The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air Book 1)

On our way home, Taryn stops and picks blackberries beside the Lake of Masks. I sit on a rock in the moonlight and deliberately do not look into the water. The lake doesn’t reflect your own face—it shows you someone else who has looked or will look into it. When I was little, I used to sit at the bank all day, staring at faerie countenances instead of my own, hoping that I might someday catch a glimpse of my mother looking back at me.

Eventually, it hurt too much to try.

“Are you going to quit the tournament?” Taryn asks, shoveling a handful of berries into her mouth. We are hungry children. Already we are taller than Vivi, our hips wider, and our breasts heavier.

I open my basket and take out a dirty plum, wiping it on my shirt. It’s still more or less edible. I eat it slowly, considering. “You mean because of Cardan and his Court of Jerks?”

She frowns with an expression just like one I might make if she was being particularly thickheaded. “Do you know what they call us?” she demands. “The Circle of Worms.”

I hurl the pit at the water, watching ripples destroy the possibility of any reflections. My lip curls.

“You’re littering in a magical lake,” she tells me.

“It’ll rot,” I say. “And so will we. They’re right. We are the Circle of Worms. We’re mortal. We don’t have forever to wait for them to let us do the things we want. I don’t care if they don’t like my being in the tournament. Once I become a knight, I’ll be beyond their reach.”

“Do you think Madoc’s going to allow that?” Taryn asks, giving up on the bush after the brambles make her fingers bleed. “Answering to someone other than him?”

“What else has he been training us for?” I ask. Wordlessly, we fall into step together, making our way home.

“Not me.” She shakes her head. “I am going to fall in love.”

I am surprised into laughter. “So you’ve just decided? I didn’t think it worked like that. I thought love was supposed to happen when you least expected it, like a sap to the skull.”

“Well, I have decided,” she says. I consider mentioning her last ill-fated decision—the one about having fun at the revel—but that will just annoy her. Instead, I try to imagine someone she might fall in love with. Maybe it will be a merrow, and he will give her the gift of breathing underwater and a crown of pearls and take her to his bed under the sea.

Actually, that sounds amazing. Maybe I am making all the wrong choices.

“How much do you like swimming?” I ask her.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

She, suspecting some sort of teasing, elbows me in the side.

We head through the Crooked Forest, with its bent trunks, since the Milkwood is dangerous at night. We have to stop to let some root men pass, for fear they might step on us if we didn’t keep out of their way. Moss covers their shoulders and crawls up their bark cheeks. Wind whistles through their ribs.

They make a beautiful and solemn procession.

“If you’re so sure Madoc is going to give you permission, why haven’t you asked him yet?” Taryn whispers. “The tournament is only three days away.”

Anyone can fight in the Summer Tournament, but if I want to be a knight, I must declare my candidacy by wearing a green sash across my chest. And if Madoc will not allow me that, then no amount of skill will help me. I will not be a candidate, and I will not be chosen.

I am glad the root men give me an excuse not to answer, because, of course, she’s right. I haven’t asked Madoc because I am afraid of what he will say.

When we get home, pushing open the enormous wooden door with its looping ironwork, someone is shouting upstairs, as though in distress. I run toward the sound, heart in my mouth, only to find Vivi in her room, chasing a cloud of sprites. They streak past me into the hall in a blast of gossamer, and she slams the book she was swinging at them into the door casing.

“Look!” Vivi yells at me, pointing toward her closet. “Look what they did.”

The doors are open, and I see a sprawl of things stolen from the human world, matchbooks, newspapers, empty bottles, novels, and Polaroids. The sprites had turned the matchbooks into beds and tables, shredded all the paper, and ripped out the centers of the books to nest inside. It was a full-on sprite infestation.

But I am more baffled by the quantity of things Vivi has and how many of them don’t seem to have any value. It’s just junk. Mortal junk.

“What is all that?” Taryn asks, coming into the room. She bends down and extracts a strip of pictures, only gently chewed by sprites. The pictures are taken one right after the other, the kind you have to sit in a booth for. Vivi is in the photos, her arm draped over the shoulders of a grinning, pink-haired mortal girl.

