The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air 2)

I turn to her, frowning in the pretense of puzzlement.

“No matter,” she says, and leaves me to spending the rest of the evening tossing and turning on the hard floor, trying to seem as though I feel it is the height of comfort.

I wake to terrible cramps and dizziness. Cold sweat beads on my brow, and my limbs shiver uncontrollably.

For the better part of a year, I have been poisoning my body every day. My blood is used to the doses, far higher than they were when I began. Addicted to them, so that now it craves what it once reviled. Now I can’t do without the poison.

I lie on the stone floor and try to marshal my thoughts. Try to remember the many times Madoc was on a campaign and tell myself that he was uncomfortable on each one. Sometimes he slept stretched out on the ground, head pillowed on a clump of weeds and his own arms. Sometimes he was wounded and fought on anyway. He didn’t die.

I am not going to die, either.

I keep telling myself that, but I am not sure I believe it.

For days, no one comes.

I give up and drink the sea water.

Sometimes I think about Cardan while I am lying there. I think about what it must have been like to grow up as an honored member of the royal family, powerful and unloved. Fed on cat milk and neglect. To be arbitrarily beaten by the brother you most resembled and who most seemed to care for you.

Imagine all those courtiers bowing to you, allowing you to hiss and slap at them. But no matter how many of them you humiliated or hurt, you would always know someone had found them worthy of love, when no one had ever found you worthy.

Despite growing up among the Folk, I do not always understand the way they think or feel. They are more like mortals than they like to believe, but the moment I allow myself to forget they’re not human, they will do something to remind me. For that reason alone, I would be stupid to think I knew Cardan’s heart from his story. But I wonder at it.

I wonder what would have happened if I told him that he wasn’t out of my system.

They come for me eventually. They allow me a little water, a little food. By then, I am too weak to worry about pretending to be glamoured.

I tell them the details I remember about Madoc’s strategy room and what he thinks about Orlagh’s intentions. I go over the murder of my parents in visceral detail. I describe a birthday, pledge my loyalty, explain how I lost my finger and how I lied about it.

I even lie to them, at their command.

And then I have to pretend to forget when they tell me to forget. I have to pretend to feel full when they have told me I feasted and to be drunk on imaginary wine when all I’ve had is a goblet of water.

I have to allow them to slap me.

I can’t cry.

Sometimes, when lying on the cold stone floor, I wonder if there’s a limit to what I will let them do, if there is something that would make me fight back, even if it dooms me.

If there is, that makes me a fool.

But maybe if there isn’t, that makes me a monster.

“Mortal girl,” Balekin says one afternoon when we’re alone in the watery chambers of the palace. He does not like using my name, perhaps because he doesn’t like having to recall it, finding me as disposable as all the human girls who have come through Hollow Hall.

I am weak with dehydration. They regularly forget to give me fresh water and food, enchanting me illusory sustenance when I beg for it. I am having difficulty concentrating on anything.

Despite the fact that Balekin and I are alone in a coral chamber, with guards swimming patrols at intervals that I count automatically, I do not even try to fight and flee. I have no weapon and little strength. Even were I able to kill Balekin, I am not a strong enough swimmer to make it to the surface before they caught me.

My plan has narrowed to endurance, to surviving hour by hour, sunless day by day.

Perhaps I cannot be glamoured, but that doesn’t mean I cannot be broken.

Nicasia has said that her mother has many palaces in the Undersea and that this, built into the rock of Insweal and along the seafloor beneath it, is only one of them. But for me, it is a constant torment to be so close to home and yet leagues beneath it.

Cages hang in the water all through the palace, some of them empty, but many of them containing mortals with graying skin, mortals who seem as though they ought to be dead but occasionally move in ways that suggest they are not. The drowned ones, the guards sometimes call them, and more than anything, that’s what I fear becoming. I remember thinking I’d spotted the girl I pulled out of Balekin’s house at Dain’s coronation, the girl that threw herself into the sea, the girl who’d certainly drowned. Now I am not so sure I was wrong.

“Tell me,” Balekin says today. “Why did my brother steal my crown? Orlagh thinks she understands, because she understands the craving for power, but she doesn’t understand Cardan. He never much cared for hard work. He liked charming people, sure. He liked making trouble, but he despaired of real effort. And whether or not Nicasia would admit it, she doesn’t understand, either. The Cardan she knows might have manipulated you, but not into this.”

