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

by Holly Black

  “I already won,” I remind him.

  He smiles. “We will speak again.”

  As he walks off I can’t help thinking that maybe I was better off when he was ignoring me.

  I meet the Bomb in High King Eldred’s old rooms. This time I am resolved to go over every inch of the chambers before Cardan is moved into them—and I am determined he should stay here, in the most secure part of the palace, whatever his preferences might be.

  When I arrive, the Bomb is lighting the last of the fat candles above a fireplace, the runnels of wax so established that they make a kind of sculpture. It is strange to be in here now, without Nicasia to buttonhole or anything else to distract me from looking around. The walls shimmer with mica, and the ceiling is all branches and green vines. In the antechamber, the shell of an enormous snail glows, a lamp the size of a small table.

  The Bomb gives me a quick grin. Her white hair is pulled back into braids knotted with a few shimmering silver beads.

  Someone you trust has already betrayed you.

  I try to put Nicasia’s words out of my head. After all, that could mean anything. It’s typical faerie bullshit, ominous but applicable so broadly that it could be the clue to a trap about to be sprung on me or a reference to something that happened when we were all taking lessons together. Maybe she is warning me that a spy is in my confidence or maybe she’s alluding to Taryn’s having it off with Locke.

  And yet I cannot stop thinking about it.

  “So the assassin got away through here?” the Bomb says. “The Ghost says you chased after them.”

  I shake my head. “There was no assassin. It was a romantic misunderstanding.”

  Her eyebrows go up.

  “The High King is very bad at romance,” I say.

  “I guess so,” she says. “So you want to toss the sitting room, and I’ll take the bedroom?”

  “Sure,” I agree, heading toward it.

  The secret passageway is beside a fireplace carved like the grinning mouth of a goblin. The bookshelf is still shifted to one side, revealing spiraling steps up into the walls. I close it.

  “You really think you can get Cardan to move in here?” the Bomb calls from the other room. “It’s such a waste to have all this glorious space go unused.”

  I lean down to start pulling books off the shelves, opening them and shaking them a bit to see if there’s anything inside.

  A few yellowing and disintegrating pieces of paper fall out, along with a feather and a carved-bone letter opener. Someone hollowed one of the books out, but nothing rests inside the compartment. Still another tome has been eaten away by insects. I throw that one out.

  “The last room Cardan occupied caught fire,” I call back to the Bomb. “Let me rephrase. It caught fire because he lit it on fire.”

  She laughs. “It would take him days to burn all this.”

  I look back at the books and am not so sure. They are dry enough to burst into flames just by my looking at them too long. With a sigh, I stack them and move on to the cushions, to pulling back the rugs. Underneath, I find only dust.

  I dump out all the drawers onto the massive table-size desk: the metal nibs of quill pens, stones carved with faces, three signet rings, a long tooth of a creature I cannot identify, and three vials with the liquid inside dried black and solid.

  In another drawer, I find jewels. A collar of black jet, a beaded bracelet with a clasp, heavy golden rings.

  In the last I find quartz crystals, cut into smooth, polished globes and spears. When I lift one to the light, something moves inside it.

  “Bomb?” I call, my voice a little high.

  She comes into the room, carrying a jeweled coat so heavily encrusted that I am surprised anyone was willing to stand in it. “What’s wrong?”

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I hold up a crystal ball.

  She peers into it. “Look, there’s Dain.”

  I take it back and look inside. A young Prince Dain sits on the back of a horse, holding a bow in one hand and apples in the other. Elowyn sits on a pony to one side of him, and Rhyia to the other. He throws three apples in the air, and all of them draw their bows and shoot.

  “Did that happen?” I ask.

  “Probably,” she says. “Someone must have enchanted these orbs for Eldred.”

  I think of Grimsen’s legendary swords, of the golden acorn that disgorged Liriope’s last words, of Mother Marrow’s cloth that could turn even the sharpest blade, and all the mad magic that High Kings are given. These were common enough to be stuffed away into a drawer.

