Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing I do after my week of mourning is go to work.

There are jobs for faeries in the mortal world. There are even jobs for people who are faerie-adjacent, like me. I pick up a few here and there, to keep busy. But it’s important for me to have a normal, mortal job, so certain interested parties will think I am living a normal, mortal life. That I am not planning plans, or scheming schemes. That I am resigned to my fate. I am more than willing to be underestimated.

Besides, I don’t want to be indebted to Vivi, even though she says it’s fine and we’re family. Maybe it’s old habit, but I don’t want to owe her too much. Even though I know it doesn’t matter. Even though I know she doesn’t care.

The difficulty comes in finding me a job that doesn’t require a high school diploma or resume that also won’t make me want to kill everyone around me. Vivi says that waitressing is right out. I say she underestimates my acting abilities. She says the second some gross middle-aged man snaps his fingers to summon me I’ll do something rash and draw the sort of attention I don’t want.

She’s probably right.

Eventually, I am set up working irregular hours at a shop that sells comic books and tabletop games and Magic cards. I don’t know anything about comic books, or tabletop games, or Magic cards, which aren’t magical at all, but I can figure out how to work the iPad that serves as a cash register, and that’s enough. I get a phone so I can be texted and pick up two or three shifts a week, mostly on weekday mornings when the shop is dead and all the other workers are busy. That’s a convenient thing about me— these days, I am always available on short notice.

The shop is owned by a bearded, jovial man named Kevin. He pays me for my shifts in crisp twenties, fresh from the bank, and asks very few questions. He is human, but Vivi knows him somehow. All I know is that she makes our introduction and doesn’t step foot in the shop again. I look around at the posters on the walls, at the shelves and shelves of comic books, at the stand which boasts some zines by local artists, and wonder if Heather ever came here, if she introduced Vivi to this place. If this is where they met.

I get an answer a week and a half into my tenure, mid-way through another shift where I count cash and watch terrible shows on the shop TV. The bell over the door rings, and I mute the television then turn to the door to see Heather walk in. Her hair is still pink, nails still splotched with black ink. She’s wearing a backpack and holding a small stack of comic zines in her hands. When she sees me at the register, she stops in her tracks and her eyes widen. A deer about to bolt.

“Wait,” I call, before she can walk out the door. “Vivi’s not here. It’s just me.”

Heather chews the inside of her cheek. I can tell she doesn’t trust me, but she shouldn’t have to abandon a place she likes just because I’m here. That’s stupid.

After a minute of deliberation, she approaches the counter with caution. “I thought you lived over there.”

“I’m here for now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

She softens a little. Maybe it’s something in my tone. “Tell me about it.”

I want to be the person who does. I want to be the person who opens up to a near-stranger who was once almost family, because she doesn’t know me and won’t judge me. I want to cry on her shoulder and let her tell me it’s going to be okay. Maybe it will make my chest feel less hollow, my shoulders lighter.

Instead, I shrug. “Politics.” And then, for reasons I don’t understand, I add, “Men.”

Heather rolls her eyes on my behalf. “Cishet men are the worst. I’m glad I don’t have to date them.” And she smiles at me, as if that is a combination of words I am supposed to make sense of.

“Sure,” I reply. She’s probably trying to sympathize with me. “But girls come with their own problems, right?”

“Yeah.” She frowns. “Some more than others, but, yeah.”

I wasn’t trying to make her think of Vivi. “She didn’t mean any harm,” I say, knowing that it’s true, even if I’m not sure that really matters. I think I’ll manage to sleep fine at night if I defend Vivi to Heather and Heather to Vivi. I believe my sister did more wrong, but I know Vivi loves Heather sincerely. She hasn’t been exactly the same since Heather moved out. “She just doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be a mor— a human over there. She never had to learn.”

Heather looks uncomfortable for a moment, then says quietly, “She should have done better.”

“She should have,” I agree. “I’m sorry she didn’t. But I should have been looking out for you, too. There was just—”

Oak. The Undersea. Locke and Taryn. Madoc.

Cardan.

“There were many things happening at once,” I finish lamely.

Heather gives me a strange look. “Um, yeah. You got kidnapped.”

Right.

I don’t like to think about the missing month that I spent in the Undersea, hopeless, helpless, despairing. Remembering puts me back on the ocean floor with water in my lungs. Belatedly, I realize it would have been a much better lie to say I was sent here to recover from my ordeal. “I’m fine now,” I say quickly. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

This does not seem to persuade her in any direction. “Is that one of the things that just happens over there? Do people just get kidnapped by mermaids?”

“No. That was… new.” I nod at the comics in her perpetually ink-stained fingers, eager to change the subject. “What are those?”

“Oh!” Heather exclaims, as though she’d forgotten them. “These are mine. They let me sell them here sometimes, on the zine shelf. I was hoping to talk to Kevin…”

“He’s out this morning. I’ll take them for now.” I hold out my hands and make sure to handle the comics with care when she passes them over. Out of curiosity, I ask, “What do you sell them for?”

She shrugs. “Like ten bucks. If I were trying to make money, I’d do something else. But this is what I love. It’s just cool to make something someone can hold in their hands.”

There’s a thing about the mortal realm and following your bliss. Doing what you love. It must be nice to be able to do that instead of what it takes to survive.

Heather is looking at me again. “Hey, Jude,” she says a bit dreamily, as though she’s lost in thought. “How old were you when you moved there?”

Moved there. Vivi never bothered to explain that either. My irritation stings. “Seven.”

“Has anyone ever bothered to teach you how to be a person in the real world?”

My world is as real as yours, I want to say. But I know what she means. “No, but I’m a fast learner. It’ll be fine.”

“I can help,” Heather volunteers.

I blink at her slowly, convinced I’ve misheard. “What? Why?”

She shrugs. “You were nice to me when I needed it.”

I am a lot of things. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who would call me nice. I feel a little squeamish, like I have told a bald-faced lie, even though I haven’t.

“I am human, though,” I protest. “I’m sure it’ll all come back to me.”

Heather looks me over, then looks around the shop. Her eyes alight on the TV. “Do you even know how to change the channel on this thing?”

“Uh, no,” I lie. Let her think that’s why Keeping Up With The Kardashians reruns are being broadcasted in a nerd shop. Not because I find watching rich beautiful people be horrible inherently comforting. Familiar. “There are so many buttons.”

Heather sighs. “The world’s changed a lot since 2008, Jude,” she says. “Let me help you out.”

How often have I wanted to hear those words from someone? How often have I balked at them, wary of invisible strings? Heather doesn’t know how good I am at biting the hands that feed me. But she is also human, and doesn’t assume that I’ll be in her debt if I accept. She doesn’t expect anything in return for her help.

In fact, she thinks she’s paying me back.

“Okay,” I say. “Teach me how to be a person.”

The job is the first thing. The second thing I do is take some of my earnings and join a boxing gym.

I am keenly aware of how outmatched I was against Madoc at Cardan’s coronation. Training Oak in swordplay won’t be enough, nor will sparring my own reflection. I can’t fight Cardan in the way that matters with my fists alone, but when I make my return to Faerie, I will probably have to fight just about everyone else.

And if I picture his face anyway and strike a little harder, who’s to know but me and the punching bag?

So I ride the bus to the gym, to trade my twenties for a membership and equipment. There I learn that human fighters are careful in a way that faeries aren’t. I am reckless with my body. They are not. I learn how to wrap my mortal hands so the bones in them don’t shatter. I am given posture corrections so that I don’t sprain or twist anything. I wear padded gloves for punching.

The first time I am matched with another girl to practice crosses and jabs and blocks, she aims just to the side of my head. I aim for her face, and she doesn’t block me fast enough. My glove connects with her nose, and she reels back, clutching at it with her own padded hands. Tears spring up in her eyes, but it’s not broken.

I apologize to her, but only once. She won’t learn to block if she doesn’t learn the consequences of not blocking. But she doesn’t look at me again, and then she’s paired with someone else.

By the second week I am told to only come to the intermediate and advanced sessions in the late afternoons. So I do.

One of the instructors asks me where I learned to fight. I say my father taught me. It isn’t a lie. Madoc would be proud of how even some of the men twice my size are reluctant to spar with me now. But it isn’t the entire truth, either. I am what he made me, but more than that, I am what I made myself.

I wonder if someday I won’t become a tale that faerie mothers tell their children at night: behave, or the mortal Queen will get you.

When I’m packing up one afternoon, I catch my reflection’s eye in one of the mirrors. She is haunted and hungry, a phantom girl. I don’t know her. But the look, I know well.

My human lessons with Heather continue weekly. She asks me to keep her confidence, and I do. I don’t tell Vivi that I see her. I tell myself that Vivi knows anyway, which may or may not be true. She does seem suspicious of how quickly I begin acclimating all of a sudden.

The truth is that I like Heather a lot, and I am a little angry with Vivi for scaring her away. Anger makes me vindictive. Heather and I might have been sisters. With Taryn on our father’s side, I could use another one of those.

We come up with better lies for me, a new biography. Instead of saying I was homeschooled, I say I went to a small private school with a bunch of rich kids, whom I hated. I say I never graduated, but have been working since, and plan to get my GED soon. I say I used to live with my strict adoptive dad, but decided to move in with my sister to get away from all of that. All of these lies have kernels of truth, which makes them easier for me to spout and people to swallow. They make me seem like a person who understands how this world works.

Heather turns out to be into fashion; she’s a student of various Instagram feeds, finding inspiration in them for her drawings. She brings me a copy of one of her earlier zines, with girls of all shapes, sizes and colors in all kinds of different clothes. I point out the pictures I like best, and she sketches up outfits for me. I remember when Taryn designed me a wardrobe and then used it to impersonate me when Cardan was vulnerable. I remind myself that Heather has no agenda other than being nice.

Besides, Heather knows the secret language of human clothes in a way that I do not. She says that I seem like a steel-toed boots person, but am probably actually a black Converse person. I don’t know what any of that means, but I think that if she knew me at all, really knew me, she would go for the steel-toed boots. But every week she sends me off with a shopping list that I take to thrift stores: skinny jeans with rips at the knees, A-line dresses to flatter my figure, knit sweaters for when the weather really turns cold. Bold colors and simple patterns; nothing too busy, everything easy to mix and match.

I even find a leather jacket that fits me like a second skin, and fashion a knife holster for a small Bowie knife to wear on the waistband of my jeans. I feel a little like myself again.

Slang and pop culture are bigger subjects to tackle. Every week I note down words I hear and don’t understand so Heather can translate them for me. I study them until I know most of them well enough to use them in proper context, although I’ll probably never grasp exactly what a “yeet” is.

Since I’m only planning to be here for a short while, Heather comes up with a solution to my conversational woes: if I can pass myself off as nerdy to most people, they’ll forgive me for not knowing pop culture, and if I can pass myself off as mainstream to the nerds, they won’t think I know much obscure geek trivia. The resulting band of things I “need to” need to by her estimation is fairly slim, and I have a lot of it covered by my unfortunate fascination with the Kardashians, but not all.

For example, Heather is scandalized that I haven’t read Harry Potter, and have only seen a couple of the movies. But the first book had only just been placed in my hands when I was seven, and I was spirited away to Faerie shortly after. When I tell Heather this, she temporarily forgets all about Harry Potter and insists that I watch the animated film Spirited Away instead. She manages to dig up a copy on DVD, and sends it home with me.

Oak and Vivi and I watch it on Vivi’s old laptop that night; Vivi narrows her eyes when I produce the movie, but doesn’t ask where I got it. We watch as a girl is separated from her family, as she finds herself in a fantastical world filled with mostly unkind, unempathetic spirits, as she makes impossible bargains and is forced to labor at a bathhouse. I sit, silent and still, even as Oak cackles and gasps and cackles again; he finds it all very funny, especially when the parents turn to pigs. He doesn’t see the horror, but he wouldn’t.

I leave before the end. I know why Heather thought I would like it, and I know that Heather doesn’t know me very well. In that story, the little girl may be out of her depth, but her tenacity and human compassion aid her; she never lets the cruelty of the world in which she’s found herself mold her and make her cruel. I already know how her story goes.

Girls like Chihiro get to go home.

I know I am being followed everywhere I go, but it takes me a few weeks to actually catch a spy.

The one I apprehend rides the bus line I take to and from the boxing gym. The first time I see her, she is wearing a white button-down shirt, a blue blazer, and a plaid skirt that drapes over her knees, as if trying to convince everyone around her that she is a student, as if that explains away the glow and vitality. There is some human blood in her—even though I can see through her glamour just fine, her ears are not as round, features not as delicate, as a full-blooded faerie. She has her nose in a calculus textbook and ignores me from the back of the bus with a little too much eagerness.

I pretend not to see her and let her get comfortable. She gets off at my stop and slyfoots well enough behind me for me to nearly forget that she’s there. When I am in safely in Vivi’s apartment, she walks to the end of the street and disappears around the corner.

The next time I take the bus, she is there, reading The Canterbury Tales and pointedly not looking at me. Again, I give no indication that I see her. Again, she follows me off the bus and trails me until I am home.

The time after that, I enter Vivi’s apartment and wait for her to pass, then slip silently out the door and trail her around the corner. She doesn’t hear me as I approach her, continuing along whatever pre-established route had been agreed upon for her. Her day is over. She is likely going to report to whatever master she has.

I have two options: I can wait for her to make her report and find out who her master is, or I can ambush her now and alter that report before she makes it. It’s not as though she can lie to me.

I am restless. I choose option two.

When I am within arm’s reach of her, I reach out and yank her back by the collar of her blazer, then slam her up against the nearest tree. My free hand goes to my knife, which is out of its sheath and against her throat before either of us can blink.

“Senes—” And then she stops herself, because that’s not right anymore and she has no idea what to call me. That’s fine. I don’t, either. “My lady,” is what she settles on, for although I may be a murderer and an exile, I am still Madoc’s daughter and a member of the Gentry. I think.

“Who sent you?” I demand. No time for courtesy. No time for games. The neighborhood is a little darkened at twilight, the shadows longer, but this also tends to be when people are out walking dogs, and I don’t want to be seen.

“My lady, I am of the Court of Shadows.”

Her eyes are wide. She’s green. Apparently, I am not a difficult assignment. I don’t know whether I’m meant to be insulted or suspicious. “I don’t know you,” is all I say.

“I joined after your—” She pauses, unsure of the delicate way to refer to my abduction at the hands of the Undersea. “Disappearance.”

“To whom do you make your reports?”

“The Roach, my lady. When he comes to return the human laborers to their beds.”

That squares with my knowledge. I once accompanied the Roach on such a mission, a lifetime ago. “Then tell him I’m fine,” I say, and my hands don’t shake even though my voice might. “Tell him I’m living my most mundane mortal life. That I’m healthy and well. And tell him only that.”

A very petty part of me wants to tell her that she should say that I am kissing many people and not thinking of Cardan ever. But I restrain myself.

“That’s not enough,” says the spy. “He’s going to know you found me.”

I release her blazer, but keep the knife on her. She hasn’t made any move to resist me, which makes me certain that she is under orders not to engage. “I’m sure he’s counting on it. Swear. I haven’t asked you to repeat any falsehoods, have I?”

She seems uncomfortable, but says carefully, “I swear to repeat it.”

“And say nothing more,” I press.

“And say nothing more.”

I slide my knife back into its sheath. “Best be on your way. I wouldn’t want you to miss your rendezvous.”

The spy tries to give me a glare and brush off her borrowed mortal uniform with dignity, but she is clearly shaken. Good.

I wait for her to disappear out of sight before walking back to Vivi’s place. That night, I sneak out of the apartment and make my way to the place where the Roach and I once brought a magical boat ashore, laden with human cargo. From a distance, I see the spy make her report. And I see the Roach laugh. He asks her a few more questions, to which she either nods and shakes her head, which I did not explicitly forbid her from doing. Then he sends her on her way.

I really should have told her to say the thing about kissing. Maybe it would have soured Cardan’s mood.

But I was right about this being a test. Not a particularly difficult one, but a test all the same.

Throw something else at me, I think as I creep back to the apartment, alert to every single sound. I’m itching to show you all that I can do.

Faeries have no need for fantasy. Everyone who comes into the shop when I am working is painfully mortal. The times I work afternoons or evenings I bear witness to a few tabletop roleplaying games, where the players escape from lives pretending to be wizards or dwarves or elves. I have to give it to them—they have more imagination than most of the Folk I’ve met, even if they don’t know their swordplay or their poisons.

I can’t help but eavesdrop on their games from behind my counter. It’s a rare opportunity to observe other people who are roughly my age, to see how I might act. This is a very specific type of playacting, though: putting on voices and verbally spelling out the things their characters do, determining the outcomes of events with the rolling of many different die. It is nigh impossible for me to remember the rules without asking questions, so I don’t.

But I do chime in occasionally. It always startles them to remember that I am there.

“Fourteen,” says Carey.

“That’s a hit,” says Jake, the dungeon master, a tall guy with curly hair and glasses. He has clearly never seen the inside of an actual dungeon. “You stab the orc. Roll for damage.”

“Where are you stabbing him?” I ask, curious, as she takes out one of her oddly-shaped die and drops it on the table.

“Where do you normally stab people?” Carey asks rhetorically. She waves a hand in front of her torso. “This general area. Anyway, four points of damage.”

“You need to know where you’re putting that knife, then. You’ll just scrape a rib if you’re not careful. Or if you’re holding the blade wrong.”

I am the recipient of a few bemused stares.

“Well,” I say with a little exasperation, “that’s what ribs are there for.”

“This is a lot,” Carey says.

“She’s right, though,” says Jake. “Roll a d20 again. Let’s see what happens.”

“Are you serious?” Carey turns her stare on him, for which I am grateful. “We’ve never done that before!”

“Yeah, but that was before we had Jude—” Jake falters. “What’s your last name, Jude?”

“Duarte.”

“‘Jude Duarte, Master Assassin’ in our midst.” He grins at me.

One of the other guys, whose name, I think, is Enrique, says, “You should get that on a business card.”

They have no idea.

Sighing, knowing she’s not going to win this argument, Carey picks up the die with twenty sides and rolls it. “It’s a six,” she says glumly.

“Yeah, you definitely hit a rib,” says Jake, and then he looks at me. “Half damage?”

“Sure. And you’ll piss off the orc.”

He laughs. “Okay. Two points of damage and one pissed-off orc, coming right up.”

“I’m only stabbing people in the thigh from now on,” Carey mutters.

“There’s an artery in the thigh,” I point out. “You might get lucky.”

“How do you know this stuff?” Enrique asks.

The lie Heather and I agreed on springs easily to my tongue. “I write fantasy,” I say. “So I do a lot of weird research.”

No one questions me, although some of them probably think I’m a serial killer anyway. As long as they don’t suspect the truth: that I am from another world.

When the store is dead and I don’t have anything to do, I pull out some unsold trades and flip through them. Superhero stories weren’t ubiquitous when Vivi, Taryn and I disappeared from the mortal world, but they are now. It doesn’t take me too long to learn them, though. They’re just what comes after the fairytales. Men who make bargains with gods or science and find themselves with gifts that always have a catch. Kings who gain superhuman powers when they assume the throne. Orphan girls taken from their beds and raised to be killers and spies. My stories.

And through all those hazy days, all those other stories, Heather’s zine calls to me from the zine shelf. I know it’s a bad idea to open it, even though she put her comics out, publicly, to be sold. The cover is black except for a little white drawing of what looks like Tinkerbell, from the Disney Peter Pan. That’s enough to keep me away.

But during a particularly slow morning shift, I cave, even though I know what I’m going to see.

The title page tells me that these are “Adventures in Fairyland.” The pages mostly contain individual scenes: a girl from behind, facing a dark forest, a maze with no clear beginning or end, giant toads with reins. A few detail the story of a girl who gets turned into a cat. Unlike Heather, she transforms fully, shrinking to kitten size, running around through shrubs and between the legs of partygoers until someone picks her up. But the story ends there, without her ever being changed back.

And then the likenesses. Heather’s style borders on caricature—wide eyes, big heads, small noses, slim limbs—but everyone is clearly themselves. There’s Vivi, rendered lovingly and terrifyingly in a few different poses, her inhuman features exaggerated, her teeth sharpened. She is beautiful in a way I don’t entirely recognize, in a way that I know Heather must see her.

Then little Oak with his horns, grinning in one image, clutching a hand, presumably Oriana’s, in another. Taryn and I in our human costumes, then as we were the day of the wedding: Taryn beautiful and glowing in her wedding gown, on the arm of a fox-man, Locke’s animal characteristics overpowering the rest of him; me in Oriana’s borrowed silver gown with Nightfell strapped to me. Taryn looks soft and innocent, the virgin sacrifice. There is something about my likeness that has a very sharp edge.

Then Madoc and Oriana, the odd couple, opposites in almost every way. Other wedding guests, including some of the Folk who must seem strange to her: pixies with jewel-toned skin, the faun musicians, scampering imps. And then Cardan.

I wouldn’t think Heather would find him worthy of drawing, but then again, he is the King of Faerie, and she has portrayed him as such, regal and handsome and unearthly. His black hair curls below his ears. The crown is on his head. The sketch of him is black and white, but I know the scarlet cloak he wears.

I steel myself and turn the page, ready to be rid of him, only to find him again. On the next page, Heather has drawn him looking at me as I walk away, presumably going with Ghost to the site of my abduction. I don’t know that he has ever looked at me that way. Maybe Heather has drawn what she wants to see. Maybe Heather is a big soft romantic.

There are more sketches yet, but I close the zine. I want to throw the thing into the trash. Instead, I calmly walk over and set it back on the shelf, as though someone is watching me. No one is, as far as I can tell, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to pretend.

This is the shape of my days: wake up, go to work, go to boxing, go home, drill Oak in swordplay and help him with homework. And plan. Always plan.

The rhythm is not one that I would call comfortable. But it is predictable. It is monotonous. There are no surprises. It is all I can do not to be lulled into a false sense of contentment.

One day, I come back from work to find Vivi and Oak seated at the kitchen table, waiting expectantly for me.

“What is this?” I ask, toeing off my shoes by the door, feeling prickly. It seems suspiciously like an ambush.

Then I notice the small round cake sitting between them, the two candles burning, a white, waxy one, a blue polka-dotted eight.

“Happy birthday,” Vivi says, grinning at me.

I stare at her.

“We got cake!” Oak exclaims. He has a party hat on his head, slanting precariously between his horns, and he grins at me.

“It’s ice cream cake,” Vivi adds. “Get over here before it melts.”

I do. I sit in the third chair, and don’t explain to her that I’d forgotten my birthday. Not the date, and not that my birthday fell on it, but the concept of my birthday at all. It’s been so long since I’ve celebrated one with ice cream cake and candles.

And singing.

“You know the happy birthday song, right?” Vivi says to Oak, who grins widely in response. He’s probably had to sing it for other kids at school. I wonder how puzzled his first teachers were at him not knowing it. “Okay, count of three. One, two…”

They start singing, Oak in his high warbly child voice, Vivi with more confidence and less of a sense of pitch. I want to sink into the floor, but I endure it.

When the song is over, Oak reaches for the cake with his hand, but Vivi intercepts him before he can so much as smear the icing. “Uh-uh,” she says. “Jude has to blow out the candles and make a wish first, remember? And she’s the birthday girl, so she gets the first bite.”

Oak pouts for a second. I understand. There are so many rules to remember. Then he brightens again, and implores me, “Make a wish, Jude!”

I wonder if he thinks my wish will come true. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s just one of the ordinary, everyday magicks mortals put faith in. When I blow out the candles, my eyes are squeezed tightly shut.

We all know what I wish for.

