The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air 2)

I can pretend. I can do this.

I swim over, keeping my face carefully blank. Orlagh gazes deeply into my eyes, and it’s excruciatingly hard not to look away, to keep my face open and sincere.

“We are your friends,” Orlagh says, stroking my cheek with long nails. “You love us very much, but you must never tell anyone how much outside of this room. You are loyal to us and would do absolutely anything for us. Isn’t that right, Jude Duarte?”

“Yes,” I say readily.

“What would you do for me, little minnow?” she asks.

“Anything, my queen,” I tell her.

She looks down the table at Balekin. “You see? That’s how it’s done.”

He appears sullen. He thinks a lot of himself and mislikes being put in his place. The eldest of Eldred’s children, he resented his father for not seriously considering him for the throne. I am sure he hates the way Orlagh talks to him. If he didn’t need this alliance, and if he wasn’t in her domain, I doubt he would allow it.

Perhaps here is a divide for me to exploit.

Soon a parade of dishes is brought out in cloches full of air, so that even under the water, they are dry until about to be eaten.

Raw fish, cut into artful rosettes and cunning shapes. Oysters, perfumed with roasted kelp. Roe, glistening red and black.

I don’t know if it’s allowed for me to eat without being explicitly granted permission, but I am hungry and willing to risk being reprimanded.

The raw fish is mild and mixed in some peppery green. I didn’t anticipate liking it, but I do. I quickly swallow three pink strips of tuna.

My head still hurts, but my stomach starts to feel better.

As I eat, I think about what I must do: listen carefully and act in every way as though I trust them, as though I am loyal to them. To do that, I must imagine myself into at least the shadow of that feeling.

I look over at Orlagh and imagine that it was she instead of Madoc who brought me up, that I was Nicasia’s sort-of sister, who was sometimes mean but ultimately looked out for me. At Balekin, my imaginings balk, but I try to think of him as a new member of the family, someone I was coming to trust because everyone else did. I turn a smile on them, a generous smile that almost doesn’t feel like a lie.

Orlagh looks over at me. “Tell me about yourself, little minnow.”

The smile almost wavers, but I concentrate on my full stomach, on the wonder and beauty of the landscape.

“There’s little to know,” I say. “I’m a mortal girl who was raised in Faerie. That’s the most interesting thing about me.”

Nicasia frowns. “Did you kiss Cardan?”

“Is that important?” Balekin wants to know. He is eating oysters, spearing them one after another with a tiny fork.

Orlagh doesn’t answer, just nods toward Nicasia. I like that she does that, putting her daughter above Balekin. It’s good to have something to like about her, something to concentrate on to keep the warmth in my voice real.

“It’s important if it’s the reason he didn’t agree to an alliance with the Undersea,” Nicasia says.

“I don’t know if I am supposed to answer,” I say, looking around in what I hope appears like honest confusion. “But yes.”

Nicasia’s expression crumples. Now that I am “glamoured,” she doesn’t seem to think of me as a person in front of whom she has to pretend to stoicism. “More than once? Does he love you?”

I didn’t realize how much she’d hoped I was lying when I’d told her I kissed him. “More than once, but no. He doesn’t love me. Nothing like it.”

Nicasia looks at her mother, inclining her head, indicating she got the answers she wanted.

“Your father must be very angry with you for ruining all his plans,” Orlagh says, turning the conversation to other things.

“He is,” I say. Short and sweet. No lies I don’t have to tell.

“Why didn’t the general tell Balekin about Oak’s parentage?” she continues. “Wouldn’t that have been easier than scouring Elfhame for Prince Cardan after taking the crown?”

“I am not in his confidence,” I say. “Not then and definitely not now. All I know is that he had a reason.”

“Doubtless,” Balekin says, “he meant to betray me.”

“If Oak was High King, then it would really be Madoc who ruled Elfhame,” I say, because it’s nothing that they don’t know.

“And you didn’t want that.” A servant comes in with a little silken handkerchief filled with fish. Orlagh spears one with a long fingernail, causing a thin ribbon of blood to snake toward me in the water. “Interesting.”

Since it’s not a question, I don’t have to answer.

A few other servants begin to clear the plates.

“And would you take us to Oak’s door?” Balekin asks. “Take us to the mortal world and take him from your big sister, carry him back to us?”

“Of course,” I lie.