  I pull out each one to see what’s inside. I see Balekin as a newborn child, the thorns already growing out of his skin. He squalls in the arms of a mortal midwife, her gaze glazed with glamour.

  “Look into this one,” the Bomb says with a strange expression.

  It’s Cardan as a very small child. He is dressed in a shirt that’s too large for him. It hangs down like a gown. He is barefoot, his feet and shirt streaked with mud, but he wears dangling hoops in his ears, as though an adult gave him their earrings. A horned faerie woman stands nearby, and when he runs to her, she grabs his wrists before he can put his dirty hands on her skirts.

  She says something stern and shoves him away. When he falls, she barely notices, too busy being drawn into conversation with other courtiers. I expect Cardan to cry, but he doesn’t. Instead, he stomps off to where a boy a little bit older than him is climbing a tree. The boy says something, and Cardan runs at him. Cardan’s small, grubby hand forms a fist, and a moment later, the older boy is on the ground. At the sound of the scuffle, the faerie woman turns and laughs, clearly delighted by his escapade.

  When Cardan looks back at her, he’s smiling too.

  I shove the crystal back into the drawer. Who would cherish this? It’s horrible.

  And yet, it’s not dangerous. There’s no reason to do anything with it but leave it where it was. The Bomb and I continue through the room together. Once we’re satisfied it’s safe, we head through a door carved with an owl, back into the king’s bedchamber.

  A massive half-tester bed rests in the center, curtained in green, with the symbol of the Greenbriar line stitched in gleaming gold. Thick spider-silk blankets are smoothed out over a mattress that smells as though it has been stuffed with flowers.

  “Come on,” says the Bomb, flopping down on the bed and rolling over so that she is looking up at the ceiling. “Let’s make sure it’s safe for our new High King, just in case.”

  I suck in a surprised breath, but follow. My weight on the mattress makes it dip, and the heady scent of roses overwhelms my senses.

  Spreading out on the King of Elfhame’s coverlets, breathing in the air that perfumed his nights, has an almost hypnotic quality. The Bomb pillows her head in her arms as though it’s no big thing, but I remember High King Eldred’s hand on my head and the slight jolt of nerves and pride I felt each time he acknowledged me. Lying on his bed feels like wiping my dirty peasant feet on the throne.

  And yet, how could I not?

  “Our king is a lucky duck,” the Bomb says. “I’d like a bed like this, big enough to have a guest or two.”

  “Oh yeah?” I ask, teasing her as I would have once teased my sisters. “Anyone in particular?”

  She looks away, embarrassed, which makes me pay attention. I push myself up on one elbow. “Wait! Is it someone I know?”

  For a moment, she doesn’t answer, which is long enough.

  “It is! The Ghost?”

  “Jude!” she says. “No.”

  I frown at her. “The Roach?”

  The Bomb sits up, long fingers pulling the coverlet to her. Since she cannot lie, she only sighs. “You don’t understand.”

  The Bomb is beautiful, delicate features and warm brown skin, wild white hair and luminous eyes. I think of her as possessing some combination of charm and skill that means she could have anyone she wanted.

  The Roach’s black tongue and his
twisted nose and the tuft of fur-like hair at the top of his scalp add up to his being impressive and terrifying, but even according to the aesthetics of Faerieland, even in a place where inhuman beauty is celebrated along with almost opulent ugliness, I am not sure even he would guess that the Bomb longs for him.

  I would never have guessed it.

  I don’t know how to say that to her without sounding as though I am insulting him, however.

  “I guess I don’t,” I concede.

  She draws a pillow onto her lap. “My people died in a brutal, internecine Court war a century ago, leaving me on my own. I went into the human world and became a small-time crook. I wasn’t particularly good at it. Mostly I was just using glamour to hide my mistakes. That’s when the Roach spotted me. He pointed out that while I might not be much of a thief, I was a dab hand at concocting potions and bombs. We went around together for decades. He was so affable, so dapper and charming, that he’d con people right to their faces, no magic required.”

  I smile at the thought of him in a derby hat and a vest with a pocket watch, amused by the world and everything in it.