Maybe Taryn isn’t the only one who has decided to fall in love.

At dinner, we sit at a massive table carved along all four sides with images of piping fauns and dancing imps. Fat wax pillar candles burn at the center, beside a carved stone vase full of wood sorrel. Servants bring us silver plates piled with food. We eat fresh broad beans, venison with scattered pomegranate seeds, grilled brown trout with butter, a salad of bitter herbs, and, for after, raisin cakes smothered in apple syrup. Madoc and Oriana drink canary wine; we children mix ours with water.

Next to my plate and Taryn’s is a bowl of salt.

Vivi pokes at her venison and then licks blood from her knife.

Oak grins across the table and starts to mimic Vivi, but Oriana snatches the cutlery from his grasp before he can slice his tongue open. Oak giggles and picks up his meat with his fingers, tearing at it with sharp teeth.

“You should know that the king will soon abdicate his throne in favor of one of his children,” Madoc says, looking at all of us. “It is likely that he will choose Prince Dain.”

It doesn’t matter that Dain is third-born. The High Ruler chooses their successor—that’s how the stability of Elfhame is ensured. The first High Queen, Mab, had her smith forge a crown. Lore has it that the blacksmith was a creature called Grimsen, who could shape anything from metal—birds that trill and necklaces that slither over throats, twin swords called Heartseeker and Heartsworn that never missed a strike. Queen Mab’s crown was magically and wondrously wrought so that it passes only from one blood relation to another, in an unbroken line. With the crown passes the oaths of all those sworn to it. Although her subjects gather at each new coronation to renew their fealty, authority still rests in the crown.

“Why’s he abdicating?” Taryn asks.

Vivi’s smirk has turned nasty. “His children got impatient with him for remaining alive.”

A wash of rage passes over Madoc’s face. Taryn and I don’t dare bait him for fear that his patience with us stretches only so far, but Vivi is expert at it. When he answers her, I can see the effort he’s making to bite his tongue. “Few kings of Faerie have ruled so well for so long as Eldred. Now he goes to seek the Land of Promise.”

As far as I can tell, the Land of Promise is their euphemism for death, although they do not admit it. They say it is the place that the Folk came from and to which they will eventually return.

“Are you saying he’s leaving the throne because he’s old?” I ask, wondering if I’m being impolite. There are hobs born with lined faces like tiny, hairless cats and smooth-limbed nixies whose true age shows only in their ancient eyes. I didn’t think time mattered to them.

Oriana doesn’t look happy, but she isn’t actively shushing me, either, so maybe it’s not that rude. Or maybe she doesn’t expect any better than bad manners out of me.

“We may not die from age, but we grow weary with it,” Madoc says with a heavy sigh. “I have made war in Eldred’s name. I have broken Courts that denied him fealty. I have even led skirmishes against the Queen of the Undersea. But Eldred has lost his taste for bloodshed. He allows those under his banners to rebel in small and large ways even as other Courts refuse to submit to us. It’s time to ride to battle. It’s time for a new monarch, a hungry one.”

Oriana furrows her brow in mild confusion. “By preference, your kin would have you safe.”

“What good is a general with no war?” Madoc takes a large, restless swallow of wine. I wonder how often he needs to wet his cap with fresh blood. “The new king’s coronation will be at the autumn solstice. Worry not. I have a plan to ensure our futures. Only concern yourselves with making ready for a great deal of dancing.”

I am wondering what his plan might be when Taryn kicks me under the table. When I turn to glare at her, she raises both brows. “Ask him,” she mouths.

Madoc looks in her direction. “Yes?”

“Jude wants to ask you something,” Taryn says. The worst part is, I think she believes she’s helping.

I take a deep breath. At least he seems to be in a good mood. “I’ve been thinking about the tournament.” I imagined saying these words many, many times, but now that I am actually doing it, they don’t seem to come out the way I planned. “I’m not bad with a sword.”

“You do yourself too modest,” Madoc says. “Your bladesmanship is excellent.”

That seems encouraging. I look over at Taryn, who appears to be holding her breath. Everyone at the table has gone still except for Oak, who taps his glass against the side of his plate. “I am going to fight in the Summer Tournament, and I want declare myself ready to be chosen for knighthood.”

