Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jude wakes at the brush of Cardan’s tail against the back of her knee. 

It tickles more than anything, and it’s this that shoves her into wakefulness. Growing up as a human in Faerie has not afforded Jude the luxury of graceful sleep. She comes into consciousness like a soldier, eyes open wide and trying to make sense of her surroundings. 

Cardan watches her from the far side of the bed. 

Jude furrows her brows. The sun is low in the sky, and it casts their room into burnished amber. It lines the angles of Cardan’s face with gold and shadow, and with the length of his body reposed before her, he is unearthly. Untouchable. She thinks she could still be dreaming right now.

Until she notices the distant look in his eyes.

She peers past the drowsy haze of sunset, taking in the way his tail lashes low and distracted across his body. He probably hadn’t meant to wake her from the looks of it. His tail often moves with a mind of its own. 

She stretches out a hand across the space between them, the sheets of their bed cool and empty against the backs of her fingers. “Cardan?” 

They had gone to sleep as they usually did, curled together and limbs tangled. It was the common way things were after they began sharing their marriage bed in earnest months ago. 

This is new. 

“Jude,” he says in reply, and in his voice, she hears something she doesn’t understand. 

It strikes in her an unfamiliar urge to soothe. It’s a human thing, one that she hasn’t had reason to attend to while being raised in a redcap’s stronghold. She’s not quite sure what caused it, what it was in the way he whispered her name. All she knows is that it makes her want to shift closer. 

Cardan has an unnerving ability to bring out the human in her, despite her best efforts, despite her being High Queen of Elfhame. 

She reaches out a hand, and he – unearthly, untouchable – lets her brush a knuckle across his cheek. She waits. 

He says nothing. 

Undeterred, she tries to brush a curl of ink black hair away from his eyes. They burn. 

She pauses. 

He is holding himself preternaturally quiet, and still. So still, the way only fae can. An animal sort of stillness, she thinks. 

Within the next heartbeat, Jude understands that gentle is not what Cardan needs right now. 

Alright. This she knows how to do. 

Her fingers, previously resting at his temple, move to tangle in his hair. She pulls hard enough to make him hiss. “What is it?” She tightens her hold. “What happened?” 

His black gem eyes go clear with pain – and something else. Something darker. “A nightmare,” he breathes, finally.

She narrows her eyes, thinking about the tense line of his shoulders.

When he doesn’t elaborate, she slips a little bit closer. For better leverage. He tracks her movement across the bed. 

From this distance, her nails rake a path down his temple and the side of his face. She digs her fingers in when she reaches his jawline, feels the way he clenches it in response. “Tell me.” 

Something cruel pulls the corner of his mouth upward. “You shall like very little of it.” 

He smiles when he’s nervous, Jude reminds herself. 

She leans in close enough to see how the skin of his jaw is going white against the half-moons of her nails. “Tell me anyway.” 

His eyes close. She thinks she sees a little of defeat in the way he leans into the rough grip of her fingers. “I dreamt,” he whispers into the waiting air, “of the Undersea.” And even in the warmth of the bed they share together, something cold slithers up Jude’s spine. 

“Why?” she demands, before she can think better of it.

They haven’t talked much about her kidnapping. He’d almost forsaken his kingdom in exchange for her, and that was more than her heart, then so unsure and betrayed by her exile, could understand. 

But now, there is space to wonder. 

(“When you were gone—truly gone beneath the waves—I hated myself as I never have before.”)

Cardan’s eyes flash open. “Why?” he repeats, and Jude feels the power shift between them. “Don’t you remember, wife?” he croons. “It was the Undersea that stole you away from me.” 

And Jude has only enough time to think, danger, before he – 

– lunges at her – 

Jude’s back hits the bed with a thud, and Cardan leans on his elbows over her, the unforgiving weight of him pressing her into the mattress. This time, it is his hand that grips her chin, the raw emotion in his dark eyes at odds with the careful way he tilts her face up to his. “They hid you away for weeks.”

“I clawed my way out of there,” she says, a little breathlessly. “I didn’t let them keep me.” 

The slant of his mouth grows crueller. “Darling, I had to forge a treaty for you.” 

Indignation sparks in her, at the reminder of her weakness. “I didn’t ask you to – ”

Cardan swoops in, and Jude holds her breath as his lips come perilously close to hers. “Do not mishear me, Jude Duarte Greenbriar,” he says softly, so softly. “I would have done anything to get you back.” 

Jude sucks in another breath, because Cardan has suddenly dropped his mouth to the tender skin of her neck. 

“Anything,” he says, and his lips ghost the words behind her ear as he speaks. “Everything.” 

It’s instinct that has her spreading her legs, letting the weight of him make a home in the cradle of her thighs. He settles against her body like he belongs there. 

“Do you understand that, Jude?” he asks. “Can you?” 

He presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss at the base of her throat, and Jude wonders at how something so small can be felt all the way down to her toes. 

Still, his words have dredged up memories she thought were long past. They are vivid in her mind now: the dampness of the dark cell, the ache of her exhausted body, the cold brush of Balekin’s lips – 

“They did all that they could,” she says, because suddenly it’s like she has something to prove, “but I did not let them break me.” 

Cardan tenses, his forehead resting on the softness of her cheek. 

“Don’t you remember?” she asks him now. “I came for you the very same night they released me.” 

Something passes over the length of his body, and pressed against him so closely like this, Jude can recognize it for what it is: a shudder.

“Oh, Jude,” he breathes into the line of her jaw. “I dreamt that you didn’t.” 

What had he said? A nightmare. 

“There was nothing left of you to ransom for,” he continues, face hidden in the crook of her neck. “Nothing but salt and seafoam.” And there, in their ridiculously large bed with the cobweb canopy billowing in a sunset breeze, the High King of Elfhame begins to tremble.

Jude is frozen underneath him. “Cardan,” she whispers, because there is nothing else she can say. No one that she can remember has ever cared for her like this before. 

Another shudder passes through him at the sound of his name. And suddenly, he is moving closer, something like desperation igniting the insistent press of his body over hers as he tries to burrow his face deeper into her collarbone. 

“I dove into the water,” he says, and she feels every word dance on the sensitive skin of her neck, “and it was cold and it was dark, but I swam and I searched, and I couldn’t find you.” His hands fist into the gossamer skirts of her nightgown. 

Jude grits her teeth. She is powerless in the wake of his heartache. She doesn’t know what to do. This is an enemy she has never faced before. 

“I would have done everything,” he repeats, lost. She gets the feeling that he isn’t speaking entirely just to her anymore. 

In this liminal space between waking and dreaming, Cardan duels with the imaginary horrors of his nightmare, and Jude holds on as tight as she can. 

The rocking starts with the intention to soothe. Jude thinks of Oriana, calming a restless Oak in the cradle of her arms. She thinks of her mother, wrapping her in an embrace that swept her back and forth. She thinks of Cardan’s mother, Lady Asha, and how she most likely never held her son the way mothers do. 

So Jude begins to sway, as best as she can with the weight of him all along the front of her body. There is so much of him to hold, almost too much because he is so much bigger than her, but she will hold him. She will hold all of him until he no longer needs her. 

A different kind of tremor passes through Cardan’s body when he feels her moving under him. She runs a hand through the hair at the base of his neck, gently scraping with the tips of her nails. Cardan seems to melt into her more, a long, faint breath easing out of him. 

Soon, he starts to sway with her. Just a simple accompaniment of his body with hers. Against hers. Beat and tempo are but second language to the king of Faerie and his many revels.

He continues to murmur in her ear, as if the words are a refrain he cannot get out of his head. “Everything,” he is saying. “My everything, Jude.” The words are both vow and reassurance all at once. She feels them seep into her bones. 

Cardan moves over her, trembling no longer. The mattress dips under their combined weight. 

There’s a certain whiplash to all of this. She’s supposed to be the one comforting him, and yet now it is he who is whispering sweetly into the quickly heating skin of her neck. It is he who guides their bodies into an altogether different kind of rhythm. 

Jude’s fingers clench into his bare shoulders. His habit of wearing nothing to bed has carried over into their marriage. She feels the overwhelming warmth of him all over her, the wisps of her nightgown a paltry barrier. 

Their hips press flush, and Jude knows it wasn’t intentional, but he’s right there between her thighs, and the way he’s rolling against her is now wickedly familiar. 

Or maybe he had meant it. Maybe this is how she can give him the comfort he needs –

There is no mistaking the rocking of their bodies now.

They are similar in this regard, in this need for something to fight with, to move against.  She will be the sentinel at his back as he wrestles with the phantom of his dreams.

Cardan surfaces from the crook of her neck like he is surfacing from cold water. She brings him down to her, until they are nose to nose, until she can see the last dregs of his nightmare swirling in the depths of his eyes. 

The words spill from him like a confession. “In the darkest shadows of my heart,” he tells her, hushed against the backdrop of the dying sun, “I wondered if I should ever see you again.”

And Jude thinks of the many, long months of her exile. Of how he had fought to keep her when Madoc stole her back as Taryn. She remembers the way he had clutched her to him after she beheaded the cursed snake. This isn’t just about the Undersea. 

“I came for you,” she reminds him. “I came back for you.” And then she rolls her hips up to meet his. 

Cardan groans. 

All traces of innocence evaporate. 

He descends upon her with a new vigor. She rises up under him with purpose simmering in her blood. Their bodies collide, and collide again, and he grasps her by the waist to hike her up higher. She wraps her legs around his hips, feels the length of him through the insubstantial fabric of her underwear. 

He dances, she fights, and in this, they move together. 

But first, she needs him to understand something. 

Jude pulls on his hair again, now a mess of black curls from her fingers. She wants the pain to remind him just who exactly he has pinned beneath him. His Queen, his wife, his equal. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promises harshly, and then takes her teeth to the base of his throat. 

His assent is a broken moan against her forehead. He spreads her knees wider, and grinds down in retaliation. He hits that spot between her legs, and Jude chokes back a whimper. 

“I want you with me for always.” His breathing is ragged. His pace is ceaseless. “Do you believe me?” 

Her body is hot all over, and he feels so good right there, she rocks her hips up because she wants him to do it again, more – 

She can feel his cock now, hard and hot against the quickly dampening fabric between her thighs. It’s blessed friction, but it’s not enough. 

“Do you believe me?” he says again. When she doesn’t answer right away, he digs into her again, running his length up and down the seam of her underwear. The tip of it rubs against her clit, not quite hard enough, with every pass. 

Something like a whine escapes her lips. She can almost feel the beginnings of an orgasm curling low in her body, if only he would just – 

“Say yes, Jude.” It’s almost a plea, sealed with a strategic roll of his hips that has her arching up from the bed. And there, in his need for her confirmation, for her validation, Jude feels another piece of armor fall away between them. “Say yes.”

He’s crushing her, with the sheer weight of him all down the length of her hypersensitive body, with the magnitude of the meaning behind his words. 

She is surrounded by him, his chest pressed against hers. He is all she sees when she opens her eyes, not realizing that she had closed them in the first place. His eyes scorch as he looks down at her, dark with desire – and the need for her to believe. 

A small wildness charges the air between them. He knows her body so well now, knows exactly how to angle the next flex of his hips – 

“Yes,” Jude gasps. 

Cardan grins, slow and full of wicked intent. 

He bends down low again, ready to whisper another naughty pledge, ready to press a kiss to her wanting lips, ready to finally take that sinful mouth and those clever fingers and finish what he started – 

Three knocks, rapid like gunfire, ricochet through the room.  

Chapter Text

The moment shatters like glass.

They remain unmoving for several, thudding heartbeats. As if the noise will go away if they just ignore it hard enough. Jude is breathing too fast, too close to something she didn’t reach. The sound of it is somehow deafening in the silence left behind by their interruption.

She doesn’t register the sound completely at first. She’s too busy staring at her husband’s mouth. It’s too far away.

Cardan kneels between her legs with the stillness of the fae. It’s only his tail lashing from side to side that betrays him. His eyes pin her in place even as he cocks his head to the side, listening.

“The door,” Jude realizes. But her voice comes out far too shaky for her liking.

“Hush, wife.”

His arms are braced on either side of her head. His chest is still pressed flush against hers, and she feels her breasts brushing against him with every inhale.

There is a predatory edge to the way he watches her struggle to regain her breath. She wonders what she must look like to him, flushed and frustrated against the spread of their bedsheets.

Something like satisfaction curls the corner of his mouth into a smirk. It isn’t entirely kind.

One hand comes up, slowly, to lay flat against her sternum. The weight of his palm bears down.

“I can feel your heart racing,” he whispers.

Jude feels an irrational urge to slap him.

He must see it in her face, because his smirk grows. “So vindictive,” he says, once again bowing his head. And even though she’s irritated, Jude feels the answer in her body, powerless to resist the siren song of his waiting mouth, her eyelids fluttering closed and her spine curling up –

Knock, knock, knock.

Cardan bares his teeth at the door with a snarl.

Jude blinks up at him in a daze, and with a little bit of surprise. Cardan so very rarely shows his temper like that.

She thinks that she likes the violence in his face perhaps far too much.

Even so, without the weight of his eyes on her, her thoughts clear a little bit. Whoever it was had sounded a little frantic this time. She sighs, and moves to get up.

“No.” Cardan yanks her back beneath him, swinging his uncharacteristic glare toward her. But, no, it’s not entirely a glare. His expression is too bright, too fevered.

He sweeps his gaze over her, following the flush of her desire from the heated skin of her cheeks, down to the wanting part of her mouth, down to the mess he has made of her nightgown. The ties in the front are a tangle and half-undone, and the thin strap on one side has completely slipped off. She feels the expanse of her shoulder and the upper swell of her breast exposed to the cold night air – and to outside, prying eyes.

“No,” he grits out again. Jude is surprised to hear how uneven his voice is. “Not as you are. Not looking like that.”

Jude probably looks utterly debauched, but she sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.

It’s this that has her reaching for the slim, stiletto blade under her pillow. The one she never sleeps without. The one that ends in a silver needlepoint that she wastes no time in pressing to the soft underside of Cardan’s chin. His breath trips even as he stares down, imperious as ever.

“Let me remind you, husband,” she says, her voice soft with danger, “that I can do whatever I please. Besides, it’s your fault I look the way I do.”

“Truly, I can find no remorse.”

She runs the tip of the blade all the way down the line of his throat. “Can’t you?”

This close, she can see it when he swallows.

She smiles. It isn’t kind, either. “Won’t you be a dear and get the door?”

He sighs, looking for all the world a little wistful. “I do so love waking up with you.”

“Get on with it.”

His black gem eyes glint down at her, an answer to the silver at his throat. “As you wish.”

Cardan rises from the bed. If he notices Jude staring at his naked back while he walks, he doesn’t show it.

