The Cruel Prince (4 page)

Cardan's gaze meets mine, and I know he isn't finished with me, not by a long shot.

“Why did you dare them like that?” Taryn asks when they've walked back to their own merry luncheon, all spread out for them. “Talking back to him—that's just stupid.”

Make me.

Afraid I'll win?

“I know,” I tell her. “I'll shut up. I just—I got angry.”

“You're better off being scared,” she advises. And then, shaking her head, she packs up our ruined food. My stomach growls, and I try to ignore it.

They want me to be afraid, I know that. During the mock war that very afternoon, Valerian trips me, and Cardan whispers foul things in my ear. I head home with bruises on my skin from kicks, from falls.

What they don't realize is this: Yes, they frighten me, but I have always been scared, since the day I got here. I was raised by the man who murdered my parents, reared in a land of monsters. I live with that fear, let it settle into my bones, and ignore it. If I didn't pretend not to be scared, I would hide under my owl-down coverlets in Madoc's estate forever. I would lie there and scream until there was nothing left of me. I refuse to do that. I will not do that.

Nicasia's wrong about me. I don't desire to do as well in the tournament as one of the fey. I want to win. I do not yearn to be their equal.

In my heart, I yearn to best them.

O
n our way home, Taryn stops and picks blackberries beside the Lake of Masks. I sit on a rock in the moonlight and deliberately do not look into the water. The lake doesn't reflect your own face—it shows you someone else who has looked or will look into it. When I was little, I used to sit at the bank all day, staring at faerie countenances instead of my own, hoping that I might someday catch a glimpse of my mother looking back at me.

Eventually, it hurt too much to try.

“Are you going to quit the tournament?” Taryn asks, shoveling a handful of berries into her mouth. We are hungry children. Already we are taller than Vivi, our hips wider, and our breasts heavier.

I open my basket and take out a dirty plum, wiping it on my shirt. It's still more or less edible. I eat it slowly, considering. “You mean because of Cardan and his Court of Jerks?”

She frowns with an expression just like one I might make if she was being particularly thickheaded. “Do you know what they call us?” she demands. “
The Circle of Worms
.”

I hurl the pit at the water, watching ripples destroy the possibility of any reflections. My lip curls.

“You're littering in a magical lake,” she tells me.

“It'll rot,” I say. “And so will we. They're right. We are the Circle of Worms. We're mortal. We don't have forever to wait for them to let us do the things we want. I don't care if they don't like my being in the tournament. Once I become a knight, I'll be beyond their reach.”

“Do you think Madoc's going to allow that?” Taryn asks, giving up on the bush after the brambles make her fingers bleed. “Answering to someone other than him?”

“What else has he been training us for?” I ask. Wordlessly, we fall into step together, making our way home.

“Not me.” She shakes her head. “I am going to fall in love.”

I am surprised into laughter. “So you've just decided? I didn't think it worked like that. I thought love was supposed to happen when you least expected it, like a sap to the skull.”

“Well, I
have
decided,” she says. I consider mentioning her last ill-fated decision—the one about having fun at the revel—but that will just annoy her. Instead, I try to imagine someone she might fall in love with. Maybe it will be a merrow, and he will give her the gift of breathing underwater and a crown of pearls and take her to his bed under the sea.

Actually, that sounds amazing. Maybe I am making all the wrong choices.

“How much do you like swimming?” I ask her.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

She, suspecting some sort of teasing, elbows me in the side.

We head through the Crooked Forest, with its bent trunks, since the Milkwood is dangerous at night. We have to stop to let some root men pass, for fear they might step on us if we didn't keep out of their way. Moss covers their shoulders and crawls up their bark cheeks. Wind whistles through their ribs.

They make a beautiful and solemn procession.

“If you're so sure Madoc is going to give you permission, why haven't you asked him yet?” Taryn whispers. “The tournament is only three days away.”

Anyone can fight in the Summer Tournament, but if I want to be a knight, I must declare my candidacy by wearing a green sash across my chest. And if Madoc will not allow me that, then no amount of skill will help me. I will not be a candidate, and I will not be chosen.

I am glad the root men give me an excuse not to answer, because, of course, she's right. I haven't asked Madoc because I am afraid of what he will say.

When we get home, pushing open the enormous wooden door with its looping ironwork, someone is shouting upstairs, as though in distress. I run toward the sound, heart in my mouth, only to find Vivi in her room, chasing a cloud of sprites. They streak past me into the hall in a blast of gossamer, and she slams the book she was swinging at them into the door casing.

“Look!” Vivi yells at me, pointing toward her closet. “Look what they did.”

The doors are open, and I see a sprawl of things stolen from the human world, matchbooks, newspapers, empty bottles, novels, and Polaroids. The sprites had turned the matchbooks into beds and tables, shredded all the paper, and ripped out the centers of the books to nest inside. It was a full-on sprite infestation.

But I am more baffled by the quantity of things Vivi has and how many of them don't seem to have any value. It's just junk. Mortal junk.

“What
is
all that?” Taryn asks, coming into the room. She bends down and extracts a strip of pictures, only gently chewed by sprites. The pictures are taken one right after the other, the kind you have to sit in a booth for. Vivi is in the photos, her arm draped over the shoulders of a grinning, pink-haired mortal girl.

Maybe Taryn isn't the only one who has decided to fall in love.

