The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air 1)

With a half smile, I set down the bolt. “Sure. All yours.”

Taryn kisses me on the cheek. I guess we’re back to normal. If only everything in my life were so easily resolved.

I choose a different cloth, the dark blue velvet. Vivienne chooses a violet that seems to be a silvery gray when she turns it over her hand. Oriana chooses a blush pink for herself and a cricket green for Oak. Brambleweft starts to sketch—billowing skirts and cunning little capes, corsets stitched with fanciful creatures. Butterflies alighting along arms and in elaborate headpieces. I am charmed at the alien vision of myself—my corset will have two golden beetles stitched in what looks like a breastplate, with Madoc’s moon crest and elaborate swirls of shining thread continuing down my front, and tiny sheer drop sleeves of more gold.

It will certainly be clear to what household I belong.

We are still making small changes when Oak runs in, being chased by Gnarbone. Oak spots me first and scrambles onto my lap, throwing his arms around my neck and giving me a small bite just beneath my shoulder.

“Ow!” I say in surprise, but he just laughs. It makes me laugh, too. He’s kind of a weird kid, maybe because he’s a faerie or maybe because all kids, human or inhuman, are equally weird. “Do you want me to tell you a story about a little boy who bit a stone and lost all his pearly white teeth?” I ask him in what I hope is a menacing fashion, sticking my fingers under his armpits to tickle him.

“Yes,” he says immediately between breathless giggles and shrieks.

Oriana strides over to us, her face full of trouble. “That’s very kind of you, but we ought to begin dressing for dinner.” She pulls him off my lap and into her arms. He begins screaming and kicking his legs. One of the kicks lands against my stomach hard enough to bruise, but I don’t say anything.

“Story!” he shouts. “I want the story!”

“Jude is busy right now,” she says, carrying his squirming body toward the door, where Gnarbone is waiting to take him back to the nursery.

“Why don’t you ever trust me with him?” I shout, and Oriana wheels around, shocked that I said a thing we don’t say. I am shocked, too, but I can’t stop. “I’m not a monster! I’ve never done anything to either of you.”

“I want the story,” Oak whines, sounding confused.

“That’s enough,” Oriana says sternly, as though we’ve all been arguing. “We will speak about this later with your father.”

With that, she strides from the room.

“I don’t know whose father you’re talking about, because he’s sure not mine,” I call after her.

Taryn’s eyes go saucer-wide. Vivienne has a small smile on her face. She takes a minute sip of tea, and then she raises the cup in my direction in salute. The seamstress is looking down and away, leaving us to our private family moment.

I cannot seem to contort myself back into the shape of a dutiful child.

I am coming unraveled. I am coming undone.

The next day at school, Taryn walks beside me, swinging her lunch basket. I keep my head high and my jaw set. I have my little knife with me, cold iron, tucked into one of the pockets of my skirt, and more salt than I reasonably need. I even have a new necklace of rowan berries, sewn by Tatterfell and worn because there was no way she could know I didn’t need it.

I dally in the palace garden to gather a few more things.

“Are you allowed to pick those?” Taryn asks, but I do not answer her.

In the afternoon, we attend a lecture in a high tower, where we are taught about birdsongs. Every time I feel as though my courage will falter, I let my fingers brush the cool metal of the blade.

Locke looks over, and when he catches my eye, he winks.

From the other side of the room, Cardan scowls at the lecturer but does not speak. When he moves to take an inkpot from a satchel, I see him wince. I think about how sore his back must be, how it must hurt to move. But if he holds himself a little more stiffly as he sneers, that seems to be the only difference in his manner.

He looks well practiced in hiding pain.

I think of the note I found, of the press of his nibbed pen hard enough to send flecks of ink spattering as he wrote my name. Hard enough to dig through the page, maybe to scar the desk beneath.

If that’s what he did to the paper, I shudder to think what he wants to do to me.

After school, I practice with Madoc. He shows me a particularly clever block, and I do it over and over again, better and faster, surprising even him. When I go inside, covered in sweat, I pass Oak, who is running somewhere, dragging my stuffed snake after him on a dirty rope. He’s clearly stolen the snake from my room.

“Oak!” I call after him, but he’s up the stairs and away.

I sluice off in my bath and then, alone in my room, unpack my schoolbag. Tucked down in the bottom, wrapped in a leftover piece of paper, is a single worm-eaten faerie fruit I picked up on the way home. I set it on a tray and pull on leather gloves. Then I take out my knife and cut it into pieces. Tiny slivers of squishy golden fruit.