The sight of it, bare and scarred and unguarded in her presence, strikes an arrow into her heart.

He almost attends to the door like that, without a stitch or a care on him, but stops when she hisses his name.

Rolling his eyes, he pulls on a robe of crushed velvet, in the color of too-ripe rowan berry. It’s unfair, really, how good he looks even though he has just rolled out of bed. The robe is lazily tied and it gapes open to show the lines of his chest. His feet are bare. Still, he looks like he belongs on a throne.

He catches her staring then, and tosses her a decidedly unkingly wink.

Jude grits her teeth and moves to get up as well, tucking her stiletto back into its place. The damp fabric of her underwear scrapes against sensitive skin as she slides to the edge of the bed.

That’s going to be a problem.

Irritation flaring, she stomps to their closet. Small budding violets sprout in the wake of her footsteps, as if the loam is answering her with a peace offering.

Jude grabs the first decent thing she can find that is both easy to put on, and passably presentable.

She doesn’t feel presentable, though. Her hair is loose, and wild. She spots a residual flush heating the skin of her neck and cheeks when she peeks into the mirror. The intricately embroidered material of the damask robe that she slips on, exquisite as it is, grates against her bare arms.

It’s a far cry from the silk-spun sheets of their bed.

Cardan is watching her.

His hand rests on the door knob while he waits for her to finish tying the knot at her waist. His eyes linger as she adjusts the lapels over her chest, as she tugs the end of the robe over the tops of her thighs.

Their gazes meet.

The moment holds.

Knock, knock –

Cardan turns and wrenches the door open. It swings so hard the doorknob crashes into the adjoining wall. Earth and vine shudder.

The messenger on the other side starts, his hand still raised.

“Your Majesty!” It’s one of Randalin’s squires. “The Council has called for an urgent meeting.”

“Oh?” Cardan leans against the great oaken door frame. It creaks a little, as if in admonishment of his rough handling. “Urgent, you say?”

Jude thinks that perhaps she ought to warn the imp away from the look her husband is giving him. She also thinks that perhaps she ought to run him through herself.

She hears the squire squeak out something about the Living Council and land treaties. Cardan murmurs something back that has the imp’s oversized ears twitching in agitation. Even from across the expanse of the royal suite, she can recognize the menace in his tone. Before the messenger can say anything in reply, Cardan slams the door in his face.

“Would you look at that, Jude,” he says, dryly. “The kingdom calls.”

Jude is already pulling out her trousers and tunic. “You didn’t have to be so rude.” Even though she would have probably done worse.

His eyes flash. “Didn’t I? As it stands, I shall ask no forgiveness. I had more urgent things in mind.”

There are pillows on the floor, she notices. Thrown and abandoned from the bed in their urgency.

Jude begins to tug on her clothes with more force than necessary. Her everyday attire as Queen of Elfhame is not so different from what she wore as seneschal. She favors close-fitting trousers and jackets for ease of movement as much as possible, and saves the elaborate dresses and trains and ball gowns for the revels. Of which there are many.

However, her husband’s flair for the extravagant has somehow seeped into her own fashion choices, like a wine spill she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried.

Tonight, she wears an ensemble of skin-tight black leather trousers and a matching long-sleeved top. The extravagance comes in the form of a hammered gold overlay, the filigreed metal made to fasten over her torso and shoulders like a chestplate of burnished feathers. The bottom edge flares out at her hips in the slightest suggestion of a skirt.

She’s in the middle of putting her arms through it when Cardan steps up behind her.

His hands settle on her waist. “Let me,” he murmurs. The words brush against the curve of her too-round ear.

Jude stills. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Much to the dismay of Tatterfell and Jude’s other hopeful attendants, she discovered early on in their marriage that her husband is sometimes just as useful – and obliging – with his delight in helping her dress.

But there is something different about the way he handles her now. Something infinitely more gentle. As if confessing his nightmare has shorn off a little of his sharp edges.

Standing behind her, he helps her into the golden shell of the chestplate. He is a searing presence at her spine, and Jude is painfully aware of him. The way his chest and shoulders cover her entire back. The way his hands feel as they skim over the fabric of her shirt. The way he’s so tall, he has to bend a little bit to reach around her. The room around them feels like it’s holding its breath.

The first clasp clicks into place at the small of her back, and she almost jumps out of her skin. There is a huff of breath at her ear. She considers kicking him in the shin. The second clasp clicks in the middle of her spine.

Why is he standing so unnecessarily close?

She thinks she feels the brush of his nose against her hair.

He slides the last clasp closed against the back of her neck. Jude isn’t sure if the sweep of a finger up her nape, light as a moth’s wing, is intentional or not.

Cardan turns her around to face him. His fingers are so long that she feels them across the entire expanse of her hip bones, feels the tips of them dig into the softness of her stomach.

There is something heartbreakingly intimate in this act of dressing her. It’s a sense of vulnerability completely different from that of taking off her clothes. It’s one thing for him to tear off what she’s wearing in a haze of lust and desire. It’s another thing entirely to help her back into them with the patience and the attentiveness of a partner.

Jude fears that if she speaks, the thrall will be broken.

She barely notices it when he secures the clasps at her shoulders. She’s too busy watching the soft focus in his face.

No one else, she thinks, would have dressed me so carefully.

He straightens when the body piece is fully secured. “There,” he says. “My fearsome queen.”

And then, eyes locked on hers, Cardan sinks to a knee.

“Cardan, what –”

“Just your knives now,” he murmurs. She doesn’t even want to think about where his mouth would be if she weren’t wearing anything.

Jude keeps her weapons in the same closet as her clothes, for she would be equally naked without either.

Cardan plucks the first knife from her armory, and gives it an appreciative twirl. She wonders idly from where, or from whom, he learned how to do that. It glints silver and sharp between his fingers. There is an answering knife’s edge in his smile as he tucks it into her left boot.

“One,” he says. And then traces a fingernail across the top of her ankle. Jude narrows her eyes at him.

The second one goes in her right boot. “Two.” His hand lingers a little too long on the tender skin of her Achilles’ heel.

Jude isn’t entirely sure if she likes this game.

The third is her favorite of all her knives. The blade is a delicate scrollwork of curling vines and twisting ivy, and it ends in a deadly point. It is beautiful and dangerous and everything she wishes she could be. It’s the knife that reminds her most of the fae.

Cardan thumbs the hilt as he decides where it will go. There is a holster built into the right leg of her trousers, a common feature of most of her clothes. He eyes it with interest.

His free hand begins its journey up, cupping the curve of her calf, up and up to the delicate skin of the back of her knee –

Jude sucks in a breath.

Cardan grins.

The sight of him, looking up at her like that, sears itself into her brain. They’re fully clothed, but something about the way he’s kneeling before her, his hair deliciously mussed, his robe barely hanging on for dear life, feels utterly illicit.

He palms the back of her leg, ever so slowly slipping her favorite knife into place.

“Three,” he whispers, and then he leans in and takes his teeth to the inside of her thigh.

Jude pitches forward, helpless to stop the curl of her body as she grasps at his shoulders for balance.

“Cardan,” she gasps. She wants to shake him, to slap him, to kiss that stupid smug expression off his stupidly gorgeous face –

“Mm?” The fabric of her trousers is caught in between his teeth.

Jude shoves him. Hard.

He doesn’t fall, exactly. The fae are much too graceful for that. He catches himself with his elbow and follows his momentum down, until the length of his body is laid out before her, amusement clear in his face.

He smirks up at her, that trouble-making smirk that Jude knows ruined her for anyone else the moment she first saw it.

His mouth had left a wet mark on the inner seam of her trousers.

It isn’t the only thing that is wet anymore.

Jude turns away with something like determination. “We’re needed at the Council,” she says through clenched teeth.

The Council is the last place she wants to be, but she is the High Queen of Elfhame, and this is what she has worked so hard for.

Jude finishes dressing, continuing the count that Cardan had started. Four is a small dagger that she tucks under her left sleeve. Five is a twig-thin, needle-tipped stylet that she uses to pin her hair up. The final piece she puts on is a golden dragonscale sash that shimmers and flows over her right shoulder. It hides the knives she wears close to her body, but not Nightfell, heavy and comforting strapped proudly on her left hip.

Cardan hasn’t moved, lounging on the floor as if it were a throne. His tail swings in the air, tapping teasingly at her ankles. “There are a lot of needs not being met right now, darling.”

“Such as your need for a knife up your – ”

“Tut.” He has the audacity to actually look affronted. “Such crude words. We haven’t even eaten yet.”

She keeps her eyes away as she stalks past him. To look at Cardan now is to look at her ruination.

There is a food tray waiting for them in their sitting room. It has tea, and wine, and honeycake, and various cuts of meat and slices of fruit. The tea is still a little too hot; Jude relishes the burn of it on her tongue. A suitable distraction from other sensations.

Cardan throws himself into the seat beside her. One long leg dangles over the armrest.

“I wonder what could be so important,” Jude mutters into her honeycake. She’s eating dessert first and she doesn’t care. She damn well deserves it after everything.

“I suspect the Living Court wishes to talk about Insear.” He heaves a groan. “I loathe land grabs.”

“I thought you’d already handled that.”

He makes a pass for her honeycake but she snatches her hand from reach. He pouts. “I did. The peace talks are scheduled for later tonight. Hence, the urgency.”

“Peace talks?”

Mischief hides in his smile. “Peace revels, then.”

Jude sighs. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Of course I know what I’m doing. I just never know if things will turn out the way you want them to.”

Jude frowns, opening her mouth to reply, what’s that supposed to mean, but Cardan is suddenly sitting up.

“I propose a toast.”

“A toast?” She stares at him. “To what?”

He grabs for a teacup, and, completely bypassing the freshly brewed pot, fills it with dark, red wine.

“To escaping the Undersea,” he says, and something in Jude jolts.

His nightmare. Hers. The dampness of the dark cell, the ache of her exhausted body, the cold brush of Balekin’s lips –

In the haze of desire, she’d almost forgotten.

Cardan raises his teacup to hers. His eyes are heart-wrenchingly soft in the newborn moonlight. “And to the truths we have laid to rest.”

Something in her stomach sinks.

I haven’t told him.

The weight turns into lead. She recognizes this feeling, now. Despises it to the core of her being.

Guilt.

Mutely, Jude clinks her cup against his.

I still haven’t told him about Balekin.

Chapter Text

Fand is waiting for them outside the royal suite. The knight bows at the sight of the king and queen.

Jude nods her head in acknowledgement, even though she’s not entirely paying attention. The heavy weight in her stomach has only worsened now that they are outside the dreamy confines of their bedroom.

In truth, she’s not exactly sure what she’s guilty about. Cardan doesn’t know what Balekin made her do in the Undersea. What she let him do. What she had to do. But she would have done it again, if it meant that she would be exactly where she is right now.

Cardan stands tall with a hand at her back now, awaiting her cue.

“Report,” she says to Fand, because routine is something she doesn’t have to think much about.

“Your Majesties.” The knight salutes. “There have been sightings of falcons flying close over Elfhame. Not an unusual number, to be sure, but…”

“Falcons.” Cardan wrinkles his brow beside her. “Not the ones you punished, for participating in Madoc’s coup?”

Jude remembers. For those who do not wish to atone, become falcons in earnest.

“Too far to tell, sire. I reported it in case there was cause for suspicion.”

“You did well, Sir Fand,” says Jude. Then she sighs. “That should be checked, at the very least. I can assemble a team and leave within the hour.”

Cardan pouts immediately. “And throw me to the mercies of the Living Council?”

“There are no mercies as far as you’re concerned.”

“Well,” he says, something secret in his eyes, “I suppose you would know better than most.”

She resists the strong urge to kick him. Fand’s face goes carefully blank.

“Why don’t you just move the meeting, then?” Jude says, a little hurriedly. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Cardan shakes his head dolefully. “With great regret, I already told Randalin’s little messenger to scurry along and tell them we’re convening within the quarter hour.” Petulance creeps into his voice. “Even though the last thing I want to do is listen to them squabble over Insear.”

At that, Fand frowns.

“What is it, Sir Fand?”

“My queen.” She seems to stand even straighter. “That’s where the falcons were sighted. Flying low above Insear.”

Jude pauses. That’s close. She catches Cardan’s eye, sees her concern mirrored in his.

“How many?” she asks.

“Last count was two, Your Majesty.”

“A pair.” Her mind is churning. It’s almost a blessing, to be thinking about this. She knows this: tactics and strategy and risk management. She knows too little of handling guilt and conscience and the feeling that she has left something important undone. “One could be an accident, two could be intentional. Cardan –”

“Yes, I understand. I will handle the Living Council.” His expression has sobered. Cardan makes a graceful king when he wants to. He gives her a gentle tap at the small of her back. “Go.”

But something roots her to the spot a little while longer. Maybe it’s because her back now feels cold without the weight of his palm on it. “I’ll be back in time for the revel,” she assures him.

“You’d better. It shall be a great creative achievement.”

Jude almost scoffs. The idea of a revel as a summit for a land treaty is certainly creative, she’ll give him that. “The greatest of your life?” she teases. She realizes she doesn’t want to leave him. Not just yet.

“Of course not. Becoming me was the greatest creative achievement of my life.”

She does scoff this time. “One of these days, my eyeballs are going to roll right out of their sockets because of you.”

He smiles, then, a gentle and precious thing. The sight of it burrows into her heart. He places a hand on the curve of her cheek. “I’ll be waiting for you. Be careful.”

Her breath trips a little in her throat. Fand stands stiffly before them, her eyes trained on the nearest pillar. Affording them some sort of privacy, in her own knightly way. Jude tells herself to get it together. “Aren’t I always?”

“No, Jude.” The way he shakes his head is almost mournful. “You’re really not.”

She frowns, but before she can say anything, he’s reaching into his pocket.

“Here, take these with you.” He produces a pair of honeycakes stolen from their food tray, wrapped in an elaborately embroidered handkerchief. She hadn’t even noticed him take them. Spots of glaze have already stained the intricate whorls of thread. “I was planning to share this with you during the meeting, but alas. My plans are foiled. Again.”

And there, that look. He has only just dressed her, but his eyes are promising the exact opposite. How is it that he’s able to go from wishing for her safety, to throwing her dirty looks beneath his stupidly long eyelashes?

He’s making it incredibly difficult to leave now.

“I need to go,” Jude says gruffly, if only to convince herself to get moving. If she sounds a little more irate than usual, it’s his damn fault anyway. Besides, the faster she clears up this falcon business, the faster they can wrap up the revel and the Insear headache, and the faster they can –

He’s full on smirking now, as if he knows exactly what she’s thinking.

Jude snatches the honeycakes out of his hands with more force than necessary.