  “Then he had this idea we were going to steal from the Court of Bone in the West. The con went wrong. The Court carved us up and filled us full of curses and geases. Changed us. Forced us to serve them.” She snaps her fingers, and sparks fly. “Fun, right?”

  “I bet it wasn’t,” I say.

  She flops back and keeps talking. “The Roach—Van, I can’t call him the Roach while I’m talking like this. Van’s the one who got me through being there. He told me stories, tales of Queen Mab’s imprisoning a frost giant, of binding all the great monsters of yore, and winning the High Crown. Stories of the impossible. Without Van, I don’t know if I could have survived.

  “Then we screwed up a job, and Dain got hold of us. He had a scheme for us to betray the Court of Bone and join him. So we did. The Ghost was already by his side, and the three of us made a formidable team. Me with explosives. The Roach stealing anything or anyone. And the Ghost, a sharpshooter with a light step. And here we are, somehow, safe in the Court of Elfhame, working for the High King himself. Look at me, sprawled across his royal bed, even. But here there’s no reason for Van to take my hand or sing to me when I am hurting. There is no reason for him to bother with me at all.”

  She lapses into silence. We both stare up at the ceiling.

  “You should tell him,” I say. Which is not bad advice, I think. Not advice I would take myself, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.

  “Perhaps.” The Bomb pushes herself up off the bed. “No tricks or traps. You think it’s safe to let our king in here?”

  I think of the boy in the crystal, of his proud smile and his balled fist. I think of the horned faerie woman, who must have been his mother, shoving him away from her. I think of his father, the High King, who didn’t bother to intervene, didn’t even bother to make sure he was clothed or his face wiped. I think of how Cardan avoided these rooms.

  I sigh. “I wish I could think of a place he’d be safer.”

  At midnight, I am expected to attend a banquet. I sit several seats from the throne and pick at a course of crisped eels. A trio of pixies sings a cappella for us as courtiers try to impress one another with their wit. Overhead, chandeliers drip wax in long strands.

  High King Cardan smiles down the table indulgently and yawns like a cat. His hair is messy, as though he did no more than finger-comb it since rising from my bed. Our eyes meet, and I am the one who looks away, my face hot.

  Kiss me until I am sick of it.

  Wine is brought in colored carafes. They glow aquamarine and sapphire, citrine and ruby, amethyst and topaz. Another course comes, with sugared violets and frozen dew.

  Then come domes of glass, under which little silvery fish sit in a cloud of pale blue smoke.

  “From the Undersea,” says one of the cooks, dressed for the occasion. She bows.

  I look across the table at Randalin, Minister of Keys, but he is pointedly ignoring me.

  All around me, the domes rise, and the smoke, redolent of peppercorns and herbs, fills the room.

  I see that Locke has seated himself beside Cardan, drawing the girl whose seat it was onto his lap. She kicks up her hooved feet and throws back her horned head in laughter.

  “Ah,” says Cardan, lifting up a gold ring from his plate. “I see my fish has something in its belly.”

  “And mine,” says a courtier on his other side, picking out a single shiny pearl as large as a thumbnail. She laughs with delight. “A gift from the sea.”

  Each silvery fish contains a treasure. The cooks are summoned, but they give stammering disavowals, swearing the fish were fresh-caught and fed nothing but herbs by the kitchen Folk. I frown at my plate, at the beads of sea glass I find beneath my fish’s gills.

  When I look up, Locke holds a single gold coin, perhaps part of a lost mortal ship’s hoard.

  “I see you staring at him,” Nicasia says, sitting down beside me. Tonight she wears a gown of gold lacework. Her dark tourmaline hair is pulled up with two golden combs the shape of a shark jaw, complete with golden teeth.

  “Perhaps I am looking only at the trinkets and gold with which your mother thinks she can buy this Court’s favor,” I say.

  She picks up one of the violets from my plate and places it delicately on her tongue.