I have researched faerie poisons in dusty, hand-scribed books in Madoc’s library. I read about the blusher mushroom, a pale fungus that blooms with beads of a red liquid that looks uncomfortably like blood. Small doses cause paralysis, while large doses are lethal, even for the Folk. Then there is deathsweet, which causes a sleep that lasts a hundred years. And wraithberry, which makes your blood race until your heart stops. And faerie fruit, of course, which one book called everapple.

I take out a flask of pine liquor, nicked from the kitchens, thick and heavy as sap. I drop the fruit into it to keep it fresh.

My hands are shaking.

The final piece, I put on my tongue. The rush of it hits me hard, and I grit my teeth against it. Then, while I am feeling stupid, I take out the other things. A leaf of wraithberry from the palace garden. A petal from a flower of deathsweet. The tiniest bead of juice from the blusher mushroom. From each, I cut away a tinier portion and swallow.

Mithridatism, it’s called. Isn’t that a funny name? The process of eating poison to build up immunity. So long as I don’t die from it, I’ll be harder to kill.

I do not make it downstairs for dinner. I am too busy retching, too busy shivering and sweating.

I fall asleep in the bath area of my room, spread out on the floor. That’s where the Ghost finds me. I wake to his poking me in the stomach with the foot of his boot. It’s only grogginess that keeps me from crying out.

“Rise, Jude,” the Ghost says. “The Roach wants you to train tonight.”

I push myself up, too exhausted to disobey. Outside, on the dewy grass, with the first rays of sun creeping across the island, the Ghost shows me how to climb trees silently. How to put down a foot without snapping a branch or crackling a dried leaf. I thought I’d learned how in my lessons at the palace, but he shows me mistakes my teachers didn’t bother correcting. I try, over and over. Mostly, I fail.

“Good,” he says, once my muscles are shaking. He’s spoken so little that his voice startles me. He could more easily pass for human than Vivi, with the subtler point on his ears, light brown hair, and hazel eyes. And yet he seems unknowable to me, both calmer and colder than she is. The sun is almost up. The leaves are turning to gold. “Keep practicing. Sneak up on your sisters.” When he grins, with sandy hair falling over his face, he seems younger than I am, but I’m sure he’s not.

And when he goes, he does it in such a way that it appears like vanishing. I head back home and use what I’ve just learned to slyfoot my way past the servants on the stairs. I make it to my room, and this time when I collapse, I manage to do it in my bed.

Then I get up the next day and do everything all over again.

Attending lectures is harder than ever. For one thing, I am sick, my body fighting the effects of the fruit and the poisons I am forcing down. For another, I am exhausted from training with Madoc and training with Dain’s Court of Shadows. Madoc gives me puzzles—twelve goblin knights to storm a fortress, nine untrained Gentry to defend one—and then asks for my answers each evening after dinner. The Roach orders me to practice moving through the crowds of courtiers without being noticed, to eavesdrop without seeming interested. The Bomb teaches me how to find the weak spot in a building, the pressure point on a body. The Ghost teaches me how to hang from rafters and not be seen, to line up a shot with a crossbow, to steady my shaking hands.

I am sent on two more missions to get information. First, I steal a letter addressed to Elowyn from a knight’s desk in the palace. The next time, I wear the clothing of a faerie bride and walk through a party to the private chambers of the lovely Taracand, one of Prince Balekin’s consorts, where I take a ring from a desk. In neither case am I allowed to know the significance of what I stole.

I attend lectures beside Cardan, Nicasia, Valerian, and all the Gentry children who laughed at my humiliation. I do not give them the satisfaction of my withdrawing, but since the incident with the faerie fruit, there are no more skirmishes. I bide my time. I can only assume they are doing the same. I am not foolish enough to think we are done with one another.

Locke continues his flirtation. He sits with Taryn and me when we take our lunch, spread out on a blanket, watching the sun set. Occasionally he walks me home through the woods, stopping to kiss me near a copse of fir trees just before Madoc’s estate. I only hope he doesn’t taste the bitterness of poison on my lips.

I do not understand why he likes me, but it is exciting to be liked.

Taryn doesn’t seem to understand it, either. She regards Locke with suspicion. Perhaps since I am worried over her mysterious paramour, it is fitting that she seems equally worried over mine.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I overhear Nicasia ask Locke once, as he joins them for a lecture. “Cardan won’t forgive you for what you’re doing with her.”

I pause, unable to pass by without listening for his answer.

But Locke only laughs. “Is he more angry that you chose me over him or that I chose a mortal over you?”