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

by Holly Black

  My sister’s voice comes from my bedroom. “You’re back early.” She sticks her head out, holding up a few garments.

  Someone you trust has already betrayed you.

  “How did you get in?” I ask. My key turned, met resistance. The tumblers moved. I have been taught the humble art of lock picking, and though I am no prodigy, I can at least tell when a door is locked in the first place.

  “Oh,” Taryn says, and laughs. “I posed as you and got a copy of your key.”

  I want to kick a wall. Surely everyone knows I have a twin sister. Surely everyone knows mortals can lie. Ought someone not have at least asked a question she might find tricky to answer before handing over access to palace rooms? To be fair, though, I have myself lied again and again and gotten away with it. I can hardly begrudge Taryn for doing the same.

  It’s my bad luck that tonight is when she chooses to barge in, with Cardan’s clothing scattered over my rug and a heap of his bloody bandages still on a low table.

  “I persuaded Madoc to gift the remainder of Tatterfell’s debt to you,” Taryn announces. “And I’ve brought you all your coats and dresses and jewels.”

  I look into the imp’s inkdrop eyes. “You mean Madoc has her spying for him.”

  Tatterfell’s lip curls, and I am reminded how sharply she pinches. “Aren’t you a sly and suspicious girl? You ought to be ashamed, saying such a thing.”

  “I am grateful for the times you were kind,” I say. “If Madoc has given your debt to me, consider it paid long ago.”

  Tatterfell frowns unhappily. “Madoc spared my lover’s life when he could have taken it by right. I pledged him a hundred years of my service, and that time is nearly up. Do not dishonor my vow by thinking it can be dismissed with a wave of your hand.”

  I am stung by her words. “Are you sorry he sent you?”

  “Not yet,” she says, and goes back to work.

  I head toward my bedroom, picking up Cardan’s bloody rags before Tatterfell can. As I pass the hearth, I toss them into the flames. The fire flares up.

  “So,” I ask my sister, “what did you bring me?”

  She points to my bed, where she has spread my old things on my newly rumpled sheets. It’s odd to see the clothes and jewels I haven’t had in months, the things Madoc bought for me, the things Oriana approved. Tunics, gowns, fighting gear, doublets. Taryn even brought the homespun I used to sneak around Hollow Hall and the clothes we wore when we snuck to the mortal world.

  When I look at it all, I see a person who is both me and not. A kid who went to classes and didn’t think the stuff she was learning would be all that important. A girl who wanted to impress the only dad she knew, who wanted a place in the Court, who still believed in honor.

  I am not sure I fit in these clothes anymore.

  Still, I hang them in my closet, beside my two black doublets and a single pair of high boots.

  I open a box of my jewels. Earrings given to me for birthdays, a golden cuff, three rings—one with a ruby that Madoc gave me on a blood moon revel, one with his crest that I don’t even remember receiving, and a thin gold one that was a present from Oriana. Necklaces of carved moonstone, chunks of quartz, carved bone. I slide the ruby ring onto my left hand.

  “And I brought some sketches,” she says, taking out a pad of paper and sitting cross-legged on my bed. Neither of us are great artists, but her drawings of clothing are easy to understand. “I want to take them to my tailor.”

  She’s imagined me in a lot of black jackets with high collars, the skirts slashed up the sides for easy movement. The shoulders look as though they’re armored, and, in a few cases, she has drawn what appears to be a single shiny sleeve of metal.

  “They can measure me,” she says. “You won’t even have to go to the fittings.”

  I give her a long look. Taryn doesn’t like conflict. Her manner of dealing with all the terror and confusion in our lives has been to become immensely adaptable, like one of those lizards that changes color to match its surroundings. She’s the person who knows what to wear and how to behave, because she studies people carefully and mimics them.

  She’s good at picking out clothes to send a certain message—even if the message of her drawings appears to be “stay away from me or I will chop off your head”—and it’s not like I don’t think she wants to help me, but the effort she’s put into this, especially as her own marriage is imminent, seems extraordinary.

