The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air 2)

“So,” I said. “You enjoy being my pawn?”

He grinned lazily, as though he didn’t mind being baited. “For now.”

My gaze sharpened. “For far longer than that.”

“You’ve won yourself a year and a day,” he told me. “But a lot can happen in a year and a day. Give me all the commands you want, but you’ll never think of everything.”

Once, I was the one to throw him off balance, the one to ignite his anger and shred his self-control, but somehow the tables turned. Every day since, I’ve felt the slippage.

As I gaze at him now, stretched out on my bed, I feel more off balance than ever.

The Roach sweeps into the room as late-afternoon light streams from the hill above us. On his shoulder is the hob-faced owl, once a messenger for Dain, now a messenger for the Court of Shadows. It goes by Snapdragon, although I don’t know if that’s a code name.

“The Living Council wants to see you,” the Roach says. Snapdragon blinks sleepy black eyes at me.

I groan.

“In truth,” he says, nodding toward the bed, “they want to see him, but it’s you they can order around.”

I stand and stretch. Then, strapping on the sheath, I head into the parlor of my apartments so as not to wake Cardan. “How’s the Ghost?”

“Resting,” the Roach says. “Lot of rumors flying around about last night, even among the palace guard. Gossips begin to spin their webs.”

I head to my bath chamber to clean myself up. I gargle with salty water and scrub my face and armpits with a cloth slathered in lemony verbena soap. I brush out my tangles, too exhausted to manage anything more complicated than that. “I guess you checked the passageway by now,” I call out.

“I did,” the Roach says. “And I see why it wasn’t on any of our maps—there’s no connection to the other passageways at any point down the length of it. I’m not even sure it was built when they were.”

I consider the painting of the clock and the constellations. The stars prophesying an amorous lover.

“Who slept there before Cardan?” I ask.

The Roach shrugs. “Several Folk. No one of particular note. Guests of the crown.”

“Lovers,” I say, finally putting it together. “The High King’s lovers who weren’t consorts.”

“Huh.” The Roach indicates Cardan with the lift of his chin in the direction of my bedroom. “And that’s the place our High King chose to sleep?” The Roach gives me a significant look, as though I am supposed to know the answer to this puzzle, when I didn’t realize it was a puzzle at all.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He shakes his head. “You best get to that Council meeting.”

I can’t say it’s not a relief to know that when Cardan wakes, I won’t be there.

The Living Council was assembled during Eldred’s time, ostensibly to help the High King make decisions, and they have calcified into a group difficult to oppose. It’s not so much that the ministers have raw individual power—although many are themselves formidable—but as a collective, it has the authority to make many smaller decisions regarding the running of the kingdom. The kind of small decisions that, taken together, could put even a king in a bind.

After the disrupted coronation and the murder of the royal family, after the irregularity with the crown, the Council is skeptical of Cardan’s youth and confused by my rise to power.

Snapdragon leads me to the meeting, beneath a braided dome of willow trees at a table of fossilized wood. The ministers watch me walk across the grass, and I look at them in turn—the Unseelie Minister, a troll with a thick head of shaggy hair with pieces of metal braided into it; the Seelie Minister, a green woman who looks like a mantis; the Grand General, Madoc; the Royal Astrologer, a very tall, dark-skinned man with a sculpted beard and celestial ornaments in the long fall of his navy blue hair; the Minister of Keys, a wizened old hob with ram’s horns and goat eyes; and the Grand Fool, who wears pale lavender roses on his head to match his purple motley.

All along the table are carafes of water and wine, dishes of dried fruit.

I lean over to one of the servants and send them for a pot of the strongest tea they can find. I will need it.

Randalin, the Minister of Keys, sits in the High King’s chair, the wooden back of the throne-like seat is burned with the royal crest. I note the move—and the assumptions inherent in it. In the five months since assuming the mantle of High King, Cardan has not come to the Council. Only one chair is empty—between Madoc and Fala, the Grand Fool. I remain standing.

“Jude Duarte,” says Randalin, fixing me with his goat eyes, “Where is the High King?”

Standing in front of them is always intimidating, and Madoc’s presence makes it worse. He makes me feel like a child, overeager to say or do something clever. A part of me wants nothing more than to prove I am more than what they suppose me to be—the weak and silly appointee of a weak and silly king.