“Goodbye,” he says, amusement clear in his tone. She huffs at him, already turning. “And Jude?”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

Jude pauses. It could have been the sincerity in his voice. It could have been the fact that she hates that there’s something she hasn’t told him. It could be the fact that she just doesn’t want to leave him right now. She turns right back around, just in time to catch the soft smile lighting up his eyes.

It strikes her clean through the chest.

She had once promised that she would be better than all of the fae. Right now, though, she is no better than them. She is no less a cheap manipulator of secrets and deceit and pretense.

He’s got one up over her. He was brave enough to tell her about his nightmares. She’s still scared to tell him about his own brother.

How strange her life has become, that being honest with her husband is how she wins the game.

Except it’s not a game. Not really. There’s nothing she wants to play with when she looks at the open affection plain on his face.

She makes a new vow in her head. Later, she thinks, as she pulls him down by his ridiculous cravat to press a kiss to the middle of his cheek. I will tell you everything later.

“Bye,” she whispers, her nose tracing his jaw as she settles back down to her heels.

The wonder she leaves on his face carries her all the way to Insear.

The island has grown.

In truth, Jude has only seen Insear once since returning from her exile, and it was as she had first seen it that day Cardan had faced off against Orlagh and raised it from the sea. Small, because it had been used to imprison Nicasia. And grey, because the lava and the ash that it had been named after had blanketed the soil like granite snow.

Now, the Isle of Ash is large enough to hold more than just a disgraced princess. At almost the size of Insmoor, it can fit two sprawling palaces and have room left over. It’s not entirely grey anymore, either. When their little boat makes landfall, Jude notices that the lava and the ash have crystallized on its shores like sparkling sand.

Diamonds, she thinks. They look like tiny diamonds.

The whole island is covered in it. It dusts the tall, white birch trees and low, sprawling underbrush that have rooted themselves as far as the eye can see. It sparkles from the petals of the flowers that dot the moonlit landscape: there is a range of blue irises, turquoise roses, and an elegant bloom of cool, black petals that Jude has never seen before.

Cardan did this. Cardan made all of this.

She is no stranger to his power, not now. But seeing the island he made, with nothing but the wave of a hand, makes the full breadth of his power suddenly unthinkable.

“I think I get it now,” she says, voice hushed a little by awe. “Why the Living Council and the High Courts are in such a frenzy over Insear.”

The Bomb whistles in appreciation beside her. They stand on the sparkling sand while Fand secures the boat behind them. “This is old magic. The land probably hasn’t felt anything like it since the three original islands of Elfhame were created.”

Jude shakes her head. “How is this possible? The island is still growing.”

“All of Elfhame thrives on the king’s lifeblood,” says the Bomb. “The island he raised himself most of all.”

“I knew Cardan had magic, but not like this.”

“He’s never been more powerful, and as a consequence, his blood more potent. He’s young, for one thing. And he’s happy.”

Jude’s head almost snaps off. “What?”

The Bomb throws a pointed look her way. “Not many of the old rulers were. Didn’t you notice?”

All Jude can remember is how distant and untouchable Eldred had been on the throne. What did it matter if the ruler was happy, as long as he was king? “But Eldred was –”

“Resigned. He had long accepted his life as king, but he derived no true joy during his rule. It’s different with Cardan. There is contentment, but there is more than that. Hope. Light.” The Bomb bends down, lets her fingers sink into the glistening sand of Cardan’s own making. “You can feel it in the soil.”

Jude thinks of how Cardan looked earlier tonight. The untouchable bending to her touch.

“And it’s not just Cardan, you know,” continues the Bomb. With the white shock of her hair, she looks like she belongs here. “It’s also different with you.”

“Because I’m human.”

“No. Because you’re happy, too.” She flashes Jude an impish smile. “Even though you’d be the last to admit it.”

Jude frowns. She doesn’t know what to make of that. “But I had no hand in raising Insear.”

“As queen, the land feeds off of you in turn.” The Bomb tilts her head back, and breathes in deeply. When she exhales, there is peace in her eyes. “The king and queen are happy, and it shows.”

Jude’s mind scrambles for an answer, but in truth, she is thrown. She has never really included happiness in her long-term plans for herself before, and now that it is a possibility – more than a possibility – she finds that it’s the slightest bit mythical. Something that’s as beautiful and as impossible as the fae.

And yet, here she is, the human Queen of Faerie.

She’s saved from replying by Fand coming up behind them. “The boat is secure, Your Majesty. And there’s no sign of the falcons.”

“Good. It’s possible that their presence was just a coincidence,” Jude says, “but let’s check further inland to be sure.”

The island seems to grow richer in foliage the deeper they go. There are flowers everywhere now, seas of deep blue and turquoise blooms, dotted with the occasional black. She leans down to pick one glittering obsidian flower, and brings it to her nose. It smells sweet. Black pollen dusts her fingertips and stands out against the metal of her chestplate. The shimmering ash crunches a little underfoot, and Jude’s golden cape swishes against it as she walks.

Even the air is different here. It feels lighter and cleaner, as if there is nothing that could possibly weigh it down.

A bird shrieks in the distance.

The three of them freeze.

Jude draws Nightfell. Fand and The Bomb close ranks on either side of her.

“Up ahead,” she says.

“It was close,” says The Bomb, “and low to the ground.” She wrinkles her brow. “That’s odd.”

They find the falcons not long after that. Find, because one of them is laying on the ground, chest rising and falling in shallow breath, and the other is in a nearby birch and makes a half-hearted attempt to fly over their heads only to land, visibly weakened, beside his comrade. They rest, defeated, against the glistening landscape borne of the new king’s power.

Both are marked by a blood-red crest on their chests. Redcap red.

“Traitors,” murmurs Fand.

“What’s wrong with them?” Jude asks. But the answer comes as quickly as she speaks.

You will not have your own true form back until such time as you hurt no living thing for the space of a full year and a day.

Jude sheathes her sword.

But how will we eat if we can hurt nothing?

She takes a step forward. One falcon emits a small cry, meant to intimidate, or perhaps to implore.

“My queen,” warns Fand.

“Peace,” says Jude, to her knight, and to her punished.

She kneels when she reaches them, her golden cape pooling against the ground.

“I do not rescind my judgement over you, who sought to overthrow the crown and wreak chaos upon the kingdom,” she tells them. And it is true. She regrets nothing of the way she had handled justice that day. “But,” she continues, “I once promised that kindness would sustain you, and today it is kindness I shall give.”

She reaches into her pocket and draws out the honeycakes that Cardan gave her. She holds it out to the once disgraced soldiers, and they – starved to the brink of death – fall upon it like a benediction.

The High Queen of Elfhame feeds those that had once sought to unseat her, and Fand and The Bomb bear witness in solemnity. When they are finished, she speaks again.

“Fly on,” she says. “When we meet again, meet me as yourselves.”

The minute Jude sets foot back in the palace, she knows that something is wrong.

Her body feels the slightest bit off-kilter, like she’s taking a step in the wrong direction. She can’t pinpoint what it is exactly. The Bomb makes her leave to return to the Court of Shadows, and Fand falls back into step behind her.

She wants to see Cardan.

The meeting with the Living Council was moved to a dusty antechamber on the opposite side of the brugh where the usual Council Chambers are. Jude suspects it was pure spite on Cardan’s behalf that led to this unnecessary change in meeting venue. She recalls with a vague satisfaction the clear distress on the messenger’s face earlier.

She can just imagine Randalin’s reaction, and it’s almost enough to make her smirk. If she were in the proper mood for smirking right now. A pounding is starting behind her eyes.

Jude catches the tail end of the dreaded Council meeting as she rounds the final corner.

Over the past few weeks, the Courts of Elfhame have been in a much aggrieved clamor over ownership and land rights to Insear. Each individual court seemed to present reason upon reason as to why they have a right to a piece of the island. Jude had understood why, in the vaguest sense, having not yet witnessed the current state of the land in question. It was technically free for the taking, having freshly risen out of nowhere, and was thus primed for the next inevitable round of political ladder climbing.

Now that she’s seen it, though, she can admit that there’s a part of her that would hate to see it go to the greedy hands of a faceless court. That would like, on no small terms, to have Insear all for herself.

It’s the nature of magic, she supposes. To create something so beautiful that no one can have.

As it stands, the island has served as a recurring headache for the king and queen, with two courts coming dangerously close to an armistice more than once. The revel that Cardan is hosting tonight is supposed to serve as neutral ground for interested parties to present their petitions, and for the monarchs to come to an amicable decision.

It seems like Randalin and the Living Council have a better solution.

“And to whom shall the money go, oh Minister of Keys?” It’s Cardan’s voice, and from his tone alone, it sounds as though the meeting is going as well as anticipated. Which is not at all.

“Sire?”

There’s a guard at the door that jolts into attention the second he sees her. His mouth opens to announce her, but she holds a finger to her lips. She wants to listen first. With a nod at Fand, Jude steps into the shadows.

“You suggested that the Isle of Ash be bestowed upon the court that can offer the greatest tithe,” Cardan says to Randalin. He’s seated at the helm of the long table, and the Council is arranged before him, with the Minister of Keys seated the closest to him on his left. “So let me ask you again. To whom shall the money go?”

From her vantage point, hidden by the door, Jude see’s Randalin’s horned face blanch. “Well, it will of course go to crown and kingdom, my liege.”

“To crown and kingdom?” Cardan rests his chin in his hand, pulling the words through his mouth as if he is playing with them. “But I didn’t ask for it.”

“What the Councilor means to say, sire,” Nihuar, the Seelie Minister, says quickly, her small green lips curved into a placating smile, “is that the funds will benefit all endeavors in the name of Elfhame –”

“So you mean to say,” Cardan drawls, “that the money will go to you.”

The Living Council erupts into a cacophony of sputters and indignant justification. It’s in the middle of rolling his eyes at the table in front of him that Cardan notices Jude hiding in the shadows by the door.

He sees her. Even though she does her best to hide herself, he always sees her.

He’s leaning sideways on his chair at the head of the table, so much so that half of his body is practically spilling over into her empty seat at his right. It’s such a familiar sight that a pang goes through Jude’s chest. She’s missed him.

Cardan stands. The Council falls silent in confusion. The drumming in Jude’s head begins to pound in time with her heart.

He keeps his eyes on her as he walks. All the way down the long table. All the way across the room. Until he is standing right in front of her and the Council is scrambling to their feet because the Queen of Elfhame is here.

Cardan holds out his hand. Jude is powerless to deny him.

She’s pinned to the floor by his expression. She’s only truly been gone for the better part of an hour, but maybe it’s possible that he’s missed her, too. He must see something in her face, because when he speaks, he addresses it to the Council frozen behind him, his eyes never once leaving her.

“This meeting is adjourned.”

“Your Majesties.” Randalin’s voice is strained. “The solution to the Insear claim has yet to be finalized.”

“I find myself tired of the lot of you,” Cardan says, something of his old impetuousness in his tone, “and my wife has just returned. Leave us.”

It’s Nihuar who tries next, once more in vain. “My king, if you would only review the –”

“Desist.” The ember of a threat sparks in his voice. “Now.”

Jude hears the sound of chairs scraping back and feet shuffling out of the door. The Council members most likely bow as they pass, but she isn’t looking at them. When the room is empty, she hears Fand murmur “Your Majesties,” from behind, and then the door is groaning shut. They’re alone.

Cardan sighs, and she can see the tension leaving his shoulders. He pulls her in closer by their joined hands, and when she’s near enough, his tail winds itself once around her hips. He rests his forehead against hers, stooped just enough to reach.

“So?” he says. His entire demeanor has shifted. Gentled. Jude feels the slightest bit dizzy from the sudden change. Or maybe she’s just dizzy. “What of the falcons at Insear?”

Jude swallows. She tells him everything: how Insear has changed, how they discovered the fallen falcons, how she fed them from a kindness that was more human than faerie. All the while, he listens with his forehead against hers and his hands at her waist.

When it is over, Cardan takes her face in his hands. “Look at you,” he breathes. “You are queen of us all.”

And Jude –

– blooms under his gaze. Under the sincerity of the adoration she finds there. Like the flowers she saw in Insear, black, shimmering petals unfurling under the tender moonlight. Like a drop of inky poison, spreading and spreading without control.

She sways a little.

There’s something she needs to tell him. There’s something he needs to know.

He might hate me, she thinks. He might truly hate me for it.

“Cardan,” she whispers.

“Yes.” His eyes have dropped from her eyes to somewhere lower.

The next time she sways, she sways a little bit into him, unable to stop the tilt of her body. His fingers tighten into the shining gold cape at her back, holding her against his chest.

“Cardan,” she says again. Their lips are so close, she almost brushes his name against his mouth. She is finding it hard to see anything but his face.

She thinks about how the last time she held off on telling him something important, he turned into a giant snake and she had to cut his head off.

He leans in.

The words tear themselves free from her throat.

“I kissed him,” she says.

Cardan stills. “What?” The confusion is clear in his voice.

“I had to,” she babbles, and this is how she’s sure something’s not entirely right with her. “He couldn’t know I was resistant to glamour. It was the only thing I had left. The only thing.”

“Jude.” There’s worry now, and a little bit of alarm. She could be wrong. The edges of her vision are going blurry. “You’re not making any sense.”

“Balekin,” she whispers, because his name is almost forbidden, because she has little of her strength left. She's near enough to see the shock widening his eyes. Shock, and something else. Something sharp. Something that can cut her.

“I kissed him,” she confesses, “and then I killed him.”

Jude’s world goes black.

Chapter Text

Jude wakes alone to an empty room.

The first thing she notices is that she’s in the royal suite. Someone has laid her out on the giant silkspun bed and folded the covers gently over her. She’s been stripped of her clothes and returned to the nightgown that she slept in.

The second thing she notices – her head is killing her.

She struggles into a sitting position and immediately regrets it. There is a cold ache at the base of her skull, and it radiates up into her skull without mercy the more that she tries to move. She has to catch her forehead in her hand because it’s almost impossible to keep her head up. Her muscles feel sore, like she’s just finished a brutal sword match with five of Grima Mog at the same time.

Has she been poisoned?

Pressing the heels of her palms over her eyes, Jude tries to think through the fog of pain. She runs through the list of poisons that she once upon a time routinely fed herself in order to bargain immunity. She comes up worryingly short: it isn’t wraithberry, because the speed of her pulse when she presses her fingers to her wrist is normal, if a little slow from slumber. It isn’t blusher mushroom, either, because paralysis should have set in by now. And the fact that she woke up from sleep at all refutes the possibility of deathsweet.

Her body aches, her head is pounding, her blood is cold underneath her skin despite all of the blankets, and more than anything, she’s pissed.

It’s either someone failed spectacularly at poisoning her properly, or whatever it is, it’s something completely new.