Vivi informs me that eighteen-year-olds don’t marry in the US unless they’re religious or pregnant. As I am neither, my husband isn’t here, and he only wed me to trick me into relinquishing power over him, she suggests I proceed as though we’re already exes.

“Faeries don’t have a good grasp on monogamy anyway,” she informs me, as though I could forget. “You don’t think he’s—”

“No,” I say coldly. “I don’t.” Mostly because I try not to think about what Cardan might be doing in my absence, or whom. It’s not my concern. It never was. He has plenty of courtiers to warm his bed, not to mention Nicasia, now ambassador of the Undersea. She would be a likely volunteer, and he was strangely eager to keep her around.

“So forget him,” Vivi says, as though it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Go on dates. Kiss boys you don’t like. Or girls. Be a teenager, Jude, at least while you’re here. Figure out who you want to be.”

I know who I want to be. I knew her for hours before she was snatched away from me.

But I don’t argue. Having any fun in the mortal world feels impossible now, but if I’m able to pull it off I’ll spite Cardan in a way he would never imagine, the first coup of many. So I let Vivi swipe through my newly-acquired phone and arrange dates for me. It makes her happy. Who am I to deny her happiness?

The first date is a disaster. I match with a guy who seems all right over text messages. In person, over dinner at a Mexican restaurant, we have nothing to say to each other. We eat chips and salsa, I dully spout my rehearsed lies, and he asks no follow-up questions. He talks about cars and stares at not my face. My burrito tastes like nothing. When we leave, he asks if I want to go home with him.

I turn him down in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

The second one is with a girl, to Vivi’s great delight. Between Locke, Cardan, and that last guy, men haven’t exactly given me a lot to like, and it’s not as though I have anything against girls. This girl is pretty, taller and a little broader than me, with blonde hair in what’s called a “pixie cut,” which is silly, because pixies wear their hair every which way. She’s home for the weekend from college, where she plays something called “rugby,” one of those mortal sports that involves tackling each other into the mud. She likes that I box.

She’s nice, and very normal. I think, had I been raised here, maybe we could have been friends. But there’s nothing else there, and we part with a painfully awkward hug that she initiates.

The third date is a surprise. I don’t seek it out. It finds me.

Jake the dungeon master comes into the shop on a quiet morning when I am behind the counter. “Hey,” he says. “Jude Duarte, Master Assassin. I thought I might find you here.”

“I work here.”

“No, I know.” He shuffles his weight awkwardly, then goes to peer at the collectable figurines for a minute or two. Then he looks at me and says, again, “Hey.”

“What?”

“I kind of want to hear more about those stories you mentioned.”

It takes my mind a second to catch up. “The ones I’m writing?”

“Yeah. I bet they’re good.”

“They’re okay.” I wonder how I would tell my own story and make it sound it happened to someone else, somewhere else. A fictional person. I was never good at weaving narrative for the sake of it, but I think I could manage to spin Once upon a time, a mortal girl and her two sisters were taken from their beds and raised in a land of fairytales…

Jake is quiet for a minute, and then he says abruptly, “Do you want to get coffee sometime?”

I stare at him. “What?”

He shrugs. “If you don’t want to talk about what you’re writing, we can talk about… how to stab people properly. Or anything.”

“Hold the blade flat, then here—” I pantomime. “—if you’re going for the lungs, lower for the liver.” Curious, I look him over. “You realize it’s a really bad idea to ask someone out when they’re working.”

“Yeah, I thought maybe I should start by asking for your number so I could text you about poisons and antidotes, but I decided to just bite the bullet.” He stuffs his hands down in his pockets. He is having a little trouble meeting my eyes. “I thought you might appreciate that. I don’t know.”

“It was a bad idea,” I repeat. “But okay. Sure.”

Jake looks up. “What, really?”

“You weren’t creepy about it, and I drink coffee, so, yeah.” I watch him light up, and heave an internal sigh. He’s so normal, with his glasses and his vintage-looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt that I’m sure is ironic and the fading acne on his jaw. I should really be warning him away from me.

What I actually say is, “Don’t expect too much. I just got out of a relationship.”

I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know that I was ever in a relationship, much less that I am out of it now. But there’s some weird relief that comes from saying this extremely normal thing to this extremely normal boy. It’s a thing that the version of Jude who grew up mortal might say.

“Ouch.” Jake raises his eyebrows. “Is he dead?”

“I wish. Why do you ask?”

“You just seem to know a lot about killing people.” He pauses. “It’s scary, but also kind of hot.”

It’s like I never left home.

“Do not press your luck here,” I caution.

He nods. “Copy that.”

Jake sticks around for a little while to pick up his pull list. We chat about how axe-throwing is apparently a “thing” now. Then we exchange numbers out of necessity, so we can text about where and when to meet for coffee on Saturday. And then he leaves.

I marvel at the normalcy of that interaction. I have never wanted to make it in the mortal world, but for the first time it seems like something I could do: get my GED; work odd jobs; watch bad TV with my sister; take up axe-throwing; go on dates with profoundly normal boys. That frightens me. I remember telling Oak when he first started living with Vivi that it would be time for him to come home when going home felt like the difficult choice. It’s not a difficult choice to me yet—I know where I belong—but for the first time I feel an icy pang of dread at the thought that maybe, someday, it could be.

Sure, I’ll go on a date. But then I need to go back to Faerie. It’s been too long, and I fear that I am far too mortal to resist the strange siren song of this world forever.

Saturday morning rolls around. I shower, dress in clean jeans, my black Converse shoes, and a blue knit top that might be charitably called a sweater but isn’t nearly thick enough. The weather has long been cold, and I pull on my leather jacket and wrap a scarf around my neck. I finish the outfit with a little mascara and my Bowie knife, tucked safely in its sheath. I also keep my pocket knife in my jacket, just in case.

I’ve arranged to meet Jake at a coffee shop within walking distance, since he has a car and I don’t even have a learners’ permit. I arrive early and order a latte. After Cardan exiled me, I find it hard to take my coffee black.

The table I choose allows me to sit with my back to the wall. Jake shows up a couple of minutes late with an apology ready, something about parking. I’m not too bothered. I’d been playing a game on my ancient cell phone, one where a pixel snake eats other pixels and becomes longer and longer and longer. He pokes fun when he sees it, asks if I’m stuck in the mid-2000s, and then goes to buy a coffee and a scone for us to split.

I am stuck in the mid-2000s. More than he could ever know.

Our conversation quickly veers out of my area of expertise. We start awkwardly talking about happenings around the talk, which leads to me asking about a couple of action figures that he bought and receiving way, way too much information about his figurine collection. I am a decent pretend listener, which doesn’t help, because Jake feels all the more empowered to tell me about something called Warhammer 40,000 which seems to involve few actual warhammers and many expensive hand-painted miniatures.

My mind wanders. My eyes do, too. There is art on the far wall of the coffee shop, framed abstract paintings that I do not understand, except the one pastel blue print of an impressionist Eiffel Tower. A middle-aged couple is sharing a table. A woman talks on her cell phone a little too loudly for the space. The barista wipes down the counter. No one is looking at me.

So why do I suddenly feel the prickling at the back of my neck that I get when I am being watched?

I inhale through my nose and take stock of the other people here. The barista. The couple. The woman on her cell phone. All of the people standing in line. And beyond them: a bearded man typing on his laptop. And—

Cardan.

Cardan sits at a table in the back corner of the coffee shop.

My heart stutters to a stop in my chest.

No, no, no. No. This cannot be happening. But it must be happening, because if this were a glamour I’d be able to see through it. Still, there is no rational explanation for his being here.

And yet he is. Not only is he here, but he is attired as though he belongs here. Someone has dressed him as a hipster: he wears several layered shirts, one of them plaid, and maroon skinny jeans cling to his legs. A grey knit cap hides his pointed ears. I can’t help but wonder if some poor mortal man is going to wake up dazed and confused and wearing extremely fine raiment that does not belong to him.

He looks as comfortable as he always does.

He looks ridiculous.

I hadn’t even seen him come in.

He gives me a wave, then sips from a demitasse without breaking eye contact. It is absurdly tiny in his long fingers. Although he has glamoured himself to appear slightly more human, he is still unnaturally striking. Mortals would think he looks like a movie star. One of the girls in line is checking him out.

Before I can plot any course of action—I had envisioned several possibilities for our first meeting, but none of them involved him coming here—he stands from his table, as though having received his cue in a stage play. And he walks over, apparently not realizing how dead he is going to be once he reaches me.

“Hello, Jude,” he says, as though we are old friends meeting by chance. He takes the unoccupied chair from the cell phone lady’s table without asking and drags it over to mine, then sits down.

This is enough to make Jake finally stop talking.

Cardan ignores him completely. The close-lipped smile he wears curdles my stomach. I am reminded of every single feeling I have ever had in his presence. Fear. Hatred. Other things far less comfortable.

“Go away.” I am surprised to find that my voice is perfectly toneless, although I have a white-knuckled grip on my latte.

“I won’t, I’m afraid.” His own voice is calm, like the sea before a storm. His black eyes glitter with something like anger, something I have often mistaken for it. It might actually be anger this time. “It seems that there is much for us to discuss.”

Chapter Text

Madoc always impressed upon me the importance of scrutinizing every possible outcome. It was an impossible goal, the pursuit of omniscience—a lesson that could never be learned. Still, I think even Madoc would not have thought that Cardan might come find me in the mortal world before I had the chance to steal back into his kingdom.

That would be insane.

And yet, that is just what Cardan has done. It defies belief. I have imagined him as the punching bag for three months, and now he is here, sitting next to me at a table that is comically small for three people to share.

I’m nothing if not adaptable. Given a chance to regain my bearings, I’ll turn this around. He just needs to not leave too quickly so I can figure out exactly how.

In fact, I am not sure why I told Cardan to go away when it would better serve my purposes for him to stay. Maybe because when he is near I always feel like my skin is on fire. And he is very near. He leans against the back of the chair and sits with his feet wide. One of them nearly touches mine, but I have long refused to make myself small so he can take up more space.

“Jude,” says Jake. “What’s going on?”

“She’s been rendered speechless,” says Cardan. He sips his espresso. “But I am sure she’ll soon devise a number of canny ways to eviscerate me.”

“Physically or verbally?” I ask, having recovered myself somewhat.

Cardan just smiles.

Jake looks at me. “Do you want this guy to go?”

“What?” I blink at him. When I take his meaning, I bristle. “No, I don’t need help.”

“She is more than capable of handling me herself,” Cardan adds.

“Cardan.” I turn back to him, hardening my countenance. “You are unwanted.”

“Oh, indeed.” His voice is cold. “Next you will tell me of the blue sky and the east-rising sun. It doesn’t much matter. I have come to your court and ask only for a moment of your time. Do you mean to deny me an audience?”

He is mocking me. My cheeks sting. “I would deny you all that you’ve denied me,” I tell him. “And more.”

“Is this a LARP?” Jake asks me. I can almost see the cogs turning in his utterly bewildered mortal brain as he tries to find a reasonable explanation for whatever’s happening right now. “I didn’t know you were into that stuff.”

I look Cardan in the face. There is a part of me that wants to make him feel as small and miserable as I felt standing at the seashore, the butt of his cruelest joke yet. “No,” I say through gritted teeth. “This is a nuisance.”

Cardan is unmoved. “I could use your counsel.”

“Well, I’m very busy. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

“Uh, if you guys need to—” says Jake.

Cardan looks from me, to Jake, to me again, and then he clicks his tongue. “What, busy with him? I shouldn’t think so. You could eat him for lunch.” He leans closer to Jake, away from me, which shouldn’t be as much of a relief as it is. “How long have you known our Lady Jude? I’d much like to know what she’s said of me.”

“Who are you?” asks Jake, finally managing to get a word in edgewise.

I know what Cardan is about to say. Dread pools in my stomach. “Do not—”

But I can no more command Cardan than I can scrub the sinister gleam from his eye. He says, “I am her husband.”

Tackling him to the ground and pulling my knives on him is sadly unacceptable in the mortal world. They have rules about that sort of thing. Though I guess that behavior wouldn’t be any more acceptable in Faerie, where, as far as I know, Cardan still reigns as High King.

Maybe I’d be forgiven if it were all chalked up to a marital dispute.

I rub my temples against a brewing headache, unable to do anything but stew in my fury as long as we are all in public. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Cardan shrugs.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on,” says Jake, looking between us.

“We’re not married,” I say. “He’s joking.”

“When last I saw you, you were eager to claim otherwise.”

I don’t want to think about when last I saw him. “When last I saw you, circumstances were different.”

“So you do mean to deny me now?”

“Wait,” says Jake, comprehension dawning. “Is this the ex?”

Cardan arches an eyebrow. I regret everything.

“Lamentably for Jude, I am not her former anything.” Cardan leans back. “You seem a decent enough man. Terribly ill-suited for her.”

“You should probably leave,” I say to Jake. “Thanks for the scone. I know this isn’t how you were expecting today to go.”

“I mean, I was warned not to expect much. But…” He glances at Cardan.

“Was it something I said?” Cardan asks mildly, swiping Jake’s untouched coffee and drinking it down as though it were his own.

I shake my head. “Just go.”

“You’re okay here?”

“Go. I’ll handle him.”

Jake stands, looking uncertain. He puts his coat back on. “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

“Probably not,” Cardan supplies.

Jake gives us one more disconcerted look, and then leaves us alone. He does not glance back as he walks out the door of the coffee shop. I exhale, as though I had been holding my breath in his presence. As though, for these past three months, I have been unable to properly breathe at all.

Cardan reclines in his tiny coffee shop chair, unbearably smug at having chased away my erstwhile suitor. He doesn’t seem to realize that he’s sacrificed his only shield in the process.

He looks slightly less smug when he feels my pocket knife poking at his ribs.

“Get up,” I snap.

“Must we leave so quickly? The espresso here is very good.” He over-enunciates each syllable slightly—es-press-oh—as though reading the unfamiliar word off a sheet of paper.

“Yes, we must. You have a standing appointment with an interrogator.”

He stands with infuriating calm, like I have merely offered to escort him somewhere. I keep the point of my knife pressed into his side, palming the handle so most of it is hidden up my sleeve. “Strange,” he says, dryly. “I didn’t think I had an interrogation scheduled.”

“Luckily for you, I’ve found the time. Out. Now.”

“You won’t even allow me another espresso?”

“Now.”

“This is unbearable cruelty.”

“You are really testing me.” I dig the knife in a little harder. “It isn’t wise.”

He looks at me with something that, were he anyone else, would read as melancholy. “No,” he says. “But then, I have never been known for my wisdom.”

I will contemplate this later. For now, I seize his arm.

And I drag the High King of Faerie all the way home.

When I open the door to Vivi’s apartment, Vivi is sitting on the couch watching television with the volume turned down low. Oak lays out on his stomach on the carpet, frowning at his long division homework. I yank the door open with too much force and slam it shut so hard that they both jump.

“Bad date?” Vivi asks, turning around toward me. When she sees Cardan, her cat-slit eyes go wide. “Oh, shit.”

“Something like that,” I say.

“Bad enough without my help,” Cardan adds, unhelpfully. “Hello, Vivienne.”

Oak stares at him from the floor, clearly unsure of what to do. Oriana no doubt attempted to drill him in the correct way to behave around royalty, but I doubt those lessons covered how to act if the High King visits your home and you, yourself, are also royalty.

Vivi looks from me, to Cardan, and back to me. Then, correctly reading the expression on my face, she says slowly to Oak, “Hey, buddy. Remember how I said once you finished your math, we could go to the park?”

“Yeah?”

“I changed my mind. We’re going now. Glamour up and get your coat on.”

Oak looks at Cardan, trying to make sense of all of these sudden developments. “Is Cardan gonna go to the park, too?”

Vivi turns off the television and stands up. “No, I don’t think so.”

“High King Cardan is about to be very busy begging for his life,” I say, nearly upsetting Cardan’s balance as I give him a hard yank in the direction of my room.

“Oh, okay,” says Oak, who accepts this pretty much immediately. He, too, was raised in Madoc’s household.

“You are all remarkably calm about this,” Cardan observes as I march him past the couch.

“They know what you deserve.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t get his blood on the carpet!” Vivi calls after us from the front door. She shrugs on her own jacket. “They won’t give me the security deposit back.”

“Vivienne,” Cardan says, frowning. No quarter there. For some reason, I have trouble remembering that they were ever friendly. Then again, Vivi hasn’t had much reason to speak well of him as of late.

“Do we have a tarp?” I inquire, keeping an iron grasp on Cardan’s arm as I open the door to my room.

“Nope. Want me to stop by Home Depot while we’re out?”

“Can’t hurt.” I shove Cardan inside. “Just in case.”

I pull the door closed behind me, and lock it.

Before I can say or do anything else, Cardan asks, “This is where you sleep?”

I roll my eyes. My room is small, really a den with an adjoining half-bath, somehow simultaneously crowded with furniture and bare of most personal belongings. It is also messy, as it generally becomes when I am left to my own devices, although there are no lingering crusty dishes because I want to set some kind of example for Oak by putting them in the dishwasher. But rumpled clothes huddle in piles on the floor, having never made it to the laundry hamper. My boxing gloves and crimped hand wraps sit on the only chair. My bed is unmade.

Although bed is a generous term. The pull-out couch Oak slept on in the old apartment resides permanently in this room, its mattress now perpetually unfolded. A side-table we bought for ten dollars from a thrift store is my nightstand; my ruby ring sits on it collecting dust. Heather’s drafting table has also been moved in here, since she never came back for it, and it serves as my desk. Atop it lie a few books and some maps of Elfhame that I have hand-drawn from memory using some of Oak’s crayons. The white walls are bare but for a couple of taped up pictures that Oak drew at school and brought home for me: Taryn and me; just me, riding a giant toad; a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

I am passing through. The drawings are Oak’s. The couch is Vivi’s. The desk is Heather’s. Only the mess and the vendetta belong to me.

“No smart remarks,” I say, and I push him back into the door so hard that his back thuds against the wood. I press the blade of my pocket knife to his throat. “Only answers.”

“It’s very… cozy.” Cardan tries to peer over my shoulder at the maps. “I see you’ve been scheming again. Does your sister know?”

“I would stay very, very still if I were you.” My voice is harsh, but steady. “If my hand slips an inch, you’ll lose a lot of blood.”

Cardan stills. Good. “You won’t kill me,” he says. “That would also mean your death, not to mention the crumbling of the monarchy. I know not what would happen and am not keen to find out.”

I know the rules of the crown of Elfhame. I was the one who had it placed on his head. “I can cause a lot of pain without killing you,” I point out. “Where are you hiding your tail?”

“So you can cut it off? Do me that favor. If there’s any part I could spare…” He looks down his nose at me, every inch the condescending royal. “If we’re starting with personal questions, how long were you letting that boy court you?”

His boldness makes me uneasy. Our first interrogation was very different. He had not yet been imbued with the magic of a kingdom. I had a crossbow then. I itch for one now. “That’s not up for discussion.”

“Humor me, Jude.” His voice has a dangerous edge, like sharpened steel. “How long did he make eyes at you not knowing what you were?”

“What am I?” I shift my grip on the blade so my hand doesn’t cramp. “A queen? A spy? A murderer? You’d do well to not to forget any of it.”

“Believe me, I have not.”

The words send an icy chill down my spine. I need to retake control of the conversation. Now. “Fine. The tail is out. Now I’m debating how many fingers you really need.”

“I don’t know. Shouldn’t that be up to you?”

A blush inflames my cheeks. “Shut up.”

“If pressed, I’m sure I could make a persuasive case for all of them.”

“Cardan. Shut up.”

He’s talking this much for a reason. He’s trying to keep me distracted. He’s not sure of what I will do. But I am also unsure of what I will do. I have had him at knifepoint before, wanted to do violence to him before and not done it. Likely we are both wondering if this will be my breaking point.

“I can see you’re angry about this.” Cardan blinks down at me. “Although usually you’re threatening me with a much bigger knife.”

“This is what’s acceptable in the mortal world,” I retort. “And it cuts just the same.”

He at least has the sense to swallow, his throat bobbing beneath the blade. “Still, if this is the largest socially acceptable knife, maybe I should consider relocating.”

“Don’t. You’d have to deal with guns, and you’ll like those even less.” I suppress a shudder of my own. I don’t like guns. By law, I’m not old enough to carry one—a fact which is surreal given the various weapons I’d wielded in Faerie, not to mention the poisons—but even if I could, I’m not sure I would want to. They kill too many, all at once, with little skill involved. “But if you insist…”

I snap the small pocket knife closed and toss it aside. Before Cardan can look properly relieved, my Bowie knife is out of its sheath and against his neck.

“Ah,” he says. “Yes, this is more familiar.”

“Happy to jog your memory.” I let the blade bite into his skin. Not hard enough to draw blood, just hard enough to remind him who he’s speaking to. “Why are you here, Cardan?”

“I told you. I need counsel.”

“Then why would you—” My mouth snaps shut. I refuse to sound desperate. “If you hadn’t exiled me, you might have had my counsel whenever you wished.”

A smile lights his eyes, although it doesn’t reach his lips. “More counsel than I could ever want, I’m sure. But as it stands you are exiled, so I am here to speak with you.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

He looks affronted, and also, somehow, surprised. “But I came all this way.”

“Tough,” I say. “I guess you’ll just have to go back. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“You rescind my banishment.”

Bemusement flickers across his face, and then he frowns. “That’s not—”

“Possible? Then my counsel isn’t for sale.”

He just continues to frown at me.

We are at a stalemate. This will go nowhere unless I begin to making good on my threats, and fast. Cardan and I are both angry. I know very well what has happened, historically, when we are both angry and close together. My mouth is very near to his, by virtue of how I have my knife angled against his neck and how tightly I am pressed to him as a result. I’d nearly forgotten how tall he is.

What I need is distance.

I sigh, then pull the knife away and drop it onto the floor, where it lands on top of a pile of clothes. We both know I’m not going to carve him up. Instead, I do the thing that I know without a doubt will hurt him most: turn my back on him, walk over to Heather’s drawing desk, and sit down, ignoring him completely.

And I wait, counting seconds in my head.

When I reach twelve, Cardan says, “It’s about Madoc.”

I open a GED study guide Heather bought me and pretend to be very interested in it. I do not twist around in my chair. “What about Madoc?”

“We’ve received intelligence on his troops, but some of it is conflicting. I need someone familiar with the way he thinks, someone who can anticipate his next move.”

I quash the part of me that’s ready to leap at a challenge. Finally, after months of nothing but waging war in my head, there is a problem I can tackle. But I won’t give him the satisfaction. “You’re telling me he hasn’t made his move yet?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s made a number of small moves you just haven’t been able to see.”

“Yes,” Cardan says again, sounding exasperated. “That is why I am here to speak with you.”

I pick up a No. 2 pencil and mark a few bubbles without really seeing them. “Vivi grew up in his household just like I did.”

“We both know Vivienne didn’t take his lessons to heart like you did.”

I hear him walk across the room, but keep my back to him. My bed springs creak as he sits down on the mattress.

Then, quietly, he says, “I need you, Jude.”

My head swings toward him. He perches at the edge of my sofa bed, feet far apart. The small room feels smaller still with him in it.

“You need my counsel,” I say carefully.

Cardan doesn’t reply. He said what he said. He can’t lie.

But what he means is a different matter altogether. I don’t know what to make of it. I put the pencil down.

He doesn’t move from his seat I walk over to stand in front of him, just lifts his chin to meet my gaze. His eyes are as black as the moonless nights I endured when I first came here, sitting up late at the window and wishing I could see beyond all of the manicured lawns, beyond even the sea.

