The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
I get why he chose her. I just wish she had chosen me.
“What did you say to him?” Taryn asks.
“That I have never found myself particularly changeable,” Madoc says. “And that I found him to be unworthy of both of you.”
Taryn’s hands curl into fists at her side, but there is no other sign that she’s angry. She has mastered a kind of courtly composure that I have not. While I have studied under Madoc, her tutor has been Oriana. “Do you forbid me from accepting him?”
“It will not end well,” Madoc says. “But I will not stand in front of your happiness. I will not even stand in front of misery that you choose for yourself.”
Taryn says nothing, but the way she lets out her breath shows her relief.
“Go,” he tells her. “And no more fighting with your kin. Whatever pleasure you find with Locke, your loyalty is to your family.”
I wonder what he means by that, by loyalty. I thought he was loyal to Dain. I thought he was sworn to him.
“But she—” Taryn begins, and Madoc holds up a hand, with the menace of his curved black fingernails.
“Was the challenger? Did she thrust a sword into your hand and make you swing it? Do you really think that your sister has no honor, that she would chop you into pieces while you stood by, unarmed?”
Taryn glowers, putting her chin up. “I didn’t want to fight.”
“Then you ought not do so in the future,” Madoc says. “There’s no point in fighting if you’re not intending to win. You may go. Leave me to talk with your sister.”
Taryn stands and walks to the door. With her hand on the heavy brass latch, she turns back, as though to say something else. Whatever camaraderie we found when he wasn’t there is gone. I can see in her face that she wants him to punish me and is half-sure that he won’t.
“You should ask Jude where Prince Cardan is,” she says, narrow-eyed. “The last time I saw him, he was dancing with her.”
With that, she sweeps out the door, leaving me with a thundering heart and the royal seal burning in my pocket. She doesn’t know. She’s just being awful, just trying to get me in trouble with a parting shot. I cannot believe she would say that if she knew.
“Let’s talk about your behavior tonight,” says Madoc, leaning forward.
“Let’s talk about your behavior tonight,” I return.
He sighs and rubs one large hand over his face. “You were there, weren’t you? I tried to get you all out, so you wouldn’t have to see it.”
“I thought you loved Prince Dain,” I say. “I thought you were his friend.”
“I loved him well enough,” Madoc says. “Better than I will ever love Balekin. But there are others who have a claim on my loyalty.”
I think again of my puzzle pieces, of the answers I came back home to get. What could Balekin have given or promised Madoc that would have persuaded him to move against Dain?
“Who?” I demand. “What could be worth this much death?”
“Enough,” he growls. “You are not yet on my war council. You will know what there is to know in the fullness of time. Until then, let me assure you that although things are in disarray, my plans are not overturned. What I need now is the youngest prince. If you know where Cardan is, I could get Balekin to offer you a handsome reward. A position in his Court. And the hand of anyone you wanted. Or the still-beating heart of anyone you despised.”
I look at him in surprise. “You think I’d take Locke from Taryn?”
He shrugs. “You seemed like you wanted to take Taryn’s head from her shoulders. She played you false. I don’t know what you might consider a fitting punishment.”
For a moment, we just look at each other. He’s a monster, so if I want to do a very bad thing, he’s not going to judge me for it. Much.
“If you want my advice,” he says slowly, “love doesn’t grow well, fed on pain. Grant me that I know that at least. I love you, and I love Taryn, but I don’t think she’s suited for Locke.”
“And I am?” I cannot help thinking that Madoc’s idea of love doesn’t seem like a very safe thing. He loved my mother. He loved Prince Dain. His love for us is likely to afford us no more protection than it afforded either of them.
“I don’t think Locke is suited for you.” He smiles his toothy smile. “And if your sister is right and you do know where Prince Cardan is, give him to me. He’s a foppish sort of boy, no good with a sword. He’s charming, in a way, and clever, but nothing worth protecting.”
Too young, too weak, too mean.
I think again of the coup that Madoc had planned with Balekin, wondering how it was supposed to go. Kill the two elder siblings, the ones with influence. Then surely the High King would relent and put the crown on the head of the prince with the most power, the one with the military on his side. Perhaps grudgingly, but once threatened, Eldred would crown Balekin. Except he didn’t. Balekin tried to force his hand, and then everyone died.
Everyone but Cardan. The board swept nearly clear of players.
That can’t be how Madoc thought things would play out. But, still, I remember his lessons on strategy. Every outcome of a plan should lead to victory.
No one can really plan for every variable, though. That’s ridiculous.
“I thought you were supposed to lecture me about not sword fighting in the house,” I say, trying to steer the conversation away from the whereabouts of Cardan. I’ve gotten what I promised the Court of Shadows—an offer. Now I just have to decide what to do with it.
“Must I tell you that if your blade had struck true and you’d hurt Taryn, you would have regretted it all your days? Of all the lessons I imparted to you, I would have thought that was the one I taught you best.” His gaze is steady on mine. He’s talking about my mother. He’s talking about murdering my mother.
I can say nothing to that.
“It is a shame you didn’t take out that anger on someone more deserving. In times like these, the Folk go missing.” He gives me a significant look.