And new means that she has no immediate plan for it. New means that she’s just as helpless as anyone else.

All she has consumed up to this point came from the food tray she ate from before she set out for Insear. That immediately rules it out because then that means that Cardan should also be –

Her thoughts screech to a halt.

Cardan.

She told Cardan about kissing Balekin in the Undersea.

And then she’d – blacked out.

Jude’s mind races to recall his reaction. Was he angry? Insulted? Disgusted? But just like with the poison she draws a blank. Her memory of that moment is too foggy to sift through, and she is left wondering if she’s made a mistake.

She needs to talk to Cardan. She needs to talk to him now.

That’s when Tatterfell comes bustling in.

She takes one look at Jude, her black eyes roving over her undressed form, and tuts. “You should be ready for the revel.”

Jude attempts to sit up a little straighter, but it only makes her grit her teeth when her head swims. “Where is the High King?”

“It appears he has stepped out.”

“Out?”

Tatterfell shakes her head. “He left in a hurry. The night’s revels are about to begin. Perhaps he went to check on preparations.”

“Of course. Preparations.”

If the imp is put off by Jude’s monotone responses, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she motions for her to take her place in front of the mirror. Jude makes her way over, but her body is sluggish and slow to respond. She clenches her fists and pushes herself out of bed, refusing to show any weakness in front of her old attendant.

“Anything will do for tonight,” Jude says, nodding at the closet. The last thing she cares about right now is what she’s going to wear. Her mind reels with all the things she needs to say to Cardan, with all the things that he could say to her. She’ll find him at the revel, and then they’ll… talk.

“No matter.” Tatterfell’s voice is inscrutable. “Your garments have already been provided for.”

With a flourish, she unfurls the dress that she is carrying over her arms. It’s styled after a peacock: plumed feathers of royal blue and vibrant turquoise make up the bodice, and a fall of shimmering, night sky fabric makes up the skirt.

Despite everything, Jude’s eyes go wide.

This time, there is no sleep-softened husband to help her into her clothes. No soft looks from beneath eyelashes. No lingering touches. Instead, Tatterfell unlaces the discernibly negligible back of the dress, and looks up at her impatiently.

When Jude steps into it, the soft tips of the feathers kiss her bare collarbones, and the iridescent skirt flows down close to her legs; it spreads out where it reaches the floor, the multi-colored hem fanning out to mimic the way a peacock spreads its plumage.

The effect is extraordinary. Elaborate. Extravagant.

It has Cardan written all over it.

“Troublesome affair, this Insear business,” Tatterfell remarks, pulling Jude’s hair up into a high ponytail. She’s extending the ends of it with lengths of gold-tipped feathers that spill like a peacock’s crest down her back.

Jude’s head is now twice as heavy, and her headache now twice as powerful.

It takes far more effort than it should to respond. “I expect that after tonight it won’t be a problem anymore.”

“Yes, I should very well hope so. For the king’s sake.”

The comment is odd, but Jude’s too weary to mull it over. The way the dress bares her shoulders and arms does nothing to ward off the chill on her skin. Tatterfell clucks at the gooseflesh as she begins the finishing touches of makeup and bodypaint.

“Woe the constitution of a mortal,” she mutters under her breath. It seems that the honor of attending to the High Queen of Elfhame is not enough to rid her of her conservations. “Just today your sister snapped at the servants and commanded that all meals be delivered to her rooms. Complaining of swollen feet and an aching back, of all things.”

“Yes,” Jude says, dryly, “I suspect that’s what being eight months pregnant will do to anyone.”

Tatterfell is unfazed. “She says to tell you she’s sorry to miss the revel. But she sends her well wishes to you and His Majesty.”

Looking in the mirror, Jude thinks of the way Taryn’s features have swelled and changed while carrying her child. It’s all entirely too easy to imagine the changes on herself, because they look so much alike. But as Tatterfell finishes dusting shimmering blue and turquoise powder over her eyelids and cheekbones, then her collarbones, and her wrists, the comparison ends abruptly.

The woman looking back at her in the mirror is unearthly – untouchable, in her own way. She does not look like a nauseous, fatigued human. She looks like the High Queen of Faerie, with her dress of majestic feathers and glittering stars.

The only thing missing is her king.

If he wanted me to wear something he picked out, she thinks to herself, settling her crown on top of her head, he should’ve helped put it on me himself.

Well. That means that she’ll just have to show him, and make him regret it.

The revel is in full swing when Jude arrives.

The crowd of Folk clap and bow and part to make a path for her, and she gets her full glimpse of Cardan’s Insear peace revel for the first time.

He’s outdone himself. The high ceilings of the ballroom are a mastery of golden lanterns and strings of deep blue roses. No branch goes unadorned, no vine left empty. The whole room is effused with soft, enchanting light, the revelers plied with glasses of bubbling, aquamarine liquor. Even the moss on the walls seem to glow with serene luminescence. This is no space for fighting or hostility. A peace revel, through and through.

And it’s with a jolt that Jude realizes that the room, the decor – the gold, the blue, the turquoise –

It matches her. It matches her dress.

Here, in this revel that Cardan has crafted, she completely and wholly belongs.

Something trips in her chest. It might be her heart.

Jude turns her head immediately toward the throne, where she knows he’ll be waiting. The gravity in the room shifts the moment Cardan comes into her field of vision, and she finds herself tilting in his direction without even thinking. It is disconcerting, how easily he pulls her toward him. She can’t tell if it’s because he wields the power of all of Elfhame or because she’s hopelessly in love with him.

Tonight he wears a cape of ebony feathers and silver chains; dressed head to toe in black, he is the stark midnight contrast to her. He looks every inch the king she made him. His smile holds more promise than a knife.

Jude straightens her back, ignoring the soreness in her limbs and the ache in her head. He wants her to come to him? Fine.

But he’s already getting up from the throne and walking away. The tips of his black curls disappear into the crowd while she stands there, frozen.

He walked away. He turned his back on her.

The fury is icy in her veins. The feeling is close to embarrassment if she were being truthful with herself, but in this moment, she can’t care enough to think about it. She stalks after him, as gracefully as she can amidst the crowd of revelers watching her every move, and she ends up following the tail of his feathered cape all the way up to the secret door behind the throne. Jude sweeps aside the curtain of evergreen and storms inside.

The room has been altered only slightly for the revel. There is the same couch pushed up against the far corner, but the ceiling has been painted over in golden constellations to match the glowing lanterns outside.

“Feeling better, I see.”

The voice comes from behind her, and Jude moves on instinct. The knife comes from the holster on her ankle, and it gleams silver under the ivy-filtered moonlight as she turns on her visitor, shoving him roughly against the mossy wall.

“I was wondering where you were keeping that,” Cardan says, idly.

“Cardan,” Jude hisses. “How did you sneak up on me?” She hadn’t heard him approach at all. Just how badly is the poison affecting her?

He raises an imperious eyebrow, looking far too comfortable for someone with a knife to his throat. “Must I remind you, I am every bit a part of the Court of Shadows as you are.”

She grits her teeth. “I was supposed to be following you.”

“Yes. And then I decided to follow you instead.” Now both of his eyebrows go up. “I didn’t foresee that you would pick here of all places, what with the revel and all, but I can’t say I’m not intrigued.”

“Stop deflecting.” Because that’s exactly what he’s doing, isn’t it? With his easy posture and the smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. She sees right through him, but not enough to understand why there’s a mask in the first place. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

Something shutters in his expression, the edges of his amusement going the slightest bit duller. “No, Jude. You’re the only thing I can’t run away from.”

She presses him harder against the wall. She’s too tired for any of this. Her body aches. Her head hurts. She doesn’t have the energy or the patience left for another one of Cardan’s moods. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

But instead of answering, Cardan hooks his ankle behind hers and pulls her stance out from under her. Jude loses her balance, and he uses the momentum to swing her around and press her against the wall. She’s too dizzy to fight it, the sudden movement making her head swim.

Her knife falls to the ground, cushioned by the soft, grassy loam.

His smile has returned. But it’s the one he hides behind, the one that she thought she was seeing less and less of when it was just the two of them together. Something cold settles in her stomach the moment she sees it.

“Shall we play a little game, darling?” he croons into her ear.

“This is no time for games,” she snaps.

“Oh, I disagree. I think this is the perfect occasion.”

“Cardan.”

“Want to know what the game is?” His voice has gone deadly soft. “It’s called, ‘Show me how he touched you.’”

Jude goes very, very still.

He pulls back just enough so that he can gauge her expression. So that she can see the hard emotion in his eyes as he looks her over. She gets the uncomfortable feeling that it’s something she should recognize.

Her first thought is that he is being facetious. She searches his eyes for any trace of drink or drug. She finds none. This is no jest. He is being entirely, unlaughably serious.

And not for the first time when it comes to him, Jude finds that she is the tiniest bit afraid.

Cardan closes the scant distance between them again, bracing an arm against the wall by her head. He doesn’t trap her physically. No, it’s much worse. He traps her by the promise of his proximity, a promise that she could gorge herself on and never get her fill.

And that’s what she’s most afraid of, really. Not him. But what she’s willing to let him do to her, if only he would come closer.

“This is all I could think of,” he murmurs, “watching you during the revel. You can never make it easy for me, can you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It’s not a lie.

“No, I don’t suppose you would. You have a way of doing that to me. Making me suffer with nary a forethought.”

“Cardan –”

“Tell me.” His voice is so steady, so calm. Too calm. “Did he come close to you, like this?”

As he speaks, his other hand comes up to rest on the wall as well, so that he is holding himself above her, their bodies merely inches apart.

She doesn’t respond.

“It’s easy,” he says, gently. Almost kindly. Jude doesn’t believe it for a second. “I’ll make a guess, and you tell me if I’m right. Is this how my brother approached you?”

Whatever she thought would come out of her confessing the truth about Balekin, it definitely wasn’t this.

“Answer me, Jude. Play the game.”

A short breath escapes her. “No.”

“No?”

There’s a hidden question there, and Jude realizes her response must have sounded like a rejection. She could stop this game if she wanted to. He’d let her.

But now that it’s started, now that she has him right here, in front of her, she needs to see it through. He’s saying something with his eyes and the tense lines of his body that she should have been able to decipher by now, and she has never been able to deny him. Even now, when this whole thing feels like she’s being handed a winning card that she doesn’t know what to do with, she will take everything that she can get.

She raises her chin. “No, he didn’t approach me like that.”

A slight furrow in his eyebrows, almost imperceptible, there and then gone just as quickly – it’s the first real reaction she has procured since the revel began.

“I see,” is all he says.

His hands drift lower against the walls until they are level with her waist. He’s not touching her, but she can almost imagine the feeling of them settling on her hips. “Did he put his hands on you to pull you closer?”

Jude tries to keep her voice steady. It doesn’t work as well as she wants. “No.”

He pauses. It’s difficult to see his expression, because he’s leaning down to speak in her ear now and all she can see is the mess of his black curls. She wonders if he’s trying to tell if she’s lying.

“All right,” he says. “How about here?” One of his hands finally leaves the wall, rising until the backs of his fingers are a moth’s wing away from the swell of her cheek. “Did he touch you here?”

“No.”

His fingers drift lower, wandering down her jawline to the sensitive skin of her neck. He’s still not touching her. His thumb hovers at the pulse point fluttering under her skin.

“And what about here?”

Jude closes her eyes. “No.”

She can hear Cardan breathing, long inhales and deeper exhales. It’s gotten louder the longer this game went on. This game, Jude realizes, that he is trying very hard to hide behind. This game that is perhaps instead showing his hand. Little by little. She just wants him to look at her. She wants to see the emotion in his face, devoid of any artifice.

His hand poises over her collarbones, and she can almost feel the heat of his skin on hers, bared by the open collar of her dress. She wants to arch into him, close the distance that he won’t. The phantom of his touch is a physical thing she feels in the pit of her stomach.

She waits for the question. But this time it doesn’t come right away, as if he is afraid to even ask it, as if he doesn’t want to hear the answer. Jude has to wonder at his hesitation now. “Did he –”

Jude cuts him off, because there is something she realizes she should have made clear from the beginning. Something that she can’t believe she has waited this long to say. It seems they both have a long way to go until they are rid of the games they have grown so used to. Until then, she will meet him on this chosen battleground.

“No, Cardan.” She steels herself beneath him, and reaches up to take his hand, suspended in the air, in her own. He stills. Their hands drop, intertwined, between them. “The answer will always be no. He didn’t touch me. Not like that. Cardan, he could barely stand to kiss me.”

He says nothing, and Jude barrels on.

“He thought I was under a geas,” she explains. “No one knew that I was resistant, not him, not Orlagh. It was my choice to pretend. I had to, or they’d kill me. Towards the end, Balekin told me to kiss him the way I kiss you.” She’s never told anyone this before. “I think… I think he wanted to know something. Something about you.”

Abruptly, Cardan steps back.

Jude gets her first good look at him since the whole revel started. And she is stunned to the raw, blazing emotion written plainly in his face. His mask is gone now. Any hint of a carefully crafted smile has been replaced by the hard set of his mouth. Any fickle amusement in his eyes has been burned out by something more powerful. His hands are clenched into fists, the knuckles turning white. She watches, pinned to the wall, as a muscle ticks in his jaw.

That is when she realizes that Cardan has reached the end of his restraint.

Something like self-preservation kicks in, making her straighten her spine under the force of his emotion. “I don’t regret it. I did what I had to.”

It’s only a beat later that she understands, on some level of animal instinct – saying that has just made it worse.

Cardan snaps.

It happens so fast – and Jude is already so lightheaded – that she finds herself falling against the couch in the far corner within the dizzying blink of an eye. She hits the cushions, the high velvet back of the couch engulfing her.

Cardan looms over her, planting a knee into the cushions between her legs. “You say that like it’s supposed to make me feel better,” he snarls, and, oh, the way his voice shoots through her blood. 

Jude fights against the protests of her aching body and struggles to sit up. “I don’t understand.” Cardan doesn’t let up, dropping to his hands and knees above her. She sinks back into the ridiculously padded armrest at her back, glaring. His mouth finds its place beside the shell of her ear.

“Jude. You know me better than that.” One hand curls against the back of her neck, and she jumps at the feel of his touch, searing hot against her clammy skin. He angles her head closer as he speaks. “I am neither good, nor gentle.” His voice lowers into something rough around the edges – Jude is surrounded, overwhelmed by the sudden nearness of him. “And I do not forgive.”

Cardan’s mouth descends upon hers.

It’s not the kiss that she’s been waiting for ever since they got interrupted in their bed. It’s not the kiss she would have received from the one who had dressed her so gently, so carefully after they woke.

No. This is something else entirely.

Cardan kisses her like he would kiss an enemy: hard, calculated, every move bearing specific intent. He is demanding something from her with the insistent press of his lips, and she can barely keep up.