  “Okay,” I say. “What do you want?”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, all innocence.

  “You want us to be friends again,” I say, sliding into more modern diction with her. “I appreciate that. You want me to come to your wedding, which is great, because I want to be there. But this—this is too much.”

  “I can be nice,” she says, but does not meet my eyes.

  I wait. For a long moment, neither of us speaks. I know she saw Cardan’s clothes tossed on the floor. Her not immediately asking about that should have been my first clue that she wanted something.

  “Fine.” She sighs. “It’s not a big deal, but there is a thing I want to talk to you about.”

  “No kidding,” I say, but I can’t help smiling.

  She shoots me a look of vast annoyance. “I don’t want Locke to be Master of Revels.”

  “You and me both.”

  “But you could do something about it!” Taryn winds her hands in her skirts. “Locke craves dramatic experiences. And as Master of Revels, he can create these—I don’t even know what to call them—stories. He doesn’t so much think of a party as food and drinks and music, but rather a dynamic that might create conflict.”

  “Okay…” I say, trying to imagine what that means for politics. Nothing good.

  “He wants to see how I’ll react to the things he does,” she says.

  That’s true. He wanted to know, for instance, if Taryn loved him enough to let him court me while she stood by, silent and suffering. I think he’d have been interested in finding out the same about me, but I turned out to be very prickly.

  She goes on. “And Cardan. And the Circles of the Court. He’s already been talking to the Larks and the Grackles, finding their weaknesses, figuring out which squabbles he can inflame and how.”

  “Locke might do the Larks some good,” I say. “Give them a ballad to write.” As for the Grackles, if he can compete with their debauches, I guess he ought to have at it, although I am clever enough not to say that out loud.

  “The way he talks, for a moment, it all seems like it’s fun, even if it’s a terrible idea,” Taryn says. “His being Master of Revels is going to be awful. He will take lovers and be away from me. And I will hate it. Jude, please. Do something. I know you want to say you told me so, but I don’t care.”

  I have bigger problems, I want to tell her.

  “Madoc would almost certainly say you don’t have to marry him. Vivi’d say that, too, I bet. In fact, I bet they have.”

  “But you know me too well to bother.” She shakes her head. “When I’m with him, I feel like the hero of a story. Of my story. It’s when he’s not there that things don’t feel right.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I could point out that Taryn seems to be the one making up the story, casting Locke in the role of the protagonist and herself as the romantic interest who disappears when she’s not on the page.

  But I do remember being with Locke, feeling special and chosen and pretty. Now, thinking about it, I just feel dumb.

  I guess I could order Cardan to strip the title from Locke, but Cardan would resent my using my power for something so petty and personal. It would make me seem weak. And Locke would figure out that the stripping of his title was my fault, since I haven’t made my dislike a secret. He’d know that I had more power over Cardan than quite made sense.

  And everything Taryn is complaining about would still happen. Locke doesn’t need to be the High King’s Master of Revels to get into this kind of trouble; the title just allo
ws him to manage it on a grander scale.

  “I’ll talk to Cardan about it,” I lie.

  Her gaze goes to where his clothes were scattered across my floor, and she smiles.

  As the Hunter’s Moon approaches, the level of debauchery in the palace increases. The tenor of the parties change—they become more frenetic, more wild. No longer is Cardan’s presence necessary for such license. Now that rumors paint him as someone who would shoot a lover for sport, his legend grows from there.

  Recollections of his younger days—of the way he rode a horse into our lessons, the fights he had, the cruelties he perpetrated—are picked over. The more horrible the story, the more it is cherished. Faeries may not be able to lie, but stories grow here as they do anywhere, fed on ambition and envy and desire.

  In the afternoons, I step over sleeping bodies in the halls. Not all of them are courtiers. Servants and guards seem to have fallen prey to the same wild energy and can be found abandoning their duties to pleasure. Naked Folk run across the gardens of Elfhame, and troughs once used to water horses now run with wine.

