The Cruel Prince (11 page)

“When I find out whom you're protecting,” he tells me, “they will be sorry they ever drew breath.”

“This is not helping,” I say, leaning back in my chair.

He kneels down in front of me and takes my hand in his rough green fingers. He must be able to feel how I am trembling. He lets out a long sigh, probably discarding more threats. “Then tell me what will help, Jude. Tell me, and I will do it.”

I wonder what would happen if I said the words:
Nicasia humiliated me. Valerian tried to murder me. They did it to impress Prince Cardan, who hates me. I am scared of them. I am more scared of them than I am of you, and you terrify me. Make them stop. Make them leave me alone.

But I won't. Madoc's anger is fathomless. I have seen it in my mother's blood on the kitchen floor. Once summoned, it cannot be called back.

What if he murdered Cardan? What if he killed them all? His answer to so many problems is bloodshed. If they were dead, their parents would demand satisfaction. The wrath of the High King would fall on him. I would be worse off than I am now, and Madoc would likely be dead.

“Teach me more,” I say instead. “More strategy. More bladework. Teach me everything you know.” Prince Dain may want me for a spy, but that doesn't mean giving up my sword.

Madoc looks impressed, and Oriana, annoyed. I can tell she thinks that I am manipulating him and that I am doing a good job of it.

“Very well,” he says with a sigh. “Tatterfell will bring you dinner, unless you feel up to joining us at the dining table. We will begin a more intensive training tomorrow.”

“I'll eat upstairs,” I say, and head to my room, still wrapped in someone else's blanket. On the way, I pass Taryn's closed door. Part of me wants to go in, fling myself on her bed, and weep. I want her to hold me and tell me that there wasn't anything I could have done differently. I want her to tell me that I am brave and that she loves me.

But since I am sure that's not what she'd do, I pass her door by.

My room has been tidied while I was gone, my bed made and my windows opened to let in the night air. And there, on the foot of my bed, is a folded-up dress of homespun with the royal crest that servants of the princes and princesses wear. Sitting on the balcony is the owl-faced hob.

It preens a bit, ruffling its feathers.

“You,” I say. “You're one of his—”

“Go to Hollow Hall tomorrow, sweetmeat,” it chirps, cutting me off. “Find us a secret the king won't like. Find treason.”

Hollow Hall. That's the home of Balekin, the eldest prince.

I have my first assignment from the Court of Shadows.

I
go to sleep early, and when I wake, it is full dark. My head hurts—maybe from sleeping too long—and my body aches. I must have slept with all my muscles tensed.

The lectures of that day have already begun. It doesn't matter. I'm not going.

Tatterfell has left me a tray with coffee on it, spiced with cinnamon and cloves and a little bit of pepper. I pour a cup. It's lukewarm, which means it has been there for a while. There's toast, too, which softens up when I dunk it a few times.

Then I wash my face, which is still sticky with pulp, and then the rest of me. I brush my hair roughly, and then I pull it into a bun by knotting it around a twig.

I refuse to think about what happened the day before. I refuse to think about anything but today and my mission for Prince Dain.

Go to Hollow Hall. Find us a secret the king won't like. Find treason.

So Dain wants me to help ensure that Balekin isn't chosen to be the next High King. Eldred can choose any of his children for the throne, but he favors the three eldest: Balekin, Dain, and Elowyn—and Dain above the others. I wonder if spies help keep it that way.

If I can be good at this, then Dain will give me power when he ascends the throne. And after yesterday, I crave it. I crave it like I craved the taste of faerie fruit.

I put on the servant's dress without any of my mall-acquired underclothes to make sure I am as authentic as possible. For shoes, I dig out a pair of old leather slippers from the back of my closet. They have a hole through the toe that I tried to fix nearly a year ago, but my sewing skills are poor, and I wound up just making them ugly. They fit, though, and all my other shoes are too beautifully made.

We do not have human servants at Madoc's estate, but I have seen them in other parts of Faerie. Human midwives to deliver babies from human consorts. Human artisans cursed or blessed with tempting skill. Human wet nurses to suckle sickly faerie infants. Little human changelings, raised in Faerie, but not educated with the Gentry as we are. Cheerful magic-seekers who don't mind a little drudgery in exchange for some wish of their heart. When our paths cross, I try to talk to them. Sometimes they want to, and sometimes they don't. Most nonartisans have been at least slightly glamoured to smooth out their memories. They think they're in a hospital or at a rich person's house. And when they're returned home—and Madoc has assured me that they are—they're paid well and even given gifts, such as good luck or shiny hair or a knack for guessing the right lotto numbers.