“Let me come back,” I whisper.

He shakes his head.

“Cardan,” I say, louder. I hate having to ask him for anything, much less beg. I try to shape it like a command instead. “Let me come back.”

“I need you,” he says, “too much for that.”

It doesn’t make any sense.

“You sent me away,” I inform him, in case he’s forgotten. “You exiled me.”

He puts his hands on my hips. That doesn’t make any sense either. I am lightheaded with how little sense it makes.

“Your coloring is better.” His speech is low, quiet. “And you’ve been eating.”

I’m prepared to be offended before I remember the last time he saw me I was still weak and half-starved. I don’t say anything. Cardan thumbs the hem of my sweater, distracted.

“Do you ever think about how we haven’t consummated our marriage?” he asks.

Anger swells within me like a cresting wave. That has naught to do with anything. There is no reason for him to mention it now but to divert my attention.

Except that I dragged him into my bedroom and shut the door fast behind us, and Vivi and Oak are long gone. We are alone.

Idiot, idiot, idiot. I am an idiot.

“No,” I say easily, the lie tasteless on my tongue.

“Because I’m out of your system.”

I nod, heart thudding. “Yes.”

His long-lashed eyes never leave my face. I hate the way my cheeks grow hot under his gaze, a physical tell I can’t suppress. He has to see it. He definitely sees something. I am not sure that whatever emotion plays across his face right now is any safer than his anger.

“I’m a quick study when I want to be,” he says.

I definitely don’t like the sound of that. “Is that so?”

“Yes.” His hands move up to grip my arms above the elbows. “You always blink faster when you lie.”

And then he pulls me down to him.

I bend at the waist like a doll and don’t resist, not even when his mouth meets mine. My hands find his shoulders, then his neck, then his hair. Desire is a vise that crushes the breath from my lungs. I can’t forget what he is or what he did, but I can’t fight this either. More frighteningly, I don’t want to fight it. I want to give in.

And yet I will never be rid of the acrid fury he left behind when he ripped everything from me. Even as I kiss him, it burns. How dare he? How dare he? For him to send me away and then show up here and act like nothing has changed, like my goodwill can be bought with a kiss or two. I want to take him apart with my hands.

I bite his lower lip, hard. He makes a needy sound and holds me closer. We fall onto my bed, my hand fisted in his jacket, my knee colliding with his side. His eyes are closed. His hands are everywhere.

I peel him out of his borrowed mortal clothes. The hat goes first, then the layered shirts. There are no jewels on his hands, but he kept his earrings. They are cold against my lips when I suck at his earlobe.

The last time we did anything like this, he had been cooler than me, collected. Now he swears at my mouth on him, even as his steady hands push my leather jacket off my shoulders. I have a wicked thought, one more worthy of him: I can unspool him like this. If he is so weak for me that he would come all the way here for a touch, for a kiss, let him have me. Let him fall apart all on his own.

I sit up halfway so I can pull my sweater off, nearly knocking my head against his. He toes off his shoes and then works on mine, his clever fingers undoing my laces with surprising speed. He tackles the clasp of my bra next. It takes him a minute to undo it. I let him fumble, pulling at his hair, nipping at his ear.

Then his mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. Now I understand why mortals turn music on during the act. My breath is loud in my ears, all harsh and ragged and wrong. He crawls down my body, pulling my jeans down. His mouth is soft against the skin below my navel. His tail, now freed, curls around one of my ankles.

This is all happening bewilderingly fast. I don’t want him to stop, and I’m also terrified, keenly aware of all the ways in which my body is different, lacking. I wonder what the Folk taste like. I wonder what Nicasia tasted like—probably seaweed and pearls.

But when he puts his mouth on me, I stop caring. I don’t care for a good long while about anything other than his fingers digging into my skin and his lips and his tongue and his teeth, which nip against the sensitive flesh of my inner thigh every so often, as though to make sure l’m still paying attention. My hands fist in his hair as they would in a horse’s mane, guiding him, holding on for dear life.

I don’t know what to do with the sounds that come out of my mouth, which start as helpless gasps and rise in pitch and volume as he works at me. I have never, never felt anything like this, the currents of pleasure that snake through my veins. It’s like I am deliberately electrocuting myself, like I am standing out in an open field during a thunderstorm, waiting for lightning to strike—

And it does.

I cry out, but I know not what I say. I am far, far gone.

Then I just breathe, eyelashes fluttering, and he is watching me from where he lays at the edge of my bed. His cheek rests against my thigh. I loosen my hold on his hair, and he slides a hand down the length of my leg with something like reverence.

The fire in my chest has burned down to the coals, not extinguished but no longer all-consuming. I ask with very little confidence, “Was that supposed to be an apology?”

Cardan’s eyes flash. “What,” he asks, “do I have to apologize for?”

I growl and drag him up to me by his shoulders, swallowing his laughter. He crushes his mouth to mine with an almost giddy delight that I do not expect at all. There is something salty and different in the way he tastes—me, I think. Even though I am momentarily spent, my heart still beats like crazy. I can feel against my thigh that he is not spent at all.

“I’m torn between returning the favor and letting you suffer,” I say, strangely undaunted by how inexperienced I am at doing either of these things. In this moment, I could do anything.

He shivers. “Yes to both, some other time. For now, I would have you. If it’s all the same.”

It is not all the same. That was the reason we didn’t get this far the first time we lost our grasp on whatever strange tension binds us. But there is a certain sense of inevitability to all of this, a certain sense that saying no is pointless because I will never, ever mean it.

Maybe if we do this I’ll be able to stop thinking about him.

I brush a lock of hair out of his eyes. His is a devastating and destructive beauty, and I had always thought it cold. But with his hair falling over his brow and his face flushed, he looks anything but cold now. He is a forest fire that leaves only ashes in its wake, brilliant and blinding. I am kindling, tinder, and flint; I was the spark that lit that flame. When we’re done here, perhaps a charred husk will be all that’s left of me.

Or perhaps we’ll both catch, and blaze together.

I nod. It seems foolish of him to ask when we’ve come so far already, but I’m glad he did.

Cardan nods back.

I steel myself, but I am most worried about the walls around my fragile mortal heart.

When he enters me, I gasp anyway. I knew it would hurt, but after all I’ve endured this barely feels like pain. Still, it isn’t comfortable. Not a good fit. My feet are planted on the bed, and there’s a tremor beginning in the muscles of my thighs. I don’t know what to do with my hands.

Maybe I’m not meant for this, to fit with other people, to have things that bring me pleasure. Maybe that door is closed for me. Maybe when I chose to walk the path of a liar and a murderer, I gave all that up. I recall the words of Valerian’s curse, which he spat at me as he bled out on the floor of my bedroom.

May death be your only companion.

I should push Cardan away, tell him to leave. I bring my hands up to his shoulders, dig my nails into his skin. Then I remember how angry I am at him and decide that it might be okay if he’s cursed with me. But that doesn’t calm the nervous flipping of my stomach, nor does it keep my legs from shaking.

I fear that we don’t fit. I fear that we never will, even though Cardan moves slowly, deliberately, with shocking sobriety; he knows what he’s doing, and I don’t. He keeps watching my face, and I wish he would stop. I wanted to keep my eyes on him, to watch him come undone. But what if instead he is to be my undoing?

He shifts his hips, and something squeezes out of my lungs, something high, fluttery, and breathy. It feels like a moth. I am made of them, made of frantic beating wings. I might scatter at any moment.

Cardan hisses through his teeth, as though he’s the one in pain. “Jude,” he says, “I am going to ask you for something that you won’t want to grant.”

I want to rail at him, want to carve him up with my fingernails. What else could I possibly grant him that I haven’t granted already?

“Would you—relax?”

I choke on half a laugh—he startles that out of me. It’s such an absurd thing to say that it breaks the sinister pattern of my thoughts. I am no longer spiraling. I am here, even if here is awkward and slightly uncomfortable.

He must know me well if he knew that would work.

“I never relax,” I tell him, as though this is something he didn’t know. “You’re always—ah—relaxed enough for us both.”

“Not just now,” he grits out.

I hadn’t realized he was nervous. It makes me feel better.

My thighs still tremble, but I let my head fall back against my pillow, easing my grip on him and letting my fingers trace lazily over the stripes of faded scars on his back. He inhales, and his eyelashes flutter slightly as he rocks his hips.

“Jude,” he says again. He sounds defenseless, lost. I wonder that I was ever afraid of him. “Deathsweet darling. I might perish here.”

“Don’t.” It’s as haughty as I can manage under the circumstances, a faux-order. “I’d have to do a lot of explaining to Vivi.”

I watch a smile flash across his face, only to slacken when he moves in me again. I’m both still unaccustomed to the feeling of him inside me and dizzy with the new rightness of it. When his eyes rediscover mine, I drink that gaze, I drown in it. When his hand slips down to where we’re joined and he starts touching me with those long clever fingers, I think I’m the one who might die.

The pain becomes exquisite, coal hardening to diamonds. I push up against him and cry out, scratching him with my nails. His hips stutter as though he’s about to lose his place, and the hand that isn’t touching me curls halfway into a fist. He shakes his head and sighs, his messy hair catching my bedroom light, his breath warming the skin of my neck.

“You’ll finish me,” he cautions.

I thought that was the point, but maybe I misunderstand him. I am heady with the admission, drunk on his touch. Experimentally, I roll my hips up into his again and watch him try to hold it together with an irrational amount of glee. His forehead creases, and now he is the one to close his eyes. I keep my eyes open, wanting to watch everything.

That sense of triumph only lasts until he moves again, and I’m back on the verge of unraveling. I let one of my hands slide up to the nape of his neck, and move with him. I fight well, he dances well, and sex seems to be a near-perfect intersection of those things. We’re good at it, or at least we could be. We’re improving. I try to focus on that, and not on any lingering discomfort, nor on the sounds I can’t help but make when he rubs me the right way.

Everything builds to an intoxicating pressure. This time I know what it means. This time I am ready.

Or so I think.

During that second moment of release, something inside of me snaps, as though it were a rubber band pulled too tight. For a fleeting, precarious instant, all of the tension, all of the rage, all of the terror is gone from within me. I am falling, and the ground is nowhere in sight.

But the crash has to come. I feel his answering shudder, his body’s reply to mine. His fingers skim up my sides, and suddenly I am seized by terrible, wracking sobs that seem as though they began long before we ever climbed into bed together and might never subside.

“Jude?” Cardan asks. He is confused, concerned. I’ve never heard him so concerned. It’s almost worth the price of my humiliation. His hips are still between my knees. I can’t stop crying.

This may be the worst thing I have ever done to myself, and I have done some truly terrible things.

I don’t want him to see me like this, naked and red-faced and lacking control. If he leaves now, though, this will be worse. Much worse. I wrap my arms over his shoulder blades and hold him against me.

I feel Cardan tense. He isn’t accustomed to playing this role. I know it, I know. I am looking to the wrong person for comfort, but he is here. He didn’t do this to me—I did it to me. But he is here.

Then, to my great surprise, he presses his face to my hair.

“Jude,” he murmurs, warmly enough to melt me. “What is it?”

No mockery. Just a question, and my name.

If I didn’t already think the world was turning upside down, I would know it now for certain.

I cry harder and bury my face in his shoulder, not caring that it’s probably some form of treason to get snot on the High King of Faerie. In my defense, Cardan doesn’t seem to care either. He stays with me as my sobs subside to sniffles, then as my breathing evens out. Everything I was keeping within me is replaced by resigned exhaustion.

I let it claim me. Better that than anger, than fear, than humiliation. I close my eyes.

Cardan speaks my name one more time, and then I am gone again, this time slipping into a dark and dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

When I wake up, Cardan isn’t there.

He was here. I am not so fortunate as to have dreamt him up. There is a dimple on the pillow next to mine where he rested his head. I am curled toward the space his body used to occupy, seeking absent warmth.

Someone has drawn the covers over my shoulders.

I turn over and see that the door to my room is ajar. I wonder if, now that he’s gotten what he wanted, he’s gone home. He had said he needed counsel, and doubtless he does—he is in perpetual need of it. But what he needs and what he wanted from me are two very different things.

Perhaps I should feel relieved that he is gone. I won’t have to look him in the eye after what happened between us.

But again, I’m not that lucky.

“What’s this one?” I hear him ask from the common area outside. His voice carries now even when he’s not trying to project it.

“That’s a toaster,” Vivi says. I can hardly hear her; she, at least, is trying to be quiet. Cardan must have told her I was resting. “It toasts bread.”

“It makes Pop Tarts!” Oak exclaims, helpfully.

“What,” Cardan asks, “is a Pop Tart?”

Oak’s scandalized gasp is audible even through my cracked bedroom door.

I eavesdrop for a few moments as Oak launches into his opinions on every flavor of Pop Tart he knows. Cardan seems to be listening to Oak’s childish prattle; I imagine him wearing the same bored, haughty expression he wore throughout so many of our lessons together. But he doesn’t ever cut Oak off, which surprises me. Surely he doesn’t owe Oak any politeness? It’s true that they’re related by blood, but Cardan loathed Prince Dain, and I can’t imagine he feels any goodwill toward Dain’s son.

Apparently, I am still thinking about Cardan after all.

I slide out of bed, testing the weight my legs can bear. I don’t feel very different, as I thought I might. Sex is not a big deal in Faerie, but it definitely is in the mortal world, where it dominates almost every single fictional narrative at one point or another. Mortal girls on movie screens are forever changed by their first times. But I am just me, now with a dull headache from crying and a profound desire to not be naked anymore.

My underwear is at the foot of the bed, and I slip it back on. I cannot fathom zipping myself into my jeans, or wearing my bra again. I search for my pajama bottoms, which are not in their usual clothing pile, but don’t find them. I do spy Cardan’s flannel shirt and opt to pull it on instead, buttoning it enough for me to be decently covered to my upper thighs.

It smells really good.

Oak is now on the subject of s’mores Pop Tarts. I slyfoot to the attached bathroom, not wanting anyone to hear me moving around. I behave as though I am waking in the morning: relieve myself, wash my hands and face, drag a comb through my tangled hair. I even brush my teeth, then collect tap water in my palms and drink it down by the handful. That helps the headache somewhat. There is Advil in the medicine cabinet, but I do not take it.

I creep back into my bedroom, then realize I am at a loss for what else to do. I don’t want to go out into the living room and face Cardan and Vivi and Oak. I don’t really want to do anything. The urge to just crawl back into my bed and lay there until I die is very strong. While I don’t want to die, indulging that urge for a little while is too tempting to resist.

Maybe I’ll sleep until Cardan is gone.

Somehow I manage to drowse for a minute or two, clutching my pillow tightly. Then the sound of my door creaking further open startles me back to awareness. I am upright immediately, grasping at my nightstand for a knife that I don’t find before I remind myself that I am safe.

I expect to see Vivi coming to check on me, but it is Cardan who stands in the doorway. He wears his white undershirt and my red tartan pajama bottoms, which he must have picked up off of my floor. They’re inches too short, exposing his ankles, and too wide; he tied them tightly, and they still sit low on his hips.

When he sees me, his face goes slack and stupid. Then he recovers himself, and says, “I didn’t think I’d find you awake.”

“Yet you have.”

“Yes.” He gives me a strange, sideways look, and, so quickly that I might be imagining it, shifts his weight from the ball of one foot to another. “I would speak with you.”

How incongruous it seems that we should handle each other so cautiously when we were tangled in my bed not an hour before. How curious that he should be so deferential to me, although I suppose the room is mine. I don’t trust my voice, so I give him a small nod instead. Then I notice what he holds in his hands.

Cardan looks down too, as if remembering his purpose for coming in here. In one hand he holds a plate with two Pop Tarts, in the other a glass of milk. “Ah,” he says. “Your sister thought—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself.” I jerk my head at the nightstand. “Just put them down. I imagine you’re not accustomed to carrying your own dishes.”

His full lips press into a thin line, but he obeys and sets both the plate and the glass on the nightstand. Then he shuts the door, removes my boxing gloves and wraps from the chair in front of Heather’s desk, and sits down, leaning back. I wonder if anyone has ever taught him to sit properly upright in a chair. His feet are bare, and sink into the carpeting. He covers his face with one hand, and I am reminded of a similar tableau: the two of us in the Court of Shadows, him confessing to unwanted fantasies, me staring down a crossbow.

I wish again that I had one now. Cardan is behaving oddly, and I want to know why.

The next words out of his mouth are not at all what I expect to hear. “I think,” he says, “it is high time we call truce.”

I am flabbergasted. My astonishment hangs in the air between us for a solid minute before I pick up my jaw and swallow.

“You’re not negotiating from a position of strength,” I say, once I have recovered myself. “A truce requires trust. I can’t trust you, and even if you gave me your word, you’d be a fool to trust me.”

“I wonder what it says that I am asking anyway,” Cardan reflects, dryly.

The opening is obvious. I don’t take it.

“I’ll need a guarantee from you,” I say. “Something. Anything.”

He waves his hand dismissively, as though swatting a fly. “Fine, fine. I swear not to cross you for the duration of my time in the mortal realm, until my return to Faerie. Is that to your satisfaction? It is all I am willing to give. I will not put myself in your power again.”

Something has agitated him. My curiosity is too great for me to pass up this opportunity. “And what would you ask of me?”

“For what your word is worth, I would have you agree to do me no harm that I do not specifically request of you, for the same length of time.”

I blink. “I didn’t think you a glutton for punishment.”

“Indeed, I am not.” He gives me a weak smile. “But much like your family, I know what I deserve. Will you agree it?”

I think of how he had asked me permission before engaging in conversation. How he’s decided to call truce. How he brought me food.

“Take a Pop Tart,” I say.

Cardan just looks at me. He knows the rules. No offerings without strings.

I sigh. “You brought them to me, and now I am offering you something in return. We’re square. Besides, I’m not that hungry. And you’re a guest.”

“I thought I was a prisoner.”

“Do prisoners get to walk around freely wearing my clothes? Just.” I stifle a second sigh. “I accept your terms. Take the stupid pastry.”

He does, able to reach the nightstand from where he sits simply by leaning over. His hand brushes against my ring, which is half-hidden under a couple of crumpled receipts, but he doesn’t say anything about it.

I don’t have much of an appetite, but I break a piece off my Pop Tart and put it in my mouth. It’s still warm from the toaster, but also dry, and relatively flavorless, especially compared to faerie fare. Cardan studies his. He has probably never seen food like this before, stamped out by machine and processed en masse on assembly lines, never once touched by the hand of a cook.

“Don’t eat it too fast,” I warn him. “You’ll make yourself sick. They probably have a little salt in them and other chemicals you’re not used to. Most mortal food does, but Oak seems to get by okay.”

Cardan turns the Pop Tart over in his hands once and then nibbles cautiously at a corner. I try not to think of his teeth against my skin.

“There’s sweetness to it,” he observes, taking another, less hesitant bite and getting some of the icing this time. These are not his usual table manners. “I don’t taste much salt at all. In most mortal food?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I blink. I’ve never thought about it. “It makes food taste good,” I say. “I don’t know that there’s any other reason.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Cardan muses. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps mortals like the taste. Or perhaps they learned to, knowing that it would keep us away.” He takes another contemplative bite, swallows, and adds, “Yours are such a curious people. Short lives and long memories.”

“You seem fine,” I remark.

He looks at the Pop Tart. “Perhaps I, too, have learned to like the taste of poison.”

I roll my eyes. The high melodrama of Faerie seems out of place in my messy mortal bedroom, but it’s also comforting in its familiarity. I know these scripts, know exactly how to respond. “Or maybe small amounts of salt won’t hurt you. The Folk aren’t responsible for everything.”

Cardan takes another bite of his Pop Tart. “The first stories you’re told as children are ‘fairy tales,’ are they not?”

“That doesn’t mean anything. If I told you a fairy tale, you’d laugh at how unlifelike it was. Fairy godmothers granting boons. Curses broken by kisses.”

He hums noncommittally, and then we lapse into silence, just eating, me washing down my Pop Tart with the occasional sip of milk. Despite my warning, Cardan eats faster than me, but no ill appears to befall him. When he is finished he has nothing to occupy his hands, so he takes one of the pens from my desk and begins rolling it between his fingers, flipping it over and over, watching it instead of me.

Finally, he decides to speak what’s on his mind, and says, “I’ve never made anyone weep like that before.”

My mouth is full of Pop Tart, but I give him my best withering stare. There must be some truth to the statement if he’s able to speak it aloud, but his way with words has always been slippery at best. I certainly wouldn’t consider that true.

“Not by that… method,” he amends.

I raise both eyebrows.

“Not— I’ll stop.”

I swallow. “I think that’s for the best.”

Cardan nods. I drink my milk.

After I set the glass down, he says, “We don’t have to do that again if it pained you.”

I still.

He doesn’t look at me. His tail, not completely concealed under his ill-fitting clothes, swishes—nervously? Is he still nervous? I’ve never seen him nervous like this, about something that might affect his relationship with someone else. Something I would have thought he’d consider trivial. “The way you wept was—alarming. If it was that—”

“It didn’t hurt,” I say quickly. “Not that much.”

Cardan turns his head finally and studies me through eyes narrowed to slits, trying to discern whether or not I am lying to him.

I sigh. “Would I bother sparing your feelings?”

He blinks, and then a comprehending smirk spreads slowly across his face. “No,” he says. “You would not. But then why—”

That is a question I don’t like. I don’t want to explain myself, and wouldn’t know where to begin. Instead I stand, and take a step toward him. He stops, watching me warily, waiting to see what I will do once I close that short distance.

When I stand before him, I bend of my own volition, taking his face in my hands to kiss him. There’s a surprise rush of uncomplicated warmth when my lips touch his, maybe brought on by his unexpected consideration for my—feelings? Physical wellbeing? Me? It’s baffling. I might just be grateful, which is sickening and strange.

I had wanted him to stop talking, but now I can think only of how he tastes of cinnamon sugar. If I sample too much, he might give me a toothache. He might spoil my appetite for anything else.

Cardan is slow to kiss me back, but he does, wrapping a hand over one of my wrists. When I break the kiss, he wears a look that is somehow both hazy and bewildered.

I don’t want to think about what my face might be doing. I feel feverish.

“Ah,” he murmurs, running a finger over the cuffed sleeve of his own shirt, which I still wear. “Now everything is clear as mud.”

“You’ve taken enough people to bed,” I tell him. It borders dangerously on teasing, but I think I walk that line well enough. “Shouldn’t you know how it works?”

“Not mortals,” he admits.

“No?”

“You—must know that.”

Against my wishes, I’ve thought about a lot about Cardan and bedchambers, but I haven’t thought about whether or not he’d been with other mortals. I knew that, in more carefree days, he and his friends would sometimes sneak off to wreak minor havoc in the mortal realm, but I hadn’t considered what their mischief would or wouldn’t entail.

It’s reassuring in some way that I’m a first for him, too.

I kiss him again, then tug him out of the chair and back toward the sofa bed. I don’t want to talk about crying, or think about who else he has or hasn’t bedded. I just want him to touch me so I can forget about everything else. I am pretty sure I can manage to be touched without sobbing this time.

He goes with me, his hands finding my waist under his shirt, but he also says my name as though it were a warning. “Jude.”

Half off the bed, half on, with one knee planted on the lumpy mattress, I ask, “Did you think you broke me?”

Cardan doesn’t respond, but his eyes slide down to the hollow of my throat.

“That’s quite the presumption. It would take more than just you to break me.” I speak the words, but I am not so sure of them. I remember lying on Vivi’s couch that first week, staring at nothing, and force the memory aside.

