from avoiding, ignoring, or getting rid of me. I’ve figured out rules to prevent mortals from being tricked into years-long servitude and gotten him to proclaim them.
But it never seems like enough.
I recall walking with him in the gardens of the palace at dusk. Cardan’s hands were clasped behind his back, and he stopped to sniff the enormous globe of a white rose tipped with scarlet, just before it snapped at the air. He grinned and lifted an eyebrow at me, but I was too nervous to smile back.
Behind him, at the edge of the garden, were a half dozen knights, his personal guard, to which the Ghost was already assigned.
Although I went over and over what I was about to tell him, I still felt like the fool who believes she can trick a dozen wishes from a single one if she just gets the phrasing right. “I am going to give you orders.”
“Oh, indeed,” he said. On his brow, the crown of Elfhame’s gold caught the light of the sunset.
I took a breath and began. “You’re never to deny me an audience or give an order to keep me from your side.”
“Whysoever would I want you to leave my side?” he asked, voice dry.
“And you may never order me arrested or imprisoned or killed,” I said, ignoring him. “Nor hurt. Nor even detained.”
“What about asking a servant to put a very sharp pebble in your boot?” he asked, expression annoyingly serious.
I gave him what I hoped was a scathing look in return. “Nor may you raise a hand against me yourself.”
He made a gesture in the air, as though all of this was ridiculously obvious, as though somehow giving him the commands out loud was an act of bad faith.
I went doggedly on. “Each evening, you will meet me in your rooms before dinner, and we will discuss policy. And if you know of harm to be done to me, you must warn me. You must try to prevent anyone from guessing how I control you. And no matter how much you hate being High King, you must pretend otherwise.”
“I don’t,” he said, looking up at the sky.
I turned to him, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t hate being High King,” he said. “Not always. I thought I would, and yet I do not. Make of that what you will.”
I was unnerved, because it was a lot easier when I knew he was not just unsuitable for, but also uninterested in, ruling. Whenever I looked at the Blood Crown on his head, I had to pretend it away.
It didn’t help how immediately he’d convinced the Gentry of his right to preside over them. His reputation for cruelty made them wary of crossing him. His license made them believe all delights were possible.
“So,” I said. “You enjoy being my pawn?”
He grinned lazily, as though he didn’t mind being baited. “For now.”
My gaze sharpened. “For far longer than that.”
“You’ve won yourself a year and a day,” he told me. “But a lot can happen in a year and a day. Give me all the commands you want, but you’ll never think of everything.”
Once, I was the one to throw him off balance, the one to ignite his anger and shred his self-control, but somehow the tables turned. Every day since, I’ve felt the slippage.
As I gaze at him now, stretched out on my bed, I feel more off balance than ever.
The Roach sweeps into the room as late-afternoon light streams from the hill above us. On his shoulder is the hob-faced owl, once a messenger for Dain, now a messenger for the Court of Shadows. It goes by Snapdragon, although I don’t know if that’s a code name.
“The Living Council wants to see you,” the Roach says. Snapdragon blinks sleepy black eyes at me.
I groan.
“In truth,” he says, nodding toward the bed, “they want to see him, but it’s you they can order around.”
I stand and stretch. Then, strapping on the sheath, I head into the parlor of my apartments so as not to wake Cardan. “How’s the Ghost?”
“Resting,” the Roach says. “Lot of rumors flying around about last night, even among the palace guard. Gossips begin to spin their webs.”
I head to my bath chamber to clean myself up. I gargle with salty water and scrub my face and armpits with a cloth slathered in lemony verbena soap. I brush out my tangles, too exhausted to manage anything more complicated than that. “I guess you checked the passageway by now,” I call out.
“I did,” the Roach says. “And I see why it wasn’t on any of our maps—there’s no connection to the other passageways at any point down the length of it. I’m not even sure it was built when they were.”
I consider the painting of the clock and the constellations. The stars prophesying an amorous lover.
“Who slept there before Cardan?” I ask.
The Roach shrugs. “Several Folk. No one of particular note. Guests of the crown.”
“Lovers,” I say, finally putting it together. “The High King’s lovers who weren’t consorts.”
“Huh.” The Roach indicates Cardan with the lift of his chin in the direction of my bedroom. “And that’s the place our High King chose to sleep?” The Roach gives me a significant look, as though I am supposed to know the answer to this puzzle, when I didn’t realize it was a puzzle at all.
“I don’t know,” I say.
He shakes his head. “You best get to that Council meeting.”
I can’t say it’s not a relief to know that when Cardan wakes, I won’t be there.
The Living Council was assembled during Eldred’s time, ostensibly to help the High King make decisions, and they have calcified into a group difficult to oppose. It’s not so much that the ministers have raw individual power—although many are themselves formidable—but as a collective, it has the authority to make many smaller decisions regarding the running of the kingdom. The kind of small decisions that, taken together, could put even a king in a bind.