This is a test, I think nonsensically. A test where I have to lie, but I am afraid my ability to make sense has deserted me.

“I am no oracle,” I say, thinking of Val Moren and the refuge he’s found in riddles.

“Then guess,” he says. “When you paraded in front of my cell in the Tower of Forgetting, you suggested it was because I’d had a firm hand with him. But you of all people must believe he lacked discipline and that I sought his improvement.”

He must be remembering the tournament that Cardan and I fought and the way he tormented me. I am tangled up in memories, in lies. I am too exhausted to make up stories. “In the time I knew him, he drunkenly rode a horse through a lesson from a well-respected lecturer, tried to feed me to nixies, and attacked someone at a revel,” I say. “He did not seem to be disciplined. He seemed to have his way all the time.”

Balekin seems surprised. “He sought Eldred’s attention,” he says finally. “For good or for ill, and mostly for ill.”

“Then perhaps he wants to be High King for Eldred’s sake,” I say. “Or to spite his memory.”

That’s seems to draw Balekin’s attention. Though I said it only to suggest something that would misdirect him from thinking too much about Cardan’s motives, once it comes out of my mouth, I ponder whether there isn’t some truth to it.

“Or because he was angry with you for chopping off Eldred’s head. Or being responsible for the deaths of all his siblings. Or because he was afraid you might murder him too.”

Balekin flinches. “Be quiet,” he says, and I go gratefully silent. After a moment, he looks down at me. “Tell me which of us is worthy of being High King, myself or Prince Cardan?”

“You are,” I say easily, giving him a look of practiced adoration. I do not point out that Cardan is no longer a prince.

“And would you tell him that yourself?” he asks.

“I would tell him whatever you wish,” I say with all the sincerity I can wearily muster.

“Would you go to him in his rooms and stab him again and again until his red blood ran out?” Balekin asks, leaning closer. He says the words softly, as though to a lover. I cannot control the shudder that runs through me, and I hope he will believe it is something other than disgust.

“For you?” I ask, closing my eyes against his closeness. “For Orlagh? It would be my pleasure.”

He laughs. “Such savagery.”

I nod, trying to rein in overeagerness at the thought of being sent on a mission away from the sea, at having the opportunity for escape. “Orlagh has given me so much, treated me like a daughter. I want to repay her. Despite the loveliness of my chambers and the delicacies I am given, I was not made to be idle.”

“A pretty speech. Look at me, Jude.”

I open my eyes and gaze up at him. Black hair floats around his face, and here, under the water, the thorns on his knuckles and running up his arms are visible, like the spiky fins of a fish.

“Kiss me,” he says.

“What?” My surprise is genuine.

“Don’t you want to?” he asks.

This is nothing, I tell myself, certainly better than being slapped. “I thought you were Orlagh’s lover,” I tell him. “Or Nicasia’s. Won’t they mind?”

“Not in the least,” he tells me, watching carefully.

Any hesitation on my part will seem suspicious, so I move toward him in the water, pressing my lips against his. The water is cold, but his kiss is colder.

After what I hope is a sufficient interval, I pull back. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, clearly disgusted, but when he stares down at me, there’s greed in his eyes. “Now kiss me as though I were Cardan.”

To buy myself a moment of reflection, I gaze into his owl eyes, run my hands up his thorned arms. It is clearly a test. He wants to know how much control he has over me. But I think he wants to know something else, too, something about his brother.

I force myself to lean forward again. They have the same black hair, the same cheekbones. All I have to do is pretend.

The next day, they bring me a pitcher of clear river water, which I guzzle gratefully. The day after that, they begin to prepare me to return to the surface.

The High King has made a bargain to get me back.

I think back over the many commands I gave him, but none was specific enough to have ordered his paying a ransom for my safe return. He had been free of me, and now he is willingly bringing me back.

I do not know what that means. Perhaps politics demanded it, perhaps he really, really didn’t like going to meetings.

All I know is that I am giddy with relief, wild with terror that this is some kind of a game. If we do not go to the surface, I fear I will not be able to hide the pain of disappointment.

Balekin “glamours” me again, making me repeat my loyalty to them, my love, my murderous intent toward Cardan.

Balekin comes to the cave, where I am pacing back and forth, each scuff of my bare feet on the stone loud in my ears. I have never been so much alone, and I have never had to play a role for this long. I feel hollowed out, diminished.