“It is presumptuous,” he concedes, thankfully. “But there was no one to share the blame.”

He is wrong, of course, but he need not know that.

“Later.” I pull him down. I am glad I can lie. I mean never. But I say again, “Later.”

He seems amenable to distraction. I lie back, and he lies atop me, running his hands through my hair. His kisses are slow, savoring. Mine are more demanding. Make me forget, I think, hard, as though he might be able to hear me. I need to fall without hitting the ground. I need to fly.

I remove his shirt and am about to shuck those ridiculous pajama pants off of him when we both hear the doorknob click, and freeze.

The door to my room cracks open. Then a slim hand tosses out something in a plastic CVS bag and shuts the door fast without even looking to see where the parcel lands. Cardan and I remain immobile, barely breathing, until we hear the apartment’s heavy front door slam shut as Vivi takes Oak wherever she thinks will keep a young faerie child entertained for the next who knows how long.

I had completely forgotten both of them were in the next room.

“What,” Cardan asks, preternaturally still, “is that?”

I shake my head. I have a theory, but I don’t particularly want to test it. “I’m sure it can wait.”

That doesn’t persuade him. I didn’t think it would. He climbs off of me and goes to pick up the bag, peering at the box inside. Dread pools in my stomach as I turn onto my side to watch him.

The moment he fishes it out, I groan. I want to sink into this terrible sofa bed and drown in the pillows. I don’t want to ever have to look at his face again. Oh, Vivi.

He arches one perfect eyebrow at me. “It seems as though you know what this is.”

I know that I wish I had the ability to turn invisible right now. I do a very bad job at sounding casual when I say, “It’s—a human contraceptive. No draughts or potions here. Or magic. So…”

Cardan tosses the bag aside, deciding he is suddenly very interested in the box. He opens it and draws out a single packet; it crinkles in his long fingers.

“Don’t open that,” I almost beg, mortified.

He looks fascinated. “How does it work?”

“It—” My face burns. “There’s a—um, a sheath inside, that you wear on your—”

“Ah,” he says. A mercy. He puts the condom packet back in the box and scrutinizes it more closely. “You can use them only one time?”

“Yes? Why.”

He holds up the box, grinning at me. “There are ten in here. I think your sister’s underestimating me.”

I make a sound that only birds have ever made.

Cardan laughs, and it’s a light, melodic sound that’s only a little bit cruel. He sets the box down on my nightstand and back over to the bed. I bury my face in the throw pillow as he lies back down on top of me and kisses my ear. “You make it easy, you know,” he says. “You care so much about how others perceive you.”

I huff into the pillow. He just smooths my hair back from my face.

The follow-up comes in a whisper: “How I perceive you?”

It’s a question, I realize. He doesn’t know. He isn’t sure. I should be relieved, but whatever I feel, it isn’t that. “I know how you see me,” I mutter, although I have never been less certain of where we stand.

His answering chuckle is quiet, gently mocking. He brushes a stray lock of hair behind my too-round ear. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

I half-twist under him and find him looking at me in the same strange, soft way that he had when we were alone in his bedchamber after I was returned from the Undersea. I think about a detail that never seemed relevant before: when Taryn came to Cardan impersonating me, she wore the earrings that would enhance her beauty. And he had not been able to tell us apart.

Then again, he was in a poisoned stupor.

I turn all the way onto my back, then let myself do what I’ve never quite dared do. I reach out and trace the lines of his face with the backs of my knuckles. His cheekbones have always looked sharp enough to cut, but they don’t split my skin.

Cardan covers my hand with his own and presses it flat, so that I am cupping his cheek. “Why did you cry?” he asks me again. “Surely you don’t find me so repulsive.”

He jests, or tries to, but he truly doesn’t know. My shock is briefly obvious before I school my face straight again.

“Why do you think?” I ask, mostly as a way to avoid talking about something I don’t have the words to express. I wish he would let it drop.

A grimace turns down the corners of his mouth. “I’ve pondered it for an hour. You said you weren’t hurt. Perhaps you think me a villain and a monster; many do, and I’ve given you enough reason not to doubt them. But if you regretted what we did, why pull me close or kiss me? Why take me into your arms again?” He shrugs. “Truly, I know not.”

Now I understand why he was acting so bizarrely before, keeping his distance. Were I him, I would also be very confused.

“I do know a few things about artfully poisoning oneself,” he continues, not quite meeting my eyes. “I may well be the venom and not the antidote. I suppose it is up to you how to take me, but—I would rather know.”

I think about gold flakes of nevermore on Cardan’s lips, goblets of wine never far out of his reach. I’m not sure if that is what he is to me, but I am also not sure that I am willing to admit to his being anything else.

“An answer for an answer,” I say.

He smiles. “Sometimes I think you’re more of the Folk than I am. Very well, Jude. You shall have your answer, first if you like, and then I shall have mine.”

“I can’t,” I say, but my voice is unusually raspy. I clear my throat. He must be very desperate to make this bargain, and I would be a fool not to press my advantage. “I can’t think if you’re staring at me to see whether or not I’m lying. I’ll just blink fast all the time.”

Cardan drops his hand. I think he expects me to drop mine, too, but I don’t. I brush my thumb over his full lower lip, then run my fingers back through his bed-mussed hair. He closes his eyes and leans into my touch, oddly feline. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to trust you.”

Something breaks in my chest. A rib, maybe.

“Why did you exile me?” I whisper.

He opens his eyes again. This is a strange sort of interrogation, with his face inches from mine, my hand against his cheek. I’m not sure that I am adequately prepared for it. “Many reasons,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate.

I’ve waited. I can wait longer. And I do, pulling my hand away from him at last.

“I was angry with you,” Cardan says. “You acted against my wishes in murdering my brother.”

“It was a duel, not an assassination,” I protest, without much conviction. And yet he doesn’t seem to mind being touched by such bloodstained hands as mine. “Balekin wanted you dead. He hated you.”

“He was very cruel to me,” Cardan admits. “And yet, he was my brother. The only one who remained.”

“Yes, due to his own schemes.”

“You asked,” he chides. “I am answering.”

My shoulders slump. I nod, dumbly. I did ask, and even if he gives me an answer I do not like I suppose I have to accept it.

Cardan picks at a pulled thread on my bed sheets. “Madoc was, and is, preparing for open warfare. After negotiations with the Undersea, he views you as—”

He pauses.

“A weakness,” I supply, so he doesn’t have to say it. “Your mortal weakness.”

Of course, that is how any sane strategist would view me. Madoc would never think me weak, but he knows what Cardan is willing to compromise for me, how far he is willing to bend. It is too much, and too far.

The look Cardan gives me is dark. “You are where I would strike first, were I him. More so because you two have your own scores to settle.”

I turn my head. I cannot meet Cardan’s eyes.

“But that is not how I think of you,” he says quietly. Were he not incapable of lying, I’d think he was placating me.

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

His middle and forefinger rest against my jaw, nudging me back so that I’m facing him again. His mouth is very close to mine. We’ve now kissed dozens if not hundreds of times, and yet that closeness has not ceased to shock me. He says, “You are my greatest asset.”

My heart stutters.

“But as you were—if I could so easily surprise you—”

“I was still plenty dangerous,” I retort. “Balekin learned that the hard way.”

“Yes, my brother’s true crime was underestimating you,” Cardan remarks, caustic. “I may be guilty of many other transgressions, but I like to think I’ve learned not to make that mistake. However, if we’re going to win this war, if you’re going to be my queen, I need you at your peak.”

“But—”

His lip curls. “Tell me, how do you feel?”

I open my mouth, but no words come out. I feel like someone who’s had months of good sleep and good food, someone who’s let all her injuries heal. Someone whose anger spurred her to train daily, to recount all her lessons, to consider every possible method of reentry to Faerie and every single weak point Cardan might have.

I feel sharp, like a well-honed blade.

Scowling, I smack his arm. I want to do worse. He ducks his head to kiss my neck, shoulders shaking in silent laughter.

“I hate you,” I tell him, although what I really feel is a prickle of annoyance all over, like he told a joke and I’m most upset that I didn’t predict the punchline. “Pardon me.”

“I will not,” he says, kissing the shell of my ear. “You will return to Faerie when you are ready and not a moment sooner.”

“But I’m ready now.”

He doesn’t reply, instead choosing to put his mouth to my neck again. I don’t know that he’s given me all of his reasons. He has had months to pick through his truths and find the ones that would best mollify me. I expect this is all that I will get for now, and it is not nearly enough.

The sound I make is something between a sigh and a wail. I push him off of me, then roll him over so I can sit across his stomach. He looks remarkably calm for someone I’m about to gut.

“There you are,” he says.

I decide to torture him a different way. I grab for the waistband of the pajama bottoms he’s wearing, meaning to pull them down.

Cardan catches my wrist. “Not yet,” he says. “Why did you cry?”

“We can talk after,” I growl.

“No, now,” he insists, with an arrogance that reminds me he is still King. “You made a deal, and you must uphold it.”

“You’re the fool who trusted me.” I shake him off my wrist and pull his shirt over my head instead.

Cardan sucks in a breath, looking me over. “That is a very compelling argument,” he says, “but I will not allow you to bed me until you answer my question.”

I pause, because of course I won’t do anything like that against his will. That line is different than threatening violence or keeping secrets, arranging schemes behind his back. But now I have to confess to him, and he may be the fool who trusted me, but I’m the fool who has to admit embarrassing emotional truths with no shirt.

The door I have opened cannot be closed. It turns out I really, really do want to bed him again.

Cardan sits up, propping my pillows behind him and reclining against them as though he were on his throne. He studies me lazily through his eyelashes. “Whenever you’re ready,” he prompts.

I scrub my hands through my loose, tangled hair, then fold my arms over my chest. “Fine,” I snap. “Fine. I’ve hated you for such a long time. I’ve hated you much longer than I’ve—not hated you.”

His eyes widen at my stumble, as though he knows what I almost spoke aloud and fears the power of it, but he smooths his features over and says, “Most people would call that ‘like.’”

“I still hate you,” I add.

He smirks at me.

“At one time, you represented everything about Faerie that I feared. Everything that I loathed.” The words fall out of my mouth as though a dam has burst. “Everything that I wanted but couldn’t have.” I draw a breath. “And then I had you.”

Cardan rests a long-fingered hand gently at the small of my back.

“I don’t know what—there is now.” My voice breaks. My shoulders want to droop, but I will not let them. There is nothing about this that is easy. There is nothing about this that I like. “I don’t know what I am if all of that is gone.”

He nods, contemplating this for a moment, as though I am a supplicant who has asked him to decide a problem. “I cannot say,” he decides aloud. “I can say only what you are to me.”

“And what’s that?”

“You’re Jude Duarte,” Cardan says, both as though he is giving me very high praise and as though it should be obvious. “My queen in exile and spymaster of the Court of Shadows. The bravest, cleverest, most foolhardy, and most vexing mortal that I have ever met. And very difficult to be rid of.”

I shake my head, unwilling to let it drop. “What about us?” I ask. “What are we now that we’re not at war with each other?”

“Aren’t we?” He tilts his head and gives me a sly smile, as though we’re now both in on the joke. “We’ll always be at war. That’s what marriage is.”

I exhale.

He adds, “Besides, I still haven’t pardoned you yet.”

I look at him, at his awful, perfect face, and decide on what I’m going to say only a fraction of a second before I say it. There really is no point in turning back now. Even though I have used up my question, I ask, “Why would you do this to me?”

Cardan lights up, all mischief, but all fondness, too. “Oh, good,” he says. “I wonder the same about you. I suppose there is no hope if even you don’t have the answer.”

I kiss him, hard enough to bruise. And I stop thinking.

There are some logistical complications with our clothing. I have to dismount him to remove my underwear, which gives him the chance to lift his hips, pull my pajama bottoms down, and finally kick them off. He stays seated, and I straddle his thighs, this time the first one to reach out and touch. The sounds he makes against my mouth are arrows that strike the core of me. I echo them when he touches me in return.

My other hand is braced against the back of the sofa, behind his head. Cardan reaches out and takes it, then places it on the pale column of his neck. I stop kissing him and pull back to look at his face, surprised but not nearly put off.

“‘That I do not specifically request of you,’” he reminds me.

The corner of my mouth curls back. “Fantasy of yours?”

“We are hardly scratching the surface of my fantasies,” he says, guiding my hips forward with his hands. “If it becomes too much to bear, I’ll pinch you.” A pause. “Do your best not to murder me, however much I may deserve it.”

“No promises,” I say, and then sink down onto him.

There is no pain this time except the strangeness of penetration, the danger of allowing someone else inside me. It is such a bad idea that I can’t believe anyone would ever do it, but maybe that is most of the appeal. We fit much better now. Cardan watches me through half-lidded eyes, languorous and lustful, as I move on him. Under my hand, I feel his every swallow, every gasp.

His nails sink into my skin when I tighten my grip on his neck, and his hips grind up into mine, striking something so deep within me that my back arches. I wonder if his hands will leave bruises. Maybe mine will. I hope so.

I am euphoric, delirious with all of the power he has willingly ceded. Even when I squeeze harder, he never pinches me.

The second time is much better than the first.

Chapter Text

Cardan and I relocate to the living room and begin planning defenses. We take my best map of Elfhame and Oak’s box of crayons and I start scribbling: red x’s for the places most vulnerable to attack, green circles for potential strongholds, blue circles around defensible sites that need fortification. He tells me what has changed in my absence, and what intel he has received from the Court of Shadows. I mark the most likely paths for an army, and the least.

I guess at what Madoc might plan if he believes Cardan alone is in charge, and what he might plan to counter-plan against me. I am reminded of the puzzles he would give me when I trained with him, except instead of goblin knights versus untrained gentry it is me with half the army, him with the other, and the question of who will be the last to remain standing.

I wonder how he felt when Cardan seemed to have knocked me off the strategy board entirely.

By sunset, which comes early, my headache is beginning to return. I am surprised Cardan isn’t more fatigued, considering he would normally have been sleeping well into the late afternoon. But he just looks faintly vexed as he ponders the map, concentration turning down the corners of his mouth. He spins a crayon idly in one hand. My gaze settles on his fingers and lingers there a little too long.

“And what might you be thinking?” Cardan asks, startling me from my trance.

“Just that this is the longest I’ve seen you sober,” I reply, which is true, although not what I was thinking.

“I know. It’s dreadful.” He runs his free hand through his hair, then sighs. “What use have I for any of this?”

I blink at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“With a wave of my hand, I might split the earth and raise bluffs so that no army may approach by land or sea,” he remarks, a little too casually. “We need not bother with war at all.”

“I don’t think your subjects would appreciate that.”

“They will learn to live with it,” he says. There is a gleam of something hard and mean in his eyes that unsettles me, both alien and familiar.

You crowned him, I remind myself. For years I had observed his cruelty to others, had borne the brunt of it. I don’t like the thought that I have forgotten all of my instincts where Cardan is concerned just because we called truce and he bade me put my hand on his neck. I do not like the thought that I might be bought with kisses.

I reply, “If you use all your tricks at once, there will be nothing left up your sleeve.”

“Right you are,” he agrees, to my great relief. His lips curl into a smile. “And this is why I wed you.”

“Really.” My voice is flat. “That’s the reason? Not to make me relinquish control over you?”

“I never said it was the only reason. Shall I tell you the others?”

I look hard at the map. “I know them.”

“You most certainly do not.” He grabs me around the waist and half-pulls me onto his lap. I am not expecting the move and am too late in countering it, and then I’m sitting on his thigh like a courtier. “Where to begin…”

“We’re working,” I protest, knowing that I am already beginning to go red. “Armies aren’t going to direct themselves.”

He sighs. “Why must you be so sour when I’m trying to flirt with you?”

“You don’t need to woo me,” I point out. “We’re already married. You have nothing to prove.”

“Maybe I’m not trying to prove anything.” He rests his head on my shoulder. “Maybe I’ve just learned that humiliating you is half as fun as making you blush.”

“You’re in a mood,” I say, turning away and letting my loose hair fall across my face so he can’t see I’m doing just that.

Cardan takes a bit too long to reply. “I think I’m happy,” he says—slowly, as though marveling at it. “Are you?”

I open my mouth to respond just as we hear the key turning in the lock. My eyes meet his, and then I am scrambling off of him to right myself.

When Vivi and Oak reenter the apartment, they finds us sitting on the couch side by side, knees touching, poring over my hand-drawn map of Elfhame, innocent and studious. No one would have reason to suspect we ever did anything untoward except that we’d obviously changed clothes. I have stolen back my pajama bottoms and Cardan asked that I continue to wear his shirt, so now I am a nightmare of mismatched plaids. Cardan wears his white undershirt and a pair of borrowed grey sweatpants which have always been too long for me.

Vivi eyes the two of us with no small amount of suspicion. Her arms are full of pizza boxes. “What are you two doing?”

“We’re strategizing,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t belie my casual air.

“Someone living under this roof was already planning an invasion,” Cardan adds. “Which is most helpful.”

“An invasion of one is different from an invading army,” I remind him with a glare.

Vivi’s brows draw together. Older sisters are strange things. I wonder if she looks at us and sees two kids doing homework instead of monarchs squabbling over how to best protect their kingdom.

“Forget that,” she says, forcibly dismissive. “It’s pizza time.”

“Pizza!” Oak yells, scrambling up the sofa to squeeze in beside me now that he has shed his coat and glamour.

“Hey,” I say to him, leaning forward to clear the map and crayons off the coffee table. “Did you have a good time out? Where’d you go?”

He screws up his face. “We went to Starbucks, but Vivi made me do math anyway. And spelling.”

“You’re fortunate to have an older sister who cares for your wellbeing,” Cardan says, dryly. “Two of them, in fact.” When I look at him, his face is curiously blank.

“Math is hard,” Oak complains.

“Ah, but what is it they say about difficult things—builds character? I wouldn’t know. Perhaps you might.”

I stare. “Are you trying to set a good example for someone?”

Cardan smirks. “If young Oak does as I say and not as I do, he shall go far indeed.”

“That’s enough of that,” says Vivi, who seems similarly disconcerted. She squares her shoulders. “The Royal Pizza Distributor is speaking.”

Oak sits up straight. He likes this part.

Vivi affects a deeper voice. “For His Royal Highness, Prince Oak, his favorite—Hawaiian.” She shifts the boxes so she can hold them with one arm and hands the smallest box, a personal pie, to Oak, who grins with delight. I notice that she’s gotten pizzas from our favorite local place; if she’d really wanted to slight Cardan she’d probably have gone for Domino’s.

“Thank you, pizza person,” Oak chirps. He’s learned his manners in school and carried them home.

Vivi grins and inclines her head, then winks, which makes him laugh. She looks at me next. “For—”

“Don’t,” I protest, blushing. This game is more fun when Cardan isn’t here.

Of course, that just makes Vivi continue with greater fanfare. “For Her Majesty, Jude Duarte, Queen of Faerie in exile, a green pepper and sausage pizza, to be shared with her sister, the Royal Pizza Distributor, at her discretion. But since she is so just and merciful I’m sure there won’t be a problem.”

Cardan grins at me, apparently delighting in the mockery of court procedure. I fight the urge to cover my face with my hand and accept the pizza box. “Thanks.”

“And for His Majesty, since I was not sure he had ever tasted pizza, one of the finest delicacies of the mortal world, I went for simplicity. Half cheese and half pepperoni.” Vivi gives Cardan a hard look that says she neither wishes to show him hospitality nor finds him particularly deserving of it, but hands him the box anyway. “Enjoy.”

“Your consideration has been noted,” Cardan says. Then he looks at me. “Surely the Royal Pizza Distributor is invited to sup at our table.”

“Yep,” I say. “Vivi, sit down.”

“Most generous of you,” says Vivi. She is smiling again; apparently she and Cardan can at least find common cause in embarrassing me. She sits down cross-legged on the carpet, across the coffee table from me, and then we all lapse into silence as we eat. I had not realized how famished I was until I tasted my first savory mouthful of cheese and sauce. The pizza is still warm, and a leaves a little grease behind on my fingers.

Cardan seems to enjoy his pizza well enough; he asks me a few questions about its construction, which I can mostly answer. From time to time, I notice Vivi watching him with me, wearing an expression I have often seen on Oriana’s face when she observes Taryn or me playing with Oak. I want to tell her off, let her know that I am not a child in need of protection, but can’t figure out how to do so with Cardan still in the room.

Or without sounding petulant.

Oak finishes his entire personal pizza, licking his fingers clean. Then he looks to me and Vivi. “Can we play Mario Kart?” he asks. “I finished math and spelling.”

“I don’t see why not,” says Vivi.

“Cardan and I have work to do,” I begin. “But—”

Cardan waves his hand dismissively. “I think we have done as much work as needs doing,” he says. “For now. What is Mario Kart?”

I open my mouth, then close it. “With no due respect, your Infernal Majesty—”

“Oh, do call me that and nothing else,” Cardan interjects. “I think it’s my favorite form of address.”

“I can do worse,” I say through gritted teeth.

Vivi clears her throat.

“It’s a video game!” says Oak, oblivious to whatever else is happening and determined to push through his agenda. “You play it on the TV. You race cars and somebody wins. You can knock each other off the road.”

“How exciting,” muses Cardan, eyes twinkling. “I shall join you for a round of Mario Kart. Jude?”

“There are only three controllers,” I say, with a glance at Vivi.

“I don’t mind watching,” Vivi says. “Although you better kick his aa—butt.”

Oak giggles, then jumps off the couch to turn on the Wii and get the game.

I notice Cardan looking after Oak with something like envy, like longing, but then he blinks, and the look is replaced by a smile. I think of the neglected child I saw in Eldred’s crystalized memory, and don’t puzzle over about that expression. I know it too. I’ve worn it.

Then, daringly, Cardan wraps an arm around my shoulders.

I go rigid. This is unlike us. We have never been like this, openly displaying affection in front of other people, excepting the time that Cardan was poisoned. But when he feels me stiffen he moves to pull his arm away, and I don’t want to have another conversation about my own hang-ups. I grab his hand and yank his arm back into place. He winces, but then smiles again, this time genuinely.

“Aggressive,” he remarks. “Surely you’re not averse to idle hours spent playing games?” Then he looks up, considering something. “Although I am not certain I’ve ever seen you willingly have fun…”

“I have fun,” I huff.

He grins. His teeth are perfect. I have love bites on my thigh. I shift, pressing my legs closer together.

“We shall see,” he says.

Then Oak comes back with the controllers, handing one to me and one to Cardan, and Cardan is forced to remove his arm from my shoulders. I feel a little pang of sadness when it is gone, which weirds me out. It would be unwise to let this continue as it has. I should put an end to this. I should throw him out of the apartment, out of the mortal realm altogether.

Instead, I press my knee back against his knee. He looks down at it, then up at my face, and there is a glimmer in his eye, something like wonder. Then he looks past me at Oak, who has re-taken his place on the couch, and says, “All right. Show me how this game is played.”

We play. Despite never having picked up a controller in his life, Cardan has clever hands and good coordination, and he grasps the rules quickly enough. He still loses often—mostly because of my determination to blue shell him into oblivion whenever he pulls ahead—but under these circumstances Cardan is a much more gracious loser than I would have ever assumed. The first time I knock him off course, he lets out a surprised bark of laughter, and when he comes in last he laughs and laughs as though someone has told a devastating joke. This is so utterly different from the last time I proved myself more capable than him that I am unnerved by it.

I win most of our races, although I throw a few games to let Oak take first place. The one time Cardan manages to beat me—a fluke—I fling my controller away in disgust. Cardan again laughs richly, and tells Oak, “Cherish your victories. Your sister is not an easy person to best.”

