The Cruel Prince (28 page)

There's a knock on my door, and then it opens without my signaling anything. Vivi comes in, carrying a wooden plate with a sandwich on it, along with a stoppered bottle of amber glass.

“I'm a jerk. I'm an idiot,” I say. “I admit it. You don't have to lecture me.”

“I thought you were going to give me a hard time about the glamour,” she says. “You know, the one you resisted.”

“You shouldn't magic your sisters.” I draw the cork on the bottle and take a long swig of water. I didn't realize how thirsty I was. I guzzle more, nearly draining the whole container in one continuous gulping swallow.

“And you shouldn't try to chop yours in half.” She settles back against my pillows, against my worn stuffed animals. Idly, she picks up the snake and flicks the forks of its felt tongue. “I thought all of it—swordplay, knighthood—I thought it was a game.”

I remember how angry she was when Taryn and I gave in to Faerie and started having fun. Crowns of flowers on our heads, shooting bows and arrows at the sky. Eating candied violets and falling asleep with our heads pillowed on logs. We were children. Children can laugh all day and still cry themselves to sleep at night. But to hold a blade in my hand, a blade like the one that killed our parents, and think it was a toy, she'd have to believe I was heartless.

“It's not,” I say finally.

“No,” Vivi says, wrapping the stuffed snake around the stuffed cat.

“Did she tell you about him?” I ask, climbing onto my bed next to her. It feels good to lie down, maybe a little too good. I am instantly drowsy.

“I didn't know Taryn was with Locke,” Vivi says, deliberately giving me the whole sentence so I won't have to wonder if she's trying to trick me. “But I don't want to talk about Locke. Forget him. I want us to leave Faerie. Tonight.”

That makes me sit upright. “What?”

She laughs at my reaction. It's such a normal sound, so completely out of step with the high drama of the last two days. “I thought that would surprise you. Look, whatever happens next here, it's not going to be good. Balekin's an asshole. And he's dumb on top of it. You should have heard Dad swearing on our way home. Let's just go.”

“What about Taryn?” I ask.

“I've already asked her, and I'm not going to tell you if she agreed to come or not. I want you to answer for
you
. Jude, listen. I know you're keeping secrets. Something is making you sick. You're paler and thinner, and your eyes have a weird shine.”

“I'm fine,” I say.

“Liar,” she says, but the accusation has no heat. “I know that you're stuck here in Faerie because of me. I know that the shittiest things that have happened in your whole life are because of me. You've never said it, which is kind of you, but I know. You've had to turn yourself into something else, and you've done it. Sometimes, when I look at you, I'm not sure if you'd even know how to be human anymore.”

I don't know what to do with that—compliment and insult all at once. But behind it is a feeling of prophecy.

“You fit in better here than I do,” Vivi says. “But I bet it cost you something.”

I mostly don't like to imagine the life I could have had, the one without magic in it. The one where I went to a regular school and learned regular things. The one where I had a living father and mother. The one where my older sister was the weirdo. Where I wasn't so angry. Where my hands weren't stained with blood. I picture it now, and I feel strange, tense all over, my stomach churning.

What I feel is panic.

When the wolves come for that Jude, she'll be eaten up in an instant—and wolves always come. It frightens me to think of myself so vulnerable. But as I am now, I am well on my way to becoming one of the wolves. Whatever essential thing the other Jude has, whatever part that's unbroken in her and broken in me, that thing might be unrecoverable. Vivi is right; it cost me something to be the way I am. But I do not know what. And I don't know if I can get it back. I don't even know if I want it.

But maybe I could try.

“What would we do in the mortal world?” I ask her.

Vivi smiles and pushes the plate with the sandwich toward me. “Go to movies. Visit cities. Learn to drive a car. There are lots of the Folk who don't live in the Courts, don't play at politics. We could live any way we like. In a loft. In a tree. Whatever you want.”

“With Heather?” I pick up the food and take a huge bite. Sliced mutton and pickled dandelion greens. My stomach growls.

“Hopefully,” she says. “You can help me explain things to her.”

It occurs to me for the first time that, whether she knows it or not, she isn't suggesting running away to be
human
. She's suggesting we live like the wild fey, among mortals, but not of them. We'd steal the cream from their cups and the coins from their pockets. But we wouldn't settle down and get boring jobs. Or at least she wouldn't.