But I know there are also humans who make bad bargains or offend the wrong faerie and who are not treated so well. Taryn and I hear things, even if no one means for us to—stories of humans sleeping on stone floors and eating refuse, believing themselves to be resting on feather beds and supping on delicacies. Humans drugged out of their minds on faerie fruit. Balekin's servants are rumored to be the latter, ill-favored and worse-treated.

I shudder at the thought of it. And yet I can see why a mortal would make a useful spy, beyond the ability to lie. A mortal can pass into low places and high without much notice. Holding a harp, we're bards. In homespun, we're servants. In gowns, we're wives with squalling goblin children.

I guess being beneath notice has advantages.

Next I pack a leather bag with a shift and a knife, throw a thick velvet cloak over my dress, and descend the stairs. The coffee churns in my gut. I am almost to the door when I see Vivi seated on the tapestry-covered window seat.

“You're up,” she says, standing. “Good. Do you want to shoot things? I've got arrows.”

“Maybe later.” I keep my cloak clutched tightly around me and try to move past her, keeping a blandly happy expression on my face.

It doesn't work. Her arm shoots out to block me. “Taryn told me what you said to the prince at the tournament,” she says. “And Oriana told me how you came home last night. I can guess the rest.”

“I don't need another lecture,” I say to her. This mission from Dain is the only thing keeping me from being haunted by what happened the day before. I don't want to lose focus. I am afraid that if I do, I will lose my composure, too.

“Taryn feels awful,” Vivi says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sometimes it sucks to be right.”

“Stop it.” She grabs for my arm, looking at me with her split-pupiled eyes. “You can talk to me. You can trust me. What's going on?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I made a mistake. I got angry. I wanted to prove something. It was stupid.”

“Was it because of what I said?” Her fingers are gripping my arm hard.

The Folk are going to keep treating you like crap.

“Vivi, there's no way my deciding to mess up my life is your fault,” I tell her. “But I will make them regret crossing me.”

“Wait, what do you mean?” Vivi asks.

“I don't know,” I say, pulling free. I head toward the door, and this time she doesn't stop me. Once I'm out, I rush across the lawn to the stables.

I know I am not being fair to Vivi, who hasn't done anything. She just wanted to help.

Maybe I don't know how to be a good sister anymore.

At the stables, I have to stop and lean against a wall while I take deep breaths. For more than half my life, I've been fighting down panic. Maybe it's not the best thing for a constant rattle of nerves to seem normal, even necessary. But at this point, I wouldn't know how to live without it.

The most important thing is to impress Prince Dain. I can't let Cardan and his friends take that from me.

To get to Hollow Hall, I decide to take one of the toads, since only the Gentry ride silver-shod horses. Although a servant would probably not have a mount of any kind, at least the toad is less conspicuous.

Only in Faerieland is a giant toad the
less
conspicuous choice.

I saddle and bridle a spotted one and lead her out onto the grass. Her long tongue lashes one of her golden eyes, making me take an involuntary step back.

I hook my foot in the stirrup and swing up onto the seat. With one hand, I pull on the reins, and with the other, I pat the soft, cool skin of her back. The spotted toad launches us into the air, and I hang on.

Hollow Hall is a stone manor with a tall, crooked tower, the whole thing half-covered in vines and ivy. There's a balcony on the second floor that seems to have a rail of thick roots in place of iron. A curtain of thinner tendrils hangs down from it, like a scraggly beard clotted with dirt. There is something misshapen about the estate that ought to make it charming but instead makes it ominous. I tie up the toad, stuff my cloak into her saddlebags, and start toward the side of the manor, where I believe I will find a servants' door. On the way, I stop to pick mushrooms, so it will seem as though I had a reason for being out in the woods.

As I get close, my heart speeds anew. Balekin won't hurt me, I tell myself. Even if I'm caught, he'll simply turn me over to Madoc. Nothing bad is going to happen.

I'm not entirely sure that's true, but I manage to persuade myself enough to approach the servants' entrance and slip inside.