Suddenly all of his reactions make sense. He laughed because of course I would never go easy on him; I don’t fear him, and I am not particularly respectful of his station. He can be proud of his wins where I am concerned because he knows he has earned them.

For a moment, I am grateful that Cardan was the one to sit on the throne while I pulled the strings, that he was the shield. I don’t know if I could take all the bowing and scraping and disingenuous smiling. When I was seneschal, no one bothered hiding how they felt when they looked at me.

I know that I might love being Queen more than anything else. I wonder if I will also hate it.

I let myself lean against Cardan’s side, just a little. And then I beat him again for good measure.

Bedtimes are flexible on Saturdays. We play until Oak starts yawning, and then Vivi calls it. Unlike a mortal child, Oak cannot protest against being tired. Vivi and I manage to coax him off the couch, then Vivi leaves to read him a story and tuck him into bed. The second they are out of the room, my hand is back in Cardan’s hair and his mouth is on my neck. By the time Vivi returns, we are somehow already horizontal on the sofa.

“Seriously?!” Vivi exclaims, her hands on her hips, while Cardan grins like a moron and I try to squirm out from under him. “Your room is ten feet away!”

“We’re going,” I say, just before I half-fall off the couch with very little grace.

“And in front of the leftovers, too,” Vivi mutters, shaking her head at the half-eaten pizza still on the coffee table, but I think I see her smile.

I grab Cardan by his wrist and pull him back to my bedroom. The door is barely shut behind me before I am being pressed up against it.

We do a number of things I have imagined and many that I have not. Mostly, this amounts to the same spectrum of activities in different configurations: me on my front, which brings with it a sick sort of thrill; facing each other; facing away from each other with me sitting astride him, listening to his breath catch whenever I run my hands through my hair; once, toward the end, on our sides, with my leg draped lazily over his thigh. I cannot keep count. I cannot do much thinking at all.

I hadn’t realized what a burden thought was until I was given a means of escaping it.

Cardan is still a creature of twilight, and moonlight seems to rejuvenate him. But I’ve had time to adjust to the rhythms of the mortal world, and my human body tires now with nightfall. Whatever fevered frenzy has hold of us loosens its grip on me first, and we settle into a rhythm of kissing and touching without expectation of more, exploring each other’s bodies with spent fascination. I fall asleep around midnight with his soft mouth on mine and the tuft of his tail tickling the back of my knee.

When I awaken, sunlight is already streaming through the cracks of my blinds. Cardan half-sprawls across me on his stomach, one arm outflung, the other pillowing his head. The morning light glows on his pale, perfect skin, making him look young and not very dangerous. I have the insane urge to lean forward and kiss the crown of his head while he sleeps.

I don’t do that. I don’t know if we’re there yet. Instead, I wriggle out from under him as carefully as I can. With my body heat gone, he shifts and pulls my pillow closer, but doesn’t wake.

When I try to stand from the sofa bed, my thighs protest. I thought I knew all the ways a person could be sore, but I was wrong. I feel like a cored apple. Maybe you’re supposed to start slow for a reason. I’ve never liked doing things halfway, and I am definitely paying for my hubris now.

Once standing, I know I cannot possibly sit again lest I never get up. I pull on an overly-large t-shirt and glance around the little room, taking note of how messy it is. Then I look back at Cardan and chew on my bottom lip. I don’t think he cares one whit, but I spend a few minutes easing my way around the room anyway, throwing anything obviously dirty in the laundry basket and throwing all the other clothes into one big pile away from the door. I put my knives back on my nightstand, then stand with my hand on my hips, surveying my handywork.

Still messy, but slightly better. If nothing else, the movement helped my body loosen up.

I sneak out of the room, closing the door behind me, and make my way to the kitchen. Oak is already up, sitting too close to the TV and watching an animated fantasy show that, as far as I can tell, is about humans and elves and a baby dragon. I wonder if he thinks the happenings are real, or if he knows better.

The kitchen light is already on, and Vivi is in there, leaning up against a countertop and drinking orange juice from the carton. I swipe it out of her hands and pour some into a glass.

“Good morning to you, too,” she says. “Late night?”

It takes an enormous amount of self-restraint for me not to flip her off. I swallow down about half the glass of orange juice as she grins at me, and feel a little better. I hadn’t realized I was parched. I finish off the rest of the juice, then rinse it and fill it with water to wash down the lingering acidic tang on my tongue.

“I have no idea, by the way,” Vivi continues, stealing the carton back. “I also bought earplugs from the CVS. You know, along with the other stuff.”

“Yeah, the condoms were hilarious. Thanks for that.”

Vivi’s grin widens. “He didn’t know what they were, did he?”

I roll my eyes. Of course he didn’t know what they were. The likelihood of female faeries conceiving in general is so low that no one ever really worries about trying to prevent it, and children are precious regardless; there are herbs and spells for rare unwanted pregnancies when they do occur. The likelihood of getting a mortal girl pregnant, though, is much higher. And while I don’t think faeries have sexually transmitted infections like humans do, I realize I am not totally sure.

This really seems like something Cardan and I should have talked about in advance.

Vivi glances at Oak, who is ignoring us for the TV screen, his eyes wide and unblinking. Then her eerie gaze is back on me. “But seriously, Jude,” she says in a whisper, “are you being safe?”

I don’t know if she means with the sex or with my heart. The answer would disappoint her: no on both counts. Either way, I just say, “I know what I’m doing.”

Vivi makes a disbelieving sound into the orange juice.

“Maybe we could stop by the pharmacy later,” I add in a mumble.

Her eyebrows shoot up. “For…”

“You know,” I say lamely. “The stuff you take for not getting pregnant.”

“Plan B? Morning after pill?”

“That’s it.”

She narrows her eyes. “If you’re too embarrassed to say it, you really shouldn’t be doing anything that would lead to you needing it.”

“I can say it,” I protest. “I just forgot what it was called.”

“Uh-huh. Do I have to remind you that getting knocked up right now would be really, really stupid?”

“You sound like Oriana,” I grouse. “When’d you grow up?”

“Maybe when fate dropped two little siblings in my lap,” she says, reaching up to ruffle my hair. But I also know she’s not saying that she had to figure out a lot of things on her own when Heather went away. I wonder what Heather would think if she knew Vivi was lecturing me on how to be responsible.

Maybe she’d find it ironic.

Maybe she’d be proud.

“I’m not little,” I protest.

“Of course. You’re the fierce and terrifying Queen of Faerie.” She smiles at me again. “But you’ll never stop being my little sister. Want an Eggo?”

I sigh. “Yeah.”

My Eggo is good. I munch on it while watching a little bit of Oak’s TV show. Someone is a prince. The dragon might also be a prince. I am entering in the middle of the story and not paying too much attention.

Part of me, the sensible part, wants to let Cardan sleep as long as possible, but the pull toward my room is very strong. I still fear it a little, but the fear is muddled by desire and has been for a long while. I can think of no good reason to resist my urges when we have already done almost everything I didn’t want to give myself over to. Once I have finished my breakfast, I go back.

I am not as quiet this time, and the floor creaks under my foot as I put push the door open. Cardan stirs and blinks a couple of times before opening his black eyes. When he sees me, he gives me a sleepy, lopsided grin.

He’s breathtaking. He’s my husband.

I am momentarily paralyzed by that fact, as though I have been stuck by a dart laced with blusher mushroom.

Cardan rubs his eyes against the sunlight. “You’re not in bed,” he half-mutters, still shaking off sleep.

“Astute of you.”

“Why not?”

I shrug.

He reaches for me. “Come here,” he says. “As your King, I command it.”

I pick up my head and look down my nose at him. “As your Queen, and your equal, I shall come only if it pleases me.”

His grin widens. “You shall come,” he says. “And it will please you. That, I vow.”

That shouldn’t work on me. It does. I am unable to stand the way he makes my stomach clench. “You’re ridiculous,” I inform him, as if he wasn’t already aware.

“Your voice is the sweetest sound.” Cardan drums his fingers on the part of the mattress that I used to occupy. “Jude—wife—come back to bed.”

I relent, because I never really wanted to refuse, but I shed my shirt before climbing under the covers, which appears to delight him. The moment I am in his arms again, he begins to make a mission out of kissing every inch of my bare skin. I savor it until I push him away by his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. I kiss him on the mouth, then at the hollow at the base of his throat, then lower, planting kisses like seeds in a straight row downward.

I have no idea what I’m doing, and my inexperience would normally be daunting; it still lingers, whispering doubts in my ear. But I realize that at this point I would expect Cardan to tell me if I err instead of unceremoniously ejecting me from my own bed for displeasing him.

From the way he strokes my hair, I gather that I haven’t erred yet, but the lower I kiss the more I’m gripped by the urge to do glorious, insane violence to him. I want to suck welts onto his beautiful jutting hip bones. I want to dig my nails into his thighs hard enough that the marks never fade. I want to rub my nose in the soft trail of hair that starts barely visible below his navel but thickens and darkens the further it goes. I do each of these things halfway, glancing up at him to see that he’s still enjoying himself, and find him watching me steadily every time. He’s quiet, as though holding his breath. The very air between us seems to still.

When I finally put my mouth on him, he moans.

I am most relieved to find that his skin doesn’t taste much different from mine.

His hand slips to the back of my head as I work. I listen for his gasping and the other delicious sounds that fall from his mouth, precious as jewels. I had always known that his desire meant I had power over him, but I didn’t realize how much until now. I am drunk on it, heady with it, as though I’ve been sampling faerie wine, but I would never think to abuse it.

Not outside of certain limits.

I stop before he can finish, and his simpering disappointment is replaced by excitement and a little smugness when I straddle his hips. He steadies me with his hands as I ease down onto him. I am sore, and I haven’t warmed myself up much, and I can’t hide my wince. He runs one of his hands up my side as if to soothe me, then comes to cup my breast. I lean over him, planting my hands on his chest, rocking forwards and backwards, enjoying the friction as he moves with me.

“When are you going back?” I ask, breathlessly.

Cardan stops moving and blinks at me, not quite comprehending. Then he lets out a throaty chuckle. “Don’t ask me these things when I’m inside you. I’m sorely tempted to say ‘never.’”

That’s not the response I want, which is that he’s leaving as soon as we finish and dress, and he’ll pardon me so I can join him. “I thought this—” I grind down on him. “—might be the best way to get a straight answer.”

“Cheat.” He pinches my thigh, and I yelp.

“You like it,” I accuse.

“I cannot say.”

Cardan may not have much skill in combat, but he is able to leverage his weight to flip us over, pinning me beneath him. Had I been expecting the move, I might have been able to counter it, but all I can do is let out a grunt of protest. I’m hurting. I want to do this, but I wanted to be in control.

He laughs, but doesn’t increase the tempo as I feared he might. Instead, his hand finds its way between my legs as it had the previous day, and he puts his own gratification aside—at least for a moment—to warm me up, watching my face as he touches me. I lower my eyes against that gaze, focusing instead on his hand, his hips, and feel his lips ghost over my ear.

“I thought I was the one who was supposed to use my wiles,” he purrs. I wonder if he’s still bitter about my asking him to seduce Nicasia for information. If so, mocking me for trying to turn that gambit on him is a tidy means of revenge. “If you add sexual trickery to your arsenal I fear no ruling will ever be done. We’ll be too busy waging war in the bedroom.”

He’s teasing me, and I mislike being teased. But his teasing also makes me feel oddly liquid inside, because I had never before considered that he might be playful with me if we set our resentments and scores aside. If we called truce.

I don’t respond. I just lean up and turn my head to capture his mouth with mine. And although I think we are being quiet, that we’ll muffle each other’s hopeless, helpless noises, I hear Vivi turn up the volume on Oak’s TV show to drown us out.

Cardan’s face is tucked against my neck. My body is under his. We have long since stopped panting, but neither one of us has moved. I am warm, but not hot. His weight is not too much for me to bear. I play with his black curls lazily, like we have all the time in the world.

We do not.

“I leave at sundown,” he says at last. “I’ve been away for a night. I shouldn’t risk another.”

“So soon,” I mutter. I regret the words the instant they leave my mouth; they are a damsel’s words. I add, “Does anyone know you’re gone?”

He chuckles. “Not if the Court of Shadows has done its job. To anyone who asks, I am meant to be on an unspecified diplomatic visit. My leaving Faerie altogether should have gone unnoticed.”

I nod, but wonder aloud, “But it’s known that you left the palace?”

“You would have had Oak rule in exile for a decade,” says Cardan, reminding me of one iteration of the plan that eventually crowned him. “The kingdom shouldn’t fall if I leave for a night. And the night is over. Had Faerie fallen, we would have heard tell of it.”

“This is a really stupid risk,” I point out to him.

I feel his smirk against my skin. “And yet.”

“And yet,” I echo.

Cardan finally rolls off of me, but only onto his side. Not far away. He props himself up on his elbow and reaches out, tracing my clavicle with one long finger. “Jude,” he says.

Whatever else he might have said is forgotten when there is a soft knock on my door.

“Don’t—!” I cry, diving for my covers and tucking them under my armpits to cover my chest. I am as decent as I can be by the time Vivi opens the door a sliver.

“Is it safe?” she asks.

Cardan, who has never possessed so much as an ounce of shame in his entire life, does not pull my comforter up from where it drapes around his waist, and lounges against my pillows as though everything in this room belongs to him. “Why shouldn’t it be safe?”

It’s a fair point. Earplugs or no, Vivi hasn’t failed to notice what we’ve been doing. And it’s all good and proper, in the sense that we’re married. Still, I am appropriately embarrassed to be caught in bed with a boy by my sister, which feels weirdly normal.

“I’ve convinced Jude to put all the knives away,” Cardan adds.

Never mind.

Vivi opens the door enough to poke her head in, cat-slit eyes narrowed. She sees no knives, no blood, just me trying to look natural beside Cardan’s effortless nonchalance. She does not comment on our shared state of undress. “I’m taking Oak to the mall,” she says. “Do you want to come?”

“We’re fine,” I say, just as Cardan says, “I’ve never been to a mall.”

I glance at him, my mouth falling open. “You can’t be serious.”

“What?”

“You want to go?”

He shrugs. “I’ll only be in the mortal world a short while. I should see what it has to offer.”

Part of me wants tell him he’d feel more at home in a nightclub than a mall, as though I know anything at all about clubs. Another, more vocal, part wants to ask him why he’s not content to just stay in bed with me, as I would be with him.

I just look at Vivi and say, “We’ll be ready in half an hour.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she counters. “I can only keep Oak busy so long.”

“Twenty.”

“Fine.” She points one slender faerie finger at Cardan. “Clothes.”

To my great surprise, Cardan, who loathes being commanded in any way, only gives her a slightly mocking incline of his head. “Yes, sister,” he says.

Vivi frowns deeply at nothing in particular, then at me. “Twenty minutes.”

“Okay,” I say, and she closes the door. Then I look at Cardan, and don’t ask him any of my questions. “I’m going to wash up.”

He nods, and I leave the room. I share the full bath out in the hall with Oak; Vivi has her own. Of every mortal world innovation, I am most grateful for indoor plumbing. I turn the shower water hot, hot enough to ease my soreness, both in my muscles and at being asked to leave the apartment when Cardan and I have only just figured each other out.

It doesn’t really work, but at least I am clean.

I return to my room wrapped in a towel with my hair dripping wet. Cardan looks as though he has barely moved, and is still sitting up in my bed naked. He is tossing something back and forth between his hands. I am about to scold him for not getting ready when he stops fidgeting and reaches over, taking my left hand in one of his.

“Wear this out,” he says, and, to my great astonishment, he slips my ruby ring back onto my finger.

It’s almost enough to make me to forget my irritation with him.

But not quite.

Chapter Text

“Fifty dollars?!” I exclaim.

Vivi and I stand together in a pharmacy aisle, under bright fluorescent lighting that makes me blink too often. Before us are all the so-called feminine products anyone could ask for—tampons, sanitary pads, creams and gels for infections—all in packages bright like candy wrappers to sugarcoat the mess of being human. But the morning-after pill isn’t here. A cardboard printout of the label is in the place where the boxes should be, along with the price and instructions to ask for it at the front of the store. As if this errand weren’t mortifying enough already.

“I read somewhere that it costs like two hundred thousand dollars to raise a kid,” says Vivi, standing on her toes to peer over my shoulder. “Which doesn’t even count school. Plus, your kids would be immortal, so you’d never stop paying. Fifty bucks is pretty cheap by comparison.”

I whip my head around to glare and find her grinning, cat eyes alight with mischief.

“Don’t worry. I’ll buy it,” she says, patting my shoulder mock-reassuringly. “That way it’ll cost zero dollars and you won’t have to worry about college tuition money for your hellspawn yet. Plus, you’ll owe me one.”

The idea that I might actually have kids with Cardan someday briefly throws me for a loop, and I gawp at Vivi for a minute before turning back to the shelf. Obviously that wouldn’t happen anytime soon, and Cardan and I are only going to be married for seven years anyway…  unless he decides he doesn’t want to abdicate after all, in which case the Greenbriar line would need to continue through someone…

“It says we have to get it up at the counter,” I say, nodding at the sign and focusing on only that. “We should go ask.”

Vivi’s grin widens. “Ooh, this is going to be fun.”

“Vivi.”

“I mean, not for you. But if I don’t shame you, how are you going to learn not to be stupid again?”

“Vivi!” I call after her, but she is already halfway down the aisle, practically skipping away from me.

I start after her, but am destined to never make it to the front of the store. Cardan is waiting to intercept me at the end of the aisle, leaning against the shelves with his nose in a glossy tabloid magazine. “Jude,” he says, with mild, languorous interest, “why do you think the princes are estranged?”

“What?” I snap. “Not now.”

But it’s too late. Vivi, now far out of my reach, flounces up to the nearest open register. “Hi,” she says to the cashier, wearing a wicked smile. “I’m here because my little sister made a very big mistake…”

I groan, thankful now to have a willing distraction. I turn back to Cardan and pretend Vivi doesn’t exist. “Sure, fine. What princes?”

He nods down at the magazine. “The princes William and Harry, of… England, it seems? Do you think it’s because of Meghan?”

“I don’t know who—” I sigh, watching Vivi engage in an animated and mostly one-sided conversation out of the corner of my eye. Then I glance at the cover of Cardan’s magazine. “Oh. No idea. It doesn’t matter. They don’t even rule here.”

“But then why bother with gossip?” he asks, seeming genuinely perplexed. “Surely their lives do not affect yours in any way.”

“No, but mortal lives can be monotonous, and everyone loves a good story about people who are richer and more famous than they are.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to will away all of the useless things I now know about the siblings Khloe, Kourtney, and Kim, Kendall and Kylie. Or ignore how, around him, I lapse into the habit of talking about mortals as though I am not one of them.

Cardan frowns at the tabloid. “I was never overly fond of my siblings, but I daresay we would have made for more entertaining stories.”

“You’d probably have your own show,” I mutter.

“Hmm?”

“Never mind.”

“We were a better-looking group,” says Cardan, in a tone that indicates he is agreeing with me.

I am in a mood to be disagreeable. I glance at the magazine again. “I don’t know,” I say, my voice heavy with sarcasm he won’t comprehend. “Harry’s okay.”

Cardan turns the magazine cover away from me to squint at it, then raises both eyebrows, which I like not at all. Confusingly enough, his mouth sets in a grim line. “I see,” he says. “Is it the hair?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you prefer red hair?”

“I—” It takes me a moment to realize that he is talking about Locke, to whom I have not given a single thought in two months. It feels more like two years. I realize I think of him more now as Taryn’s husband, a nuisance, and an occasional threat than I do as the first boy I ever kissed. I feel heat creeping into my cheeks. “No, no. No! Absolutely not.”

Cardan beams at me. “I thought not, but it pleases me to hear you deny it.”

“I don’t live to please you,” I huff, scowling. “Where’s Oak?”

“Last I saw, by the counter.”

“Last you saw? You just let him—” I begin, and then I close my mouth, realizing I’m beginning to sound like Oriana. “He’s a child. Someone needs to mind him.”

Cardan sighs and closes the magazine. “What manner of trouble could a single faerie child cause? Don’t worry. I’ve set him to a task that will keep him out of harm’s way.”

“What task?”

It’s then that Oak runs back up to us, his arms heavy with one of almost every type of candy sold by the front counter. A packet of Mounds spills out from the crook of his elbow. He looks as though he has been granted his greatest wish. “I did it!”

“Oh, no,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

“They’re for me, not him,” says Cardan, motioning for Oak to hand over the candy mountain. “I am going to purchase them.”

“Yes, and then they’ll be yours,” I deadpan, folding my arms. “Yours to share with whom you please. As schemes go, this isn’t your best.”

Cardan sighs, and then gives Oak a little smile. “Best put it back,” he says. “Those who defy your sister often regret it.”

“But—” Oak pouts.

“That’s an order from your King,” Cardan reminds him, faintly amused and oddly fond.

Oak sighs and trots back to the counter.

Cardan and I follow behind him, coming to cluster around Vivi, who is just picking her bagged purchases up from the counter. The cashier—female, mortal, and middle aged, with her black hair pulled back in a frizzy ponytail—raises a single eyebrow at our approach. “This the mistake?”

“Huh?” Vivi looks at us. “Oh, yeah.”

The cashier purses her lips and nods her head back and forth, considering. Then she hums and gives a little shrug. “I would.”

Vivi doubles over laughing, an arm clutched around her middle. Cardan raises both eyebrows as I grab him by his jacket and pull him away.

“Wait outside,” I say, ushering him and Vivi through the automatic doors. “I’ll get Oak.”

Cardan’s eyes gleam, but the look on my face keeps him silent. Vivi is still laughing too hard to contradict me.

I walk back in through doors that woosh open for me like magic, though they are not, grateful for the blast of warm air that greets me. With my hands in the pockets of my winter coat, I loiter near the entrance, making sure Oak sulkily replaces the last of his candy haul. I’m going to need backup if we’re all to survive this day in one piece. I pull out my phone and send off a quick text message, then shove it back into my pocket when Oak slinks over to me.

“Who’d you text?” Vivi asks, when we finally leave the store. She’s bright-eyed from laughter, a little flushed, but that didn’t escape her. I don’t know what to make of this version of my older sister, who notices everything.

“Comic shop friend,” I reply, which is a faerie truth if ever there was one. “Asking for advice.”

She eyes me suspiciously. “On?”

“Wrangling faeries.”

Vivi snorts. “Good luck. These are for you.”

“These?” I echo, realizing the bag feels a little too heavy in my hands. I dread what I will find in the bag, but I peek in anyway. Vivi had thrown a small tub of personal lubricant in with the pills. I don’t even know when she swiped it. I stuff the bag far down in my large purse and shrug the strap up onto my shoulder.

Vivi lights up with glee at having made me uncomfortable again—a universal faerie trait, I think—but she says, “I know sex ed was really lacking in Faerie. I figured you could use the help.”

She’s not wrong. Most of our sex education came from accidentally spying on other people’s trysts and then whatever we could glean from mortal movies. I ask, “And you’re so much wiser?”

“I’ve read many websites.” Her smile is all teeth. “Also, I am your elder and not to be questioned.”

“As enlightening as all this has been,” Cardan cuts in, “I believe I was promised a mall.”

“And you shall have one, Your Majesty,” I say, with no small amount of sarcasm. “We just have to make it to the bus stop.”

“Good.” Then he takes a Snickers bar out of his pocket and tosses it to Oak. I never even saw him snatch the candy up, and it worries me to think what else he might have done while I wasn’t looking. Oak, unbothered, catches it with a whoop of triumph.

