The Cruel Prince (14 page)

He makes a bow. “You may inform your lady mother that though I am honored to be asked to her table, I would not so impose myself on her. I only wanted to speak with you both. I will, however, call again. You may be sure of that.”

“You talked to Jude about school?” There is trepidation in Taryn's voice. I wonder what they spoke about before I returned. I wonder if he persuaded her to attend the lectures again, and if so, how he did it.

“Until tomorrow,” he says to us with a wink.

I watch him walk off, still overwhelmed. I don't dare look at Taryn, for fear she will see all of it on my face, the whole day's events, the almost kiss. I am not ready to talk, so I am the one who avoids her for once. Skipping up the steps with as much nonchalance as I can muster, I head to my room to change for dinner.

I forgot that I asked Madoc to teach me swordplay and strategy, but after dinner he gives me a stack of military history books from his personal library.

“When you're done reading these, we will talk,” he informs me. “I will set you a series of challenges, and you will tell me how you might overcome them with the resources I give you.”

I think he expects me to object and insist on more swordplay, but I am too tired to even think of it.

Flopping down on my bed an hour later, I decide that I am not going to even take off the blue silk dress I am wearing. My hair is still disarranged, although I tried to improve it with a few pretty pins. I should take those out, at least, I tell myself, but I can't seem to make any movement toward doing so.

My door opens, and Taryn comes in, hopping up onto my bed.

“Okay,” she says, poking me in the side. “What did Locke want? He said he had to talk to you.”

“He's nice,” I say, rolling over and folding my arms behind my head, staring up at the folds of fabric gathered above me. “Not totally Cardan's puppet like the rest of them.”

Taryn has an odd expression on her face, like she wants to contradict me but is holding herself back. “Whatever. Spill.”

“About Locke?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “About what happened with him and his friends.”

“They're never going to respect me if I don't fight back,” I tell her.

She sighs. “They're never going to respect you, period.”

I think of crawling across the grass, my knees dirty, the savor of the fruit in my mouth. Even now I can taste the echo of it, the emptiness it would fill, the giddy, delirious joy it promises.

Taryn goes on. “You came home practically naked yesterday, smeared with faerie fruit. Isn't that bad enough? Don't you care?” Taryn has pulled her whole body back against one of the posts of my bed.

“I am tired of caring,” I say. “Why should I?”

“Because they could kill you!”

“They better,” I say to her. “Because anything less than that isn't going to work.”

“Do you have a plan for stopping them?” she asks. “You said you were going to defy Cardan by being your awesome self and if he tried to take you down, you'd take him down with you. How are you going to manage that?”

“I don't know exactly,” I admit.

She throws up her hands in frustration.

“No, look,” I say. “Every day that I don't beg Cardan for forgiveness over a feud he started is a day I win. He can humiliate me, but every time he does and I don't back down, he makes himself less powerful. After all, he's throwing everything he's got at someone as weak as I am and it's not working. He's going to take himself down.”

She sighs and comes over to me, laying her head against my chest, putting her arms around me. Against my shoulder she whispers, “He's flint, you're tinder.”

I hug her closer and make no promises.

We stay like that for a long moment.

“Did Locke threaten you?” she asks softly. “It was so odd that he came here looking for you, and then you had such a weird expression when I walked into the stables.”

“No, nothing bad,” I tell her. “I don't know exactly what he came for, but he kissed my hand. It was nice, like out of a storybook.”

“Nice things don't happen in storybooks,” Taryn says. “Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.”

It's my turn to sigh. “I know it's stupid, thinking well of one of Cardan's friends, but he really did help me. He stood up to Cardan. But I'd rather talk about you. There's someone, isn't there? When you said you were going to fall in love, you were talking about someone in particular.”

Not that I'd be the first to green gown her.

“There's a boy,” she says slowly. “He's going to declare himself at Prince Dain's coronation. He's going to ask for my hand from Madoc, and then everything is going to change for me.”

I think of her weeping, standing beside Cardan. I think of how angry she's been that I am feuding with him. I think of that, and a cold and terrible dread creeps over me. “
Who?
” I demand.

