Chapter Text
“You are the knife I turn inside myself.”
— Franz Kafka, ‘Letters to Milena’
~
The folk of Elfhame convene beneath a barrow hill in a glittering perversion of revelry. The Fae keep their holy days, their fêtes and ceremonies, heralded by moon or solstice. They are the sprites and spirits of the earth and air, after all, and they celebrate both sabbath and equinox, and those days which mark the turning of the seasons; but for the most part, they need no formal invitation to congregate. Much like their pastime of capering on faultlines, flirting with art and debauchery alike, the spirit of mirth is in their nature. Theirs is a bastard get, garish and not altogether pleasant, but it is not without its pleasures.
Immortal existence is as a river runs, ceaseless in its perpetuity, and it is seldom the Folk have cause to mark sunups or count spokes in the turning wheel, the way mortal-kind may check off boxes on a calendar. But change is coming. For the first time in some three hundred years, Elfhame will welcome a new monarch, and their mounting anticipation is palpable enough to touch. It is fluid enough to shape, like a path dragged through the condensation on a fogged windowpane. Their every affair of late comes charged with the same high-strung, restless tension, and they gather still more often, perhaps to purge themselves of its excess.
The Folk relish this prospect of something new, and perhaps even more, they delight in the inevitable upheaval it will cause. They have loved their High King for as long as he has ruled, but the very nature of Fae is fickle and whimsy. It manifests itself, as ever, in chaos and caprice.
Vivi likened these such affairs, spent carousing in the throne room—around the fading spectacle of High King Eldred—to one hosting a celebration for their own funeral, several months leading up to their death. She labeled it one of many inherently Fae customs that would be considered barbaric by civilized human standards. Cardan maintained that Vivi was only half so passionate on the subject, as it justified her repeated absence. It was considered poor etiquette, not to attend the revels within the brugh. But then, Vivi had never cared overly much for matters of etiquette.
It was somewhat disconcerting, to realize she still viewed this place through the lens of a mortal girl. It was an unmistakably human sentiment, to mourn the concept of death. The Fae do not expire in the same sense as their mortal counterparts, who are inclined to a long, agonizing breakdown of body and mind—disrepair through depreciation—all the while painfully conscious of what is happening to them. It is a rather less dramatic process, from their own standpoint. Still, stepping down as a monarch was an act of permanence. Once he crowned a successor, Eldred would embark on a final undertaking to the Land of Promise, the fount from which all Folk spring, and the bed upon which they all return. It was their closest equivalent to a traditional human death, and thus warranted some measure of veneration. But until the autumn solstice, he remained Elfhame’s sitting monarch, and his wan, abstracted gaze oversaw those congregations held within the brugh. The Folk paid him pretty obeisance, even now, planting kisses and favors upon his jewel-encrusted knuckles. To his credit, he received them all as graciously as ever.
Cardan was certain Vivi would have found the affair altogether more barbaric, had she known the true circumstances behind Eldred’s coming succession. Rulers were intrinsically tied to the land they ruled, and the High King’s magic had been fading for years now; a diminishment felt by all of his subjects—and one which had ultimately deemed his abdication imperative.
A diminishment cultivated with poison.
Still, in this place where Folk could not lie, every person was bound to their extent of the truth, and Cardan had always been careful not to needlessly implicate her. She was a clever creature, just the same, and single-minded in her cat’s curiosity. He could only venture at what she might have guessed, or what his sister, Rhyia—and her best friend—might have told her.
He was rather more confident in the High King’s ignorance.
That his father’s presumptive heir had been feeding him poison for years now to hasten along his succession was only one in a long list of Greenbriar family secrets that proved infinitely safer before one knew about it. Court politics could be reasonably likened to an endless, Shakespearean-scale drama. As to what alignment his own reticence filed him under, Cardan thought it better not to wonder—unlikely as it was he would be counted among the do-gooders.
No matter.
Eldred had given him a namesake and little else—certainly nothing worth dying over—and his brother had never hesitated to dispose of those who stood between him and the throne. He’d orchestrated the murder of a seneschal’s mortal lover to place himself at the High King’s ear, and he’d let Cardan take the blame for it. He would likely welcome any cause to be rid of their father’s ill-fated sixth-born.