Pinned as she is under the warm weight of his body, Jude can only kiss back in kind, the worthy opponent she has trained herself to be. When he presses her back against the cushions, she licks at the seam of his mouth. When he hooks one of her legs around his hips, she tangles her fingers into his hair, desperate with the urge to retaliate.

He groans into her mouth.

But as her mind begins that slow, familiar slide, Jude is struck by the feeling that this kiss is a battle she’s not going to win. Because she’s finally starting to understand a little of what he’s telling her.

It’s in the lingering pecks on the corner of her mouth in between searing kisses. It’s in the way he cradles her face even as he’s pulling her roughly closer. It’s in the way he’s holding on to her, hands fisted in the shimmering fabric of her skirts, even though she’s already wrapped tightly around him.

She thought, all this time, that he was angry with her. Furious. Outraged.

She’s not so sure anymore.

They break apart with the same abruptness with which they came together. She knows it now, this kiss has changed something, chipped away at the final vestiges of whatever mask he was hiding behind.

“Jude.” Her name is a barely veiled plea. “I need you to indulge me something.” That’s when she hears it, that first crack of something fragile breaking in his voice. She feels a tender thing, right there behind her ribcage, unfurl at the sound of it.

“Of course,” she says, immediately, without thinking. “Anything.”

A sigh leaves Cardan’s body. She could have sworn it looked like relief.

But then Jude is swearing for a different reason, because Cardan is now suddenly moving down her body. The breath gets caught in her throat.

“What are you doing?”

“Let me take it away,” he says, voice muffled by her collarbones. “Let me burn away the memory of him. Of the Undersea.”

It takes longer than it should for her mind, honeyed by his kisses, to catch up. She rears back a little. “Cardan. The revel. We don’t have time for this.”

His head bows under some strong emotion. The feathers on her dress stand out stark against his dark head. “How dare they,” he whispers. “How dare they use you–” He sends a growl of frustration into the skin of her neck, resuming his path downwards with fevered determination. “I couldn’t do anything then.” He punctuates his sentence with a bruising kiss on the soft spot right underneath her ear, and she squirms. He’s touching all the places he’d asked her about during their game. “Let me do this now.” Another kiss, his lips leaving a wet mark above the crest of feathers between her breasts. She arches into him without forethought. “Indulge me this. I beg of you.”

And this is what gives Jude pause. Because Cardan never begs.

When he reaches down to hook her right leg over his shoulder – when he presses another hot, open-mouthed kiss on the sensitive, tender skin of her ankle –

Jude groans, throwing her head back. It’s an acquiescence and a surrender all at once.

Cardan makes quick work of the silk underwear beneath her dress. It’s gone before she can even protest, lost to the grassy carpet beneath them, and swiftly forgotten. Her husband begins a new path with his mouth, trailing lips and tongue now up the length of her leg. First past her ankle, then up to her bare calf, littering his way with featherlight kisses.

When he gets to her knee, Jude is a mess of anticipation and rumpled blue skirts beneath him. All aches and chills are forgotten. Eyes alight with dark mischief, he traces the tip of his tongue against the fold of her knee, with the barest hint of suggestion, taking his sweet time.

“Cardan,” she says through gritted teeth. “No more games. Just hurry up.”

She is rewarded when he abruptly turns his head and sucks a searing bruise into the inside of her thigh. She jolts, the heel of her foot digging into his shoulder, and he has the nerve to chuckle.

She stares at the swollen curve of his lips, the traces of peacock blue dust on his cheekbones, the way he’s kneeling before her now as if in reverence, and wonders if he was created for her own destruction.

It certainly feels that way when he finally lowers his mouth and seals his lips over her.

Jude falls back against the cushions with a soft moan, muffled against her palm.

Out of all the things they have done, it is somehow this that brings out some semblance of shyness in her. As if she can’t believe how much she enjoys it – but, of course she enjoys it, because Cardan’s mouth has never been anything but wicked, his fingers anything but clever. No, it’s that she can’t quite believe how much he enjoys doing it to her.

And damn him if he doesn’t get her every fucking time.

He presses his lips to the wetness at her entrance, and Jude swallows the next gasp that threatens to leave her lips.

“None of that.” She feels his breath, hot against her slick flesh, when he speaks. She almost whines at the interruption. “Let me hear you properly.”

“Cardan, the revel.” Her words are more breath than actual words. “They’ll hear.”

As if in response, Cardan licks. One long, luscious stroke up the length of her. Opening her up. Making her feel him, right where she wants him. When he reaches her clit, the tip of his tongue flicks over it, the pressure intense and then gone again just as fast. Her whole body jerks, as if the pleasure is a force like an electric shock up her spine.

“Let them hear.” A slow grin spreads his lips, shinier now than they were moments before. “Don’t you want them to?”

The thought that anyone can come in at any moment and see the Queen with her skirts pushed up to her hips, and the King kneeling before her with her legs thrown over his shoulders – well. It sounds like the exact kind of danger that Jude thrives on.

“I –” But she doesn’t get to finish her sentence. Cardan pounces on the hesitation in her voice and sucks her clit into his mouth. Jude’s spine leaves the cushions, her hands fisting in his hair for anything to hold on to. Another moan would have left her mouth as well, but she’s determined not to give him the satisfaction.

She’s not sure how long she will last.

“One last game,” he says, eyes burning. “I’ll touch you in all the places my brother didn’t –” His thumb continues his work while he speaks, rubbing slow, steady circles that are both too much and not enough “– and in return, you’ll let me know how good you feel. You’ll let everyone outside this room know if that’s what it takes.”

This, she learned early on, is something that Cardan has always known more about than her. And the more time that he has spent learning her body has only proven to her how little she stands a chance against him on this particular battlefield. It is one of the few things that she can never begrudge him for being better than her at.

Even now, when he’s wielding it against her, she can’t hold it against him. How can she, when he returns his mouth to her clit and sweeps his tongue over her so perfectly – fast, even strokes across the entirety of it, exactly the way she likes it, as if he means to evaporate the ghost of Balekin’s kiss with every flick. How can she, when he swirls a fingertip at her entrance, nudging it inside just enough so that she can feel the barest of stretches, just enough so that her hips immediately roll trying to get more.

Time melts away after that. Jude’s head is thrown back against the couch, and stars fill her vision, the myriad of constellations painted on the ceiling blurring together into specks of glitter and gold, disjointed and effervescent like the pleasure coursing through her body.

She can barely remember the cold depths of the Undersea. There is only his touch, skin warmed against skin, and his mouth, his lips, his tongue, hotter than anything she’s ever felt before.

“You like this a little, don’t you? Knowing that the entire kingdom is out there waiting for us.” And as if on cue, the music swells as the revelers begin another dance, their cheers audible through the thin mossy walls of the room. “They’re right outside, Jude. Do you think they’ll hear it when you come?”

Her answer is a whimper. She passed the point of words a long many moments ago. The sounds are escaping her mouth with more abandon. He’s done his best to wear her down, and it’s working far too well.

She can feel something immense building tight in her belly. She’s a tiny bit afraid of what it took to get her here. She’s a tiny bit afraid of how little more she needs before it all comes crashing down.

“Do you want to know what I was thinking about when I saw you walk into the room tonight, wearing the dress I handpicked for you?” The sound she makes is less a query and more of a plea for him to continue, whether it’s speaking or ruining her with his mouth, she’s not entirely sure anymore. “I thought to myself that the Undersea will live in nothing but fear, for all the time that you draw breath. And then I thought about how their fear will never be good enough for you.”

He times the next swirl of his tongue – the hardest one thus far – with a perfectly placed flick of his finger, hooking behind her pubic bone and pressing up against that spot that makes her feel like bursting. And it’s over.

Jude comes with something that’s very nearly a scream, if only she weren’t digging her teeth into the back of her hand. Her toes curling. Her body writhing. It builds and it builds, like an earthquake ready to rend her world apart.

She returns to herself only to find that she’s thrown her arms up over her eyes: it’s blessedly dark and uncomplicated behind her eyelids. She finds that she’s a little embarrassed by how strongly he’s made her come. It’s slow work lowering her arms and peeling her eyes open, and when she finally sees him, she’s struck to the bone by the intensity of his gaze.

Even though she’s the one that’s just come all over his mouth and hands, he’s the one that looks like he’s received something he doesn’t deserve.

Cardan leans over her once more to smooth down the fall of her skirts, to fix the positioning of the feathers on her chest. Without thinking, her arms come up to wrap around his shoulders and to bring him closer but then – he’s pulling away.

“I knew the dress would suit you,” he says, eyes burning with something unsated, lips swollen and shining with the evidence of what he’s done to her. “You were never one to hide your true colors.”

And then he stands and walks away.

Again.

Chapter Text

Cardan doesn’t get very far.

Well.

She doesn’t let him.

Jude snatches her forgotten knife off the ground, not far from the couch, and throws. It flies hilt over blade, over and over, a flash of silver teeth in the moonlight, until it strikes its target: the patch of mossy wall just a hair's breadth away from the tip of Cardan’s ear.

He freezes. Inches from the door. “Did you just throw a knife at me?”

“I should’ve aimed closer.” Jude glares at his turned back. She still hasn’t quite gotten her breath back and it shows in her voice. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Back to the revel. The one you were so worried about missing.”

“The one you clearly don’t care enough about considering you led me here instead.”

He turns, finally, raising his shoulders as if to say, I guess you’re right. The smile has returned to his face. It is a mask, and it does not fit.

She wants to slice it off.

Jude stands. Or, well, attempts to, with as much dignity as possible. The thing is — she can’t feel her knees.

Cardan notices. His smile ripples, shifts. A smirk begins to flirt with the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t you dare.”

The smirk only grows.

Jude cuts her eyes to the knife embedded in the wall. “I mean it.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?”

“Not funny. Listen,” she hisses. “I don’t have time for this. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. You’re distant, you’re brooding, whatever. But you don’t get to walk away from me.”

His eyes flash. “And what makes you think I’m walking away from you?”

“Because that’s what you do. Running away. Hiding under tables. Drinking wine to clear away reality.” She doesn’t know where this is coming from. There is something cold, too cold, in her blood. She let him have his way and he still turned his back on her.

Jude watches the words land, sees him rear back in response. This urge to hurt him, just a little, is familiar but wrong. Like putting on old clothes that are too small. She makes it fit. “I don’t see why it matters anyway,” she continues. “The Folk don’t care about these things. Brothers kissing the same girl. It’s what counts as fun around here.” She thinks of Locke, and of Taryn, and the taste of it is bitter in her mouth.

There is no mistaking the fury on his face now. She can’t even celebrate the loss of his mask. “Is that what you think this is about?”

“What else is there?” she says without thinking, at the end of her rope. “Are you jealous, Cardan? Do you think I liked kissing Balekin better than –”

“Shut up.”

“No.”

“Foolish human. You couldn’t possibly fathom it.”

“Exactly,” she snarls. “I can’t fathom it. I can’t understand what you’re thinking. Is that it? Is it because I’m human? So I got kidnapped and held hostage and you had to make a deal for me. Are you defending my honor? Is that how little you –”

“Tread carefully, wife.” Malice sparks in his tone.

They’re going in circles. Like a faerie dance that an enchanted mortal can’t break away from.

“I’ve made my peace with it!” She very nearly shouts it. “Why can’t you?”

Because that’s what the problem is, isn’t it? She’s made her peace with it, the whole, terrible lot of it. She was kidnapped, used, tortured in that insidious way the fae like to torture. Geases and tricks and not-truths. But she didn’t let it break her. So why is it that he’s the one that’s broken, the one shaken awake by nightmares, the one unable to meet her eyes?

Jude is — exhausted. She feels a little sick for goading him, and she despises how little she is able to control her words and her temper. This isn’t how she wants to treat him, but her head hurts. She desperately misses the way they were in the safety of their room: open, vulnerable, trusting. She wants him the way he was after his nightmare, trembling and soft and ready to tell her everything without making her guess a word.

She won’t let him see her shoulders slump, but her voice loses its edge. “Fine. You clearly don’t want to — to talk about it right now. I hate it,” and she makes sure her eyes burn her vitriol at him, “but that’s not my problem. I will not beg for your favor.” And she says it with her chin held high. “Nor do I need it.”

He’s watching her, the wariness unmistakable on his face.

“But know this, High King of Elfhame. The next time you turn your back on me will be the last time I throw a knife at you.” My blade will strike true.

Jude sweeps past him to retrieve her knife embedded in the wall. She means to leave him there, much in the same way he meant to leave her only moments before. But her hand has barely closed around the hilt of her blade before there are soft fingers encircling her wrist, gently tugging her backwards.

Cardan wraps his arms around her from behind, pulling her back against his chest. Jude wants to snap at him, to tell him that no amount of cuddling will account for the way he closed himself off to her – but then his head is dropping to her shoulder, stray curls brushing against her bare, chilled skin, and her body is melting against him because he’s warming her up all pressed close like this, and, well, isn’t this what she wanted all along?

He sighs, and it feels like a kiss against the skin behind her ear. Before she knows it, she’s leaning completely against him, until her cheek is resting against his temple and he’s supporting all of her weight. And everything feels like it could be alright, just for a little while.

Jude allows herself to chip a little. A piece of armor falling away. It wouldn’t normally be this easy, but this night has taken so much from her already. Her fingers wrap around his forearms. “Just – are you angry?”

“Yes.”

Jude swallows it, the word a lump of ice in her throat.

But Cardan is speaking again. “Not at you.”

“Oh.”

“Jude.” He sends her name into her skin. And he sounds exactly the way he did when he woke up from his nightmare. “How could you ever think it was you?”

Her fingers tighten around his forearms, digging into the black fabric of his shirt. She fixes her gaze on the ceiling, golden lanterns and constellations for a revel that suddenly seems so very far away. “I just always thought you would hate me for it. Think me weak.”

“I could never. If there was anyone weak in the face of the Undersea, it was I.”

Jude lifts her head. “What?”

“I couldn’t do anything when you were taken. Anything that mattered. I couldn’t stop them, couldn’t bring you back. Not without a king’s ransom and admitting Madoc one step closer to the crown. I hated that making the deal was the only thing I could do. But I did it anyway.”

The words he whispered in their bed ring through her ears.

I would have done anything to get you back. Anything. Everything.

She wishes she could see his face, turn around and lift his eyes to her. But his arms have become iron around her waist, and he is pressing his face into her neck as if he never means to surface from her again.

“Every day that you were gone, I stood on the cliff and gazed into the waves. As if I could bring you back by the sheer force of my longing. Never before had I loathed the feeling of being weak as much as then. All the power of Elfhame and I couldn’t bring you back.”