Madoc’s brows go up. “That’s what you want? It’s dangerous work.”

I nod. “I’m not afraid.”

“Interesting,” he says. My heart thuds dully in my chest. I have thought through every aspect of this plan except for the possibility that he won’t allow it.

“I want to make my own way at the Court,” I say.

“You’re no killer,” he tells me. I flinch, my gaze coming up to his. He looks back at me steadily with his golden cat eyes.

“I could be,” I insist. “I’ve been training for a decade.”

Since you took me, I do not say, although it must be in my eyes.

He shakes his head sadly. “What you lack is nothing to do with experience.”

“No, but—” I begin.

“Enough. I have made my decision,” he says, raising his voice to cut me off. After a moment when we both are silent, he gives me a conciliatory half smile. “Fight in the tournament if you like, for sport, but you will not put on the green sash. You’re not ready to be a knight. You can ask me again after the coronation, if your heart’s still set on it. And if it’s a whim, that will be time enough for it to pass.”

“This is no whim!” I hate the desperation in my voice, but I have been counting down the days to the tournament. The idea of waiting months, just so he can turn me down again, fills me with wild despair.

Madoc gives me an unreadable look. “After the coronation,” he repeats.

I want to scream at him: Do you know how hard it is to always keep your head down? To swallow insults and endure outright threats? And yet I have done so. I thought it proved my toughness. I thought if you saw I could take whatever came at me and still smile, you would see that I was worthy.

You’re no killer.

He has no idea what I am.

Maybe I don’t know, either. Maybe I never let myself find out.

“Prince Dain will make a fine king,” Oriana says, deftly shifting the conversation back to pleasant things. “A coronation means a month of balls. We will need new dresses.” She seems to include Taryn and me in this sweeping statement. “Magnificent ones.”

Madoc nods, smiling his toothy smile. “Yes, yes, as many as you like. I would have you look your finest and dance your hardest.”

I try to breathe slowly, to concentrate on just one thing. The pomegranate seeds on my plate, shining like rubies, wet with venison blood.

After the coronation, Madoc said. I try to focus on that. It only feels like never.

I’d love to have a Court dress like the ones I have seen in Oriana’s wardrobe, opulent patterns intricately stitched on skirts of gold and silver, each as beautiful as the dawn. I focus on that, too.

But then I go too far and imagine myself in that dress, sword at my hip, transformed, a true member of the Court, a knight in the Circle of Falcons. And Cardan watching me from across the room, standing beside the king, laughing at my pretension.

Laughing like he knows this is a fantasy that won’t ever be real.

I pinch my leg until pain washes everything away.

“You’ll have to wear out the soles of your shoes, just like the rest of us,” Vivi says to me and Taryn. “I bet Oriana’s sick with worry that since Madoc encouraged you to dance, she can’t stop you. Horror of horrors, you might have a good time.”

Oriana presses her lips together. “That’s not fair, nor is it true.”

Vivi rolls her eyes. “If it wasn’t true, I couldn’t say it.”

“Enough, all of you!” Madoc slams his hand down on the table, making us all jump. “Coronations are a time when many things are possible. Change is coming, and there is no wisdom in crossing me.”

I can’t tell if he’s talking about Prince Dain or ungrateful daughters or both.

“Are you afraid someone is going to try for the throne?” Taryn asks. Like me, she has been raised on strategy, moves and countermoves, ambushes and upper hands. But unlike me, she has Oriana’s talent for asking the question that will steer a conversation toward less rocky shores.

“The Greenbriar line ought to worry, not me,” Madoc says, but he looks pleased to be asked. “Doubtless some of their subjects wish there was no Blood Crown and no High King at all. His heirs ought to be particularly careful that the armies of Faerie are satisfied. A well-seasoned strategist waits for the right opportunity.”

“Only someone with nothing to lose would attack the throne with you there to protect it,” Oriana says primly.

“There’s always something left to lose,” Vivi says, and then makes a hideous face at Oak. He giggles.