A hallway goes to the kitchens, where I deposit the mushrooms on a table beside a brace of bloody rabbits, a pigeon pie, a bouquet of garlic scapes and rosemary, a few cloudy-skinned plums, and dozens of bottles of wine. A troll stirs a large pot alongside a winged pixie. And cutting up vegetables are two sunken-cheeked humans, a boy and a girl, both of them with small, stupid smiles on their faces and glazed-over looks in their eyes. They don't even look down as they chop, and I'm surprised they don't cut off their own fingers by accident. Worse, if they did, I am not sure they'd notice.

I think of how I felt yesterday, and the echo of faerie fruit comes unbidden into my mouth. I feel my gorge rise, and I hurry past, down the hall.

I am stopped by a pale-eyed faerie guard, who grabs my arm. I look up at him, hoping I can school my expression to be as blank and pleasant and dreamy as that of the mortals in the kitchens.

“I haven't seen you before,” he tells me, making it an accusation.

“You're lovely,” I say, trying to sound awed and a little confused. “Pretty eye mirrors.”

He makes a disgusted sound, which I guess means I am doing a good enough job of pretending to be an ensorcelled human servant, although I feel I went weird and over the top in my nervousness. I am not as good at improvising as I had hoped I would be.

“Are you new?” he asks, saying the words slowly.

“New?” I echo, trying to figure out what someone brought here might think about the experience. I cannot stop remembering the sickly sweet taste of faerie fruit on my tongue, but instead of getting me deeper into character, I just want to throw up. “Before I was somewhere else,” I blurt out, “but now I have to clean the great hall with polish until every inch of it shines.”

“Well, I guess you best, then,” he says, letting me go.

I try to control the shudder building up under my skin. I don't flatter myself that my acting convinced him; he was convinced because I'm human and he expects humans to be servants. Again, I can see why Prince Dain thought I would be useful. After the guard, it is fairly easy to move around Hollow Hall. There are dozens of humans drifting through their chores, lost in sickly dreams. They sing little songs to themselves and whisper words out loud, but it's obviously just snatches of a conversation happening in their dreams. Their eyes are shadowed. Their mouths, chapped.

No wonder the guard thought I was new.

Besides the servants, however, are the fey. Guests of some fete that seems to have ebbed rather than ended. They sleep in various states of undress, draped over couches and entwined on the floors of the parlors I pass through, their mouths stained gold with nevermore, a glittering golden powder so concentrated that it stupefies faeries and gives mortals the ability to glamour one another. Goblets lie on their side, mead pooling to run over the uneven floor like tributaries into great honey-wine lakes. Some of the Folk are so still I worry that they have debauched themselves into death.

“Excuse me,” I say to a girl about my age carrying a tin bucket. She passes me without even seeming to notice I have spoken.

With no idea what else to do, I decide to follow. We pad up a wide stone staircase without rails. Three more of the Folk lie in a dissipated stupor beside a thimble-sized bottle of spirits. Above, from the other end of the hall, I hear an odd cry, like someone in pain. Something heavy hits the ground. Rattled, I try to school my face back to dreamy nonchalance, but it isn't easy. My heart beats like a trapped bird.

The girl opens a door to a bedroom suite, and I slip in behind her.

The walls are stone and hung with no paintings or tapestries. A massive half-tester bed takes up most of the space in the first room, the headboard panel carved with various animals with women's heads and bare breasts—owls and snakes and foxes—doing some kind of weird dance.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since Balekin heads the profligate Circle of Grackles.

The books piled up on the wooden desk are ones I recognize—the same books Taryn and I study for our classes. These are spread out, with a few pieces of paper scattered over the wood between them, beside an open inkpot. One of the books has careful notations along one side, while the other is covered in blots. A broken pen, snapped in half deliberately—or at least I can't think of a way it could have happened that's not deliberate—is lying in the hinge of the ink-stained book.

Nothing that looks treasonous.

Prince Dain gifted me the uniform, knowing I could walk in as I had done. He was counting on my ability to lie for the rest. But now that I am inside, I hope there is something in Hollow Hall to find.

Which means that no matter how frightened I am, I must pay attention.

Along the wall are more books, some of them familiar from Madoc's library. I pause in front of a shelf, frowning, and kneel down. Stuffed into a corner is a copy of a book I know but didn't expect to see here in this place—
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
, bound together in one volume. Mom read to us from one a lot like that back in the mortal world.