“But you did,” she says, because as much as she kept herself alive and refused to let them break her, he got her out. He got her out in the end. “You did.”

He doesn’t hear her. “And then now you tell me of my brother’s tricks and machinations. Taking what he can from you. Giving you no choice but to yield to him. Another tally in the long list of ways I’ve failed. Do you understand me now, Jude? I am haunted by the water.”

And Jude is thunderstruck.

Because this whole time.

This whole time, he was angry with himself.

He thinks — he thinks he failed her.

She tries to speak, to say something, anything — you didn’t fail me maybe, or I think you might have saved me even — but he’s pressing a kiss to her temple and turning her in his arms. Holding her hips and smiling a rueful smile, neither a fake nor a mask and even more disconsolate in its truthfulness.

“My Queen of Knives,” he says. “Come. We have a land grab to settle.”

They’re ambushed the minute they emerge.

The Courts of Elfhame are eager to stake their claim on the Isle of Ash, and it would seem the carefully crafted festivities of Cardan’s peace revel are not enough to placate them any longer.

They are met with a blur of faces and titles and allegiances and honestly, at this point, barely veiled propositions as the people of the kingdom vie for their favor. Cardan takes the lead in charming them all and maneuvering the conversation without really agreeing to anything, because they both know that’s what he’s best at. The revel continues as the politicking unfolds. The music is liquid, the air thick as syrup. And Cardan – doesn’t let go of her.

From the moment they stepped out of their secret room behind the throne, he’s made sure that he’s touching her somehow. It’s his tail twining around her elbow while a goblin with lime green skin outlines his extensive plans should Insear be bequeathed to the Court of Moths. It’s his pinky curling around hers while a pixie chatters away at them, her wings near vibrating with her enthusiasm. It’s his steadying hand on her back as he leads her away from a member of the Gentry that has clearly had too much wine.

As if he understands how much she’s pushing her body right now to keep going on. As if he understands how turning his back on her was a sting that she won't easily forget. As if maybe she isn't the only one in need of these small affections.

The King and Queen hold court with their kingdom, but neither of them are really listening, because they are also holding court with each other. The Folk watch them with bemusement.

Jude doesn’t really care at this point.

She had seen the tightness in his eyes, the clenching of his jaw. She had assumed their meaning, and oh, how wrong she had been. Now she is taking in all the things she missed the first time, wondering how she hadn’t noticed the slump to his shoulders, the unhappy tilt of his lips.

Anger is a strange thing, in that it takes root from the things that hurt the most.

Cardan steps away at one point when something far ahead catches his notice, and he presses a quick kiss to her cheek before departing. She almost chases after him, because he took all the warmth with him when he left, and she’s not sure if she could endure another round of simpering and sidling without him.

When the Bomb suddenly materializes at her side, Jude almost sighs in relief.

“Here.” The Bomb hands her a vial filled with clear, violet liquid.

Jude narrows her eyes at it. “What is that?”

“The king said you weren’t feeling well.”

“What? When?”

“Not long after we returned from Insear. He was frantic. Said you fainted into his arms.” There’s teasing in the corner of her smile, if she looked close enough.

Jude snatches the bottle from her. “I did no such thing.”

“Whatever you say, Your Worshipfulness.”

Eyeing the contents, Jude asks, “What kind of antidote is it?”

It’s the Bomb’s turn to frown. “It’s just a tonic. Why would you need an antidote?”

“I think I’ve been poisoned. But I can’t be sure. It’s not a poison I know. It’s just that the symptoms came on so fast for it to be anything else.” Jude goes over how she ruled out all the possible common fae toxins.

“Jude, you should have told someone sooner. What symptoms?” Her friend’s voice has transformed from easygoing to clinical.

“Headache. Chills. Sore muscles.” Jude thinks over the last hour, her encounter with Cardan behind the throne room. “And some kind of mood change. I’m… I’m too irritable. Volatile.” She shakes her head. “More so than usual.”

“Glad to know you’re self-aware, at least.”

Jude ignores the jab. “I’ve run out of ideas. I don’t know what it is, or how I imbibed it.” And the symptoms aren’t going away. But even in front of her friend, Jude is loath to show weakness. This conversation, asking for help, it’s already uncomfortable enough.

“Leave it to me.” The Bomb turns to go, but before she leaves, she looks back at Jude with a grin. “And here I thought you were out of sorts for a different reason.”

“What?”

She sends a look over Jude’s shoulder and melts into the shadows with one last wink. Jude turns and sees Cardan making his way back, eyes heavy on her.

His clothes are covered in glitter.

Blue, turquoise, and gold powder shimmering against all the black. Scattered on his shoulder where he threw her leg over him. Across the front of his chest where she grabbed him. Dusted across his cheekbones where he pressed his face into —

Her. His clothes are covered in her.

Has he looked like that the entire time? All the ambassadors they talked to…

“Your Majesty.” It’s Randalin. He pauses, leaning forward to peer a little closer. “Are you feeling alright? You look a little flushed.”

“Hm? Oh, I’m perfectly fine,” she lies. She’s not sure if it’s because of whatever poison is possibly in her system right now, or because she’s still not recovered from that mind-melting orgasm, but she wouldn’t mind betting that she always looks like this after a period of Cardan’s undivided attention.

“I’ve finally caught you alone, my queen. You see, I wondered if I might have a word –”

“Speak directly, Minister.” And quickly, for your sake.

Jude casts her eyes around. Where did Cardan – oh. It looks like he’s found himself caught in the clutches of the Council as well. Nihuar stands in his way, and they are locked in a conversation that clearly looks like one he doesn’t want to be having.

“The resolutions to the Insear claim have been delayed. Intentionally. Multiple times, all of them without due reason. Well, with perhaps as singular a reason as this.” Randalin gestures at the revelry unfurling before them, and she much mislikes the disdain in his goat eyes.

Her fingers tighten on the vial in her hand. She hasn’t even had a chance to drink the damn thing. “What are you implying?”

“I come to simply say that perhaps in this matter, the king cannot be relied upon, and to prevent further damage to the kingdom, that the next course of recompense be –”

Jude sees red. The vial of tonic crashes into the floor, where it shatters and seeps like strange jeweled blood.

“How dare you." Rage creeps like frost under her skin. “Unreliable and incompetent are the last things Cardan will ever be. You should know. He saw right through you, didn’t he?”

And then there is actual blood on the floor, because Randalin is bleeding, a good chunk of his hob’s ear missing. She’s got her knife in her hand, and him in a chokehold, spluttering and gasping and scrambling to put pressure on his wound.

“That’s why you came to me, isn’t it? The king was too smart to play along with you, and so you thought to try your luck with the queen. Maybe you should change your title to the Fool, dear Minister of Keys.”

Finally. She finally got to sink her knife into someone who deserved it.

Her blood sings, loud in her ears.

Somebody screams.

“You will leave this matter alone,” she’s telling him. Threatening him. “You will not try to play the crown again, especially not for the sake of the Council’s useless pockets, or else the next time it won’t be your ear missing its tip.” She angles her blade towards Randalin’s horns, and he makes a little scared sound in the back of his throat.

Then there are arms, warm and strong, pulling her gently away. Unwinding her hands around Randalin’s neck and lifting her up. The bloodlust evaporates from her at his touch and suddenly, she’s dizzy and reeling.

“Take the Minister away,” Cardan says to someone she cannot see. She feels the words rumble in his chest where she’s pressed up against him.

“At once, sire. And the queen, will she need a healer’s attention?”

“No. Leave us.” The frisson of authority in his voice thrills in Jude’s blood. When he looks down at her, his eyes are pure black. “I will deal with the queen.”

Cardan carries her all the way to the bathroom of the royal suite.

He doesn’t speak when he sets her down on the floor. He doesn’t speak when he starts to help her out of her dress, fingers masterful but not lingering as he undoes the laces, peels away her skirt, threads the feathers out of her hair. He doesn’t speak when he holds out his hand and guides her into the great, green marble bath, already steaming with fragrant, flowered water.

The scent is the first thing she notices. Pink roses and snowy jasmines float along the edges of the bath. The water swirls blue and turquoise when she sinks into it, the night’s colors washing away from her body. It’s wonderfully, blessedly hot, soothing the chill under her skin.

Jude is almost too distracted by how good the water feels to be self-conscious when he takes a seat by the side of the bath, folding his long limbs onto the floor to sit with her as she soaks.

And then, finally: “You do realize that there are other solutions to political scheming that are not attempted murder?”

Jude sinks further down into the water until it covers up to her mouth. “None quite so efficient,” she mumbles. The words come out as bubbles.

Cardan watches her as she leans back against the bathtub, expression neutral. “Liliver thinks you’ve been poisoned.”

“I think I’ve been poisoned. I told her so when she came to deliver the tonic you requested.” She raises an eyebrow at him in a silent question.

“Yes, I believe I gave her a bit of a fright after you fainted. How are you not dead?”

She doesn’t know if it’s a comfort or a concern to realize that they’ve reached the point in their monarchy where poisonings and assassination attempts are now considered topics for small talk.

“It’s either I was given the wrong dosage, or poisoning me wasn’t the intention.” She taps a lone rosebud as it floats by her on the water. “It’s not a toxin I recognize.”

“Maybe it’s not a toxin at all.”

She lifts her head to see him wrinkling his brow. “What do you mean?”

“Have you eaten anything? Drank anything?”

“Nothing you haven’t. That’s why I ruled out the food tray from earlier. The one with the honeycakes.”

“I remember.” A corner of his mouth lifts, and she thinks of the way he had pressed the honeycakes into her hands, wrapped in a king’s kerchief and a lover’s promise. “So if it wasn’t the food tray, then it must have happened at Insear. Did you… did you touch anything?”

She narrows her eyes. “Yes. Some of the flowers. Why?”

Cardan sighs. “The magic there is unfamiliar. New.” He looks down at his hands, rings shining. “I’m not entirely sure we know enough about it.”

“It’s supposed to be your magic, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he begins, then stops suddenly. He stares at her as if an idea has struck him. “If it was my magic that caused this, then I wonder…”

“Cardan?”

“I wonder if my magic can fix it.” Cardan is suddenly leaning forward. “Close your eyes.”

“I don’t really –”

“Trust me.”

And she does. The world goes dark behind her closed eyelids, and she is engulfed in the scent of roses and jasmines, heavy and dreamy in the air.

A stream of water trickles down her forehead and she opens her eyes in surprise to find Cardan’s cupped hand above her face.

“Trust me,” he whispers again, and his voice lulls her eyes closed once more. The next stream of water flows down her nose, and over her lips. She can almost taste the flowers. Another stream of water, this time over her eyelids, droplets catching in her lashes, and then Jude begins to feel the strangest thing. The cold is washing away. The tension, the ache behind her eyes, the soreness in her muscles, swirling off into the water. She is lighter, warmer, calmer.

Jude takes her first full breath in what feels like days.

She opens her eyes, and Cardan is smiling down at her. A real one this time, a small tilt of his lips, but real.

“There you are,” he says.

He healed her. He healed her and now he’s smiling like he’s proud and she wants to wrap her arms around his neck and drag him down into the water with her fully clothed, but instead she croaks out, “It’s my magic, too. Why didn’t I just heal myself from the beginning?”

Cardan’s smile catches. He searches her face. “Is it truly so bad to need my help, Jude?”

She looks away. “You know I hate feeling powerless.”

“I know it far too well.” A pause, and then, as if he’s speaking it through his teeth, as if he is barely leashing himself: “Balekin and the Undersea made you feel powerless.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you killed him?”

It’s a good question. It isn’t the right one.

“A part of it.”

“And the other part?”

Jude meets his gaze, holds it. Unwavering. She lets another piece of armor fall. “You’re not the only one willing to do everything.”

He doesn’t say anything. By the look on his face, it doesn’t seem like he can at the moment. Mouth parted, eyes wide. Stunned. How could he still be so surprised even now?

Clearly, she needs to do better at telling him how she feels.

Jude leans in, unrelenting. “Ask me if I liked it.”

His voice comes out a little hoarse. “What, killing him?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Did you like it, Jude? Did you enjoy kissing my brother?”

“No.” She’s daring him. Daring him to find the lie in her words, her face, her voice. “No. I loathed every second of it.”

“Then how –” The words come out in a hiss, as if he couldn’t stop himself from speaking them. He tries to take a steadying breath. It sounds ragged even across the bath water. “You said you made your peace with it.”

“Yes.”

Ask me. Ask me the right question.

It comes out in a whisper, as if the words themselves were something to be careful with. “Then, how, Jude? How did you survive the Undersea?”

“I thought of you,” she confesses, and there it is. “The whole time. Through the worst of it, I remembered you. Your face, your voice, the way you held me when –” She’s whispering now, and he has stilled, as if his entire being depended on the next words out of her mouth. “Sometimes I imagined you were there beside me, in my cell. And when I did, things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed.”

She seems to have shocked him into speechlessness for the second time in ten minutes, so she goes on.

“The only way I got through kissing Balekin is by pretending that it was you. That was the only way I could bear it. So you see,” she ends awkwardly, when he continues staring at her like he can’t believe she’s real, “you ended up helping me after all.”

The act of speaking this, of telling him, is somehow infinitely more intimate than sitting in a bathtub naked in front of him, or letting him put his face between her legs with hundreds of their people dancing in the next room.

“Jude,” he breathes, his voice hushed like hers. It’s as if they both realize that something sacred, something precious has passed in the air between them.

“You saved me then. And you also saved me now, tonight.” She reaches out to graze his cheek. “Not quite so feckless after all.”

It’s Cardan who moves first, curling his fingers around her hand at his cheek and pulling her forward, into him. His lashes are wet. Jude almost thinks it’s because of the bath water, but then he’s pressing his forehead against hers, his breaths coming out in little gasps, and no, it’s not the bath water.

Their lips are barely touching, suspended in this moment. She’s half out of the tub. He’s half in it.

She wants to kiss him, to lean those last few inches and close the distance. But this is just as important. This is what makes everything worth it. This is one last piece of armor crumbling between them, and suddenly it’s not quite so bad feeling vulnerable when there’s someone in the world who loves her this much. She tilts her head so that their noses brush. A silent comfort.

Somebody’s shaking. It might be her.

“You’re shivering.” His hands wrap around her shoulders. “Let’s get you dressed.”

Jude lets him pull her out of the tub. Normally, she would hate being coddled. Is this what being coddled even means? She realizes that she doesn’t really have much experience to draw from. But the soft, tender parts of her have been laid bare tonight and so she doesn’t fight it when Cardan begins to dry her with a warm cloth.

His hands. There are rings on most of his fingers, and the thought occurs to her that she should get him a wedding ring of his own. Something with rubies. Something that would match the one he gave her, the one she wears each day on the finger missing its tip. Jude tucks that idea away for another time.