  I meet with Vulciber, seeking more information about the Undersea, but he has none. Despite knowing that Nicasia was trying to bait me, I go over the list of people who may have betrayed me. I fret over who and to what end, over the arrival of Lord Roiben’s ambassador, over how to extend my year-and-a-day lease on the throne. I study my moldering papers and drink my poisons and plan a thousand parries to blows that may never come.

  Cardan has moved to Eldred’s old chambers, and the rooms with the burned floor are barred from the inside. If it makes him uncomfortable to sleep where his father slept, he gives no sign. When I arrive, he is lounging nonchalantly as servants remove tapestries and divans to make room for a new bed carved to his specifications.

  He is not alone. A small circle of courtiers is with him—a few I don’t know, plus Locke, Nicasia, and my sister, currently pink with wine and laughing on the rug before the fire.

  “Go,” he says to them when he sees me at the threshold.

  “But, Your Majesty,” begins a girl. She’s all cream and gold, in a light blue gown. Long pale antennae rise from the outer edges of her eyebrows. “Surely such dull news as your seneschal brings will require the antidote of our cheer.”

  I’ve thought carefully about commanding Cardan. Too many orders and he’d chafe under them, too few and he’d duck beneath them easily. But I am glad to have made sure he’d never deny me admittance. I am especially glad that he can never countermand me.

  “I am sure I will call you back swiftly enough,” Cardan says, and the courtiers troop out merrily. One of them carries a mug, obviously stolen from the mortal world and filled to the brim with wine. I RULE, it reads. Locke shoots me a curious glance. My sister grabs hold of my hand as she goes, squeezing it hopefully.

  I go to a chair and sit down without waiting for an invitation. I want to remind Cardan that over me, he has no authority.

  “The Hunter’s Moon revel is tomorrow night,” I say.

  He sprawls in a chair opposite mine, watching me with his black eyes as though I am the one to be wary of. “If you wish to know details, you ought to have kept Locke behind. I know little. It is to be another one of my performances. I shall caper while you scheme.”

  “Orlagh of the Undersea is watching you—”

  “Everyone’s watching me,” Cardan says, fingers fiddling restlessly with his signet ring, turning it round and round again.

  “You don’t seem to mind,” I say. “You said yourself that you don’t hate being king. Maybe you’re even enjoying it.”

  He gives me a suspicious look.

  I try to give him a genuine smile in return. I hope I can be convincing. I need to be convincing. “We can both have what we want. You can rule for a lot longer than a year. All you have to do is extend your vow. Let me command you for a decade, for a score of years, and together—”

  “I think not,” he says, cutting me off. “After all, you know how dangerous it would be to have Oak sit in my place. He is only a year older than he was. He’s not ready. And yet, in only a few months, you will have to order me to abdicate in favor of him or make an arrangement that will require us to trust each other—rather than my trusting you without hope of being trusted in return.”

  I am furious with myself for thinking he might agree to keeping things the way they are.

  He gives me his sweetest smile. “Perhaps then you could be my seneschal in earnest.”

  I grit my teeth. Once, a position as grand as seneschal would have been beyond my wildest dreams. Now it seems a humiliation. Power is infectious. Power is greedy.

  “Have a care,” I tell him. “I can make the months that remain go slowly indeed.”

  His smile doesn’t falter. “Any other commands?” he asks. I ought to tell him more about Orlagh, but the thought of his crowing over her offer is more than I can bear. I cannot let that marriage happen, and right now I don’t want to be teased about it.

  “Don’t drink yourself to death tomorrow,” I say. “And watch out for my sister.”

  “Taryn seemed well enough tonight,” he says. “Roses in her cheeks and merriment on her lips.”

  “Let’s be sure she stays that way,” I say.

  His brows rise. “Would you like me to seduce her away from Locke? I could certainly try. I promise nothing in the way of results, but you might find amusement in the attempt.”

  “No, no, absolutely not, do not do that,” I say, and do not examine the hot spike of panic his words induce. “I just mean try to keep Locke from being his worst self when she’s around, that’s all.”

  He narrows his eyes. “Shouldn’t you encourage just the opposite?”