“The Roach continued to teach me while you were gone,” Cardan says, when he spies my disapproving look. “Where is this bus stop?”

My eyes narrow. He is trying to distract me. “A short walk. You are teaching your nephew all the wrong lessons.”

Cardan nods, and then, as I turn away to start walking, I see him slip Oak a packet of Peanut M&Ms out of the corner of my eye. I pivot back around, and he counters my scowl with an absolutely devastating grin.

I have the briefest thought that I don’t know if I’ll survive him, which is ridiculous. I’ve survived much worse than Cardan Greenbriar, who is pretty much destined to outlive me no matter what. But no one has ever tried so steadfastly to annoy me to death and slay me with smiles in turn, and the combination has me feeling dizzy and unmoored, a ship adrift in the cloaking mists around Elfhame.

We take the bus to the mall, mostly without incident. Cardan is understandably wary of entering an iron box on wheels, sensing some sort of trap, and keeps his hands in his pockets, refusing to touch anything. Oak, in the grips of a Snickers-induced sugar high, skips up and down the aisle until I am able to wrangle him into a seat.

The bus drops us off by Macy’s. Oak and I shed our puffy winter jackets as soon as we get inside the mall. Cardan seems unaffected by the chill that set in overnight, and comfortably inhabits the same clothes he wore yesterday. They are slightly rumpled, but somehow that only enhances the hipster disguise. Though his pointed ears are hidden and he’s made some minor tweaks through glamour, there’s no mistaking him for anything human. His height and bearing and beautiful features stand out even more among the flock of ordinary mall-goers.

I find myself lingering on the fullness of his mouth and wonder if I will be able to look at him again without remembering where that mouth has been, and what he looked like naked.

A small gasp from Vivi startles me from those unwelcome thoughts. It is just before lunchtime on a Sunday, and, although it’s not peak season, the mall is beginning to fill up. But even among all of the people walking by, there is no mistaking the pink-haired figure hovering by the entrance of the Pottery Barn, wearing a black dress with a white moon and stars print.

Vivi stops in her tracks and looks at me, her eyes wide. “You didn’t.”

I shrug, but admit to nothing. I remember something Roach once told me, that he thought I might have as much fun pulling mortal strings as I did with the Folk. This doesn’t feel fun, though. It feels necessary. Anyone could see Heather and Vivi missed each other. Winning Heather’s trust over the months had been vital in bringing them back together. It had been vital to getting Heather here.

But I hadn’t mentioned any of this to my sister. Maybe Vivi should know what being surprised feels like once in a while.

“Go talk to her,” I say.

Vivi is generally unflappable, but now she looks slightly ill. “She hasn’t answered my texts for months.”

I inhale. “She answered mine, and I told her you would be here.”

“She knew I was coming but I didn’t know she was coming? That’s not fair.” Vivi gives me a harsh look, obviously searching for some reason to delay.

“Nothing’s fair.”

“How long have you been texting her?”

“That doesn’t matter.” I don’t know why she’s acting like this. I thought she would be delighted to see Heather, and I have never known her to fear anything. “Look, we’re right behind you. Go talk to her.” I shove at her arm. “Go.”

Vivi closes her eyes briefly, but she goes. I keep close to her. Cardan and Oak follow behind. I ignore Cardan’s inquisitive glance; I’ll explain all of this to him later. Right now, we’re too busy picking our way across to Heather at a snail’s pace.

To my surprise, Oak is the first one to say something. “Heather!” he exclaims, once he realizes who it is we’re all walking toward. He breaks away from us and bounds over to her, wraps his arms around her waist. I’d forgotten that she and Vivi had essentially co-parented him for months.

With forewarning, Heather is much better prepared to see all of us than we are to see her, for once. “Hey, kiddo,” she says, tearing her gaze away from Vivi as she bends to pat his hair. “You’re getting pretty tall.” Her face screws up in a weird way, as though she’s trying to get her head around something, or maybe trying to find words that a child would understand. “Where are you hiding the, uh…”

She brings her two index fingers to her forehead and wiggles them. Oak smiles, and then he lets his glamour ripple for a second so she can get a glimpse of his horns.

“Wow,” she says, in the slightly exaggerated way you say things to show kids they’ve impressed you. “Careful. You might take an eye out with those things.”

Oak’s grin widens. “I missed you,” he says. “I’m doing long division now in school and it’s hard. Vivi’s okay but she’s not good at math. Jude’s here too now, and she’s good at math, but she’s been in her room all—”

“Hey,” I chide, mostly in the interest of cutting him off. “We all ate pizza and played video games together. That was fun.”

“We?” Heather asks, but then she notices Cardan with us. It takes her a moment to place him in his mortal clothes, but he has an unforgettable face. She drew it.

She blinks, and says, “Oh, shit.”

“That’s what I said,” Vivi interjects, speaking up for the first time.

Heather looks back at her, and then breaks into a smile. It’s an old, comfortable smile, for some sort of inside joke shared between close friends. Or lovers. “That’s the King, right? He’s the King of the Faeries? He’s in the mall?” Vivi nods, and Heather exhales. “Well, I’ve seen some weird things, but that’s just… wild.”

“Absolutely,” Vivi agrees, beaming back. “Really fu—frickin’ wild.”

“Need it be said that I may go where I please when I please?” Cardan asks, sounding a bit vexed at being discussed as though he weren’t present. “If I felt a trip to the mortal world would be—stop pinching me, Jude—pleasurable, who would deny me?”

Vivi looks like she’s about to burst into another fit of giggles. Heather says, mildly, “Sure.” Then she pauses. “Do I have to say ‘Your Highness,’ or ‘Your Majesty,’” or…”

Cardan waves a hand dismissively. “I’ve learned that we don’t stand very much on formality here. And I’m given to understand from Taryn’s wedding that you’re family as well, are you not?”

Heather looks puzzled. I clear my throat. “Vivi and Heather are, um.”

“It’s complicated,” Vivi interjects, sparing everyone embarrassment for once.

“Ah.” Cardan looks at me. “Few things are not, I have learned.”

“So, you two…” Heather glances between us. “Are you—”

“Complicated,” I say.

“Married,” Cardan says.

I glare at him. I want to ask why he won’t stop doing that. Instead, I say, “Hence, complicated.”

Heather looks shocked. I had never told her. “Does everyone get married super young in Faerieland?”

“The Folk marry whenever they wish,” Cardan explains. “Marriages aren’t meant to last an eternity. Most are built to be temporary.”

“So it’s not… serious?”

He smirks. “Fortunately for Jude—or perhaps unfortunately, going by her scowl—we are bound so long as I sit on the throne. And I haven’t felt much like relinquishing it as of late.”

“We’re here to shop, right?” I interject, exasperated. “You wanted to see the mall.”

“I am seeing it,” Cardan says. “This is much more interesting.”

“I’m going to take Oak to Old Navy,” Vivi proclaims.

Oak groans.

“All your pants are too short. Stop growing and we wouldn’t have this problem. C’mon. We can do the food court after.”

After some consideration, Oak comes to accept this bargain. I say, “Great, so Heather—”

“Keep an eye on my sister, okay?” Vivi interrupts, giving Heather a meaningful look. “If you don’t mind.”

“What?”

“I don’t mind,” says Heather.

I draw myself up to my full height, taller than Vivi. That is not the plan. The plan is that Vivi and Heather walk around the mall like they used to and everything goes back to normal. “No. I don’t need minding.”

“You said you needed help wrangling faeries, did you not?”

“But—”

“I tire of this,” Cardan announces, sounding like his old self, bored and haughty. “Whither shall we wander first?”

Heather looks him over, chewing on her lower lip. “Oh,” she says, lighting up like the sky at dawn, “I know just the place.”

I can count the number of times I’ve been in a Sephora on two fingers. The first, Taryn and I were a few years younger, and we’d dared each other to go inside, intimidated by the sheer amount of stuff inside. We had no use for makeup, living in Faerie, as the Folk have little need for foundation, but mortals seemed to smear all kinds of concoctions over their faces. The second, more recently, Heather sent me to the Sephora on a mission to find a good concealer, and a salesperson used some strange gadget to “color match” my face. The concealer hides the dark circles under my eyes that never quite disappear, but the whole process was so strange that I’ve felt no desire to return.

But Heather was right. This is the perfect shop for Cardan.

I brood by a picture of Rihanna, one of the few celebrities whose faces I know. We have been here half an hour at most, and Cardan has managed to produce a truly indecent number of makeup samples from… somewhere. I don’t know if he has glamoured the salespeople or simply charmed them. Currently, he is allowing Heather to test a full-size eyeliner on him, bending at the knees so she can reach his face. She has a steady artist’s hand, and is doing a very good job. She is smiling.

She isn’t supposed to like him. She’s supposed to be on my side.

I realize that’s a foolish thing to think since Cardan and I aren’t at odds at the moment, but I can’t help it. Truces are temporary. We’ve been enemies much longer than we’ve been allies, or—whatever it is we are now. I know enough to know that this won’t remain the status quo. He’ll leave, and then we’ll be enemies again.

“Penny,” Cardan says suddenly, appearing before me to swipe a soft brush over the tip of my nose.

I startle. I hate the way my mind wanders whenever it turn to him, like a rambling brook. “What?”

“For your thoughts,” he explains. “That’s a mortal phrase, isn’t it?”

“Oh. I thought you were talking about whatever you have in your hands.”

“Hm? No, this is a highlighter, apparently. It is named…” He turns the makeup pan over in his hand. “Ah.”

“What?” I am distracted by my face, reflected in one of the mirrors at the end of the aisle. The tip of my nose is now a glittery dandelion yellow.

“‘Trophy Wife.’” His mouth twists. “Ironic. I think there are some arguments to be made for who the ‘trophy’ spouse is in this marriage.”

I wipe at my nose with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, but the only effect that has is that my sleeve is now glittering too. My sweatshirt is black, with PORTLAND in white in block letters; the glitter is noticeable. I sigh and look away. “It’s very yellow.”

“Nothing here is pigmented enough. It could be much yellower, but it will suffice,” Cardan grouses. With his eyes lined, and glitter of indeterminate origin on his own cheeks, he looks much like the arrogant and spoiled prince who’d haunted my childhood. Then he brushes a line of yellow sparkles gently over my cheekbone, something that prince never would have done. “And it does suit you. So, what is it that I’m meant to have done this time?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t mistake me. I am far from blameless.” He dabs my face with more glittery yellow highlighter. “But I have been retracing my steps in my mind and you have me stumped. I’m not sure what I did to displease you.”

I meet his eyes, which don’t quite match the smile he’s wearing. Telling him that I’m cross over something so trivial seems impossible. I ask, “Why did you want to come here?”

Cardan blinks. That was not what he had thought I would say. “It seemed like it would be diverting. And I have still seen very little of the mortal world.”

“Right.”

He raises both eyebrows, clearly expecting me to elaborate.

I don’t want to elaborate. Communication is, supposedly, the key to a successful relationship, but I’m not sure if what Cardan and I have counts. We have a particularly thorny marriage. We’ve gone to bed together. But we seem to still be missing a few important pieces of the puzzle.

“There were diversions to be had at the apartment,” is all I say, in the most neutral tone I can muster.

Cardan keeps looking at me, brows raised. And then he says, “Ah.”

“You know, more video games,” I add quickly. “Chicken nuggets.”

He smirks, but doesn’t interrupt. Just lets me continue to dig my own grave.

“Forget it,” I mutter, turning away. “I’m not mad. Let’s just pay for your things and go.”

His long-fingered hand closes around my arm. “Jude,” he says, his voice rich with amusement. “Did you want to spend more time with me?”

I don’t look at him. “We’re spending time together right now.”

Cardan tries to tug me back into him, but I refuse to budge. I hear him put the makeup aside and then feel him wrap his arms around me, clasping his hands over my navel. “You wanted to go back to bed,” he says, his breath tickling my ear. He sounds insufferably smug.

“I didn’t. I don’t. No.” I try to pry his hands apart, but his grip holds fast.

“And here I thought I was doing you a kindness.”

“What?”

“I thought you’d taken all that you could. Was I mistaken?”

I remember the wince I couldn’t hide that morning. He’s probably right, and I hate that more than anything else. “I’m fine,” I protest, a mortified blush flaring in my cheeks.

“Far be it from me to discourage you testing your limits, but I can opt not to participate. My darling wife, you thought I didn’t notice the change in your gait?”

I say nothing.

“Lest you take this as a sign of mortal weakness, I’ll have you know this is not the first time this has happened, and I do not expect it to be the last.”

I turn my head to glare at him. He looks so thoroughly pleased with himself that I want to slap the glitter right off his face.

“I have never had much use for patience, but for you I will make an effort to dredge some up. I have waited a while to take you to bed. I can wait longer to do it again.” He presses a kiss to my temple. I want to lean into it. I want to squirm away. “Instead we shall finish here, then go to this food court and gorge ourselves on…”

“Panda Express?” I supply.

“Yes. Whatever that may be.”

Just then, Heather returns with her basket of products, some of which I assume are Cardan’s. Cardan lifts it out of her hands, grinning as he tosses in the highlighter, and then asks her, “Is that all you desire?”

“You’re buying her things?” I ask. “It’s not enough to be the High King of the Faerie? You’re Santa Claus now? Don’t take that,” I add to Heather. “There are always strings.”

Cardan’s dark eyebrows draw together. “Your Heather has a deft hand with a pen. Were my sister Elowyn around, she’d welcome Heather with open arms into the Circle of Larks. But we are not in Faerie, so I must find some other way to honor her service. I am in a generous mood, and I hear good foundation is very expensive. Would you like anything, dearest heart?”

“No, no, that’s—fine. Just go check out.”

“As you wish.” But he is unable to resist kissing my cheek before he goes, and my skin tingles even when he’s halfway across the store.

“There’s like five hundred dollars of product in there,” Heather says, staring after him. “It’s good to be king, I guess.”

I look away from Cardan, trying to will my cheeks to stop stinging. “It’s fake money,” I say. “Leaves and things spelled to look like cash. I mean, the monarchy is wealthy, but all their stuff is back in Elfhame. Glamouring is a trick all the Folk know.”

Heather looks at me with surprise, then her mouth turns down at the corners, as if she is taking a mental tally of all the times she’s ever seen Vivi pay for something. “Still,” she says, at last. “Are you really married to him?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t seem thrilled about it.”

“What?”

“I’m just saying, I’m not even into—”

I groan. I don’t need to hear anything more about how pretty Cardan is. I have eyes.

“Hey, let me finish. I’m not into guys, you know that, but if some magical faerie king swooped in to offer me the world on a silver platter, I don’t think I’d look as sour about it as you do. And you are into guys, so something is up.”

“No, it’s just—you don’t know him.” I wipe at my nose again. “I’ve known him over a decade. He’s never this happy. And if he is, someone’s paying for it. Dearly.”

“Seems like he’s paying.” Heather and I watch Cardan pick up a few of the sample-size products on the shelves by the cash registers. They are comically tiny in his hands. She cocks her head to the side. “Maybe he just likes you.”

I snort.

“Seriously, maybe he’s happy to be here.”

Shaking my head, I say again, “You don’t know him.”

“Right.” Heather’s brow creases. “Well, the cashier seems to like him.”

“What?” I look over. “Oh, no. Again?”

“What do you mean, ‘again?’”

I am already heading over to the counter, and don’t reply. Behind me, I hear Heather say under her breath, “It’s like herding cats.”

Maybe she’s finally realizing the shape of her future with Vivi.

This cashier is younger, maybe a little older than me, and male, his face impeccably contoured and his eyeshadow a shining rainbow. He is telling Cardan very enthusiastically about something as he rings up all of the products in the basket, leaning ever so subtly over the counter. The worst thing is that he probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

But to my horror, Cardan seems actually interested in whatever is being said, which means I need to nip this in the bud before it gets out of hand.

“Hi,” I say, stopping at Cardan’s side.

He blinks. He seems surprised, but a little pleased, to see me there. “Hello.”

“What’s all this?”

“Oh, Edward was just telling me of this most intriguing weekly event.”

I look at Edward, who winces for some reason. “Really.”

“Do you know of this ‘drag show?’” Cardan asks me. “It sounds like wonderful pageantry. I’ve been invited to attend the next showing.”

I am tempted to smack my forehead, but refrain. Cardan would probably be enchanted by a drag show. “I’m sure it is wonderful,” I say, dispassionately, threading my arm through his. “If only you were in town longer.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I can’t linger.” Cardan reaches out and catches one of my errant curls around his index finger. “Not for even the most enchanting of diversions.”

Unfortunate Edward the cashier has frozen in the midst of scanning a face mask. “Oh,” he says. “Are you guys—?”

“Yes,” I say sharply.

“Very,” Cardan adds, the cat who got the cream.

“Oh,” Edward says again, and I see his face turn red even under his layer of foundation. “Right.”

“But I am still happy to know of this drag show,” Cardan says. “Perhaps for the next visit.” He holds out a few glamoured leaves. “Will this be enough?”

Edward stammers his way through the rest of the transaction, and then we are free, and I am pulling Cardan over toward the exit. Back in Faerie, he and his friends had been so beautiful that it almost hurt to look at them, and I saw them nearly every day. I hadn’t considered how he must look to mortals who have never before seen one of the Folk in their lives. This whole excursion was a mistake.

But Cardan doesn’t seem to think so. He’s practically humming.

“What has you in such a mood?” I snap.

“No small thing,” is his answer. “I never realized how gratifying it would be to see you jealous.”

I halt, going hot and cold all at once. “Jealous? What have I to be jealous of?”

Cardan smiles. “Nothing at all. Which is why I find your glaring so delightful.”

“Well, I’ll stop,” I hear myself say. It comes out sharp, cutting. “I know that marriage isn’t the same for the Folk.”

He blinks at me, long-lashed eyes dark and deep as a shadowed wood. “What?”

“I wouldn’t want—I wouldn’t expect—” I press my hands to my eyes, digging in with the heels of my palms to make red and green flash on the inside of my closed eyelids. “Never mind.”

His eyebrows climb higher on his forehead. “Out with it,” he says. “I may guess at your thoughts, but I am incapable of divining them.”

I wish I’d never said anything at all. “You can charm as many mortals as you want. You don’t owe me fidelity.”

Cardan looks surprised and a little scandalized, which is the last thing I expect from him. He draws back from me, unlinking our arms. “You think so little of me?”

“I—what?”

“Or do you believe I think so little of the vows we made to each other that I would just as soon put them from my mind?”

“But—” I scrabble for the words. “Of course you would. You banished me. Am I meant to believe that there hasn’t been anyone since I’ve been gone? That you haven’t bedded or kissed or flirted with anyone?”

“Yes,” he says flatly, annoyed. “Should I have?”

I don’t know what to make of that at all. In fact, I feel a little dizzy with the admission and the way he says it as though I should have known it to be true all along. I am not crazy. Vivi had agreed that Cardan would probably not honor the marital vows he made to get rid of me. And here he is, daring to stand before me and claim otherwise.

But he can’t lie, and even as I mentally pick apart what he’s said to find some verbal trickery, I am unable to. Which is more frightening than not.

Cardan waits for me to say something, his lips pressed in a thin line.

“I never asked that of you,” I tell him. “I never expected it.”

“Would you have me take other lovers, then?”

I want to lie, and tell him that I would have him do as he pleases. I want to pretend I don’t care. But instead, I draw in a deep breath. “No. If you’re so determined to honor your vows, then honor them.”

“Because it seems to matter to me, is that it?” He is still frowning at me.

“I can’t pretend to divine your whims, either.”

“Ah.” He takes a step closer to me. I find that after all this time, I still resent him for his height, the way that he thinks that just by standing close enough he will force me to lean back and tilt my head back to see him. “Does the thought of wanting something for yourself so pain you?”

“We’re not talking about me.”

“Putting me on the throne, under your control, for the sake of your family. Agreeing to wed me to keep the peace. Encouraging me to remain faithful to my wife because doing so seems to please me.”

“You were the one who suggested that I marry you for peace,” I retort. “You were the one who used me and then upheld the vows you made for trickery, and now you have the audacity to act like I’m the one who’s wronged you?”

“I thought that the worst you could do was use your mortal freedom to trick me, lie to me.” Something simmers behind his eyes. “I was mistaken, Jude. The worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.”

I turn my face away from him, furious, my eyes stinging. None of this is about me. We are speaking of the things he did, the choices he made. I have swallowed each down like a bitter pill. I have plotted and schemed around him. How dare he respond as though I have erred in thinking the worst of him when he has shown me the worst of himself, time and again?

But by the time I look back, armed with my retort, he is already gone. My arguments die, and panic rises in my throat like bile. No matter how I scan the crowd, I find no sign of Cardan anywhere, hide nor hair.

I have lost the High King of Faerie.

Chapter Text

Heather stands by the entrance to Sephora, tapping at her phone. I run straight at her, still holding the bag full of things Cardan had just bought.

“Did you see him?” I demand. “Did you see Cardan?”

She looks up at me. “What?”

“He was here and then he—” I shake my head. “He can move quickly. We need to split up and look for him.”

“He just left?”

I don’t want to explain our argument. “Yeah.”

“You think he’s going to find trouble?”

“I’m more afraid trouble will find him.” And it may be inevitable. Cardan is High King of Faerie, and his powerful magic is bound up in the Isles of Elfhame. I am not sure what power he has in the mortal realm. It might be none.

The thought of Cardan wandering about without his powers and without me to protect him induces a mind-numbing terror. I assume some of his spies are tailing us, although they are doing a good job of keeping out of sight, but any number of other assailants could be lurking about, waiting for the opportunity to kidnap or kill him. I mentally retrace our steps, trying to remember whether I saw anyone out of place. But I hadn’t been paying attention.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“Take these and go back the way we came,” I tell Heather, handing her the shopping bag. “Text me if you find him.”

She nods. “Right.”

Then she goes one way, and I go the other, running deeper into the mall, weaving between people as I go. Cardan is tall and should be easy to spot, and I look this way and that, through the doorways of stores, seeing no sign of him nor any other faces I know, familiar or feared. My mind races with all of the horrible things that might have befallen him just because I let him slip from my sight.

But in the end, I find Cardan in the food court, artfully slouching alone at a table and holding a cold drink cup from Red Mango. He looks a bit put out, but he is intact.

A knot of girls who look to be in their early high school years stand not too far from him, jostling each other. He does not seem to have noticed them, too consumed by his thoughts.

“He’s in one of those boy bands, I think,” one whispers to another. “He can’t not be famous.”

“No!” says the girl nearest Cardan. “But I’ve definitely seen him on Insta. I know I have.”

“Well, ask him!”

“You ask him!”

“Hey,” calls a third girl, and her friends all gather closer to her in a tighter bunch, tittering and giggling.

Cardan looks up.

“Uh.” The girl seems momentarily dumbstruck, and then she asks, “Are you an influencer? Like, a model?”

Faintly bemused, Cardan says, “I do have influence, yes.”

“I knew it!” crows the girl who’d thrown out that guess. “What’s your handle?”

“That’s enough,” I say, stepping forward. “Leave him be.”

Cardan’s eyes widen in surprise, as though he didn’t think I would come after him. But then he blinks, and he is back to looking bored and faintly cross. The girls all bristle at the intrusion. They cannot be more than two or three years younger than me, but it feels like there are decades between us.

“Who are you?” asks the one who had been bold enough to speak to Cardan first.

“I’m his wife,” I say, in no uncertain terms.

Cardan raises his eyebrows.

That statement disappoints all the girls in one fell swoop, as I knew it would. “Well, fine,” says their self-appointed speaker. “Uh, good for you, I guess.” And then they slink away.