Oriana reaches for him and then stops herself. Nothing bad is actually happening. And yet I see the gleam in Vivi’s cat eyes, and I’m not sure Oriana’s wrong to be nervous.

Vivi would like to punish Madoc, but her only power is to be a thorn in his side. Which means occasionally tormenting Oriana through Oak. I know Vivi loves Oak—he’s our brother, after all—but that doesn’t mean she’s above teaching him bad things.

Madoc smiles at all of us, now the picture of contentment. I used to think he didn’t notice all the currents of tension that ran through the family, but as I get older, I see that barely suppressed conflict doesn’t bother him in the least. He likes it just as well as open war. “Perhaps none of our enemies are particularly good strategists.”

“Let’s hope not,” Oriana says distractedly, her eyes on Oak, lifting her glass of canary wine.

“Indeed,” says Madoc. “Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies.”

I pick up my glass and knock it into Taryn’s, then drain it to the very dregs.

There’s always something left to lose.

I think about that all through the dawn, turning it over in my head. Finally, when I can toss and turn no more, I pull on a robe over my nightgown and go outside into the late-morning sun. Bright as hammered gold, it hurts my eyes when I sit down on a patch of clover near the stables, looking back at the house.

All of this was my mother’s before it was Oriana’s. Mom must have been young and in love with Madoc back then. I wonder what it was like for her. I wonder if she thought she was going to be happy here.

I wonder when she realized she wasn’t.

I have heard the rumors. It is no small thing to confound the High King’s general, to sneak out of Faerie with his baby in your belly and hide for almost ten years. She left behind the burned remains of another woman in the blackened husk of his estate. No one can say she didn’t prove her toughness. If she’d just been a little luckier, Madoc would have never realized she was still alive.

She had a lot to lose, I guess.

I’ve got a lot to lose, too.

But so what?

“Skip our lessons today,” I tell Taryn that afternoon. I am dressed and ready early. Though I have not slept, I do not feel at all tired. “Stay home.”

She gives me a look of deep concern as a pixie boy, newly indebted to Madoc, braids her chestnut hair into a crown. She is sitting primly at her dressing table, clad all in brown and gold. “Telling me not to go means I should. Whatever you’re thinking, stop. I know you’re disappointed about the tournament—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, although, of course, it does. It matters so much that, now, without hope of knighthood, I feel like a hole has opened up under me and I am falling through it.

“Madoc might change his mind.” She follows me down the stairs, grabbing up our baskets before I can. “And at least now you won’t have to defy Cardan.”

I turn on her, even though none of this is her fault. “Do you know why Madoc won’t let me try for knighthood? Because he thinks I’m weak.”

“Jude,” she cautions.

“I thought I was supposed to be good and follow the rules,” I say. “But I am done with being weak. I am done with being good. I think I am going to be something else.”

“Only idiots aren’t scared of things that are scary,” Taryn says, which is undoubtedly true, but still fails to dissuade me.

“Skip lessons today,” I tell her again, but she won’t, so we go to school together.

Taryn watches me warily as I talk with the leader of the mock war, Fand, a pixie girl with skin the blue of flower petals. She reminds me that there’s a run-through tomorrow in preparation for the tournament.

I nod, biting the inside of my cheek. No one needs to know that my hopes were dashed. No one needs to know I ever had any hope at all.

Later, when Cardan, Locke, Nicasia, and Valerian sit down to their lunch, they have to spit out their food in choking horror. All around them are the less awful children of faerie nobles, eating their bread and honey, their cakes and roasted pigeons, their elderflower jam with biscuits and cheese and the fat globes of grapes. But every single morsel in each of my enemies’ baskets has been well and thoroughly salted.

Cardan’s gaze catches mine, and I can’t help the evil smile that pulls up the corners of my mouth. His eyes are bright as coals, his hatred a living thing, shimmering in the air between us like the air above black rocks on a blazing summer day.

“Have you lost your wits?” Taryn demands, shaking my shoulder so that I have to turn to her. “You’re making everything worse. There’s a reason no one stands up to them.”

“I know,” I say softly, unable to keep the smile off my lips. “A lot of reasons.”

She’s right to be worried. I just declared war.