To prove that there is another reason for Cardan to have chosen a mortal seneschal than because I can lie for him.

“I am here in his place,” I say. “To speak in his stead.”

Randalin’s gaze is withering. “There is a rumor that he shot one of his paramours last night. Is it true?”

A servant sets the asked-for pot of tea at my elbow, and I am grateful both for the fortification and for an excuse not to immediately answer.

“Today courtiers told me that girl wore an anklet of swinging rubies sent to her as an apology, but that she could not stand on her own,” says Nihuar, the Seelie representative. She purses her small green lips. “I find everything about that to be in poor taste.”

Fala the Fool laughs, clearly finding it to his taste. “Rubies for the spilling of her ruby-red blood.”

That couldn’t be true. Cardan would have had to arrange it in the time it took me to get from my rooms to the Council. But that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t arrange it on his behalf. Everyone is eager to help a king.

“You’d prefer he’d killed her outright?” I say. My skills in diplomacy are nowhere near as honed as my skills in aggravation. Besides, I’m tired.

“I wouldn’t mind,” says the Unseelie representative, Mikkel, with a chuckle. “Our new High King seems Unseelie through and through, and he will favor us, I think. We could give him a debauch better than the one his Master of Revels brags over, now that we know what he likes.”

“There are other stories,” continues Randalin. “That one of the guard shot High King Cardan to save that courtier’s life. That she is bearing the royal heir. You must tell the High King that his Council stands ready to advise him so that his rule is not plagued by such tales.”

“I’ll be sure to do so,” I say.

The Royal Astrologer, Baphen, gives me a searching look, as though reading correctly my intention not to talk to Cardan about any of this. “The High King is tied to the land and to his subjects. A king is a living symbol, a beating heart, a star upon which Elfhame’s future is written.” He speaks quietly, and yet somehow his voice carries. “Surely you have noticed that since his reign began, the isles are different. Storms come in faster. Colors are a bit more vivid, smells are sharper.

“Things have been seen in the forests,” he goes on. “Ancient things, long thought gone from the world, come to peer at him.

“When he becomes drunk, his subjects become tipsy without knowing why. When his blood falls, things grow. Why, High Queen Mab called Insmire, Insmoor, and Insweal from the sea. All the isles of Elfhame, formed in a single hour.”

My heart speeds faster the longer that Baphen talks. My lungs feel as though they cannot get enough air. Because none of this can be describing Cardan. He cannot be connected to the land so profoundly, cannot be able to do all that and yet be under my control.

I think of the blood on his coverlet—and beside it, the scattered white flowers.

When his blood falls, things grow.

“And so you see,” says Randalin, unaware that I am freaking out, “the High King’s every decision changes Elfhame and influences its inhabitants. During Eldred’s reign, when children were born, they were perforce brought before him to pledge themselves to the kingdom. But in the low Courts, some heirs were fostered in the mortal world, growing up outside of Eldred’s reach. Those changeling children returned to rule without making vows to the Blood Crown. At least one Court has made such a changeling its queen. And who knows how many wild Folk managed to avoid making vows.”

“We need to watch the Queen of the Undersea, too,” I say. “She’s got a plan and is going to move against us.”

“What’s this?” Madoc says, interested in the conversation for the first time.

“Impossible,” says Randalin. “How would you have heard such a thing?”

“Balekin has been meeting with her representatives,” I say.

Randalin snorts. “And I suppose you have that from the prince’s own lips?”

If I bit my tongue any harder, I’d bite clean through it. “I have it from more than one source. If their alliance was with Eldred, then it’s over.”

“The sea Folk have cold hearts,” Mikkel says, which sounds at first as though he’s agreeing with me, but the approving tone of his voice undermines it.

“Why doesn’t Baphen consult his star charts?” Randalin says placatingly. “If he finds a threat prophesied there, we shall discuss further.”

“I am telling you—” I insist, frustrated.

That is the moment that Fala jumps up on the table and begins to dance—interpretively, I think. Madoc grunts out a laugh. A bird alights on Nihuar’s shoulder, and they begin gossiping back and forth in low whispers and trills.

It is clear that none of them wants to believe me. How could I know something they do not, after all? I am too young, too green, too mortal. “Nicasia—” I begin again.