I slide into the chair across from Cardan. “You can’t just leave without saying where you’re going,” I tell him. “You are High King, and away from Elfhame you are unsafe.”

“As you can see,” Cardan says dryly, “I am perfectly safe, save for the threat of overeager female companionship.”

“Well, maybe if you—” I begin, and then I bite off the rest of the statement; it is ugly. If he wanted, Cardan could glamour himself into looking like someone else and thus avoid attention. Otherwise he looks how he looks, and he is not compelling all the mortals around him to lose their minds by magic—he is only existing. Even feeling as I do, like there are embers in the pit of my stomach, I shouldn’t blame him for that.

“That did feel good,” I confess instead. “Saying it. Making them leave.”

Cardan just sips at his drink.

I look down at my hands. My ruby ring winks cheerfully in the light, mocking me. My left ring finger, missing its tip, seems strangely unbalanced with the ring at its base. “What are you drinking?”

“It’s a smoothie,” he says. “Strawberry banana, ostensibly, although the strawberry isn’t very potent and I do not know what a banana is meant to taste like. Liquor would improve it.”

“You’ve never eaten a banana?”

He gives me a blank look. “Should I have?”

“I guess not,” I admit. I had never thought about it, but bananas are a tropical fruit and neither grown on Elfhame nor imported to it. Still, it seems strange that Cardan has never had one, especially since he’s sampled other, more interesting delights that most mortals will never taste. “You should get someone to bring you a bunch as tribute.”

Cardan scoffs. Then silence again. The rest of the mall seems to hold its breath, waiting for one of us to speak.

“Look,” I say, at last. “You haven’t given me reason to think well of you.”

His lips curl into the sneer I know so well. It is almost comforting. “Is this how you begin all of your apologies?”

“I’ve nothing to apologize for!” My voice rises against my will, and I tamp down on it, so that it comes out cold and even. “And you have wormed your way out of every apology you yet owe me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Cardan sips at his smoothie, no longer a king but a petulant boy. “I suppose your dogged belief in my unfaithfulness explains your dalliance with that mortal.”

It takes me a second to realize he means Jake. Yesterday morning feels impossibly far away. “There was no dalliance,” I say. “We were just meeting for coffee. I never laid a hand on him, and he never touched me.”

“He wanted to, though,” Cardan remarks.

“You want to.” I don’t even blush as I say it. I barely blink. “How can you hold that against him?”

“Indeed, I cannot,” he concedes, but begrudgingly.

I study him, all the sharp lines of his face. “That really bothered you,” I marvel. “It still bothers you.”

Cardan doesn’t say anything.

This should be a triumph. On some level, I had wanted to bother him. I had wanted to send a signal that what had transpired between us didn’t much matter, and I had sent it. But all I feel is achy, hollowed out.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “And I don’t understand why you’re cross with me for acting as though we aren’t married.”

“We are married.”

“Yes, but.” I feel myself becoming vexed. Surely he knows what I mean. “It was only a trick marriage. You only wed me so I’d release you from the vow you swore to me, and then you used that freedom to send me away.”

“I didn’t foresee you being still so bitter about that,” Cardan says. “Somewhat bitter, yes. Not so bitter it would taint my every word and action.”

This makes no sense. “Elfhame is my home. You cast me out. You humiliated me.”

“You know why I did that.”

I don’t think I do. Part of it, yes, but not the entirety. Not yet. I just say, “But you did it.”

Cardan contemplates the smoothie cup, looking for all the world like he’s suddenly lost his appetite. “The marriage wasn’t a trick,” he says. “The marriage was real.”

“Yes, I know that by the customs of the Folk, we are truly married. You won’t let me forget it.”

“No, Jude,” he says, refusing to meet my eyes. “I refused to wed Nicasia, although doing so would have been the easiest way to ensure the truce between our peoples endured—future complications aside. I found another way to keep that peace. There was likely another way, too, to persuade you to relinquish your hold on me, but that was not the path I chose. I chose to wed you.”

I stare at him. “So, you—”

“Wanted to, yes.” Cardan shifts in the chair, uncomfortable with the admission. I would give anything to see what his tail is doing right now.

But I am hardly faring any better. “You wanted to marry me.”

“Yes.”

“Because you want me,” I say, searching for the safe thing, something to which he has already confessed. “You wanted to—lay claim to me.”

Cardan snorts. “I pity the poor sap who would dare lay claim to you. No. I wanted to be married to you because I like you.”

“What?”

“A shameful amount,” he adds, but he sounds a little too dejected for the remark to have the bite that it should. “Although most days I believe the cause to be hopeless.”

Maybe he just likes you, Heather had said. Maybe I should have listened.

“I like the way you speak to me as few people dare,” Cardan continues. “I like—your cleverness and the ways in which you challenge me. I like how my bloodline and my being High King never figured into your like or dislike of me, only the way I treat you and others. I like vexing you because it’s easy and I like your smiles because they’re rare. I fear if I ever really heard you laugh, I would like it so much that I’d devote my life to keeping you happy all your days.”

“You like me enough to marry me,” I say, testing the weight of the words on my tongue as I might test the balance of a blade on my hand. “You like me enough that—you would give me fidelity.”

He cocks his head to the side. “I’ll ask again: do you want my fidelity, Jude?”

“It’s a very mortal way to conduct a marriage,” I say carefully.

He waits.

“Yes,” I admit, though he had been right, and it does pain me to do so. “Yes, I do want that. Although—if someone really struck your fancy, I’d rather you not chafe under the yoke of it.”

“Hmm.” Cardan mulls this over. “I cannot foresee that happening anytime soon. Would you have me tell you if some other creature caught my eye? I shouldn’t want to take you by surprise.”

I hadn’t even realized that was an option. Slowly, as I work through the implications, I nod. “Yes, I think so. I would rather know.”

Cardan nods back. Then, with odd hesitancy, he asks, “Would you extend to me the same courtesy?”

“Of course,” I say immediately. “If we’re to be really married. If you do like me that much. If you—”

I stop, paralyzed by realization. Even my heart stutters to a halt. I am no longer aware of any of the other mall patrons, nor the existence of the food court. There is only Cardan there, sitting across from me. And maybe for the first time, I am listening, really listening, to what he has said.

“What is it?” he asks. “What do you see?”

“You love me.” It comes out overly harsh, an accusation. I look at him with wide eyes, open to everything. “You love me.”

Cardan exhales.

“Do you deny it?” I challenge.

“I suppose I don’t not love you,” he admits. “Your brother asked me a similar question. I could not find the words to deny him then, and so it must be true.”

My head spins. Ever since Cardan had admitted to once loving Nicasia, I had been boggled by his capability to love anything. I would never have thought he loved me, especially not after he exiled me. And yet if he can admit to it—

“Say it,” I order.

Cardan looks stricken. “Is that necessary?”

“Yes, it is.” I stare at him across the table. “Say it.”

After a moment, he acquiesces. He reaches across the table and takes my left hand, the one bearing the ruby ring. “Jude Duarte, daughter of clay, mortal ward of—”

“You are stalling.”

“I love you.” The words come out quickly, all at once, and at first he seems horrified by the way they spill out, and his grip on my hand tightens. Then he relaxes, and closes his eyes, a shudder moving through him. “I love you,” he says again, an accepting sigh this time. And then once more, “I love you.”

“Oh,” I say, dazed. Somehow I didn’t think he would actually say it, much less say it thrice. I thought he would avoid it, as he has so often avoided discomfort and hard work.

Cardan opens his eyes. “Please say something. I feel as though I have been poisoned again.”

I scowl. “You are going to be fine.”

“Not the words I was hoping for, but they will do.” He gives me a wan smile.

“I’m thinking.” I draw my thumb in a circle over the back of his hand. The words he wants to hear I can’t give him, not now. Not when everything is still so raw, so potent. When the dust settles, if it ever does, I will. I know what I feel. There is no one who can worm his way under my skin like he can, who can delight me like he can. And for all that we misunderstand each other constantly, the more I know of Cardan, the more I feel that we are more alike than we are different.

The words are not yet on the tip of my tongue, but I know the inevitability of them. It seems like cold comfort to look at Cardan and tell him that maybe, someday, I will say them back.

“Come with me,” I say instead, standing and tugging at his hand. “Come on.”

And though Cardan looks confused, he goes with me.

The nearest clothing store is Hot Topic, and I make a beeline for it. I’ve never understood this store, which throbs with alternative music and bristles with band shirts and pop culture references galore. It seems like it’s trying to capture the appeal of someone like Heather, with her ink-stained fingers and bright pink hair and slightly off-kilter thrifted fashion. But of course, it is in a mall.

For my purposes, it will do.

I grab the first dress I see. It is black and cap-sleeved, with white vertical pinstripes and printed roses scattered irregularly across the skirt. I’m not even certain that it’s my size, but with the hanger clutched in one hand and Cardan’s hand clutched in the other, I march up to a girl folding some graphic t-shirts and replacing them on their shelves.

“I’d like to try this on,” I say.

The girl has faded blue hair pulled back in twin braids and a nose ring. She says, “Sure,” and pulls some keys out of her pocket. Then she looks at Cardan. “Uh, you know he can’t go in with you.”

Cardan catches on quickly. “You’ll find that I can go wherever I please,” he says, voice thick and honey-sweet with glamour.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” says the girl, sounding slightly unfocused. “Follow me.”

She leads us to the back, unlocking a heavy black door that doesn’t quite stretch from floor to ceiling, then leaves us. I know immediately that I’ve chosen well. The fitting room is spacious, and there’s a low bench stretched across the far end from wall to wall.

My mouth is on Cardan’s before the door has finished swinging closed behind us.

He knew my intent, but didn’t expect the force of it. We stagger back together, stopped only by the wall, and then one of his hands is in my loose hair and his other arm wraps around my waist and his mouth opens against mine. The dress falls from my hand, a puddle of stripes and cotton on the floor. My coat, which I’d been carrying folded over my forearm, soon joins it. As Cardan walks me back toward the bench, I let my purse drop too so I can better wrap my arms around his neck.

No words, for now. But this works just as well, or maybe better.

There is room on the bench for us both to share it, even with me sitting sideways with my knee knocking against the wall, one foot still planted on the floor and Cardan there trapped by my legs, leaning over me, bending me backward. His hand slips up the back of my sweatshirt, under the camisole beneath, and he chuckles when he finds my knife, holstered at my low back. Then his warm palm presses against my bare skin, sliding up my spine, over my bra strap. Even that little bit of contact is enough to send shivers through me, a stone rippling the surface of a pond.

I feel the upturned corners of his mouth as he kisses me. He can’t stop smiling. He must be dizzily, dangerously, deliriously happy.

At least, that’s what I imagine, because with the shock of his confession fading, warmth blooms in my chest like new spring roses with thorns I am determined to ignore. He loves me. He said it, so it is true. There is a lot that still doesn’t make sense, and there is a lot that admission can’t explain away. And I will address it with him later.

He is wearing too many clothes.

My hand moves to the fly of his borrowed mortal jeans.

Cardan surprises me by laughing low and plucking it away by the wrist. “What do you mean to do?” he asks, kissing the corner of my mouth.

“You,” I say, trying to wrest my hand from his grasp. It is a mortal thing to say; the Folk don’t speak of “doing” anyone. Three months ago I would never have said it.

“Peace, Jude,” he says, his voice heartachingly tender. He presses his lips to my jaw. They are warm and a little swollen from the force of my kissing. “Tarry with me awhile. There is time.”

I don’t know how he can say that when he’s leaving tonight. Certainly there is time, there is just not enough of it. I wriggle in his arms. “But…”

“Sometimes,” he murmurs, his mouth over my neck, “kissing is the end, not just the means to it.”

He applies his mouth to my neck, and I let my eyes fall shut. We have never had enough breath to tarry. We never have the freedom for it. But perhaps it would be nice to stay here kissing him, to kiss him for hours. It seems like a luxury we can ill afford—

Cardan sucks, hard, at the skin of my neck. Hard enough to make me groan indecently.

“Ow!” I strike his shoulder, not hard. The pain throbs in my blood, lighting up parts of me that I don’t expect. But it still hurts.

He stops, laughing again and picking his head back up to kiss my ear. My eyes catch on our reflection in the dressing room mirror: we are inextricably tangled together, my cheeks are flushed, and a red welt is rising on the skin of my neck. I can see it clearly, which means everyone else will be able to also.

“Something to remember me by,” says Cardan, the words rich with mirth.

I don’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or strike him again, or kiss him until he is unable to think. That is the nature of this thing between us.

“I hate you,” I say. “So much.”

“I know,” he sighs, his nose buried in my hair. “My sweet poison, my bitter tonic. I know.”

I decide that I am going to kiss him until he is unable to think.

But I have barely begun when someone knocks on the door, three loud knocks. We break apart, startled; I nearly crack my forehead against Cardan’s nose. Then we both look at the door.

“I will deal with it,” Cardan says, and he starts extracting himself from me to glamour whoever is there into leaving. I am inexplicably bereft at the loss of his heat.

But then Vivi calls through the door, “You guys are going to get us banned from the mall!”

I groan, my head falling back against the wall. The one person who can’t be glamoured away. “What are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” she asks. “There is one fitting room here and someone else will definitely need it before you guys are done canoodling. You couldn’t have chosen the Macy’s?”

Cardan looks torn between rage and amusement. I cover my face with my hand. “Don’t say ‘canoodling.’”

“Then come out of there!”

“Fine!”

“Fine.”

I begin the agonizing process of picking up all of the stuff I dropped. Cardan barely bothers fixing his clothes. “Your sister may be a tyrant,” he says, “but she is a fair one.”

“I heard that,” says Vivi.

Again, I am forced to recall Cardan’s terrible upbringing and hold my tongue, though I otherwise would have gladly supplied a biting remark about the sort of tyrant Vivi is. I open the door and glare at her.

“Look,” she says coolly, her arms folded. “Don’t get me banned from the mall. That’s all I ask. I like the mall. You either,” she casts over my shoulder, at Cardan. “I’m serious.”

Cardan unfolds himself from the bench, coming to stand behind me, suddenly full of regal self-possession and, admittedly, a little terrifying. “Vivienne, must I remind you that I am your King, and not a child to be scolded?”

Vivi, who is shorter than I am, just looks him in the face and says, “We’re not in Elfhame, are we, Your Majesty? Besides, you’re married to my sister, which makes you my younger brother, which gives me the right to scold you, child or no.”

To my surprise, Cardan smiles. “Very well. There is some sense in that. Jude is the one who deserves the tongue lashing, as this display was entirely her fault.”

“Who glamoured the cashier?” I ask.

“Almost entirely,” Cardan concedes. “But you can’t believe that I would think to tumble your sister in such a place as this.”

“No. Which is why I’m honestly questioning Jude’s judgment more than yours right now.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “No more talk of canoodling or tumbling while I’m in earshot, ever again. How did you even know we were here?”

“Heather saw you guys go in. She texted me.”

Indeed, over Vivi’s shoulder I spy Heather and Oak near the front of the store, picking through a display of Pokémon merchandise. Well, at least they’re texting again, although this was not at all how I expected them to get there.

I stalk past her. “Great. I am so glad you two are allied in the common cause of spoiling my fun.”

“It’s not my fault you’ve belatedly gone boy-crazy,” Vivi says, trotting to keep up with me. She is eyeing the mark on my neck. “Whatever. We’re going to Forever 21. Come with us.”

“No,” I snap. “I’m hungry. I’m getting something to eat.”

“Suit yourself. Cardan?”

“I will stay with Jude,” he says airily. “Perhaps we’ll join you later.”

So it will be as I hoped for a while: Heather and Vivi with Oak, like old times, and me alone with Cardan. That is enough to soothe the burn of embarrassment, but only somewhat. I stride out of the store without looking at any of them.

The blue-haired girl is behind the register now, and she gives us a dreamy smile and a little wave as we leave.

Back in the food court, Cardan and I are inconspicuous. There are couples all around, many roughly our age. My eyes seem drawn to every one: a shy pair of young teenagers on what is clearly a first date, sharing fries; two bickering college students whose relationship seems on its last unsteady legs; a boy whose hand rests a little too far below the waist of his female companion. Couples standing near each other, couples trying to tame unruly children, couples holding hands.

Cardan must notice where I am looking, because when he comes to stand beside me, he slips his hand into mine, thumbing my ruby ring. I frown up at him, not cross, just a bit puzzled. He had wrapped himself around me in between the shelves of Sephora and kissed me behind a closed door in Hot Topic, but openly standing together with clasped hands is something new.

“What would satiate your hunger?” he asks, unaware of my unasked questions or choosing to ignore them. “The Panda Express?”

“It’s just ‘Panda Express.’ And, no. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’m hungry after all.”

“Perhaps not for food,” Cardan suggests.

I look down at our hands. “This is alright?”

“Is it not?”

“The only time you ever kissed me in public, you’d been poisoned.” I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this to him.

Cardan frowns. “But we are in the mortal realm.”

“That hardly means we’re alone. There are spies everywhere.”

“I know. Most of them are mine.” He leans forward and kisses the tip of my nose. “You trained them.”

“And you’re…” It seems foolish to ask when I don’t know that I’ll like what he has to say, although if the last twenty-four hours have proven anything, it’s that there is more fool in me than I ever quite knew. I am on uneven footing, and I don’t like that at all. But better to embarrass myself by asking than not know. “You don’t mind if people know?”

“So many already assumed you warmed my bed,” he teases, knowing very well that was not what I meant. “And visiting with the lover who murdered my brother is not the most salacious thing a faerie ruler has ever done.”

I roll my eyes.

Cardan releases my hand and turns to stand in front of me, then places his hands on my waist and draws me closer. “All will be known,” he murmurs. “So, yes. This is alright.”

That is just enough of a promise to be reassuring and just vague enough to unsettle. I exhale, but lean against him anyway. It feels like there are no rules, which is ridiculous, because of course Faerie is far more lawless than the mortal world. But Cardan and I are anonymous here. No one knows us, save the spies he’s admitted are on our tail. We might be college students, too. We might be anyone.

And without all eyes on us, without any burden of expectation, I can stand close to him, my chest pressed to his, and he can slip his hands in the back pockets of my jeans, and we can be disgustingly affectionate with each other. I can look at him as long as I want without worrying about what I’m giving away. He can kiss me in front of everyone and not care. It is dizzying, and dangerous, and too good to be true—

Because it’s fleeting. Because he’ll go back tonight and leave me behind. Because I’ll return to anger and schemes, and he’ll return to the throne. Because that’s what a truce is: a fragile peace with an expiration date.

I know what happened the last time I let my guard down around him. I can’t trust that this isn’t all part of some cruel game of cat and mouse, that he isn’t playing with my heart only to break it again. True, he said he loved me, but what does that mean? Love had not saved my mother from Madoc. Love would not save either of us from each other.

But there is a part of me, one that I thought I’d had enough sense to bury, that wants so badly to just be a teenage girl, standing in the mall with her arms around the neck of the boy who loves her.

A shuddering sigh escapes me, and then I rest my head against his shoulder. His hands slide lower in my hips.

Behind us, someone clears their throat.

I pick my head up and look back over my shoulder. A woman with a toddler in a stroller and another, slightly older child at her side is glaring daggers at us. “There are children present,” she says.

Instead of dismissing the woman or glamouring her into leaving, Cardan surprises me once again by simpering and wrapping his arm around my shoulder. “Your pardon,” he says. “I’m leaving tonight.”

The woman continues to glower at us.

“He’s going back to college,” I lie, because he cannot. Now that we are wed, perhaps I will always be telling his lies. “In Boston.”

“Hmph,” says the woman, but she doesn’t chastise us again.

“I am not sure when I’ll next see her,” Cardan adds, which is true enough, since he does not plan to pardon me. “And I will miss her.”

He keeps that charming smile fixed on the woman. I think he might enjoy how easy it is to play us mortals without using any magic at all.

The woman looks at both of us. Her older child begins tugging at the sleeve of her coat. “Well, keep it PG,” she says at last, and then, mollified, she moves along.

Cardan laughs when she is gone, and leans against me again, but I have been jolted out of my reverie and do not lean back, spine straight as a rod.

“Jude,” he asks, “did she trouble you so?”

I shake my head.

“Then what does?”

“This isn’t real,” I inform him, as if he somehow didn’t know. “What’s happening now isn’t real.”

He frowns at me. “I don’t know of any hallucinogen that can produce an illusion this potent. Neither of us can be glamoured. And you—” He pinches my waist, and I shoot a quick glare his way. “—feel too substantial to be a dream. It’s real enough.”

“No,” I say, relieved to be getting angry. My anger at him is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s far safer than whatever else I’m feeling right now. “This isn’t the way things are. It can’t last. It’s not—” My voice breaks. I am a silly girl with silly dreams. “It’s not forever.”

To my surprise, his eyes sparkle with something like fondness. “My mortal fool,” he says, “just because it’s not forever doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

I breathe out through my nose. When one lives as long as he will, I suppose few things last forever.

“But,” he adds, “for what it’s worth, which may be very little, I doubt I shall tire of this long as you live. Will you?”

I don’t expect that reply. It hits me like a punch to the gut. And the thing is, I don’t think he means us as we are now, affectionate, careless. Friendly. I think he means alternating between this and being at each other’s throats, and that prospect brings with it a simmering sort of anticipation that I like quite a bit.

“As long is there is breath in my lungs, I will be a thorn in your side,” I promise him.

“I would have it no other way. Now, come,” he says, a sweeping command that’s undercut by the way he removes his hands from my waist to drape his arm casually over my shoulder. “I passed a tantalizing display earlier and am now most eager to learn what secret Victoria keeps.”

I roll my eyes. “We’re not going to Victoria’s Secret.”

He pouts. “If this is your revenge, I don’t like the taste of it.”

“You’ll know my revenge when you taste it,” I say, jabbing him in the ribs, making him scowl. “We’re going to meet Vivi and Heather at Forever 21.”

“That will suffice,” Cardan says, and then he muses, “By mortal standards, I suppose I will be twenty-one forever.”

“Twenty-one and a terror,” I mutter.

“Oh, yes,” he agrees with glee. “Horrible.”

“The very worst.”

He laughs and kisses me again. And I give in.

Chapter Text

We spend the early afternoon in Forever 21, where Oak makes a game of having Cardan try on different hats and sunglasses, and Vivi and Heather cajole us all into crowding around someone’s phone for selfies. Time slips away through my fingers like sand through the neck of an hourglass; I am unable to grasp at it, to slow it down. Before long, we all pile into Heather’s car and return to Vivi’s apartment.

Oak finally tires out, and curls up for a nap in his room. Vivi and Heather sit on the living room couch; they have been talking now for at least an hour. I can hear their voices through my door, but they’re not loud enough for me to make out their words. Still, Heather hasn’t left yet, and I suppose that’s as good a sign as any.

Whatever it is that Cardan and I have been doing—lovemaking isn’t quite right, but none of the other euphemisms I know really work either—we don’t do any more of it for a little while. By silent and mutual agreement, we go to my room, strip down, climb into bed together, and then just doze. Cardan would usually be waking about now, I realize, but if he’s tired, he doesn’t complain.

My head rests on Cardan’s shoulder, my front tucked against his side, his arm draped casually around my waist. I am wearing only my sweatshirt and camisole, having extracted my bra from under my clothes without removing them; he wears nothing. His skin is warm through the fabric and against my cheek. He idly traces the shape of my ear over and over again, seemingly fascinated by its roundness.

“The sun will set soon,” he observes, glancing up at my window. A neutral observation, but we both know what it means. “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” I say flatly, assuming that he’s asking how I feel about his imminent departure.

“Good. Don’t move.”

