A few feet in, I find the crossbow. It is not the compact thing that I have carried. It’s massive, more than half my size, obviously dragged here—I can see the way the carpet is rucked up in the direction whence it came.
Whoever shot it, shot it from here.
I jump over and keep going. I would expect a passageway like this to have many branches, but this one has none. It dips down at intervals, like a ramp, and turns in on itself, but it runs in only one direction—straight ahead. I hurry, faster and faster, my hand cupped around my candle flame to keep it from going out.
Then I come to a heavy wooden slab carved with the royal crest, the same one stamped in Cardan’s signet ring.
I give it a push, and it shifts, clearly on a track. There’s a bookshelf on the other side.
Until now, I have only heard stories of the great majesty of High King Eldred’s rooms in the very heart of the palace, just above the brugh, the great branches of the throne itself snaking through his walls. Although I’ve never seen them before, the descriptions make it impossible to think I am anywhere else.
I walk through the enormous, cavernous rooms of Eldred’s apartments, candle in one hand, a knife in the other.
And there, sitting on the High King’s bed, her face stained with tears, is Nicasia.
Orlagh’s daughter, Princess of the Undersea, fostered in the High King’s Court as part of the decades-ago treaty of peace between Orlagh and Eldred, Nicasia was once part of the foursome made up of Cardan and his closest, most awful friends. She was also his beloved, until she betrayed him for Locke. I haven’t seen her by Cardan’s side as often since he ascended to the throne, but ignoring her hardly seems like a killing offense.
Is this what Balekin was whispering about with the Undersea? Is this the way Cardan was to be ruined?
“You?” I shout. “You shot Cardan?”
“Don’t tell him!” She glares at me furiously, wiping wet eyes. “And put away that knife.”
Nicasia wears a robe, heavily embroidered with phoenixes and wrapped tightly around herself. Three earrings shine along her lobes, snaking up the ear all the way to their bluish webbed points. Her hair has gotten darker since I saw it last. It was always the many colors of the sea, but now it is the sea in a storm—a deep greenish black.
“Are you out of your mind?” I yell. “You tried to assassinate the High King of Faerie.”
“I didn’t,” she says. “I swear. I only meant to kill the girl he was with.”
For a moment, I am too stunned by the cruelty and indifference to speak.
I take another look at her, at the robe she’s clutching so tightly. With her words echoing in my head, I suddenly have a clear idea of what happened. “You thought to surprise him in his rooms.”
“Yes,” she says.
“But he wasn’t alone.…” I continue, hoping she will take up the tale.
“When I saw the crossbow on the wall, it didn’t seem it would be so difficult to aim,” she says, forgetting the part about dragging it up through the passageway, though it’s heavy and awkward and that couldn’t have been easy. I wonder how angry she was, how unthinking in her rage.
Of course, perhaps she was thinking entirely clearly.
“It’s treason, you know,” I say aloud. I am shaking, I realize. The aftereffects of believing someone tried to assassinate Cardan, of realizing he could have died. “They’ll execute you. They’ll make you dance yourself to death in iron shoes heated hot as pokers. You’ll be lucky if they put you in the Tower of Forgetting.”
“I am a Princess of the Undersea,” she says haughtily, but I can see the shock on her face as my words register. “Exempt from the laws of the land. Besides, I told you I wasn’t aiming for him.”
Now I understand the worst of her behavior in school: She thought she could never be punished.
“Have you ever used a crossbow before?” I ask. “You put his life at risk. He could have died. You idiot, he could have died.”
“I told you—” she starts to repeat herself.
“Yes, yes, the compact between the sea and the land,” I interrupt her, still furious. “But it just so happens I know that your mother is intent on breaking the treaty. You see, she will say it was between Queen Orlagh and High King Eldred, not Queen Orlagh and High King Cardan. It doesn’t apply any longer. Which means it won’t protect you.”
At that, Nicasia gapes at me, afraid for the first time. “How did you know that?”
I wasn’t sure, I think but do not say. Now I am.
“Let’s assume I know everything,” I tell her instead. “Everything. Always. Yet I’m willing to make a deal with you. I’ll tell Cardan and the guard and the rest of them that the shooter got away, if you do something for me.”
“Yes,” she says before I even lay out the conditions, making the depth of her desperation clear. For a moment, a desire for vengeance rises in me. Once, she laughed at my humiliation. Now I could gloat before hers.
This is what power feels like, pure unfettered power. It’s great.
“Tell me what Orlagh is planning,” I say, pushing those thoughts away.
“I thought you knew everything already,” she returns sulkily, shifting so she can rise from the bed, one hand still clutching her robe. I guess she is wearing very little, if anything, underneath.
You should have just gone in, I want to tell her, suddenly. You should have told him to forget the other girl. Maybe he would have.
“Do you want to buy my silence or not?” I ask, sitting down on the edge of the cushions. “We have only a certain amount of time before someone comes looking for me. If they see you, it will be too late for denials.”