  Perhaps it would be better for Taryn to discover unhappiness with Locke as soon as possible. But she’s my sister, and I never want to be the cause of her pain. I shake my head.

  He makes a vague gesture in the air. “As you wish. Your sister will be wrapped in satin and sackcloth, as protected from herself as I can make her.”

  I stand. “The Council wants Locke to arrange some amusement to please Grimsen. If it’s nice, perhaps the smith will make you a cup that never runs out of wine.”

  Cardan gives me a look up through his lashes that I find hard to interpret and then rises, too. He takes my hand. “Nothing is sweeter,” he says, kissing the back of it, “but that which is scarce.”

  My skin flushes, hot and uncomfortable.

  When I go out, his little circle is in the hall, waiting to be allowed back into his rooms. My sister looks a bit queasy, but when she sees me, she pastes on a wide, fake smile. One of the boys has put a limerick to music, playing it again and again, faster and faster. Their laughter floods the hallway, sounding like the cawing of crows.

  Heading through the palace, I pass a chamber where a few courtiers have gathered. There, toasting an eel in the flames of a massive fireplace, sitting on a rug, is the old High King Eldred’s Court Poet and Seneschal, Val Moren.

  Faerie artists and musicians sit around him. Since the death of most of the royal family, he’s found himself at the center of one of the Court factions, the Circle of Larks. Brambles are coiled in his hair, and he sings softly to himself. He’s mortal, like me. He’s also probably mad.

  “Come drink with us,” one of the Larks says, but I demur.

  “Pretty, petty Jude.” The flames dance in Val Moren’s eyes when he looks my way. He begins picking off burnt skin and eating the soft white flesh of the eel. Between bites, he speaks. “Why haven’t you come to me for advice yet?”

  It’s said that he was High King Eldred’s lover, once. He’s been in the Court since long before the time my sisters and I came here. Despite that, he never made common cause of our mortality. He never tried to help us, never tried to reach out to us to make us feel less alone. “Do you have some?”

  He gazes at me and pops one of the eyes of the eel into his mouth. It sits, glistening, on his tongue. Then he swallows
. “Maybe. But it matters little.”

  I am so tired of riddles. “Let me guess. Because when I ask you for advice, you’re not going to give it to me?”

  He laughs, a dry, hollow sound. I wonder how old he is. Under the brambles, he looks like a young man, but mortals won’t grow old so long as they don’t leave Elfhame. Although I cannot see age in lines in his face, I can see it in his eyes. “Oh, I will give you the finest advice anyone’s ever given you. But you will not heed it.”

  “Then what good are you?” I demand, about to turn away. I don’t have time for a few lines of useless doggerel for me to interpret.

  “I’m an excellent juggler,” he says, wiping his hands on his pants, leaving stains behind. He reaches into his pocket, coming up with a stone, three acorns, a piece of crystal, and what appears to be a wishbone. “Juggling, you see, is just tossing two things in the air at the same time.”

  He begins to toss the acorns back and forth, then adds the wishbone. A few of the Larks nudge one another, whispering delightedly. “No matter how many things you add, you’ve got only two hands, so you can only toss two things. You’ve just got to throw faster and faster, higher and higher.” He adds the stone and the crystal, the things flying between his hands fast enough that it’s hard to see what he’s tossing. I suck in a breath.

  Then everything falls, crashing to the stone floor. The crystal shatters. One of the acorns rolls close to the fire.

  “My advice,” says Val Moren, “is that you learn to juggle better than I did, seneschal.”

  For a long moment, I am so angry that I can’t move. I feel incandescent with it, betrayed by the one person who ought to understand how hard it is to be what we are, here.

  Before I do something I will regret, I turn on my heels and walk away.

  “I foretold you wouldn’t take my advice,” he calls after me.

  The evening of the Hunter’s Moon, the whole Court moves to the Milkwood, where the trees are shrouded in masses of silk coverings that look, to my mortal eyes, like nothing so much as the egg sacks of moths, or perhaps the wrapped-up suppers of spiders.