Please not Cardan. Anyone but Cardan.

“I promised not to tell anyone,” she says. “Even you.”

“Our promises don't matter,” I say, thinking of Prince Dain's geas still freezing my tongue, of how little any of them trust us. “No one expects us to have any honor. Everyone knows we lie.”

She gives me a stern, disapproving look. “It's a faerie prohibition. If I break it, he'll know. I need to show him I can live like one of the Folk.”

“Okay,” I say slowly.

“Be happy for me,” she says, and I feel cut to the quick. She has found her place in Faerie, and I guess I have found mine. But I can't help worrying.

“Just tell me something about him. Tell me that he is kind. Tell me that you love him and that he's promised to be good to you. Tell me.”

“He's a faerie,” she says. “They don't love the way we do. And I think you would like him—there, that's something.”

That doesn't sound like Cardan, whom I despise. But I am not sure I find her answer reassuring, either.

What does it mean, I would like him? Does that mean we've never met? What does it mean that he doesn't love the way we do?

“I
am
happy for you. Honest,” I say, although I am more worried than anything. “This is exciting. When Oriana's dressmaker comes, you're going to have to make sure you get an extra-pretty gown.”

Taryn relaxes. “I just want everything to be better. For both of us.”

I reach over to my bedside table to retrieve the book I stole from Hollow Hall. “Remember this?” I ask, lifting up the collected
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
book. When I do, a folded piece of paper slips out and flutters to the floor.

“We used to read that when we were little,” she says, grabbing for the book. “Where did you get it?”

“I found it,” I say, not able to explain whose bookshelf it had come from or why I had been in Hollow Hall in the first place. To test the geas, I try to say the words:
Spying for Prince Dain
. My mouth will not move. My tongue stays still. A wave of panic washes over me, but I push it back. This is a small price for what he's given me.

Taryn doesn't press for more information. She's too busy flipping through the pages and reading bits of it aloud. While I can't quite remember the cadence of my mother's voice, I think I hear an echo of it in Taryn's.

“
Now,
here
, you see, it takes all the running
you
can do, to keep in the same place
,” she reads.
“If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I reach down surreptitiously and shove the fallen paper under my pillow. I plan to unfold it once she returns to her room, but instead I fall asleep, long before the story is over.

I wake in the early morning, alone, needing to pee. I pad into my bath area, lift my skirts, and do my business in the copper basin left there for this purpose, shame heating my face even though I am alone. It is one of the most humbling aspects of being human. I know that faeries are not gods—maybe I know that better than any mortal alive—but neither have I ever seen one hunched over a bedpan.

Back in bed, I push aside the curtain and let the sunlight spill in, brighter than any lamp. I take the folded-up paper from behind my pillow.

Smoothing it out, I see Cardan's furious, arrogant handwriting scrawled over the page, taking up all available space. In some places he pressed the nib so angrily that the paper tore.

Jude
, it reads, each hateful rendering of my name like a punch to the gut.

T
he dressmaker comes early the next afternoon, a long-fingered faerie called Brambleweft. Her feet are turned backward, giving her an odd gait. Her eyes are like those of a goat, brown with a horizontal line of black just at the center. She is wearing an example of her work, a woven dress with embroidered lines of thorns making a striped pattern down the length of it.

She has brought with her bolts of fabric, some of it stiff gold, one that changes color like iridescent beetle wings. Beside that, she tells us, is a spider silk so fine that it could have fit through the eye of a needle three times over and yet strong enough to have to be cut with silver scissors magicked to never lose their edge. The purple fabric shot through with gold and silver is so bright that it seems like moonlight itself puddling over the cushions.

All the fabrics are draped onto the couch in Oriana's parlor for us to inspect. Even Vivi is drawn to run her fingers over the cloth, an absent smile on her face. There is nothing like this in the mortal world, and she knows it.

Oriana's current maid, a hairy, wizened creature named Toadfloss, brings tea and cakes, meat and jam, all piled on a massive silver tray. I pour myself tea and drink it without cream, hoping it will settle my stomach. The terror of the last few days is at my heels, making me shudder without warning. The memory of the faerie fruit keeps rising unbidden to my tongue, along with the cracked lips of the servants in Balekin's palace and the sound of the leather as it struck Prince Cardan's bare back.