I wonder what Heather is going to think of that.

Once Prince Cardan is dealt with in some way, then what? Even if I figure out the mystery of Balekin's letters, there's still no good place for me. The Court of Shadows will be disbanded. Taryn will be wed. Vivi will be gone. I could go with her. I could try to figure out what's broken in me, try to start over.

I think of the Roach's offer, to go with them to another court. To start over in Faerie. Both feel like giving up, but what else is there to do? I thought that once I was home, I'd come up with a plan, but so far I haven't.

“I couldn't leave tonight,” I say hesitatingly.

She gasps, hand to her heart. “You're seriously thinking about it.”

“There are some things I need to finish. Give me a day.” I keep bargaining for the same thing over and over: time. But in a day I will have squared things with the Court of Shadows. Arrangements will be made for Cardan. One way or another, everything will be settled. I will wring whatever payment I can from Faerie. And if I still don't have a plan, it will be too late to make one. “What's a single day in your eternal, everlasting, interminable life?”

“One day to decide or one day to pack your bags?”

I take another bite of sandwich. “Both.”

Vivi rolls her eyes. “Just remember, in the mortal world, it won't be the way it is here.” She goes to the door. “
You
wouldn't have to be the way you are here.”

I hear Vivi's steps in the hall. I take another bite of my sandwich. I chew and swallow it, but I don't taste anything.

What if the way I am is the way I am? What if, when everything else is different, I'm not?

I take Cardan's royal ring out of my pocket and hold it in the center of my palm. I shouldn't have this. Mortal hands shouldn't hold it. Even looking closely seems wrong, yet I do anyway. The gold is full of a deep rich redness, and the edges are smoothed by constant wear. There is a little bit of wax stuck in the impression, and I try to root it out with the edge of my nail. I wonder how much the ring would be worth out in the world.

Before I can persuade myself not to, I slip it onto my unworthy finger.

I
wake up the next afternoon with the taste of poison in my mouth. I had gone to sleep in my clothes, curled around Nightfell's scabbard.

Although I don't really want to, I pad down to Taryn's door and knock on it. I have to say something to her before the world turns upside down again. I have to make things right between us. But no one answers, and when I turn the knob and enter, I find her chamber is empty.

I head down to Oriana's rooms, hoping she might know where I can find Taryn. I peek in through the open door and find her out on her balcony, looking at the trees and the lake beyond. The wind whips her hair behind her like a pale banner. It balloons her filmy dress.

“What are you doing?” I ask, coming in.

She turns, surprised. And well she might be. I am not sure that I have ever sought her out before. “My people had wings once,” she says, the longing clear in her voice. “And though I've never had a pair of my own, sometimes I feel the lack of them.”

I wonder if, when she imagines having wings, she pictures herself flying up into the sky and away from all this.

“Have you seen Taryn?” Vines curl around the posts of Oriana's bed, their stems a vivid green. Blue flowers hang down in clumps over where she sleeps, making for a richly perfumed bower. There is nowhere to sit that doesn't seem crawling with plants. It's hard for me to picture Madoc comfortable here.

“She's gone to the house of her betrothed, but they'll be at the High King Balekin's manor tomorrow. You will be there, too. He's throwing a feast for your father and some of the Seelie and Unseelie rulers. You'll be expected to be less hostile to each other.”

I cannot even imagine the horror, the awkwardness, of being dressed in gossamer, the smell of faerie fruit heavy in the air, while I am supposed to pretend that Balekin is anything but a murdering monster.

“Will Oak go?” I ask her, and feel the first real pang of regret. If I leave, I won't get to see Oak grow up.

Oriana clasps her hands together and walks over to her dressing table. Her jewelry hangs there—slices of agate on long chains of raw crystal beads, collars set with moonstones, deep green bloodstones strung together, and an opal pendant, bright as fire in the sunlight. And on a silver tray, beside a pair of ruby earrings in the shape of stars, is a golden acorn.

A golden acorn, twin to the one I found in the pocket of the gown that Locke gave me. The dress that had belonged to his mother. Liriope. Locke's mother. I think of her madcap, joyful dresses, of her dust-covered bedroom. Of how the acorn in her pocket opened to show a bird inside.