She’s moving before she even knows it, palms rising to his nape and fingers sinking into his curls until she’s pulling him down, down. Until she’s brushing the hair back from his forehead and pressing her lips there. A kiss as tender as she knows it.

The air leaves him in a sharp exhale.

The cloth falls to the ground.

Cardan grabs her around the waist, and suddenly, it doesn’t feel like coddling anymore.

Anticipation curls low in her stomach.

But he doesn’t kiss her. He just stares down at her with his dark, deep eyes. Memorizing her. Drinking her in.

And Jude has waited far too long for the kiss he would have given her if they weren’t interrupted after waking up.

All her life she’s had to get what she wants herself. And what she wants right now, well, she knows exactly how to get it.

Cardan doesn’t bend down to make it easier for her when she starts to wind her arms around his neck. He makes her work for it a little. Makes her stretch her naked chest up his front. Makes her stand on her tiptoes.

She knows how this goes, this delicious war of bodies between them. She knows her weapons, and how to use them.

“Please,” she breathes against his lips.

Cardan melts into her with a groan. A sense of finality. Something important has changed between them tonight, and Jude welcomes it just as much as she welcomes the crash of his soft, lush mouth against hers.

Long, dragging, drugging kisses.

She had once told him that he was out of her system, and it was perhaps the biggest lie she has told anyone. It was definitely the grandest lie she has told herself, mithridatism be damned.

Nothing could have prepared her for the likes of kissing Cardan.

Kissing Cardan is like reaching to touch the sun.

She crowned him, cursed him, and killed him, and now — she gets his tongue in her mouth any damn time she wants. His hands pressed open on her back, her hips, his fingers spread as if to feel as much of her as he can against him.

She would have endured a thousand nights in the Undersea for this.

The journey from the bathroom to the bedroom is a blur. Cardan breaks away to lower his mouth to her breast, and oh, the way his tongue feels is obscene. Her skin is still damp and tingling from the bath and so she feels lit up everywhere when he sucks.

“Sweet,” she thinks she hears him mumble, his hands beginning a path downward, “always so sweet for me.”

“Off.” Her hands are taking a familiar path too, undoing buttons and unclasping fastenings. It’s wholly unfair that he’s still fully clothed. “Take it off –” Cardan’s cape of ebony feathers falls away from him, and she just about gets his shirt undone all the way before his fingers find her, wet and wanting between her legs, and her voice cuts off on a gasp.

His thumb presses against the bundle of nerves, driving her to the tips of her toes.

Her toes, which are slippery from the bath water.

Jude loses her balance, feels her feet slide out from under her, thinks oh, shit, before grabbing on to the nearest stable thing.

Cardan’s shoulders shake under her fingers.

“Don’t –” The order loses a bit of its ferocity because she’s choking back her own laughter. “Don’t you dare laugh –”

It’s no good. “That was the most uncoordinated I have ever seen you.”

“Shut up –”

As it turns out, kissing is the best way to shut the both of them up, but she feels the curve of his mouth against her lips, unable to hide his humor. One last chuckle escapes him before he hauls her over to the edge of their bed.

Jude looks up at him. His shirt is undone and half-way down his arms. His hair is mussed, his tail swaying from side to side. The last of the moonlight is streaming in through the windows, and it outlines the traces of laughter in his face. Jude has seen Cardan many ways, but happy just might be her favorite.

He guides her hands to the bed posts on either side of them.

“Hold on,” he tells her.

Then he’s kneeling before her for the second time that night.

It’s an encore of his performance in the ivy-filled room behind the throne, a symphony of fingers, lips, and tongue that he plays on the instrument of her body. She would have thought that it would take longer this time because he’s already made her come tonight, but no, it has only made her all the more sensitive. He works her up so fast it’s almost ridiculous, as if she’s back in her peacock skirts seconds from a climax just feet away from an entire ballroom.

Cardan runs his hands over the ugly gash along her shin. Along the multitude of cuts and scrapes that she’s accumulated over the years. “These are the scars I know you by. And these are the marks you’ll remember me for.” He mouths at the bruise he left on her inner thigh during the revel. Was that just hours ago? It feels like it’s been days.

He slips a finger inside her, then another one, when she whines. He curses at how wet she is, like he’s angry, like he can’t believe it. Then he gets her going with thick, luscious strokes and her thighs close around his head. He curls an arm around one, opening her to him again, until he can lick and lap and suck the soul out of her body and into her second orgasm of the night.

She must lose a little time because the next thing she knows, she’s opening her eyes and Cardan is completely undressed.

They stare at each other from across the bed, like two opponents waiting for the next move.

She wants him. She has him. She just doesn’t know quite what to do with him.

She thinks of honeycakes and hands helping her into her clothes and steaming baths waiting for her in the ensuite. All the things she didn’t know she needed until he gave them to her.

Moving slowly, deliberately, keeping her eyes on him the entire time, Jude releases her grip on the bed posts and turns. On her hands and knees in front of him.

She feels more than hears the strangled groan that leaves him. “Jude.” A warning. A plea.

Jude Duarte Greenbriar has always craved power. Tonight she understands that the relinquishing of her control is maybe its own special kind, the kind that she’s quickly beginning to realize is one that only she’ll ever have — the power to give her husband exactly what he needs.

“Please,” she whispers once more into the waiting night air, because even though she doesn’t know how to put it into words herself, she may have him the slightest bit figured out already.

He drops his head to kiss her, and Jude’s neck is craned over her shoulder in a way that would swiftly become uncomfortable, but she doesn’t care. The things he can do with his tongue are absolutely filthy.

“Heart of darkness, soul of mine,” he breathes into her mouth. “You ruin me.”

And only then does he press on, press in, press deep. Slowly. Opening her up. Inch by inch. Jude holds her breath, head bowing against the sheets of their bed, feeling that glorious stretch and that consuming pressure. This. She will give him this. They both groan when he bottoms out inside her, his hips flushed against her.

She cranes her neck back to look at him. Cardan’s face is vulnerable in a way she's never seen before, lips parted and breathing ragged. He closes his eyes for a moment, as if he needs to piece himself back together.

Jude has never felt more powerful in her life.

He doesn’t move at first, letting her get used to the feeling of him in a different position. He bends his head and trails kisses along her spine, between her shoulder blades, up the nape of her neck. Each kiss is like a brand on her heated skin.

She’s bracing herself for him to take her, a little hard, a little rough in that way that she’s only seen from him once or twice before. They are perhaps two people well versed in how to find pleasure within the space of pain, and so she waits for him to fuck her with an unexplored sense of anticipation. But when he finally starts to move, it’s short, gentle rocking motions. He barely leaves her body, barely goes an inch without pushing back in again. He’s thick inside her, dragging along the front of her walls.

Jude’s back arches as that pressure gives way to pleasure.

Her body is still so sensitive from her previous orgasm just minutes before. Every stroke, every pull, she feels it like she has never felt before. Above her, around her, inside her. Cardan is everywhere, and she is surrounded without any fortification. She’s open. Raw. He could destroy her.

She is coming to terms with the fact that she might not be so afraid to let him get the better of her this way.

But instead of keeping her on her hands and knees like she thought, he’s pressing her down, his chest against her back, until she’s flat against the bedsheets and he’s holding her down with the length of his body. This is new. This she could like. It’s a different kind of forfeit altogether. And he continues to rock into her, the pace of his thrusting picking up. Jude can’t really move back against him like this, but it’s alright, he’s whispering in her ear that this is good, this is perfect, this is everything he’s ever wanted.

“Just like this,” he says. “I’ve dreamed of you just like this.”

Jude can’t quite catch her breath. It feels like all the air has been punched out of her lungs with the sheer breadth of him inside her.

She doesn’t really have any comparison, but she has thought more than once before that just a little bigger, just a little more of him pressing into her and he could easily break her into pieces. She has always managed before. Taking him, all of him, was a challenge she was determined to beat. And Jude’s always been good at winning.

Now, though, with his thighs holding hers closed and firmly together between his, with the solid weight of him bearing down on her back, her shoulders, the fit is tighter. Impossible. Almost unendurable.

He hitches his knees up a little, the bed dipping under them, and then he thrusts into her at an angle she has never felt before. And he goes in so deep, so hard, and he hits that spot inside of her that he’s only ever been able to reach with his fingers and it makes her feel —

“Oh,” she gasps, fingers scrabbling into the sheets. “What was that, what the fuck was that –”

She feels his smile curve into the nape of her neck. It’s the only warning she has before he’s pulling out and driving into her again. Jude loses her words. Her face drops into the pillows, unable to support herself any longer.

“That’s it.” His voice is rough. “I’ve got you.” And then he laces their fingers together, his palms to the back of hers, squeezing, reassuring. As if he hasn’t set out to completely devastate her with each pull of his body above her.

It takes her too long to realize that she’s just given him another weapon to use against her. Another weakness to exploit, another advantage to hold over her head. And he wields it against her so well, relentless in his pursuit of this new pleasure he has just learned he could take from her.

Cardan knows her body, knows it well. He knows the right angle to keep his hips so that every thrust hits exactly where it needs to.

She doesn’t recognize the sounds that she is making anymore.

It’s dark, with her head face-down into the pillows. She feels the skin of her forehead and cheeks shifting against the bedsheets with each thrust, but she doesn’t have it in her to move. She can’t get very far anyway. She is smothered. Tight and still and a little bit crushed. Like she almost can’t breathe.

Cardan is a voice above her, the one recognizable thing to anchor her. Without her vision, every other sense is heightened. She feels the kiss of his words as he speaks into her skin, feels it all the way down her spine. He’s whispering one more, Jude, give me another one.

“I can’t,” she sobs, and she doesn’t really know what she’s saying anymore. It’s too much. Too good. She’s going to die. “I can’t, I can’t –”

“Yes, you can. Of course you can. You can do anything, my love.” He sounds absolutely ruined, unmade above her, fucking her so sweetly and so thoroughly into the mattress. Some semblance of coherent thought forms in Jude’s brain that she would give whatever it takes to make Cardan Greenbriar sound like this all the time.

“Please.” And she’s completely lost track of how many times she’s said this tonight. It’s not a weapon she’s using against him anymore, it’s unmitigated and untempered desperation. “Please, Cardan, please –”

“I know. I know what you need. I’ll give you everything, Jude. Can you scream for me this time? The way I once promised you that you would. You were going to scream, weren’t you, in our secret room where all the revelers would have heard you.”

She tries to deny it, but he takes his sharp teeth to her neck and she is gasping and wet and writhing back against him.

“Show me.” His hand untangles from hers, finding a path against her stomach and down, down, down to her clit, which is throbbing and way more tender than she’s ever known it to be. “Show me what you can do.”

Then he begins to rub, artless circles around and over, and he doesn’t stop thrusting into her, dragging against that spot that makes her want to lose her mind — and oh, this will be her shatterpoint, this maelstrom of sensation, of pleasure, of the best thing she’s ever felt in her entire life –

– and Jude breaks.

It feels like a surrender, the way her body seizes up under him, head tilted back with an open-mouthed scream. The scream he asked her for. The scream she can’t hear because her vision goes white at the edges and there’s ringing in her ears. It feels like a surrender, but it’s also a consecration, the way she bares her heart and soul and body to him, unafraid to be caught against the sheets of their bed, letting him in and letting him take and letting him give, until she's quivering with everything he has made her feel tonight.

And then he’s coming too, with an ineloquent curse cast into the back of her neck. For the second time that night, the High King of Elfhame trembles against his queen’s pliant body. His weight crushes her for just a moment before he’s moving off to her side.

The room is cool, the bed is warm, and she holds her breath and tries to hold the moment with it. Then, one more breath in, shaky and not enough, like her lungs will never quite have the oxygen they need anymore. The air is heavy with the smell of sex and jasmine petals — and sunlight.

Jude turns her head just enough to see the beginnings of dawn breaking across their window. They’ve chased the night away completely tangled with each other in bed.

Maybe she was wrong. In the light it’s easier to see. Their bed isn’t a battlefield. It’s hallowed ground. Sanctuary.

Cardan pulls her closer against him, his arm draping around her waist. They’re moving like honey. She can’t see him behind her, but she knows that he’s there. He has her.

“I think tonight went well, all things considered.”

“I almost cut the Minister of Keys’ ear off in a poisoned haze. You think it went well?”

His tail sweeps over her hip, the top of her thigh. “Oh, yes. My heart is intact. You’re in one piece. The revel was a success, and Randalin’s in his place. See? Well.”

“You have a very strange definition of success.”

“I achieved what I set out to do. You’ll see.” There’s something smug in his voice. Is he talking about the land treaty? Because all she can remember from the negotiations is that there wasn’t much of it. “Did you like the decorations?”

“Yes, they matched my dress.”

“I wanted you to see that you belonged there. I wanted everyone to see.”

“Where I belong is my decision to make.” This bed. Soft and cozy. She belongs in this bed. Forever.

“And what is your decision?”

Jude thinks about prolonging it, making Cardan wait in suspense for her answer, and finds that she doesn’t much want to. She reaches down, fingers trailing over his forearm and then his wrist, until finally, she’s tangling her fingers in his and lifting their intertwined hands up above their heads.

“You,” she says. “I belong with you.”

The sunlight filtering through their window gilds the outline of their hands against a warm glow. There is gold on their skin, and gold in their blood.

A new day awaits them.

Chapter Text

“This is a stupid idea.”

“Have you known me to have any other kind?”

He has her there. Jude tugs at the blindfold around her eyes. “Where are we even going?”

“To the beginning and the end of all this.”

“What does that –” Her voice cuts off as the boat rocks precariously beneath her. “I really don’t like the sound of that.”

“You like very little, Jude, and that is a problem of yours.”

I was stupid enough to like you, she almost says. Instead she asks, “Why did we have to take a boat? More importantly, why are you the one rowing? You’re the king.” The boat rocks again, and Jude finds herself thinking longingly for a ragwort steed. Steady, secure, reliable — or, well, as reliable as Vivi’s magic allowed them to be.

“Crossing the water myself proves a fine reminder of my position to those who yearn otherwise.”

“A power play? That’s what you woke me up so early for? Cardan, there are a thousand more things that need my attention back at the brugh.”

It was still light out when she’d felt lips behind her too-round ear, nuzzling her awake. They had probably been asleep for a mere few hours at most. She’d woken up slowly and sweetly, like dragging a spoon through thick syrup, with Cardan curled around her — arms, legs, and tail — and his mouth soft on her neck. It was such a stark contrast to how she’d woken up the previous night that Jude melted right back into his embrace, her body heavy and worn out in the best way possible.

But then he was pulling away, coaxing her to get dressed, murmuring into her skin that he had something to show her.

Promising that she would like it.

The fae cannot lie, but that last part has yet to come true.

