The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air 2)

He kisses the scar of my palm.

I still have his brother’s blood under my fingernails.

I don’t have a ring for him.

Above us, the buds are blooming. The whole room smells of flowers.

Drawing back, I speak again, pushing away all thoughts of Balekin, of the future in which I am going to have to tell him what I’ve done. “Cardan, son of Eldred, High King of Elfhame, I forsake any command over you. You are free of your vow of obedience, for now and for always.”

He lets out a breath and stands a bit unsteadily. I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that I am… I can’t even think the words. Too much has happened tonight.

“You look as if you’ve barely rested.” I rise to be sure that if he falls over, I can grab for him before he hits the floor, although I am not so sure of myself, either.

“I will lie down,” he says, letting me guide him toward his enormous bed. Once there, he does not let go of my hand. “If you lie with me.”

With no reason to object, I do, the sense of unreality heightening. As I stretch out on the elaborately embroidered comforter, I realize that I have found something far more blasphemous than spreading out on the bed of the High King, far more blasphemous than sneaking Cardan’s signet onto my finger, or even sitting on the throne itself.

I have become the Queen of Faerie.

We trade kisses in the darkness, blurred by exhaustion. I don’t expect to sleep, but I do, my limbs tangled with his, the first restful sleep I’ve had since my return from the Undersea. When I am awakened, it is to a banging on the door.

Cardan is already up, playing with the vial of clay the Bomb brought, tossing it from hand to hand. Still dressed, his rumpled aspect gives him only an air of dissipation. I pull my robe more tightly around me. I am embarrassed to be so obviously sharing his bed.

“Your Majesty,” says the messenger—a knight, from the clipped, official sound of him. “Your brother is dead. There was a duel, from what we’ve been able to determine.”

“Ah,” Cardan says.

“And the Queen of the Undersea.” The knight’s voice trembles. “She’s here, demanding justice for her ambassador.”

“I just bet she is.” Cardan’s voice is dry, clipped. “Well, we can hardly keep her waiting. You. What’s your name?”

The knight hesitates. “Rannoch, Your Majesty.”

“Well, Sir Rannoch, I expect you to assemble a group of knights to escort me to the water. You will wait in the courtyard. Will you do that for me?”

“But the general…” he begins.

“Is not here right now,” Cardan finishes for him.

“I will do it,” the knight says. I hear the door close, and Cardan rounds the corner, expression haughty.

“Well, wife,” he says to me, a chill in his voice. “It seems you have kept at least one secret from your dowry. Come, we must dress for our first audience together.”

And so I am left to rush through the halls in my robe. Back in my rooms, I call for my sword and throw on my velvets, all the while wondering what it will mean to have this newfound status and what Cardan will do now that he is unchecked.

Orlagh waits for us in a choppy ocean, accompanied by her daughter and a pod of knights mounted on seals and sharks and all manner of sharp-toothed sea creatures. She, herself, sits on an orca and is dressed as though ready for battle. Her skin is covered in shiny silvery scales that seem both to be metallic and to have grown from her skin. A helmet of bone and teeth hides her hair.

Nicasia is beside her, on a shark. She has no tail today, her long legs covered in armor of shell and bone.

All along the edge of the beach are clumps of kelp, washed up as though from a storm. I think I see other things out in the water. The back of a large creature swimming just below the waves. The hair of drowned mortals, blowing like sea grass. The Undersea’s forces are larger than they seem at first glance.

“Where is my ambassador?” Orlagh demands. “Where is your brother?”

Cardan is seated on his gray steed, in black clothes and a cloak of scarlet. Beside him are two dozen mounted knights and both Mikkel and Nihuar. On the ride over, they tried to determine what Cardan had planned, but he has kept his own counsel from them and, more troublingly, from me. Since hearing of the death of Balekin, he’s said little and avoided looking in my direction. My stomach churns with anxiety.

He looks at Orlagh with a coldness that I know from experience comes from either fury or fear. In this case, possibly both. “As you well know, he’s dead.”

“It was your responsibility to keep him safe,” she says.

“Was it?” Cardan asks with exaggerated astonishment, touching his hand to his breast. “I thought my obligation was not to move against him, not to keep him from the consequences of his own risk taking. He had a little duel, from what I hear. Dueling, as I am sure you know, is dangerous. But I neither murdered him nor did I encourage it. In fact, I quite discouraged it.”

I attempt to not let anything I am feeling show on my face.