Is he telling me it’s okay to kill Locke? I wonder what he’d say if he knew I’d already killed one of the Gentry. If I showed him the body. Apparently, maybe, congratulations.
“How do you sleep at night?” I ask him. It’s a crappy thing to say, and I am only saying it, I know, because he has shown me just how close I am to being everything I have despised in him.
His eyebrows furrow, and he looks at me as though he’s evaluating what sort of answer to give. I imagine myself as he must see me, a sullen girl sitting in judgment of him. “Some are good with pipes or paint. Some have skill in love,” he says finally. “My talent is in making war. The only thing that has ever kept me awake was denying it.”
I nod slowly.
He gets up. “Think about what I’ve said, and then think about where your own talents lie.”
We both know what that means. We both know what I am good at, what I am—I just chased my sister around the downstairs with a sword. But what to do with that talent is the question.
As I exit the game room, I realize that Balekin must have arrived with his retainers. Knights with his livery—three laughing birds emblazoned on their tabards—stand at attention in the hall. I slink past them and up the stairs, dragging my sword behind me, too exhausted to do anything else.
I am hungry, I realize, but I feel too sick to eat. Is this what it is to be brokenhearted? I am not sure it is Locke I am sick over, so much as the world the way it was before the coronation began. But if I could undo the passing of the days, why not unwind them to before I killed Valerian, why not unwind them until my parents are alive, why not unwind them all the way to the beginning?
There’s a knock on my door, and then it opens without my signaling anything. Vivi comes in, carrying a wooden plate with a sandwich on it, along with a stoppered bottle of amber glass.
“I’m a jerk. I’m an idiot,” I say. “I admit it. You don’t have to lecture me.”
“I thought you were going to give me a ha
“You shouldn’t magic your sisters.” I draw the cork on the bottle and take a long swig of water. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was. I guzzle more, nearly draining the whole container in one continuous gulping swallow.
“And you shouldn’t try to chop yours in half.” She settles back against my pillows, against my worn stuffed animals. Idly, she picks up the snake and flicks the forks of its felt tongue. “I thought all of it—swordplay, knighthood—I thought it was a game.”
I remember how angry she was when Taryn and I gave in to Faerie and started having fun. Crowns of flowers on our heads, shooting bows and arrows at the sky. Eating candied violets and falling asleep with our heads pillowed on logs. We were children. Children can laugh all day and still cry themselves to sleep at night. But to hold a blade in my hand, a blade like the one that killed our parents, and think it was a toy, she’d have to believe I was heartless.
“It’s not,” I say finally.
“No,” Vivi says, wrapping the stuffed snake around the stuffed cat.
“Did she tell you about him?” I ask, climbing onto my bed next to her. It feels good to lie down, maybe a little too good. I am instantly drowsy.
“I didn’t know Taryn was with Locke,” Vivi says, deliberately giving me the whole sentence so I won’t have to wonder if she’s trying to trick me. “But I don’t want to talk about Locke. Forget him. I want us to leave Faerie. Tonight.”
That makes me sit upright. “What?”
She laughs at my reaction. It’s such a normal sound, so completely out of step with the high drama of the last two days. “I thought that would surprise you. Look, whatever happens next here, it’s not going to be good. Balekin’s an asshole. And he’s dumb on top of it. You should have heard Dad swearing on our way home. Let’s just go.”
“What about Taryn?” I ask.
“I’ve already asked her, and I’m not going to tell you if she agreed to come or not. I want you to answer for you. Jude, listen. I know you’re keeping secrets. Something is making you sick. You’re paler and thinner, and your eyes have a weird shine.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Liar,” she says, but the accusation has no heat. “I know that you’re stuck here in Faerie because of me. I know that the shittiest things that have happened in your whole life are because of me. You’ve never said it, which is kind of you, but I know. You’ve had to turn yourself into something else, and you’ve done it. Sometimes, when I look at you, I’m not sure if you’d even know how to be human anymore.”
I don’t know what to do with that—compliment and insult all at once. But behind it is a feeling of prophecy.
“You fit in better here than I do,” Vivi says. “But I bet it cost you something.”
I mostly don’t like to imagine the life I could have had, the one without magic in it. The one where I went to a regular school and learned regular things. The one where I had a living father and mother. The one where my older sister was the weirdo. Where I wasn’t so angry. Where my hands weren’t stained with blood. I picture it now, and I feel strange, tense all over, my stomach churning.
What I feel is panic.
When the wolves come for that Jude, she’ll be eaten up in an instant—and wolves always come. It frightens me to think of myself so vulnerable. But as I am now, I am well on my way to becoming one of the wolves. Whatever essential thing the other Jude has, whatever part that’s unbroken in her and broken in me, that thing might be unrecoverable. Vivi is right; it cost me something to be the way I am. But I do not know what. And I don’t know if I can get it back. I don’t even know if I want it.
But maybe I could try.
“What would we do in the mortal world?” I ask her.
Vivi smiles and pushes the plate with the sandwich toward me. “Go to movies. Visit cities. Learn to drive a car. There are lots of the Folk who don’t live in the Courts, don’t play at politics. We could live any way we like. In a loft. In a tree. Whatever you want.”