Sadly, despite being the most indisputably handsome of the High King’s children, Cardan had always been the least popular.
“Not long now, little brother,” Dain confides, clapping him on the shoulder, as though he’d written off any of the aforementioned bad blood between them, and simply expected Cardan to do the same. “Things will be different, once I am High King.”
He can’t imagine things taking a turn for anything but the worse, under Dain’s rule, and knowing his brother as he does, the words strike him as more threat than comfort.
“I, too, am on the edge of my seat, awaiting our father’s death.” He offers dryly, tipping his goblet of dandelion wine to his lips. They study each other, Cardan marveling at how backwards and inside-out this place truly was—that he should be the one with a name he could not purge, and a guilt he could not mend. He’d been forced to build himself up around a character that never existed, all because his father had refused to lend his testament an audience. Strange, how in a place where the Folk could not lie, there could be such contradictions, where even the truth did not suffice to protect one’s innocence.
It was Dain’s skin he’d been forced to hide under, like a selkie’s sealskin, while the High King’s third-born sat at perfect ease, with a cherub’s golden curls and a monster’s crafted smile. Safe from ominous prophecies and the tracery of fell constellations. Safe from the murder he’d committed. Safe, and in their father’s favor—a thing Cardan could only ever dream of—even as he slowly drained him of his life.
No, it should come as no surprise he has very little sympathy for his father, and even less fondness for his father’s favorite son.
“Would that you could set the edge of your insolence to a throat other than your own.” Dain says softly, his pale eyes distant and inscrutable.
You have everything, Cardan thinks, with a familiar edge of bitterness. And I have learned to fit inside your skin. But beneath it, I will always have this power.
“Ah, now that sounds like a bloody business,” He muses. “Ill-suited to my taste. I’m not like to dirty my hands with it—and why should I? When you have always been happy to do it for me.”
He supposes there are other places he might learn to take a situation, aside from ‘too far.’ Balekin’s entrance spares him from considering them.
Their father’s eldest bore a closer resemblance to Cardan than Dain, all midnight curls and vaulted cheekbones, though Balekin’s was better-likened a warrior’s frame, where Cardan’s make was spare and branching—ever more cat-like than wolf.
“I daresay we’re all equally impatient for the succession to be over and done with,” He imparts, making no qualms about having overheard their conversation. It is little consequence; the throne atop the dais behind them sat unoccupied. Eldred attended these revels, but in the past months had grown lesser inclined to see them through to their close. “Father’s had a good run, ruling Elfhame for the last several hundred years.”
“Will you defend him to the very end?” Dain wonders, clearly amused. “He wouldn’t offer you the same courtesy.”
Loathsome though he may have been, his words were true. The only child Eldred had ever favored less than his last-born was his first.
“Come, brother, our father has retired the brugh. We might speak freely,” Dain urges, with a toss of his flaxen curls. “Magic has grown stagnant throughout Elfhame, this past decade. Even you cannot deny as much.”
“I don’t suppose poison could have a hand in that.” Cardan remarks blandly. Dain’s smoke-colored eyes shift to rest on him once more, a smirk curling the sharp corners of his mouth.
“Take your drunken drollery elsewhere, Cardan.” Balekin snaps, the dismissal carrying an undertow of warning.
His tongue had always had this same habit, of digging him deeper into whatever hole he happened to find himself in. The trait was incorrigible, and largely involuntary. He could hardly deny it, in such close quarters—and for such lengthy intervals—with the likes of Dain. He would doubtless have enjoyed joining Vivi and Rhyia, in conveniently not attending these revels. Alas, at the end of the day, he was Balekin’s pet on paper, groomed and trained and hastened to obey.
Perhaps these days he wore Balekin’s skin, more often than Dain’s.
“I’m hardly even drunk.” He points out, frowning, leaving the ‘yet’ unspoken in the air between them. Nevertheless, he relents in the beat that follows, plucking another goblet of wine from the tray of a passing servant as he goes.
~