At dinner, we sit at a massive table carved along all four sides with images of piping fauns and dancing imps. Fat wax pillar candles burn at the center, beside a carved stone vase full of wood sorrel. Servants bring us silver plates piled with food. We eat fresh broad beans, venison with scattered pomegranate seeds, grilled brown trout with butter, a salad of bitter herbs, and, for after, raisin cakes smothered in apple syrup. Madoc and Oriana drink canary wine; we children mix ours with water.

Next to my plate and Taryn's is a bowl of salt.

Vivi pokes at her venison and then licks blood from her knife.

Oak grins across the table and starts to mimic Vivi, but Oriana snatches the cutlery from his grasp before he can slice his tongue open. Oak giggles and picks up his meat with his fingers, tearing at it with sharp teeth.

“You should know that the king will soon abdicate his throne in favor of one of his children,” Madoc says, looking at all of us. “It is likely that he will choose Prince Dain.”

It doesn't matter that Dain is third-born. The High Ruler chooses their successor—that's how the stability of Elfhame is ensured. The first High Queen, Mab, had her smith forge a crown. Lore has it that the blacksmith was a creature called Grimsen, who could shape anything from metal—birds that trill and necklaces that slither over throats, twin swords called Heartseeker and Heartsworn that never missed a strike. Queen Mab's crown was magically and wondrously wrought so that it passes only from one blood relation to another, in an unbroken line. With the crown passes the oaths of all those sworn to it. Although her subjects gather at each new coronation to renew their fealty, authority still rests in the crown.

“Why's he abdicating?” Taryn asks.

Vivi's smirk has turned nasty. “His children got impatient with him for remaining alive.”

A wash of rage passes over Madoc's face. Taryn and I don't dare bait him for fear that his patience with us stretches only so far, but Vivi is expert at it. When he answers her, I can see the effort he's making to bite his tongue. “Few kings of Faerie have ruled so well for so long as Eldred. Now he goes to seek the Land of Promise.”

As far as I can tell, the Land of Promise is their euphemism for death, although they do not admit it. They say it is the place that the Folk came from and to which they will eventually return.

“Are you saying he's leaving the throne because he's
old
?” I ask, wondering if I'm being impolite. There are hobs born with lined faces like tiny, hairless cats and smooth-limbed nixies whose true age shows only in their ancient eyes. I didn't think time mattered to them.

Oriana doesn't look happy, but she isn't actively shushing me, either, so maybe it's not
that
rude. Or maybe she doesn't expect any better than bad manners out of me.

“We may not die from age, but we grow weary with it,” Madoc says with a heavy sigh. “I have made war in Eldred's name. I have broken Courts that denied him fealty. I have even led skirmishes against the Queen of the Undersea. But Eldred has lost his taste for bloodshed. He allows those under his banners to rebel in small and large ways even as other Courts refuse to submit to us. It's time to ride to battle. It's time for a new monarch, a hungry one.”

Oriana furrows her brow in mild confusion. “By preference, your kin would have you safe.”

“What good is a general with no war?” Madoc takes a large, restless swallow of wine. I wonder how often he needs to wet his cap with fresh blood. “The new king's coronation will be at the autumn solstice. Worry not. I have a plan to ensure our futures. Only concern yourselves with making ready for a great deal of dancing.”

I am wondering what his plan might be when Taryn kicks me under the table. When I turn to glare at her, she raises both brows. “Ask him,” she mouths.

Madoc looks in her direction. “Yes?”

“Jude wants to ask you something,” Taryn says. The worst part is, I think she believes she's helping.

I take a deep breath. At least he seems to be in a good mood. “I've been thinking about the tournament.” I imagined saying these words many, many times, but now that I am actually doing it, they don't seem to come out the way I planned. “I'm not bad with a sword.”

“You do yourself too modest,” Madoc says. “Your bladesmanship is excellent.”

That seems encouraging. I look over at Taryn, who appears to be holding her breath. Everyone at the table has gone still except for Oak, who taps his glass against the side of his plate. “I am going to fight in the Summer Tournament, and I want declare myself ready to be chosen for knighthood.”

Madoc's brows go up. “That's what you want? It's dangerous work.”

I nod. “I'm not afraid.”

“Interesting,” he says. My heart thuds dully in my chest. I have thought through every aspect of this plan except for the possibility that he won't allow it.

“I want to make my own way at the Court,” I say.

“You're no killer,” he tells me. I flinch, my gaze coming up to his. He looks back at me steadily with his golden cat eyes.

“I could be,” I insist. “I've been training for a decade.”

Since you took me
, I do not say, although it must be in my eyes.

He shakes his head sadly. “What you lack is nothing to do with experience.”

“No, but—” I begin.

“Enough. I have made my decision,” he says, raising his voice to cut me off. After a moment when we both are silent, he gives me a conciliatory half smile. “Fight in the tournament if you like, for sport, but you will not put on the green sash. You're not ready to be a knight. You can ask me again after the coronation, if your heart's still set on it. And if it's a whim, that will be time enough for it to pass.”

“This is no whim!” I hate the desperation in my voice, but I have been counting down the days to the tournament. The idea of waiting months, just so he can turn me down again, fills me with wild despair.

Madoc gives me an unreadable look. “After the coronation,” he repeats.

I want to scream at him: Do you know how hard it is to always keep your head down? To swallow insults and endure outright threats? And yet I have done so. I thought it proved my toughness. I thought if you saw I could take whatever came at me and still smile, you would see that I was worthy.