Balekin shoots a look toward Orlagh. If they took Oak, they could foster him under the sea, they could marry him to Nicasia, they could have a Greenbriar line of their own, loyal to the Undersea. They would have options beyond Balekin for access to the throne, which cannot please him.

A long game, but in Faerie, that’s a reasonable way to play.

“This Grimsen creature,” Orlagh asks her daughter. “You really believe he can make a new crown?”

My heart feels for a moment as though it’s stuttered to a stop. I am glad no one was looking at me, because in that moment, I do not believe I could have hidden my horror.

“He made the Blood Crown,” says Balekin. “If he made that, surely he can make another.”

If they don’t need the Blood Crown, then they don’t need Oak. They don’t need to foster him, don’t need him to place the crown on Balekin’s head, don’t need him alive at all.

Orlagh gives him a look that’s a reprimand. She waits for Nicasia’s answer.

“He’s a smith,” Nicasia says. “He cannot forge beneath the sea, so he will always favor the land. But with the death of the Alderking, he craves glory. He wishes to have a High King who will give him that.”

This is their plan, I tell myself to try to stifle the panic I feel. I know their plan. If I can escape, then I can stop it.

A knife in Grimsen’s back before he finishes the crown. I sometimes doubt my effectiveness as a seneschal, but never as a killer.

“Little minnow,” Orlagh says, her attention returning to me. “Tell me what Cardan promised you to help him.”

“But she—” Nicasia begins, but Orlagh’s look silences her.

“Daughter,” says the Queen of the Undersea, “you do not see what is right beneath your nose. Cardan got a throne from this girl. Stop searching for what she has over him—and start looking for what he had over her.”

Nicasia turns a petulant look on me. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve said that Cardan didn’t much care for her. And yet she made him High King. Consider that perhaps he realized she’d be useful and exploited that usefulness, through kisses and flattery, much as you’ve cultivated the little smith.”

Nicasia looks puzzled, as though all her ideas of the world are upset. Perhaps she didn’t think of Cardan as someone capable of scheming. Still, I can see something about this pleases her. If Cardan has seduced me to his side, then she need no longer worry that he cares for me. Instead, she need only worry over my usefulness.

“What did he promise you for getting him the crown of Elfhame?” Orlagh asks me with exquisite gentleness.

“I always wanted a place in Faerie. He told me he would make me his seneschal and put me at his right hand, like Val Moren in Eldred’s Court. He’d make sure I was respected and even feared.” It’s a lie, of course. He never promised me anything, and Dain promised far less than that. But, oh, if someone had—if Madoc had—it would have been very hard to turn down.

“You’re telling me that you betrayed your father and put that fool on the throne in exchange for a job?” Balekin demands incredulously.

“Being the High King of Elfhame is also a job,” I return. “And look at what has been sacrificed to get that.” For a moment, I pause, wondering if I have spoken too harshly for them to believe I am still glamoured, but Orlagh only smiles.

“True, my dear,” she says after a pause. “And aren’t we putting our faith in Grimsen, even as we offer him a not particularly dissimilar reward.”

Balekin looks unhappy, but he doesn’t dispute it. Far easier to believe that Cardan was the mastermind than a mortal girl.

I manage to eat three more slices of fish and drink some kind of toasted rice and seaweed tea through a clever straw that leaves it unmixed with sea water before I am led to a sea cave. Nicasia accompanies the merfolk guards taking me there.

This is no bedchamber, but a cage. Once I am pushed through, however, I discover that while I am still soaking wet, my surroundings are dry and filled with air I abruptly can’t breathe.

I choke, my body spasming. And up from my lungs comes all that water, along with a few pieces of partially digested fish.

Nicasia laughs.

Then, glamour heavy in her voice, she speaks. “Isn’t this a beautiful room?”

What I see is only a rough stone floor, no furniture, no nothing.

Her voice is dreamy. “You’ll love the four-poster bed, wrapped in coverlets. And the cunning little side tables and your own pot of tea, still steaming. It will be perfectly warm and delicious whenever you try it.”

She sets down a glass of sea water on the floor. I guess that’s the tea. If I drink it, as she suggests, my body will become quickly dehydrated. Mortals can go for a few days without fresh water, but since I was breathing sea water, I may already be in trouble.

“You know,” she says as I pretend to admire the room, turning around in it in awe, feeling foolish, “nothing I could do to you will be as terrible as what you’ll do to yourself.”