“I tried to convince Madoc that Oak was too young and that this dinner will be too dull, but Madoc insisted that he come. Perhaps you can sit beside him and keep him amused.”

I think about the story of Liriope, of how Oriana told it to me when she believed I was getting too close to Prince Dain. Of how Oriana had been a consort to the High King Eldred before she was Madoc's wife. I think about why she might have needed to make a swift marriage, what she might have had to hide.

I think about the note I found on Balekin's desk, the one in Dain's hand, a sonnet to a lady with
sunrise hair
and
starlit eyes
.

I think about what the bird said:
My dearest friend, these are the last words of Liriope. I have three golden birds to scatter. Three attempts to get one into your hand. I am too far gone for any antidote, and so if you hear this, I leave you with the burden of my secrets and the last act of my heart. Protect him. Take him far from the dangers of this Court. Keep him safe, and never, ever tell him the truth of what happened to me.

I think again about strategy, about Dain and Oriana and Madoc. I recall when Oriana first came to us. How quickly Oak was born and how we weren't allowed to see him for months because he was so sickly. About how she has always been protective of him around us, but maybe that was for one reason, when I had assumed another.

Just as I'd assumed the child Liriope wanted her friend to take was Locke. But what if the baby she had been carrying didn't die with her?

I feel as though I've been robbed of breath, as if getting out words is a struggle against the very air in my lungs. I cannot quite believe what I am about to say, even as I know it's the conclusion that makes sense. “Oak isn't Madoc's child, is he? Or, at least, no more Madoc's than I am.”

If the boy is born, Prince Dain will never be king.

Oriana claps a hand over my mouth. Her skin smells like the air after a snowfall. “Don't say that.” She speaks close to my face, voice trembling. “Do not ever say that again. If you ever loved Oak, do not say those words.”

I push her hand away. “Prince Dain was his father and Liriope his mother. Oak is the reason Madoc backed Balekin, the reason he wanted Dain dead. And now he's the key to the crown.”

Her eyes widen, and she takes my chilly hand in hers. She has never not seemed strange to me, like a creature from a fairy tale, pale as a ghost. “How could you know that? How could you know any of this, human child?”

I had thought Prince Cardan was the most valuable individual in all of Faerie. I had no idea.

Swiftly, I shut the door and close up her balcony. She watches me and doesn't protest. “Where is he now?” I ask her.

“Oak? With his nurse,” she whispers, drawing me toward the little divan in one corner, patterned with a snake brocade and covered in a fur. “Talk quickly.”

“First, tell me what happened seven years ago.”

Oriana takes a deep breath. “You might think that I would have been jealous of Liriope for being another of Eldred's consorts, but I wasn't. I loved her. She was always laughing, impossible not to love—even though her son has come between you and Taryn, I cannot help loving him a little, for her sake.”

I wonder what it was like for Locke to have his mother be the lover of the High King. I am torn between sympathy and a desire for his life to have been as miserable as possible.

“We were confidantes,” Oriana says. “She told me when she began her affair with Prince Dain. She didn't seem to take any of it seriously. She had loved Locke's father very much, I think. Dain and Eldred were dalliances, distractions. Our kind do not worry overmuch about children, as you know. Faerie blood is thin. I don't think it occurred to her that she might have a second son, a mere decade after she bore Locke. Some of us have centuries between children. Some of us never carry any at all.”

I nod. That's why human men and women are the unacknowledged necessity they are. Without their strengthening the bloodline, Faerie would die out, despite the endless span of their lives.

“Blusher mushroom is a terrible way to die,” Oriana says, hand to her throat. “You begin to slow, your limbs tremble until you can move no more. But you are still conscious until everything inside you stops, like frozen clockwork. Imagine the horror of that, imagine hoping that you might yet move, imagine straining to move. By the time she got me the message, she was dead. I cut…” Her voice falters. I know what the rest of the sentence must be. She must have cut the child out of Liriope's belly. I cannot picture prim Oriana doing such a brutal, brave thing—pressing the point of her knife into flesh, finding the right spot and slicing. Prizing a child from a womb, holding its wet body against her. And yet who else could have done it?