“What?”

Cardan shifts, and then he is gone from under me. “Would it kill you to obey me without question?”

“Likely yes,” I say, which makes him laugh. I am lying on my stomach now, but don’t move except to turn my head to the side and try to see him.

“Don’t move,” he commands again, as if somehow the repetition will make me more agreeable. I see him take the lubricant Vivi bought from my nightstand—he seems to know what that is for, if not what it is—and there is an anticipatory surge of heat in my cheeks, elsewhere. Then he’s over me, his chest pressed against my back, trailing a hand up my side under my sweatshirt, bunching it up.

I shiver, not from any chill. “Do you want that off?”

“No. I like the challenge,” he replies, although there’s really very little: my breasts have always been obvious, especially by faerie standards, and his hand finds one with no issue. His other hand wraps around my neck.

The last person to grab my throat had been Valerian, when he tried to murder me and I murdered him instead. My body remembers. One of my elbows jabs back at Cardan, whose reflexes are good enough sober to dodge it. I want to buck him off, but I know he doesn’t mean to kill me—he doesn’t have the stomach for cold-blooded murder.

Or he didn’t before.

Cardan nuzzles at the back of my head. “I intend you no harm,” he says, which is, notably, not the same thing as “I won’t hurt you.”

My heart pounds in my chest. If someone had said a year ago that Cardan would be in my bed with his hand around my neck, I would have envisioned very different circumstances. “What,” I say, unable to think properly.

“I’m returning the favor,” he murmurs against my ear. The hand on my neck doesn’t move, doesn’t squeeze, just remains there like a collar that marks me his to the world. The hand under my sweatshirt, though, does not remain still. My body is already aflame with adrenaline when he begins teasing me; his touch is fuel for the fire.

This is crazy. I am crazy.

I am sick with terror and delirious with desire.

My heart is in my throat and his hand is around it.

“‘Wraithberry,’ I think,” he says. I am awake to every single small sensation— his breath tickles the nape of my neck. “Should you want me to stop.”

My brain takes a moment to catch up with the rest of me. The safe word. The poison that nearly killed him. I shake my head; stopping is the last thing I want him to do.

And he doesn’t.

Maybe this is what he daydreamed about, all those months I had him in my power. This, and the way we did it before, with me choking him. Perhaps he alternated between each fantasy. It’s nice to know that wanting what could kill you isn’t a purely human foible, that faerie minds also scramble desire and fear.

Cardan takes forever just feeling up my breasts, nibbling at my ear, holding my neck, leaving me to grind my hips against the mattress to feel something. The sounds I make are trapped, panicked animal cries, and I smother them with my pillow. When he finally slips his hand between my legs, I feel him smirk at how wanting I am. His fingers are slick with the lubricant and he teases me further, slowly, with awful intentionality, and stops whenever I am close to finishing. I am left dazed and confused and not knowing his plans. It’s as though he’s dragged me bound to the edge of a cliff once, then again, and refused to push me over.

I spend those long, agonizing minutes plotting revenge. I think of wringing his neck. I think of riding him and then stopping just before he finishes. I think of tying his hands behind his back so that he can’t touch me. I wonder if he would ever let me bed him with a knife at his throat. I think if we agreed it beforehand, that sort of playacting might excite him.

It’s a funny little game we play. If we ever stop holding back, we might tear each other to shreds.

“Surrender?” Cardan asks. He sounds breathless. Good.

I shake my head and press my hips back and up into his. I’m not the only one who needs release.

He lets out a groan, and then chuckles in my ear. “That’s cheating.”

I grit my teeth as he begins touching me again. This is bittersweet torture. I’m not sure another round of denial won’t break me. “We didn’t set—rules.”

“I thought they would be obvious. You’ll get your satisfaction, and then some, if you ask nicely.”

“You mean beg.”

“I may.”

He finally releases my neck to pull my hair. I whimper into the pillow. Forgetting about anyone else in the apartment, I don’t even want him hearing that.

“I am armed with eternity and the power to deny you,” he warns me.

I can’t think. “You’re such an asshole.”

Cardan laughs. “You sound so mortal.” He rocks his hips against mine. “Well, Jude? What will it be?”

I swallow my pride. “Just—please, just—”

It smarts to ask. All the same, he enters me and I nearly cry with relief. I am chagrined to have been brought so low, to have all my jangling nerves bared and my most shameful needs exposed, but when I finally come I am too relieved to care, and when I come again, just before he does, my mind is blissfully blank.

I turn onto my back, still beneath him. I tangle my fingers in his hair and we share smacking, sloppy, wet kisses, as though we are trying to devour each other. I tingle all over. If I know him, and I do at least a bit, he wanted me to feel him in my thighs long after he left, like he had wanted to suck that mark into my neck.

Then he flops down next to me, boneless and spent. Locks of hair cling to his forehead. I’ve never seen him really sweat before, and am oddly pleased that he bothered exert himself for me. He smells like a faerie forest in spring, trees bursting with blooms that will become fruit I shouldn’t eat.

“You’re going to pay for that,” I pant, once I am again capable of speech.

“Oh, Jude,” he sighs, equally breathless. “Sweet Jude. I am going to miss you.”

He had said that at the mall, too. I guess I am relieved to know it’s true, but I mostly hope his missing me is like a burr, or a splinter dug into the flesh between his fingers. A little prick of pain that he is unable to ignore.

All I say is, “You can order someone to boss you around. It’ll be as though I came back with you.”

Cardan snorts and rolls off of me, onto his side. Not far. “They’re likelier to wet themselves with fear at being asked.”

“You overestimate yourself.”

“Do I?” His face goes unreadable for a moment. “Much has changed in your absence.”

I try to sound casual as I say, “Then perhaps I’ve been away too long.”

“Yes,” Cardan agrees. “And no. You’ll return when you’re ready—”

“And not a moment sooner. I know.” I look up too, too weary to be angry with him. Maybe that was his goal all along in tiring me out—ensuring I’d be too spent to argue. “You’ve already said.”

He picks up my hand, kisses my knuckles. “It will be soon. I am certain of that.” And then, after a moment’s silence, he says, “We should dress.”

So we do, without speaking. There is nothing more to say.

Vivi and Heather look up from their conversation when Cardan and I enter the living room. I am both relieved and disappointed not to find them kissing. I suppose these things take time and patience. Those are luxuries they can afford.

“Is it time?” Vivi asks.

Cardan gives her a tight-lipped nod.

“Maybe we should wake up Oak,” Heather suggests. “He’ll want to say ‘bye.’”

“Let him rest. The day was long.” Cardan pauses. “But—do tell him that I said farewell when he wakes, and that I will think on this visit fondly.”

Heather nods. To her, this is perfectly normal, save for the formal language. But I am staring at Cardan, because I know how strange it must be for him to have a blood relation of whom he is fond. I want to say something halfway reassuring, that I am sure Oak enjoyed the time they spent together too, but my tongue is made of lead.

Then Cardan takes my hand, and says, “Come, Jude.”

I do. Vivi and Heather do also, even though neither of us asked them to, but I am glad of it. I don’t think I am prepared to say goodbye yet, even though we must. Cardan has to go back to Elfhame, back to the throne, before his enemies make a move in his absence. I understand that.

But I am not ready for him to tear my heart in two and carry it back with him across the sea. I am not ready to be left again with only the howling void of my anger and my sadness. I look at the sun, sinking below the horizon, as though I am a gambler watching my last golden coin disappear into someone else’s pocket.

“A moment,” says Cardan, to Vivi and Heather.

It isn’t a request, but Vivi opens her mouth to protest anyway. “I think—”

“Vee.” Heather nudges her. “C’mon.”

Vivi studies Heather, then me, but lets Heather take her arm and lead her a little ways down the street. Heather looks back over her shoulder and winks at me. I blink, momentarily stunned, and then Cardan grasps my chin lightly between his thumb and forefinger and turns my head back so that I’m looking at him.

“Jude.” He says my name softly, as though it might be a curse. Or a prayer.

“Don’t.”

“Tell me.”

I exhale through my mouth. “I hate this,” I tell him honestly.

He kisses my forehead.

“I hate that you ever came here,” I continue, and his lips brush the space between my brows. “I hate that I had one place you hadn’t touched and now it’s gone.” They skim the bridge of my nose.

“What else?” he asks, his mouth inches from mine.

I hate that you’re leaving, I don’t say. I hate that you won’t let me come back when it’s entirely within your power. I hate that I’ll go back to my room and my sheets will smell like you. I hate that a bed which felt small will now seem far too big. I hate that I’ll see the afterimage of you sitting next to me when Oak plays Mario Kart. I hate that I won’t be able to look at Pop Tarts, of all stupid things, without thinking of you. I hate that you’ve made me feel this way, that I become this person around you, and this is why we should never have been left alone, not this weekend, not in your room, not behind the throne, not in the Court of Shadows, not ever.

“I hate you,” I say instead. “I hope that every night after you return, you stare at your beautiful ceiling and lie awake thinking of how much you hate me, too.”

He kisses me, drinking me down like I am the last precious drop of wine in his goblet. I kiss him back because this will be the last time we kiss for a while, or perhaps ever, if the coming war claims one or both of us. I kiss him until I feel my heart will burst.

“Your Majesties.”

I jump and turn around. My hand is already on the handle of my knife before I realize I am looking at the Roach, who seems utterly unsurprised to have caught us kissing.

“You’re distressingly punctual,” Cardan says from behind me, laying a hand on my shoulder.

The Roach grins. “It seemed like you’d hit a lull in your conversation. But I can wait in the shadows if you want.”

“It’s fine,” I say quickly, not wanting to contemplate how long he’d been watching us. Dizzily, I replay the way he addressed us. Majesties. He knows. How many others know? I would bet not many, but I am heartened that there are more than us, that the secret is not mine alone to keep. I glance up at Cardan, who wears a grin of his own.

“I’ll see you again soon,” he says.

“Promise or prophecy?” I retort.

He just smiles, and then he takes his hand from my shoulder.

When Cardan goes to the Roach, I do not run after him. I do not wail, or weep, or beg. I stand where he left me as though rooted there. Vivi and Heather come up beside me, flanking me one on each side, like loyal knights.

The Roach inclines his head at me, still smiling, then conjures up ragwort ponies for them both to ride. I had thought the High King might travel more stylishly, but I guess when sneaking about to visit one’s secret queen, style is the first thing to be sacrificed.

Cardan pulls himself up onto the pony and takes one last, long look at me. The dying sunlight throws his cheekbones into sharp relief. All of the words I would use to describe the Folk—beautiful, alluring, terrifying—in this moment, they are not enough.

“You know,” he says, “I really thought you would have figured it out by now.”

Before I can ask what he means, he and the Roach are in the air, and then gone.

Figured it out. Figured what out? I frown, puzzling it over in place, glad to have something to distract me from the pain of his leaving. What is there to figure out? A condition of my return? He had said I would return when I was ready. Does he mean for me to solve a riddle, and if so, where would he leave it? And how would solving a riddle lead to me being pardoned by the crown?

By the—

My breath catches in my throat. I go rigid all over. It cannot be that. It cannot be that.

Heather is the first to notice the change in me. “Jude,” she says, misreading it. “It’ll be okay.”

I take two long steps forward, pick up a rock from the middle of the road, and hurl it in the direction the ponies had taken off. But of course, Cardan is too far away to hit. The rock clatters uselessly to the ground a good ways away from us.

“Son of a bitch!” I shout. The very mortal curse doesn’t feel weird on my tongue at all.

Vivi startles. “What?” she asks. “What is it?”

My hand curls into a fist. “I know how to get back.”

“What?”

I turn around. “The crown, Vivi.”

She blinks at me, hopelessly lost.

“The crown. Pardoned by the crown. He—he crowned me.” I draw a breath, taking a moment, running it through my mind. He had. He had not placed a crown on my head, but in making me his queen, he might as well have.

When I was ready. When I had recovered enough of my mental faculties to figure it out, I guess. Or maybe just when I wasn’t so angry at him that I could do nothing but seethe.

“He crowned me,” I say again, awed and furious. In the middle of the sidewalk on our quiet residential street, I sink to my knees. “Son of a bitch.”

“So, what?” Vivi asks. “Are you just going to play by his rules? Go back and, I guess, pardon yourself?”

“Oh, I am not going back his way,” I say. My face is doing something that I cannot control. I am baring my teeth. I am beaming. I think of Nightfell languishing in the back of my closet, of all of my hand-drawn maps, which seem to be unfolding at once with all of my miniature invasions. “I am going back my way. And I will make him pay. He will regret the day he exiled me. He will regret the day he met me.”

Heather and Vivi exchange a glance. Heather says, “I thought you made up.”

“We called truce.” I shake my head. “That’s over now.”

Indeed, our truce ended the moment he left the mortal realm. Cardan knows it. I know it. He will be expecting me to come home.

I will do more than that. I am a wild thing, finally let off leash. Cardan may find he doesn’t like my bite as much as he thought. But we will see.

Kneeling there on the sidewalk, I remember how to laugh. I hug my arms across my chest and laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until there are tears streaming down my cheeks and laughing turns to crying.

When there are no tears left to be cried, I wipe my cheeks and stand, puffy-faced and shaken, but fine now. Better than fine. Better than I have been in such a long time.

I turn and head back into the apartment.

There is work to do.

Chapter Text

Cardan Greenbriar, son of Eldred, High King of Elfhame, lies on his side on a particularly firm, uneven bed, in an apartment leased by his sister-in-law in the mortal city of Portland, Maine. Jude Duarte, mortal Queen of Elfhame, sleeps curled up against his chest. Salty tear trails dry on her cheeks. She is completely unclothed.

He is fascinated by her mortal body in a way that once shamed him. As she is now his wife, he supposes he has come to terms with finding Jude so alluring that he wants to crawl out of his own skin. It has both everything and nothing to do with how she looks—she has a twin, of course, but Taryn is not nearly so lovely. Jude is something other, something else. Cardan could get drunk on the swell of her breasts, the roundness of her hips, the softness to her belly that disappeared when she had returned starved and gaunt from the Undersea and has now been restored. He has sometimes gotten very drunk to try and put those things out of his mind.

She allows touching so seldomly. He relished it, and relishes it still, even though he feels he shouldn’t.

Bedding her was not his sole purpose in coming here, but if asked, he would not have been able to say he hadn’t thought about it. And then she pulled him into her room, and it was all he could think about. That, and saying whatever it took to keep her from flaying him alive. He had teased out about the right things to say and the right ways to say them for a long time before journeying to the mortal realm.

He had not thought about kissing her out of her anger. That wouldn’t work. But then she was standing before him and kissing was the only thing that seemed right. Honestly, he is still a little surprised she didn’t knee him in the gut. Perhaps he goes to her head in the same way she goes to his.

But she spent a long while weeping on him, so perhaps not.

This is not going at all as Cardan had hoped.

He feels tears prick at his eyes and squeezes them shut against her hair. He didn’t even know that he could still cry. The Folk don’t often give themselves over to bawling, in his experience. At least not in public.

If things grow where my blood falls, he wonders, what will my tears do? He isn’t sure he wants to find out, and doesn’t think Jude would appreciate a saltwater pond springing up in her bedroom. Not even a very small, decorative one. Nothing to remind her that he was ever there.

Then again, Jude didn’t seem to want him to leave, which confuses him, because he must have made her cry. There was no one and nothing else that could have done so.

Cardan does stay a while, lingering in bed with her as long as he dares, looking at her until he can no longer stand it. When he rises, he draws the covers up over her shoulders so she won’t get cold.

He doesn’t particularly want to dress, but mortals seem a bit precious about that sort of thing. Jude probably wouldn’t appreciate her sister coming home to find Cardan sulking naked in the common area, even though he and Vivienne have been swimming together. And admittedly, such a thing would be undignified conduct for a king. But the jeans, as they’re called, are much too restrictive. So he pulls his white undershirt on and borrows a pair of soft cloth trousers that belong to Jude, which are short but sinfully comfortable.

When he leaves Jude’s room, he realizes that he has no idea what to do with himself. He sits down on the sofa that is this new room’s centerpiece. It, like many of Vivienne’s possessions, is well-worn but comfortable. This dwelling he would deem humble, and indeed it is small, but he doesn’t feel stifled. He doesn’t feel much of anything past the bruising ache he’s been left with, concern and regret and—shame, if this is what shame feels like.

It must be. He can’t even remember how she felt beneath him without his stomach clenching up.

Cardan flops down on his side. Better to rot here than think of any of it.

He is still on his side, staring at nothing, when Vivienne returns with little Oak. Oak is bundled up in a puffed coat, like mortals wear, and he tarries warily behind his adoptive sister, still not sure what to do in the presence of his High King.

Before Vivienne can even speak, Cardan looks up at her from the sofa, utterly miserable. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything to drink, would you?”

“Only mortal stuff,” says Vivienne, taking this in stride. “It’s not strong.”

He nods. “All the same, I will have it.”

Displeasure flashes across her features, and he thinks she might actually try to deny him, protesting the early hour or some other meaningless thing. But with a single glance toward little Oak, and then a sweeping look around the room like she thinks Cardan might have concealed Jude somewhere, she produces a dark bottle and a wine glass from a high cupboard in the kitchen.

She sets them both on the low table before Cardan, then settles herself in a chair to watch him with disapproval.

Cardan reaches right for the bottle, forgoing the glass entirely. A single swallow tells him that Vivienne is right, though: this mortal wine is not nearly strong enough. He could down the whole bottle and not feel a thing.

“Where’s my sister?” Vivienne asks.

“She’s asleep,” Cardan says, setting the bottle back on the table. He wants to say that Jude is as Vivienne left her, but those words won’t come—they are untrue. He cannot even say with certainty that no ill has befallen her. “Whole and hale,” he adds instead.

Vivienne’s cat-slit eyes, so like Madoc’s, narrow as she studies him, trying to piece together what happened. She looks as though she might be on the verge of asking him what he has done.

I should like to know that myself, he thinks.

But he does know. He made Jude weep.

Although not until after. Cardan doesn’t know what to make of that. He’s certain he didn’t force her. He would like to believe that perhaps she was in pain, although he wouldn’t like to believe that because he’s not such a selfish monster that he’d wish her hurt simply to ease his own conscience.

He had known she was a virgin, even liked it a little. Oh, he was under no illusion that she was saving herself for anyone or anything in particular, but thought it a mark of her seriousness that even being raised among debauchery, she had never embraced the chance to lose her virginity during a random encounter. Cardan had done away with his a long time ago, having found no conceivable use for it. He was glad to be rid of it, and gladder still that all subsequent encounters had taught him a thing or two about pleasuring people. Especially now.

And while he did not remember well what it was like to be inexperienced, he tried to make her experience as pleasant as possible without coddling her. He thought he had succeeded. She seemed to enjoy it. She even kept her eyes on him this time. So the likeliest possible reason for her weeping, then, is regret.

Cardan can’t begrudge her that.

“I’m going to check on her,” Vivienne announces, pushing up from the chair.

“Do.”

“I wasn’t asking for permission.”

Cardan waves his hand. “Do anyway.”

Vivienne does go, with a glare so fleeting Cardan may have imagined it. When she is gone, Oak sits at the other end of the sofa, by Cardan’s feet. He has already grown taller since Taryn’s wedding, his horns longer. He looks at Cardan as though he has a question but doesn’t know how to begin it.

Growing up, Cardan had no good example of how to speak with children, no loving parent or brother to model. So he talks to Oak as though he were anyone else, high-handedly. “Yes? Speak if you wish.”

“Umm,” says Oak. He squirms. “Do I have to say ‘Your Majesty?’”

Cardan scoffs. “I shouldn’t think so.  We are far past formality here. You’re family, aren’t you? I suppose you could call me ‘uncle’ if you wanted.” He pauses, and frowns. “‘Older brother’ would also suffice. That’s very confusing. Are you confused?”

“Yeah,” says Oak, who certainly sounds bewildered.

“Well, I was never much for propriety, or family. Call me whatever you like. You’re a prince. I suppose that’s your right.”

Oak frowns. “I don’t know a lot about being a prince.”

Cardan rolls onto his back. “That’s a lucky thing,” he drawls. “You should cherish it. Nothing good comes from being a prince.”

“But.” Oak frowns harder. “People want to be princes, though.”

“They don’t know any better. You and I know better, don’t we?”

“Stuff’s changed a lot since I was a prince.” Oak scuffs his foot on the carpet. “I live here now.”

 Cardan picks up his head. “You’re lucky you live here. It’s much safer. And you have big sister Vivienne looking out for you. Big sister Jude teaching you how to swing a sword.”

“I miss my mom,” says Oak.

“Ah.”

“Do you have a mom?”

“Barely,” Cardan replies, rolling his eyes. “But everyone was born of someone else. That’s how it works.”

“Do you miss your mom?”

Cardan says, in no uncertain terms, “No, I do not.”

He is relieved to be able to say it. Sometimes he does miss a mother, the idea of one, but not the one he has.

His statement quiets young Oak, who seems unable to imagine anyone not missing their mother. He spends a minute or so gnawing on his knuckle. Then he asks, “Are you really married to Jude?”

This piques his interest. He sits up halfway. “What has Jude said?”

“She says she’s Queen.” Oak pauses. “And you’re King, so.”

“Yes, yes, that is good reasoning,” says Cardan with a little impatience. He sits up all the way now, sideways on the couch. “Has she said anything about me?”

“Uh, I dunno.” Oak mulls it over. “She’s sad a lot.”

Somehow, this is not what Cardan was expecting to hear. “She’s sad?”

“When she first got here she cried so much that her eyes were red all the time.” Oak says. “And she… sometimes she gets real quiet.”

“There are some who have quiet dispositions.”

“She never laughs.” Oak sounds insistent. “Happy people laugh.”

“Unhappy people laugh too, sometimes,” Cardan points out. “Sometimes laughter is a lie.”

Oak chews on his thumbnail, which is just as well. Cardan wouldn’t expect him to understand, being reared in a house with three sisters who embrace him and a mother who weeps at his leaving. It is petty to resent a child, although difficult not to.

“Do you love Jude?” Oak asks, quite suddenly.

Cardan’s first three very clever deflections refuse to be spoken aloud. He shuts his mouth and frowns. “Ah,” he says at last. “That is a weighty question. Why ask it?”

“Mrs. Simmons says that people get married when they love each other.”

“Mortals and common Folk wed when they love each other,” Cardan corrects, with a chuckle. “You and I are not so lucky. We are royalty. You may be wed to some prince or princess when you’re of age.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You won’t have to,” says Vivienne, from the far wall. Cardan isn’t sure how long she’s been standing there, listening, with her arms crossed. “You don’t have to marry anyone you don’t want to.”

“Well,” says Cardan, enjoying Oak’s reaction, “he may have to.”

Vivienne rolls her eyes. She knows the game he is playing—he is miserable, so everyone else must be as well—but she opts not to play. “If you’re going to mope on the couch, at least turn on the TV.”

“What is a TV?” Cardan asks.

“What!” Oak exclaims, loud enough that his sister shushes him. In a curious whisper, he asks, “You don’t know what a TV is?”

Cardan shakes his head.

“It’s that box that shows moving pictures,” Oak says, pointing. “It’s the best. Vivi says it’s not magic but it has to be.” He thinks for a second. “Do you know what a microwave is?”

“No.”

“A fridge?!”

Cardan scowls. “No.”

“Wow,” says Oak. “You don’t know anything.”

“That is truer than you know,” Cardan says, and his thoughts wander again to Jude, sleeping in her room, curled up toward a body that’s no longer beside her. He pushes his hair back from his face. “But I think I am finally willing to learn.”