And my own name, written over and over and over. I thought I knew how much Cardan hated me, but looking at that paper, I realized I had no idea. And he'd hate me even more still if he knew I had seen him on his knees, beaten by a human servant. A mortal, for an extra bit of humiliation, an extra dose of rage.

“Jude?” Oriana says, and I realize that I've been staring off toward the window and the fading light.

“Yes?” I put on a bright, false smile.

Taryn and Vivienne begin to laugh.

“And just who are you thinking about with a dreamy expression like that on your face?” Oriana asks, which makes Vivi laugh again. Taryn doesn't, probably because she thinks I am an idiot.

I shake my head, hoping I have not gone red-faced. “No, it wasn't anything like that. I was just—I don't know. It doesn't matter. What were we talking about?”

“The seamstress wishes to measure you first,” Oriana says. “Since you're the youngest.”

I look over at Brambleweft, who holds a string between her hands. I hop up onto the box she has set before her, holding out my arms. I am a good daughter today. I am going to get a pretty gown. I will dance at Prince Dain's coronation until my feet bleed.

“Don't scowl,” the seamstress says. Before I can stammer apologies, she continues, voice pitched low. “I was told to sew this dress with pockets that can conceal weapons and poisons and other little necessities. We'll make sure that's done while still showing you to great advantage.”

I almost stumble off the box, I am so surprised. “That's wonderful,” I whisper back, knowing better than to thank her. Faeries don't believe in dismissing gratitude with a few words. They believe in debts and bargains, and the person I am meant to be most indebted to is not here. Prince Dain is the one who expects to be repaid.

She smiles, pins in her mouth, and I grin back at her. I will repay him, although it seems I will have much to repay him for. I will make him proud of me. Everyone else, I will make very, very sorry.

When I look up, Vivi is watching me suspiciously. Taryn is next to be measured. As she gets on the box, I go and drink more tea. Then I eat three sugary cakes and a strip of ham.

“Where did you go the other day?” Vivi asks as I gulp down the meat like some kind of raptor bird. I have woken ravenous.

I think of how I fled from our conversation on my way to Hollow Hall. I can't exactly deny that, not without explaining more about where I was going than my geased tongue will allow. I shrug, one-shouldered.

“I made one of the other Gentry kids describe what happened to you at that lecture,” Vivi says. “You could have died. The only reason you're alive is that they didn't want their game to be over.”

“That's the way they are,” I remind her. “That's the way things are. Do you want the world to be different than it is? Because this is the world we get, Vivi.”

“It's not the only world,” she says softly.

“It's
my
world,” I say, my heart hammering in my chest. I stand before she can tell me otherwise. My hands are shaking, though, and my palms are sweaty when I go to finger the fabrics.

Ever since I staggered home through the woods in my underwear, I have been trying to feel nothing about what happened. I am afraid that if I begin to feel, I won't be able to bear it. I am afraid that the emotion will be like a wave sucking me under.

It's not the first awful thing I have endured and pushed into the back of my brain. That's how I've been coping, and if there's another, better way, I do not know it.

I focus my attention on the cloth until I can breathe evenly again, until the panic dissipates. There's a velvet blue-green, reminding me of the lake at dusk. I find an amazing, fantastical fabric embroidered with moths and butterflies and ferns and flowers. I lift it up, and underneath is a bolt of beautiful fog-gray cloth that ripples like smoke. They're so very pretty. The kind of fabrics that princesses in fairy tales wear.

Of course, Taryn is right about stories. Bad things happen to those princesses. They are pricked with thorns, poisoned by apples, married to their own fathers. They have their hands cut off and their brothers turned into swans, their lovers chopped up and planted in basil pots. They vomit up diamonds. When they walk, it feels as though they're walking on knives.

They still manage to look nice.

“I want that one,” Taryn says, pointing to the bolt of fabric I'm holding, the one with the embroidery. She's done being measured. Vivi is up there, holding out her arms, watching me in that unnerving way she has, as though she knows my very thoughts.