“You saved him,” I say, because if she doesn't want to talk about that part, she doesn't have to.

“I named him for Liriope's acorn,” she tells me, her voice barely more than a whisper. “My little golden Oak.”

I wanted so badly to believe that being in Dain's service was an honor, that he was someone worth following. That's what comes of hungering for something: You forget to check if it's rotten before you gobble it down. “Did you know it was Dain who poisoned Liriope?”

Oriana shakes her head. “Not for a long time. It could have been another of Eldred's lovers. Or Balekin—there were rumors he was the one responsible. I even wondered if it could have been Eldred, if he had poisoned her for dallying with his son. But then Madoc discovered Dain had obtained the blusher mushroom. He insisted I never let Oak be anywhere near the prince. He was furious—angry in a frightening way I had never seen before.”

It's not hard to see why Madoc would be furious with Dain. Madoc, who once thought his own wife and child were dead. Madoc, who loved Oak. Madoc, who reminded us over and over that family came before all else.

“And so you married Madoc because he could protect you?” I have only blurry memories of his courting Oriana, and then they were sworn, with a child on the way. Maybe I thought it was unusual, but anyone can have good fortune. And it had seemed like bad fortune to me at the time, since Taryn and I worried what the new baby would mean for us. We thought Madoc might tire of us and drop us somewhere with a pocket full of gold and riddles pinned to our shirts. No one finds bad fortune suspicious.

Oriana looks out the glass doors at the wind blowing the trees. “Madoc and I have an understanding. We do not pretend with each other.”

I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like it makes for a cold and careful marriage.

“So what's his play?” I ask her. “I don't imagine he intends for Balekin to keep the throne long. I think he would consider it some kind of crime against strategy to leave such an obvious move unexploited.”

“What do you mean?” She looks honestly baffled. They don't pretend with each other, my ass.

“He's going to put Oak on the throne,” I tell her, as though it's obvious. Because it is obvious. I don't know how he intends to do it—or when—but I am sure he does. Of course he does.

“Oak,” she says. “No, no, no. Jude, no. He's just a child.”

Take him far from the dangers of this Court.
That's what Liriope's note had said. Maybe Oriana should have listened.

I remember what Madoc told us at the dinner table ages ago, about how the throne was vulnerable during a change in power. Whatever he intended to happen with Balekin—and now I am wondering if what he imagined was for Dain to die and Balekin to die, too, for the High King to suspend the coronation, for Madoc to make a different play—he had to see the opportunity in front of him, with only three royals left. If Oak was the High King, then Madoc could be the regent. He would rule over Faerie until Oak came of age.

And then, who knew what might happen? If he could keep Oak in check, he might rule over Faerie forever.

“I was just a child once, too,” I tell her. “I don't think Madoc was enormously concerned about what I could handle then, and I don't think he will be too worried about Oak now.”

It's not like I don't think he loves Oak. Of course he loves him. He loves me, too. He loved my mother. But he is what he is. He cannot be other than his nature.

Oriana grabs my hand, squeezing it tightly enough that her nails sink into my skin. “You don't understand. Child kings do not survive long, and Oak is a frail boy. He was too little when he was brought into this world. No king or queen from any Court will bow their heads to him. He wasn't raised for this burden. You must stop it.”

What might Madoc do with so much power unchecked? What might I do with a brother on the throne? And I could put him there. I have the winning card to play, because while Balekin would resist crowning Oak, I bet Cardan wouldn't. I could make my brother the High King and myself a princess. All that power is right there for the taking. All I have to do is reach out my hand.

The odd thing about ambition is this: You can acquire it like a fever, but it is not so easy to shed. Once, I was content to hope for knighthood and the power to force Cardan and his friends to leave me alone. All I wanted was to find some place to fit in here in Faerie.

Now I wonder what it would be like to choose the next king.

I think of the tide of blood running over the stone dais to drip down onto the packed-earthen floor of the hill. Running over the bottom edge of the crown so that when Balekin had lifted it, his hands had been smeared red. I imagine that crown on Oak's brow and flinch from the image.

I remember, too, what it had felt like to be glamoured by Oak. Over and over I'd slapped myself until my cheek was red and hot and sore. A bruise bloomed the next morning, a bruise that didn't fade for a week. That's what children do with power.