Nicasia gives a long-suffering sigh. “My mother says he is a young and weak king, that he lets others influence him too much.” With that, she gives me a hard look. “She believes he will give in to her demands. If he does, then nothing will change.”
“And if he doesn’t…?”
Her chin comes up. “Then the truce between land and sea will be over, and it will be the land that suffers. The Isles of Elfhame will sink beneath the waves.”
“And then what?” I ask. “Cardan is unlikely to make out with you if your mom floods the place.”
“You don’t understand. She wants us to be married. She wants me to be queen.”
I am so surprised that, for a moment, I just stare at her, fighting down a kind of wild, panicky laughter. “You just shot him.”
The look she gives me is beyond hatred. “Well, you murdered Valerian, did you not? I saw him the night he disappeared, and he was talking about you, talking about paying you back for stabbing him. People say he died at the coronation, but I don’t think he did.”
Valerian’s body is buried on Madoc’s estate, beside the stables, and if it was unearthed, I would have heard about it before now. She’s guessing.
And so what if I did, anyway? I am at the right hand of the High King of Faerie. He can pardon my every crime.
Still, the memory of it brings back the terror of fighting for my life. And it reminds me how she would have delighted in my death the way she delighted in everything Valerian did or tried to do to me. The way she delighted in Cardan’s hatred.
“Next time you catch me committing treason, you can force me to tell you my secrets,” I say. “But right now I’d rather hear what your mother intends to do with Balekin.”
“Nothing,” Nicasia says.
“And here I thought the Folk couldn’t lie,” I tell her.
Nicasia paces the room. Her feet are in slippers, the points of which curl up like ferns. “I’m not! Mother believes Cardan will agree to her terms. She’s just flattering Balekin. She lets him believe he’s important, but he won’t be. He won’t.”
I try to piece the plot together. “Because he’s her backup plan if Cardan refuses to marry you.”
My mind is reeling with the certainty that above all else, I cannot allow Cardan to marry Nicasia. If he did, it would be impossible to prize both of them from the throne. Oak would never rule.
I would lose everything.
Her gaze narrows. “I’ve told you enough.”
“You think we’re still playing some kind of game,” I say.
“Everything’s a game, Jude,” she says. “You know that. And now it’s your move.” With those words, she heads toward the enormous doors and heaves one open. “Go ahead and tell them if you want, but you should know this—someone you trust has already betrayed you.” I hear the slap of her slippers on stone, and then the heavy slam of wood against the frame.
My thoughts are a riot of confusion as I make my way back through the passageway. Cardan is waiting for me in the main room of his chambers, reclining on a couch with a shrewd look on his face. His shirt is still open, but a fresh bandage covers his wound. Across his fingers, a coin dances—I recognize the trick as one of the Roach’s.
Someone you trust has already betrayed you.
From the shattered remains of the door, the Ghost looks in from where he stands with the High King’s personal guard. He catches my eye.
“Well?” Cardan asks. “Have you discovered aught of my erstwhile murderer?”
I shake my head, not quite able to give speech to the lie. I look around at the wreckage of these rooms. There is no way for them to be secure, and they reek of smoke. “Come on,” I say, taking Cardan’s arm and pulling him unsteadily to his feet. “You can’t sleep here.”
“What happened to your cheek?” he asks, his gaze focusing blurrily on me. He’s close enough that I can see his long lashes, the gold ring around the black of his iris.
“Nothing,” I say.
He lets me squire him into the hall. As we emerge, the Ghost and the rest of the guards move immediately to stand at attention.
“At ease,” says Cardan with a wave of his hand. “My seneschal is taking me somewhere. Worry not. I am sure she’s got a plan of some kind.”
His guards fall in line behind us, some of them frowning, as I half-lead him, half-carry him to my chambers. I hate taking him there, but I do not feel confident about his safety anywhere else.
He looks around in amazement, taking in the mess. “Where—Do you really sleep here? Perhaps you ought to set fire to your rooms as well.”
“Maybe,” I say, guiding him to my bed. It is strange to put my hand on his back. I can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin linen of his shirt, can feel the flex of his muscles.
It feels wrong to touch him as though he were a regular person, as though he weren’t both the High King and also my enemy.
He needs no encouragement to sprawl on my mattress, head on the pillow, black hair spilling like crow feathers. He looks up at me with his night-colored eyes, beautiful and terrible all at once. “For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.”
I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?”
He grins up at me. “They missed.”
I have said that he has the power to deliver a compliment and make it hurt. So, too, he can say something that ought to be insulting and deliver it in such a way that it feels like being truly seen.
Our eyes meet, and something dangerous sparks.
He hates you, I remind myself.
“Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”
I feel those words, feel them like a kick to the stomach. He sees my expression and laughs, a sound full of mockery. I can’t tell which of us he’s laughing at.
He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you.
Maybe he hates you the more for it.
After a moment, his eyes flutter closed. His voice falls to a whisper, as though he’s talking to himself. “If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”
He drifts off to sleep, but I am wide awake.