“Your sister found it first,” Oriana says.

“Pleeeeeeeease,” Taryn says to me, bending her head and looking up through her eyelashes. She's joking, but she's not. She needs to look nice for this boy who is supposed to declare himself at the coronation. She doesn't understand what use my looking nice would be, me with my grudges and feuds.

With a half smile, I set down the bolt. “Sure. All yours.”

Taryn kisses me on the cheek. I guess we're back to normal. If only everything in my life were so easily resolved.

I choose a different cloth, the dark blue velvet. Vivienne chooses a violet that seems to be a silvery gray when she turns it over her hand. Oriana chooses a blush pink for herself and a cricket green for Oak. Brambleweft starts to sketch—billowing skirts and cunning little capes, corsets stitched with fanciful creatures. Butterflies alighting along arms and in elaborate headpieces. I am charmed at the alien vision of myself—my corset will have two golden beetles stitched in what looks like a breastplate, with Madoc's moon crest and elaborate swirls of shining thread continuing down my front, and tiny sheer drop sleeves of more gold.

It will certainly be clear to what household I belong.

We are still making small changes when Oak runs in, being chased by Gnarbone. Oak spots me first and scrambles onto my lap, throwing his arms around my neck and giving me a small bite just beneath my shoulder.

“Ow!” I say in surprise, but he just laughs. It makes me laugh, too. He's kind of a weird kid, maybe because he's a faerie or maybe because all kids, human or inhuman, are equally weird. “Do you want me to tell you a story about a little boy who bit a stone and lost all his pearly white teeth?” I ask him in what I hope is a menacing fashion, sticking my fingers under his armpits to tickle him.

“Yes,” he says immediately between breathless giggles and shrieks.

Oriana strides over to us, her face full of trouble. “That's very kind of you, but we ought to begin dressing for dinner.” She pulls him off my lap and into her arms. He begins screaming and kicking his legs. One of the kicks lands against my stomach hard enough to bruise, but I don't say anything.

“Story!” he shouts. “I want the story!”

“Jude is busy right now,” she says, carrying his squirming body toward the door, where Gnarbone is waiting to take him back to the nursery.

“Why don't you ever trust me with him?” I shout, and Oriana wheels around, shocked that I said a thing we don't say. I am shocked, too, but I can't stop. “I'm not a monster! I've never done anything to either of you.”

“I want the story,” Oak whines, sounding confused.

“That's enough,” Oriana says sternly, as though we've all been arguing. “We will speak about this later with your father.”

With that, she strides from the room.

“I don't know whose father you're talking about, because he's sure not mine,” I call after her.

Taryn's eyes go saucer-wide. Vivienne has a small smile on her face. She takes a minute sip of tea, and then she raises the cup in my direction in salute. The seamstress is looking down and away, leaving us to our private family moment.

I cannot seem to contort myself back into the shape of a dutiful child.

I am coming unraveled. I am coming undone.

The next day at school, Taryn walks beside me, swinging her lunch basket. I keep my head high and my jaw set. I have my little knife with me, cold iron, tucked into one of the pockets of my skirt, and more salt than I reasonably need. I even have a new necklace of rowan berries, sewn by Tatterfell and worn because there was no way she could know I didn't need it.

I dally in the palace garden to gather a few more things.

“Are you allowed to pick those?” Taryn asks, but I do not answer her.

In the afternoon, we attend a lecture in a high tower, where we are taught about birdsongs. Every time I feel as though my courage will falter, I let my fingers brush the cool metal of the blade.

Locke looks over, and when he catches my eye, he winks.

From the other side of the room, Cardan scowls at the lecturer but does not speak. When he moves to take an inkpot from a satchel, I see him wince. I think about how sore his back must be, how it must hurt to move. But if he holds himself a little more stiffly as he sneers, that seems to be the only difference in his manner.

He looks well practiced in hiding pain.

I think of the note I found, of the press of his nibbed pen hard enough to send flecks of ink spattering as he wrote my name. Hard enough to dig through the page, maybe to scar the desk beneath.

If that's what he did to the paper, I shudder to think what he wants to do to me.