“With Heather?” I pick up the food and take a huge bite. Sliced mutton and pickled dandelion greens. My stomach growls.
“Hopefully,” she says. “You can help me explain things to her.”
It occurs to me for the first time that, whether she knows it or not, she isn’t suggesting running away to be human. She’s suggesting we live like the wild fey, among mortals, but not of them. We’d steal the cream from their cups and the coins from their pockets. But we wouldn’t settle down and get boring jobs. Or at least she wouldn’t.
I wonder what Heather is going to think of that.
Once Prince Cardan is dealt with in some way, then what? Even if I figure out the mystery of Balekin’s letters, there’s still no good place for me. The Court of Shadows will be disbanded. Taryn will be wed. Vivi will be gone. I could go with her. I could try to figure out what’s broken in me, try to start over.
I think of the Roach’s offer, to go with them to another court. To start over in Faerie. Both feel like giving up, but what else is there to do? I thought that once I was home, I’d come up with a plan, but so far I haven’t.
“I couldn’t leave tonight,” I say hesitatingly.
She gasps, hand to her heart. “You’re seriously thinking about it.”
“There are some things I need to finish. Give me a day.” I keep bargaining for the same thing over and over: time. But in a day I will have squared things with the Court of Shadows. Arrangements will be made for Cardan. One way or another, everything will be settled. I will wring whatever payment I can from Faerie. And if I still don’t have a plan, it will be too late to make one. “What’s a single day in your eternal, everlasting, interminable life?”
“One day to decide or one day to pack your bags?”
I take another bite of sandwich. “Both.”
Vivi rolls her eyes. “Just remember, in the mortal world, it won’t be the way it is here.” She goes to the door. “You wouldn’t have to be the way you are here.”
I hear Vivi’s steps in the hall. I take another bite of my sandwich. I chew and swallow it, but I don’t taste anything.
What if the way I am is the way I am? What if, when everything else is different, I’m not?
I take Cardan’s royal ring out of my pocket and hold it in the center of my palm. I shouldn’t have this. Mortal hands shouldn’t hold it. Even looking closely seems wrong, yet I do anyway. The gold is full of a deep rich redness, and the edges are smoothed by constant wear. There is a little bit of wax stuck in the impression, and I try to root it out with the edge of my nail. I wonder how much the ring would be worth out in the world.
Before I can persuade myself not to, I slip it onto my unworthy finger.
I wake up the next afternoon with the taste of poison in my mouth. I had gone to sleep in my clothes, curled around Nightfell’s scabbard.
Although I don’t really want to, I pad down to Taryn’s door and knock on it. I have to say something to her before the world turns upside down again. I have to make things right between us. But no one answers, and when I turn the knob and enter, I find her chamber is empty.
I head down to Oriana’s rooms, hoping she might know where I can find Taryn. I peek in through the open door and find her out on her balcony, looking at the trees and the lake beyond. The wind whips her hair behind her like a pale banner. It balloons her filmy dress.
“What are you doing?” I ask, coming in.
She turns, surprised. And well she might be. I am not sure that I have ever sought her out before. “My people had wings once,” she says, the longing clear in her voice. “And though I’ve never had a pair of my own, sometimes I feel the lack of them.”
I wonder if, when she imagines having wings, she pictures herself flying up into the sky and away from all this.
“Have you seen Taryn?” Vines curl around the posts of Oriana’s bed, their stems a vivid green. Blue flowers hang down in clumps over where she
“She’s gone to the house of her betrothed, but they’ll be at the High King Balekin’s manor tomorrow. You will be there, too. He’s throwing a feast for your father and some of the Seelie and Unseelie rulers. You’ll be expected to be less hostile to each other.”
I cannot even imagine the horror, the awkwardness, of being dressed in gossamer, the smell of faerie fruit heavy in the air, while I am supposed to pretend that Balekin is anything but a murdering monster.
“Will Oak go?” I ask her, and feel the first real pang of regret. If I leave, I won’t get to see Oak grow up.
Oriana clasps her hands together and walks over to her dressing table. Her jewelry hangs there—slices of agate on long chains of raw crystal beads, collars set with moonstones, deep green bloodstones strung together, and an opal pendant, bright as fire in the sunlight. And on a silver tray, beside a pair of ruby earrings in the shape of stars, is a golden acorn.
A golden acorn, twin to the one I found in the pocket of the gown that Locke gave me. The dress that had belonged to his mother. Liriope. Locke’s mother. I think of her madcap, joyful dresses, of her dust-covered bedroom. Of how the acorn in her pocket opened to show a bird inside.
“I tried to convince Madoc that Oak was too young and that this dinner will be too dull, but Madoc insisted that he come. Perhaps you can sit beside him and keep him amused.”
I think about the story of Liriope, of how Oriana told it to me when she believed I was getting too close to Prince Dain. Of how Oriana had been a consort to the High King Eldred before she was Madoc’s wife. I think about why she might have needed to make a swift marriage, what she might have had to hide.
I think about the note I found on Balekin’s desk, the one in Dain’s hand, a sonnet to a lady with sunrise hair and starlit eyes.