After the disrupted coronation and the murder of the royal family, after the irregularity with the crown, the Council is skeptical of Cardan’s youth and confused by my rise to power.
Snapdragon leads me to the meeting, beneath a braided dome of willow trees at a table of fossilized wood. The ministers watch me walk across the grass, and I look at them in turn—the Unseelie Minister, a troll with a thick head of shaggy hair with pieces of metal braided into it; the Seelie Minister, a green woman who looks like a mantis; the Grand General, Madoc; the Royal Astrologer, a very tall, dark-skinned man with a sculpted beard and celestial ornaments in the long fall of his navy blue hair; the Minister of Keys, a wizened old h
ob with ram’s horns and goat eyes; and the Grand Fool, who wears pale lavender roses on his head to match his purple motley.
All along the table are carafes of water and wine, dishes of dried fruit.
I lean over to one of the servants and send them for a pot of the strongest tea they can find. I will need it.
Randalin, the Minister of Keys, sits in the High King’s chair, the wooden back of the throne-like seat is burned with the royal crest. I note the move—and the assumptions inherent in it. In the five months since assuming the mantle of High King, Cardan has not come to the Council. Only one chair is empty—between Madoc and Fala, the Grand Fool. I remain standing.
“Jude Duarte,” says Randalin, fixing me with his goat eyes, “Where is the High King?”
Standing in front of them is always intimidating, and Madoc’s presence makes it worse. He makes me feel like a child, overeager to say or do something clever. A part of me wants nothing more than to prove I am more than what they suppose me to be—the weak and silly appointee of a weak and silly king.
To prove that there is another reason for Cardan to have chosen a mortal seneschal than because I can lie for him.
“I am here in his place,” I say. “To speak in his stead.”
Randalin’s gaze is withering. “There is a rumor that he shot one of his paramours last night. Is it true?”
A servant sets the asked-for pot of tea at my elbow, and I am grateful both for the fortification and for an excuse not to immediately answer.
“Today courtiers told me that girl wore an anklet of swinging rubies sent to her as an apology, but that she could not stand on her own,” says Nihuar, the Seelie representative. She purses her small green lips. “I find everything about that to be in poor taste.”
Fala the Fool laughs, clearly finding it to his taste. “Rubies for the spilling of her ruby-red blood.”
That couldn’t be true. Cardan would have had to arrange it in the time it took me to get from my rooms to the Council. But that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t arrange it on his behalf. Everyone is eager to help a king.
“You’d prefer he’d killed her outright?” I say. My skills in diplomacy are nowhere near as honed as my skills in aggravation. Besides, I’m tired.
“I wouldn’t mind,” says the Unseelie representative, Mikkel, with a chuckle. “Our new High King seems Unseelie through and through, and he will favor us, I think. We could give him a debauch better than the one his Master of Revels brags over, now that we know what he likes.”
“There are other stories,” continues Randalin. “That one of the guard shot High King Cardan to save that courtier’s life. That she is bearing the royal heir. You must tell the High King that his Council stands ready to advise him so that his rule is not plagued by such tales.”
“I’ll be sure to do so,” I say.
The Royal Astrologer, Baphen, gives me a searching look, as though reading correctly my intention not to talk to Cardan about any of this. “The High King is tied to the land and to his subjects. A king is a living symbol, a beating heart, a star upon which Elfhame’s future is written.” He speaks quietly, and yet somehow his voice carries. “Surely you have noticed that since his reign began, the isles are different. Storms come in faster. Colors are a bit more vivid, smells are sharper.
“Things have been seen in the forests,” he goes on. “Ancient things, long thought gone from the world, come to peer at him.
“When he becomes drunk, his subjects become tipsy without knowing why. When his blood falls, things grow. Why, High Queen Mab called Insmire, Insmoor, and Insweal from the sea. All the isles of Elfhame, formed in a single hour.”
My heart speeds faster the longer that Baphen talks. My lungs feel as though they cannot get enough air. Because none of this can be describing Cardan. He cannot be connected to the land so profoundly, cannot be able to do all that and yet be under my control.
I think of the blood on his coverlet—and beside it, the scattered white flowers.
When his blood falls, things grow.
“And so you see,” says Randalin, unaware that I am freaking out, “the High King’s every decision changes Elfhame and influences its inhabitants. During Eldred’s reign, when children were born, they were perforce brought before him to pledge themselves to the kingdom. But in the low Courts, some heirs were fostered in the mortal world, growing up outside of Eldred’s reach. Those changeling children returned to rule without making vows to the Blood Crown. At least one Court has made such a changeling its queen. And who knows how many wild Folk managed to avoid making vows.”
“We need to watch the Queen of the Undersea, too,” I say. “She’s got a plan and is going to move against us.”