  “I lost Cardan’s love for Locke’s easy words and easier kisses, sugared like these flowers,” she says. “Your sister lost your love to get Locke’s, didn’t she? But we all know what you lost.”

  “Locke?” I laugh. “Good riddance.”

  Her brows knit together. “Surely it’s not the High King himself you were gazing at.”

  “Surely not,” I echo, but I don’t meet her eyes.

  “Do you know why you didn’t tell anyone my secret?” she asks. “Perhaps you tell yourself that you enjoy having something over my head. But in truth, I think it’s that you knew no one would ever believe you. I belong in this world. You don’t. And you know it.”

  “You don’t even belong on land, sea princess,” I remind her. And yet, I cannot help recalling how the Living Council doubted me. I cannot help how her words crawl under my skin.

  Someone you trust has already betrayed you.

  “This will never be your world, mortal,” she says.

  “This is mine,” I say, anger making me reckless. “My land and my king. And I will protect them both. Say the same, go on.”

  “He cannot love you,” she says to me, her voice suddenly brittle.

  She obviously doesn’t like the idea of my claiming Cardan, obviously is still infatuated with him, and just as obviously has no idea what to do about it.

  “What do you want?” I ask her. “I was just sitting here, minding my own business, eating my dinner. You’re the one who came up to me. You’re the one accusing me of… I’m not even sure what.”

  “Tell me what you have over him,” Nicasia says. “How did you trick him into putting you at his right hand, you whom he despised and reviled? How is it that you have his ear?”

  “I will tell you, if you tell me something in return.” I turn toward her, giving her my full attention. I have been puzzling over the secret passageway in the palace, over the woman in the crystal.

  “I’ve told you all that I am willing to—” Nicasia begins.

  “Not that. Cardan’s mother,” I say, cutting her off. “Who was she? Where is she now?”

  She tries to turn her surprise into mockery. “If you’re such good friends, why don’t you ask him?”

  “I never said we were friends.”

  A servant with a mouth full of sharp teeth and butterfly wings on his back brings the next course. The heart of a deer, cooked rare and stuffed with toasted hazelnuts. Nicasia picks up the meat and tears into it, blood running over her fingers.

  She runs her tongue over red teeth. “She wasn’t anyone, just some girl from the lower Courts. Eldred never made her
a consort, even after she’d borne him a child.”

  I blink in obvious surprise.

  She looks insufferably pleased, as though my not knowing has proved once and for all how unsuitable I am. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “You want to know what I did to make him raise me up?” I ask, leaning toward her, close enough that she can feel the warmth of my breath. “I kissed him on the mouth, and then I threatened to kiss him some more if he didn’t do exactly what I wanted.”

  “Liar,” she hisses.

  “If you’re such good friends,” I say, repeating her own words back to her with malicious satisfaction, “why don’t you ask him?”

  Her gaze goes to Cardan, his mouth stained red with heart’s blood, crown at his brow. They appear two of a kind, a matched set of monsters. He doesn’t look over, busy listening to the lutist who has composed, on the spot, a rollicking ode to his rule.

  My king, I think to myself. But only for a year and a day, and five months are already gone.

  Tatterfell is waiting for me when I get back to my rooms, her beetle eyes disapproving as she picks up the High King’s trousers from my couch.

  “So this is how you’ve been living,” the little imp grumbles. “A worm in a butterfly’s cocoon.”

  Something about being scolded is comfortingly familiar, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I turn away so she can’t see my embarrassment at how untidy I’ve let things get. Not to mention what it looks like I’ve been doing, and with whom.

  Sworn into Madoc’s service until she worked off some old debt of honor, Tatterfell could not have come here without his knowledge. She may have taken care of me since I was a child—brushed my hair and mended my dresses and strung rowan berries to keep me from being enchanted—but it is Madoc who has her loyalty. It’s not that I don’t think she was fond of me, in her way, but I’ve never mistaken that for love.

  I sigh. The castle servants would have cleaned my rooms if I let them, but then they’d notice my odd hours and be able to rifle through my papers, not to mention my poisons. No, better to bar the door and sleep in filth.