A
prince of Faerie, nourished on cat milk and contempt, born into a
family overburdened with heirs, with a nasty little prophecy hanging
over his head—since the hour of Cardan's birth, he has been alternately
adored and despised. Perhaps it's no surprise that he turned out the way he
did; the only surprise is that he managed to become the High King of
Elfhame anyway.
Some might think of him as a strong draught, burning the back of one's
throat, but invigorating all the same.
You might beg to differ.
So long as you're begging, he doesn't mind a bit.
T
his?" he demands, looking down at the waves far beneath them. "This
is how you traveled? What if the enchantment ended while Vivi wasn't
with you?"
"I suppose I would have plummeted out of the air," Jude tells him with
troubling equanimity, her expression saying, Horrible risks are entirely
normal to me.
Cardan has to admit that the ragwort steeds are swift and that there is
something thrilling about tangling his hand in a leafy mane and racing
across the sky. It's not as though he doesn't enjoy a little danger, just that he
doesn't gorge himself on it, unlike some people. He cuts his gaze toward his
unpredictable, mortal High Queen, whose wild brown hair is blowing
around her face, whose amber eyes are alight when she looks at him.
They are two people who ought to have, by all rights, remained enemies
forever.
He can't believe his good fortune, can't trace the path that got him here.
"Now that I agreed to travel your way," he shouts over the wind, "you
ought to give me something I want. Like a promise you won't fight some
monster just to impress one of the solitary fey who, as far as I can tell, you
don't even like."
Jude gives him a look. It is an expression that he never once saw her
make when they attended the palace school together, yet from the first he
saw it, he knew it to be her truest face. Conspiratorial. Daring. Bold.
Even without the look, he ought to know her answer. Of course she
wants to fight it, whatever it is. She feels as though she has something to
prove at all times. Feels as though she has to earn the crown on her head
over and over again.
Once, she told Cardan the story of confronting Madoc after she'd
drugged him, but before the poison began to work. While Cardan was in the next room, drinking wine and chatting, she was swinging a sword at her
foster father, stalling for time.
I am what you made me, she'd told him as they battled.
Cardan knows Madoc isn't the only one who made her the way she is.
He had a hand in it as well.
It's absurd, sometimes, the thought that she loves him. He's grateful, of
course, but it feels as though it's just another of the ridiculous, absurd,
dangerous things she does. She wants to fight monsters, and she wants him
for a lover, the same boy she fantasized about murdering. She likes nothing
easy or safe or sure.
Nothing good for her.
"I'm not trying to impress Bryern," Jude says. "He says I owe him a
favor for giving me a job when no one else would. I guess that's true."
"I think his presumption is deserving of a reward," he tells her, voice
dry. "Not, alas, the one you intend to give him."
She sighs. "If there's a monster among the solitary Folk, we ought to do
something about it."
There is no reason for him to feel a frisson of dread at those words, no
cause for the unease he can't shake.
"We have knights, sworn to our service," Cardan says. "You're cheating
one of them out of an opportunity for glory."
Jude gives a little snort, pushing back her thick, dark hair, trying to tuck
it into her golden circlet and out of her eyes. "All queens become greedy."
He vows to continue this argument later. One of his primary duties as
the High King appears to be reminding her she isn't personally responsible
for solving every tedious problem and carrying out every tedious execution
in all of Elfhame. He wouldn't mind causing a little torment here or there,
of a nonmurdery sort, but her view of their positions seems overburdened
with chores. "Let us meet with this Bryern person and hear his tale. If you
must fight this thing, there's no reason to go alone. You could take a
battalion of knights or, failing that, me."
"You think you're the equal of a battalion of knights?" she asks with a
smile.
He might be, he supposes, although there's no telling how the mortal
world will affect his magic. He did once raise an isle from the bottom of the
sea. He wonders if he ought to remind her of that, wonders if she had been impressed. "I believe that I could easily best all of them combined, in a
suitable contest. Perhaps one involving drink."
She kicks her ragwort steed forward with a laugh. "We meet Bryern
tomorrow at dusk," she calls back, and her grin dares him to race. "And
after that, we can decide who gets to play the hero."
Having only recently stopped playing the villain, Cardan thinks again of
the winding path of decisions that brought him to this unlikely place, here
with her, racing over the sky, planning to end trouble instead of making
more of it.
Many times in his first nine years, Prince Cardan slept in the hay of
the stables when his mother didn't want him in their suite of rooms.
It was warm there, and he could pretend he was hiding, could pretend that
someone was looking for him. Could pretend that when he was not found, it
was only because the spot he'd chosen was so extremely clever.
One night, he was wrapped in a threadbare cloak, listening to the
snuffling sounds of faerie steeds, of deer and elk, and even the croaks of
great riding toads, when a troll woman stopped outside the pen.
"Princeling," she said. Her skin was the rough bluish-gray of river
rocks, and she had a wart on her chin, from which three golden hairs grew.
"You are the youngest of Eldred's spawn, are you not?"
Cardan blinked up from the hay. "Go away," he told her as imperiously
as he could manage.
That made her laugh. "I ought to saddle you and ride you around the
gardens, teach you some manners."
He was scandalized. "You're not supposed to talk to me that way. My
father is the High King."
"Better run and tell him," she said, then raised her eyebrows and ran
fingers over her long golden wart hairs, curling and uncurling them. "No?"
Cardan said nothing. He pressed his cheek against the straw, felt the
scratch of it against his skin. His tail twitched anxiously. He knew the High
King had no interest in him. Perhaps a brother or sister might intercede on
his behalf if they were nearby, and if it amused them to do so, but there was
no telling whether it would.
His mother would have slapped the troll woman and ordered her off.
But his mother wasn't coming. And trolls were dangerous. They were
strong, hot-tempered, and practically invulnerable. Sunlight turned them to
stone—but only until the next nightfall.
The troll woman pointed an accusatory finger at him. "I, Aslog of the
West, who brought the giant
Girda to her knees, who
outwitted the hag of the
Fallow Forest, labored in the
service of Queen Gliten for
seven years. Seven long
years I turned the stone of
her gristmill and ground
wheat so fine and pure that loaves of it were famed all over Elfhame. I was
promised land and a title at the end of those seven years. But on the last
night, she tricked me into moving away from the millstone and forfeiting
the bargain. I came here for justice. I stood before Eldred in the place of the
penitent and asked for succor. But your father turned me away, princeling.
And do you know why? Because he does not wish to interfere with the
lower Courts. But tell me, child, what is the purpose of a High King who
will not interfere?"
Cardan was uninterested in politics but well acquainted with his father's
indifference. "If you think I can help you, I can't. He doesn't like me,
either."
The troll woman—Aslog of the West, he supposed—scowled down at
Cardan. "I am going to tell you a story," she said finally. "And then I will
ask you what meaning you find in the tale."
"Another one? Is this about Queen Gliten, too?"
"Save your wit for your reply."
"And if I don't have an answer?"
She smiled down at him with no small amount of menace. "Then I will
teach you an entirely different lesson."
He thought about calling out to a servant. A groom might be close by,
but he had endeared himself to none of them. And what could they do,
anyway? Better to humor her and listen to her stupid tale.
"Once upon a time," Aslog told him, "there was a boy with a wicked
tongue."
Cardan tried not to snort. Despite being a little afraid of her, despite
knowing better, he had a tendency toward levity at the worst possible
moments.