“What’s this?” Madoc says, interested in the conversation for the first time.
“Impossible,” says Randalin. “How would you have heard such a thing?”
“Balekin has been meeting with her representatives,” I say.
Randalin snorts. “And I suppose you have that from the prince’s own lips?”
If I bit my tongue any harder, I’d bite clean through it. “I have it from more than one source. If their alliance was with Eldred, then it’s over.”
“The sea Folk have cold hearts,” Mikkel says, which sounds at first as though he’s agreeing with me, but the approving tone of his voice undermines it.
“Why doesn’t Baphen consult his star charts?” Randalin says placatingly. “If he finds a threat prophesied there, we shall discuss further.”
“I am telling you—” I insist, frustrated.
That is the moment that Fala jumps up on the table and begins to dance—interpretively, I think. Madoc grunts out a laugh. A bird alights on Nihuar’s shoulder, and they begin gossiping back and forth in low whispers and trills.
It is clear that none of them wants to believe me. How could I know something they do not, after all? I am too young, too green, too mortal. “Nicasia—” I begin again.
Madoc smiles. “Your little friend from school.”
I wish I could tell Madoc that the only reason he still sits on the Council is because of me. Despite his running Dain through with his own hand, he is still the Grand General. I could say that I want to keep him busy, that he’s a weapon better deployed by us than against us, that it’s easier for my spies to watch him when I know where he is, but a part of me knows he is still Grand General because I couldn’t bring myself to strip so much authority from my dad.
“There is still the matter of Grimsen,” says Mikkel, moving on as though I have not spoken. “The High King has welcomed the Alderking’s smith, maker of the Blood Crown. Now he dwells among us but does not yet labor for us.”
“We must make him welcome,” says Nihuar in a rare moment of sympathy between the Unseelie and Seelie factions. “The Master of Revels has made plans for the Hunter’s Moon. Perhaps he can add an entertainment for Grimsen’s benefit.”
“Depends on what Grimsen’s into, I guess,” I say, giving up on convincing them that Orlagh is going to move against us. I am on my own.
“Rooting in the dirt, mayhap,” Fala says. “Looking for trifles.”
“Truffles,” Randalin corrects automatically.
“Oh no,” says Fala, wrinkling his nose. “Not those.”
“I will endeavor to discover his preferred amusements.” Randalin makes a small note on a piece of paper. “I have also been told that a representative from the Court of Termites will be attending the Hunter’s Moon revel.”
I try not to let my surprise show. The Court of Termites, led by Lord Roiben, was helpful in getting Cardan onto the throne. And for their efforts I promised that when Lord Roiben asked me for a favor, I’d do it. But I have no idea what he might want, and now isn’t a good time for another complication.
Randalin clears his throat and turns, giving me a pointed look. “Convey our regrets to the High King that we were unable to advise him directly, and let him know we stand ready to come to his aid. If you fa
il to impress this upon him, we will find other means of doing so.”
I make a short bow and no reply to what is clearly a threat.
As I leave, Madoc falls into step alongside me.
“I understand you’ve spoken with your sister,” he says, thick eyebrows lowered in at least a mimicry of concern.
I shrug, reminding myself that he didn’t speak a word on my behalf today.
He gives me an impatient look. “Don’t tell me how busy you are with that boy king, though I imagine he takes some looking after.”
Somehow, in just a few words, he has turned me into a sullen daughter and himself into her long-suffering father.
I sigh, defeated. “I’ve spoken with Taryn.”
“Good,” he says. “You’re too much alone.”
“Don’t pretend at solicitude,” I say. “It insults us both.”
“You don’t believe that I could care about you, even after you betrayed me?” He watches me with his cat eyes. “I’m still your father.”
“You’re my father’s murderer,” I blurt out.
“I can be both,” Madoc says, smiling, showing those teeth.
I tried to rattle him, but I succeeded only in rattling myself. Despite the passage of months, the memory of his final aborted lunge once he realized he was poisoned is fresh in my mind. I remember his looking as though he would have liked to cleave me in half. “Which is why neither of us should pretend you’re not furious with me.”
“Oh, I’m angry, daughter, but I am also curious.” He makes a dismissive gesture toward the Palace of Elfhame. “Is this really what you wanted? Him?”
As with Taryn, I choke on the explanation I cannot give.
When I do not speak, he comes to his own conclusions. “As I thought. I didn’t appreciate you properly. I dismissed your desire for knighthood. I dismissed your capacity for strategy, for strength—and for cruelty. That was my mistake, and one I will not make again.”
I am not sure if that’s a threat or an apology.
“Cardan is the High King now, and so long as he wears the Blood Crown, I am sworn to serve him,” he says. “But no oath binds you. If you regret your move, make another. There are games yet to play.”