Orlagh leans forward as though she senses blood in the water. “You ought not to allow such disobedience.”

Cardan shrugs nonchalantly. “Perhaps.”

Mikkel shifts on his horse. He’s clearly uncomfortable with the way Cardan is speaking, carelessly, as though they are merely having a friendly conversation and Orlagh hasn’t come to chisel away his power, to weaken his rule. And if she knew Madoc was gone, she might attack outright.

Looking at her, looking at Nicasia’s sneer and the selkies and merfolk’s strange, wet eyes, I feel powerless. I have given up command of Cardan, and for it, I have his vow of marriage. But without anyone’s knowing, it seems less and less as though it ever happened.

“I am here to demand justice. Balekin was my ambassador, and if you don’t consider him to be under your protection, I do consider him to be under mine. You must give his murderer to the sea, where she will find no forgiveness. Give us your seneschal, Jude Duarte.”

For a moment, I feel as though I can’t breathe. It’s as though I am drowning again.

Cardan’s eyebrows go up. His voice stays light. “But she’s only just returned from the sea.”

“So you don’t dispute her crime?” asks Orlagh.

“Why should I?” asks Cardan. “If she’s the one with whom he dueled, I am certain she would win; my brother supposed himself expert with the sword—a great exaggeration of abilities. But she’s mine to punish or not, as I see fit.”

I hate hearing myself spoken of as though I am not right there when I have his pledge of troth. But a queen killing an ambassador does seem like a potential political problem.

Orlagh’s gaze doesn’t go to me. I doubt very much she cares about anything but that Cardan gave up a lot for my return and by threatening me, she believes she can get more. “King of the land, I am not here to fight your sharp tongue. My blood is cold and I prefer blades. Once, I considered you as a partner for my daughter, the most precious thing in the sea. She would have brokered a true peace between us.”

Cardan looks at Nicasia, and although Orlagh leaves him an opening, for a long moment, he does not speak. And when he does, he only says, “Like you, I am not so good with forgiveness.”

Something in Queen Orlagh’s manner changes. “If it’s war you want, you would be unwise to declare it on an island.” Around her, waves grow more violent, their white caps of froth larger. Whirlpools form just off the edge of the land, small ones, deepening, only to spin themselves out as new ones form.

“War?” He peers at her as though she’s said something particularly puzzling and it vexes him. “Do you mean for me to really believe you want to fight? Are you challenging me to a duel?”

He’s obviously baiting her, but I cannot imagine to what benefit.

“And if I was?” she asks. “What then, boy?”

The smile that curves his lip is voluptuous. “Beneath every bit of your sea is land. Seething, volcanic land. Go against me, and I will show you what this boy will do, my lady.”

He stretches out his hand, and something seems to rise to the top of the water around us, like a pale scrum. Sand. Floating sand.

Then, all around the Court of the Undersea, water begins to churn.

I stare at him, hoping to catch his eye, but he is concentrating. Whatever magic he is doing, this is what Baphen meant when he said the High King was tied to the land, was the beating heart and the star upon whom Elfhame’s future was written. This is power. And to see Cardan wield it is to understand just how inhuman he is, how transformed, how far outside my control he’s moved.

“What is this?” Orlagh asks as the churning turns to boiling. An oblong of bubbling and seething ocean as the Folk of the Undersea scream and scatter, swimming out of range of whatever is happening. Several seals come up on the black rocks near the land, calling to one another in their language.

Nicasia’s shark is spun sideways, and she plunges into the water.

Steam billows up from the waves, blowing hot. A huge white cloud rolls across my vision. When it clears, I can see that new earth has coalesced from the depths, hot stone cooling as we watch.

With Nicasia standing on it, her expression half amazement and half terror. “Cardan,” she calls.

He’s facing her, and one corner of his mouth is turned up in a little smile, but his gaze is unfocused. He believed that he needed to convince Orlagh that he wasn’t feckless.

Now I see he’s come up with a plan to do that. Just as he came up with a plan to throw off the yoke of my control.

During my month in the Undersea, he changed. He began scheming schemes. And he has become disturbingly effective at them.

I am thinking of that as I watch grass grow between Nicasia’s toes and wildflowers spring up all along the gently rising hills, as I notice the trees and brambles sprout, and as the trunk of a tree begins to form around Nicasia’s body.

“Cardan!” she screams as bark wraps around her, closing over her waist.