“I’m taking this blindfold off.”

“Jude –”

She can hear the petulance in his voice and that just makes her rip the stupid thing off even faster.

It turns out that “crossing the water himself” doesn’t much include actual rowing on his part. Instead, iridescent, aquamarine scales flash across the surface of the water underneath them, their movement rippling and propelling the boat forward.

Merfolk.

Pulling their vessel on his whim.

A power play, indeed.

Jude raises an eyebrow at him, impressed despite it all. He continues to pout at her and the blindfold in her hand.

Then, something catches in her mind.

“Salt and seafoam…”

“Hm?”

“Your nightmare.” She’s staring at him now, understanding how it fits together but not quite believing it. “You said that when you dove into the sea and couldn’t find me anywhere, it was because there was nothing left of me but ‘salt and seafoam.’”

“Yes.” The word is like water on burning coals.

“You –” The sentence is inconceivable even when she tries to form it in her mouth. “Have you… have you been reading fairytales? Human fairytales?”

He scoffs. “Nothing Faerie about them.”

A yes, then.

She’s known about him reading Alice in Wonderland and even wondered at the way he had kept the mortal book in his rooms. It boggles her mind like this next thought does. “So…” How does she say this? She has no clever ruse with which to coat her words, and so she gives up and goes for direct. “The Little Mermaid. That’s what caused your nightmare?”

He cuts her a look, like she’s being stupid. “No, Jude, your kidnapping and prolonged torture at the hands of my brother and the Undersea while I waited powerless and unable to help you was the cause of my nightmare. And many more of its kind before it.”

She doesn’t much like how he speaks to her like he’s explaining something to a child, but she holds her sharp tongue and wields her silence against him.

“But fine.” He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Yes. The mortal tale about the moronic mermaid and her wayward prince may have… exacerbated any woes I may have already been carrying. Don’t know why I bothered,” he grumbles under his breath. “I hate stories.”

“No,” she says, thinking of the way he fancies himself a villain even though he hasn’t truly been one in a long time, “you don’t.”

He looks pointedly over her shoulder. “We’re here.”

And Jude turns her head to see where it is that he has brought her this morning.

She has to shield her eyes a little from the amount of sunlight that refracts off the massive stretch of sparkling sand in front of her.

No, not sand. Ash.

She knows where they are.

Insear.

The beginning and the end of all this, he said.

When they disembark, Cardan holds out his hand to guide her from the boat.

She doesn’t need his help.

She takes his hand anyway.

There is still something of last night humming underneath their skin, and so if they lean into each other’s warmth and stumble across the shimmering shores of the Isle of Ash, a little lovedrunk while they walk — well. There is nary a soul to see.

It’s somehow even more beautiful in the daylight. And with Cardan here, the island seems to unfurl even further, coming alive just a little bit more the moment he steps onto the soil. The air turns sweeter the farther inland they go, the blues and blacks and ivories of the native flowers populating everywhere they turn. When Jude looks back at their footfalls upon the ash, she sees little sprigs of myrtle springing up from the indents they leave behind.

“There’s something I want to check on,” she says when they reach the thicker parts of the forest. “I’ll come find you again.”

“As you like.” Cardan’s gaze is caught on something up ahead. “Dally not, wife.”

When Jude returns to the clearing where they had encountered the fallen falcons the previous night, she finds no trace of them save a single, tawny feather in their wake.

A token.

She pockets it with a smile.

That same smile fades far too fast when she comes back to find Cardan reaching out a hand towards a shrub of suspiciously familiar, dark-petaled flowers.

She’s between him and the shrub in seconds, pushing him away a little too violently.

In that moment, she was more seneschal than queen. And in the next, when her fingers tighten around his lapels out of their own accord, she is more wife than seneschal.

“Did you touch it?” Panic raises her voice. “Did you get any of it on you?”

“No. I didn’t recognize the flora –”

“Idiot, that’s probably the flower that poisoned me.” She’s checking his hands, his clothes, for traces of shimmering, black pollen.

“Is it?” He plucks one and raises it to his face before she can stop him.

“Cardan –”

“Peace, Jude. It cannot harm its maker.”

And Jude pauses, because it’s true. This flower, this island and everything on it, is Cardan’s creation. He is the root, and as he has proven last night, he is also the remedy.

A beat passes between them, and then: “Did it really have to take a noxious, mood-altering flower for you to tell me about my brother?”

Jude scowls at the insinuation. “I was going to.” She weighs the next sentence in her head. “It’s just… easier to talk to someone when you don’t give a crap what they think.”

The human word is out of her mouth before she can reel it back in, but Cardan nods.

“Yes, I think I can understand that.”

She watches him twirl the flower in his hand. With his dark hair and eyes and clothes, it is without the shadow of a doubt that he created it, that it sprung forth from him and his magic. It belongs with him; it is him. She can imagine it pinned to his collar, petals of black glitter, an extension of his essence.

“We should inform the Bomb. Tell her that an antidote won’t be necessary.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Cardan grins at her like they are old friends trading a secret joke. “I can think of a few ways that an antidote could be useful.”

And Jude feels a thrill up her spine, because there is something conspiratorial in his voice, like he’s letting her in on his plan, like they are in it together, and maybe she enjoys that more than she thought she ever would. Having a partner.

“Scheming, are you?”

“I learned from the best.”

He is always more than what she thinks he is.

“That flower is connected to you. This whole island is, actually.”

“To us,” he corrects immediately, and she marks the strange note in his voice. “The island is connected to us.”

“Me, by extension,” she concedes. “But you raised this island with your own magic.”

He sighs then, as if a great burden has befallen him. “I suppose it now falls to me to name this flower, doesn’t it?”

“Well, you don’t have to name it now. We can always come back later –”

“Bitterblack,” he pronounces solemnly and somberly, and with a swiftness and surety that couldn’t possibly be borne of extemporization.“This bloom, flourishing upon the Isle of Ash, the land raised from my own bitterness, shall henceforth be known as bitterblack.”

“Um.” Jude blinks at his pomp. “Okay. Raised from your bitterness?”

“The birth of Insear marked the moment I deemed the crimes of the Undersea – against you, and against the crown — unforgivable. It was a bitter heart that sowed the seeds of this land. Perhaps it is only fitting that it was a full one that healed its poisons.”

Cardan casts her a sidelong look. He has a way of almost smiling, like the edge of moonlight peeking through the spidersilk canopy of their bed. A gossamer thing, but the light shines through.

A shame that this island will have to go belong to someone else, when she will forever remember Cardan here with her, looking at her like that.

“You brought me here to show me something.”

“Yes.” And oddly enough, his smile freezes a little. Jude narrows her eyes at it.

He leads her towards another clearing among the birches, tucking the bitterblack behind one pointed ear. There is more space here, and the air is crisp and clean, threaded through with the scent of salt and sunshine. The birches stand tall, but the sun reaches high enough to set the ash dusting the tops of the trees afire with crystal brilliance.

“What is this?”

His tail flicks once behind him. “The solution to the Insear claim.”

“What? Wait. You mean you knew how to resolve it all along? Randalin was right. You have been putting it off.”

“Not putting it off, waiting for the right time.”

“It’s been going on for weeks.”

Cardan shoots her a look. “I was supposed to ask you during the revel.”

The events of the revel — and the way it had ended, with Randalin bleeding in her chokehold — play out in her head. “Oh.”

He waves his hand. “No matter. It wouldn’t be the first time you caused a scene in front of the entire kingdom anyway.”

Jude crosses her arms. “Alright, let’s hear it, then. Tell me now so that we can put this whole thing behind us.”

He hesitates.

“Come on. Explain your solution.”

“This isn’t how I planned for this to go.”

“Planned for this to – Cardan. Just spit it out already.”

“Alright, fine,” he hisses. “I want to build a home with you. Here, on Insear.”

For a long moment, Jude wonders if she heard him right.

“Are you drunk?” Even though he couldn’t possibly be.

“I wish.”

“But the claim –”

“Is ours. Rightfully.” He raises his brow at her. “This island is connected to us, raised by my own magic. Isn’t that what you said?”

She stares at him.

“You know how this works, right?” Exasperation is clear in his voice. “I ask you to make a home with me on a new magical island, and you set yourself upon me, your acquiescence falling delightfully from your lips –”

“I do nothing delightfully, Cardan.”

“Oh, I could make a good argument otherwise.”

The entirety of last night, every sordidly delightful detail, flashes behind her eyes.

She clings to any rational thought she can find. “We already have a castle.” She thinks of the brugh, the entire sprawling mass of it. “A really big one.”

“Yes. And the Palace of Elfhame is the first place the High King and Queen should be. But often, it is also the last. A royal castle is just as much a royal warground.” He gives her a meaningful look. “As you and the rest of my family are well aware.”

Jude swallows. “What are you saying?”

“Our brugh will be the first place we make a home of, as monarchs. But it doesn’t have to be the only one.”

He turns her to face the clearing. His arms come around her from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder as they gaze out into a landscape stolen straight from the pages of a book.

“We could build something. Right here, in this glade. Where we don’t have to worry about anything. Where nothing else can touch us. We’ll close it off. We’ll come whenever we want. No spies, no interruptions, no watching our backs.”

And Jude recognizes the way he is holding her, because it’s the same way he held her in their secret room behind the throne, confessing the truths of his nightmares. “This is about protection.”

She feels him shrug. “A part of it, yes. Mostly I just want us to never be interrupted again. But there is power in protection. Wouldn’t you like that, Jude?”

Her head is swimming, because he’s put ideas into her brain, of waking up to the smell of birchwood and of walking along a glittering, moonlit shore — and they’re wonderful, damn him. If she’s being honest, those ideas came to her the moment she first stepped foot on Insear, like something in her had taken root in its sparkling soil, but she hadn’t let herself linger over them, knowing that the land would soon be treatied away.

But now, it’s like Cardan’s words have opened the floodgates, and her entire being, connected to Insear through his magic – their magic – thrums with the song of I could live here, I could thrive here, I belong here, and she aches with the rightness of it all.

“It’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had,” she admits, and doing so feels like she’s left her flank vulnerable during an open duel. She twists around in his arms quickly, before she can dwell on it. “But let’s get one thing clear.” Her fingers fist into his collar. “This nonsense about my being your weakness, that’s your problem. Not mine. I refuse to be held back by your fears.”

He nods with more gravity than is probably required. “And I could never ask it of you.”

“Then what do you ask of me now?” And because so much has changed between the two of them, because of everything that has led up to this moment, she adds, “What do you ask of me now and forever?”

He cups her face in his hands even as her fingers tighten on his shirt. “That you stay by my side. Through it all.” His mouth crooks self-deprecatingly. “And that you do not begrudge it too much that I miss you when you’re gone. That I worry. That I fear. Not because you are human, but because I hold you in my heart.”

She hates how swiftly her breath leaves her.

“Okay,” she says, more to steady herself than anything else, because this is a lot, and she’s never been good at dealing with a lot of feelings all at once. “Okay. I –”

“The rest of the kingdom belongs to the crown.” He presses closer, as if he can see her weakening. He takes a breath. “This… this could be ours. Just for us.”

“This island is too big for just the two of us.”

“No, Jude.” The look on his face is a little pained. “Us.”

A breath. A slice of time separating this moment into a before and after.

He isn’t talking about just the two of them. He’s talking about –

“Oh,” she breathes. “Us.”

“Only –” He’s scrambling a little now, she can see it. “Only if you want them.”

Them. Plural.

Jude sways a little. She’s not prepared for this. He should’ve warned her or something, because she doesn’t know how many surprises she can take in such a short amount of time.

Cardan is looking at her funny and she realizes she’s been quiet for too long. Something moves at the corner of her vision, and she realizes it’s his tail, flicking back and forth with the nervousness that he doesn’t show on his face.

“I want –” she begins, and he stills immediately, as if he could live or die on the next words that leave her mouth. “Okay. I don’t actually know what I want. I haven’t really had time to think about it. I want to talk about this. I do. And we’ll have to talk about it one day. But today, I don’t know if — if I know how, today.”

“Very well.” He says the words like he’s learning the shape of them on his tongue for the first time.

“It’s not a ‘no,’” she says quickly, before he gets the wrong idea. “It’s a ‘someday.’ Someday, you can ask me about children again. And in the meantime, I’ll think about when I can say yes. Deal?”

He touches her cheek, gentle, too gentle. “Deal.”

And all too late, she remembers the rule that she’s lived by all her life, the rule she’s broken time and time again when it came to this bewildering, beautiful boy that has made a place for himself between the stained-glass shards of her heart — never make a bargain with a faerie — because really, really, he shouldn’t be smiling like that, not like she’s given him the world when she’s barely even agreed to anything.

“Did you really plan a revel just to ask me about all this?”

“Yes. And you ruined it by taking a slice out of the Minister of Keys.”

Jude can’t help it. She throws her head back and laughs. “You’re a disaster.”

He glares, but there is no heat to it. “Only because you render me into one.”

Then something clicks into place. Something Tatterfell said while lacing her up in the dress he designed for her. For the king’s sake.

“Tatterfell knows.”

“She was most knowledgeable in your living preferences. How you like your room. Your furnishings. Your floors. I decided that I might know them, too.” He glances at the open space before them, at the sheer potential of it all. “Just in case.”

“We’ve been married for months. You could have asked me.”

“Would you have taken me seriously?”

She changes the subject, because he has her there. “How long have you been planning this?”

“A while.” Another shrug, less carefree this time. “Almost as long as the nightmares have come to me.”

Something hard glints in his eyes, and Jude recognizes the sharp lines of revenge if only because she has worn it too many times on her own face.

“All of this was as much a scheme,” he admits, “as it was a proposal to you. For to take a land borne of bitterness and remake it into a land of bliss, it would be –”

“The ultimate power play,” Jude finishes for him.

He grins down at her. It is heady, the realization that only she knows the true, full depths of her husband’s wickedness.

“I don’t have a lot of experience with blissful homes.” She feels the sudden urge to make sure he knows this. That he understands. It’s as much of a promise as she knows how to make. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about keeping one.”

“Nor I. We’ll have to learn together. Knowing you, there’ll be plenty of knives involved. But I think it starts,” he says, gathering her closer, “just like this.”

And when Cardan kisses her, Jude is sure that this is what conquerors must feel like. Because for years, she has fought for her place in Faerie, fought and bled and killed to belong somewhere.

And here it is.

Here it is, and she could dream entire worlds in his arms.

But she doesn’t have to. She has a whole world spread out before her already.

It’s a land of magic, raw and untested, ready to be discovered. A land of possibility, of infinite potential, waiting to be shaped by their hands. A land where sunlight grows and wayward falcons find peace. A land where the future blooms in full color, one amongst the thousands of flowers.

And it is theirs.

Their homeland.