He glared out at the stars, and they twinkled back at him accusingly.
I am not weak, he wanted to shout, but he wasn’t sure he could say that aloud, either.
The sight of the human servants unnerved him. Their empty eyes and chapped lips. Nothing like the twins from the palace school.
He thought of one of those girls frowning over a book, pushing a lock of brown hair back over one oddly curved ear.
He thought of the way she looked at him, brows narrowed in suspicion.
Scornful, and alert. Awake. Alive.
He imagined her as a mindless servant and felt a rush of something he couldn’t quite untangle—horror, and also a sort of terrible relief. No ensorcelled human could look at him as she did.
The glow of the electronic lights shone from the shoreline, and the moth dipped toward them, sending a fresh gust of wing powder into Cardan’s face. He was drawn out of his thoughts by a choking fit.
“Onto the beach,” he managed between coughs.
Margaret’s grip tightened at his waist. It felt as though she was trying to hang on to one of his rib bones. His tail was squashed at an odd angle.
“Ouch,” he complained, and was, once again, ignored.
Finally, the moth set down on a black boulder half submerged, its sides scabbed over with white limpets. Prince Cardan slid off the creature’s back, landing in a tide pool and soaking his fancy boots.
“What happens to me now?” Margaret asked, looking down at him.
Cardan hadn’t been sure he’d successfully removed the glamour on her when he’d left Elfhame, but it seemed that he had. “How ought I know?” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the shore. “You do whatever it is mortals do in your land.”
She clambered off the moth’s back, wading onto the beach. Then she took a deep, shuddering breath. “So this isn’t a trick? I can really go?”
“Go,” Cardan said, making a shooing motion with his hands. “Indeed, I wish you would.”
“Why me?” she asked. She was neither the youngest nor the oldest. She was not the strongest and far from the most pitiable. They both knew the one thing that distinguished her, and it was nothing for either of them to like.
“Because I don’t want to look at you anymore,” Cardan said.
The woman studied him. Licked her chapped lips.
“I never wanted to...” She let the sentence fall away, doubtless seeing the expression on his face. It had the unsettling effect, however, of mimicking how the Folk spoke when they began a sentence and realized they couldn’t speak the lie.
It didn’t matter. He could finish it for her: I never wanted to take a strap to your back and flay it open. It was just that I was glamoured by your brother, because part of Balekin’s punishment is always humiliation, and what’s more humiliating than being beaten by a mortal? But of course, I do hate you. I hate all of you, who took me away from my own life. And some part of me delighted in hurting you.
“Yes,” Cardan said. “I know. Now get out of my sight.”
She regarded him for a long moment. The black curls of his hair were probably wind-wild, and the sharp points of his ears would remind her that he wasn’t a mortal boy, no matter how he looked like one.
And his wet boots were sinking in the sand.
Finally, she turned away and walked up the cold and desolate beach, toward the lights beyond. He watched her go, feeling wrung out, wretched, and foolish.
And alone.
I am not weak, he wanted to shout after her. Do not dare to pity me. It is you who should be pitied, mortal. It is you who are nothing, while I am a prince of Faerie.
He stalked back to the enormous moth, but it wouldn’t return him to Elfhame until he went to a nearby general store, glamoured leaves into money to buy it an entire six-pack of lager, and then poured the booze into a frothing puddle on the ground for the creature to lap at.
T
he odd curve of her ear was what he had noticed first. A roundness echoed in her cheeks and her mouth. Then it was the way her body looked solid, as though meant to take up space and weight in the world. When she moved, she left behind footprints in the forest floor.
Because she didn’t know how to glide silently, to disturb no leaf or branch. He felt smug to see how bad she was at even such an easy thing.
It was only later that it disturbed him to think back on the shape of her boot in the soil, as though she was the only real thing in a land of ghosts.
He had seen her before, he supposed. But at the palace school, he really looked. He noted her skirts, spattered with mud, and her hair ribbons, partially undone. He saw her twin sister, her double, as though one of them were a changeling child and not human at all. He saw the way they whispered together while they ate, smiling over private jokes. He saw the way they answered the instructors, as though they had any right to this knowledge, had any right to be sitting among their betters. To occasionally better their betters with those answers. And the one girl was good with a sword, instructed personally by the Grand General, as though she was not some by-blow of a faithless wife.
When she stood up against him, she was so good that it was almost possible to believe she hadn’t let him win.
The seeds of Prince Cardan’s resentment came full bloom. What was the point of her trying so hard? Why would she work like that when it would never win her anything?
“Mortals,” said Nicasia with a curl of her lip.
He had never tried like that for anything in his life.
Jude, Cardan thought, hating even the shape of her name. Jude.
C
ome back with me to the Undersea,” Nicasia whispered against Cardan’s throat.
They were lying on a bed of soft moss at the edge of the Crooked Forest. He could hear waves crashing along the shore. She was sprawled out in a robe of silver, her hair spread beneath her like a tide pool.
It was a relationship they had fallen into, slipping easily from friendship to kisses with the eagerness of youth. She whispered to him about her childhood beneath the waves, about a foiled assassination that nearly ended her life, and recited poetry to him in the language of the selkies. In turn, he told her about his brother and his mother, about the prophecy hanging over his head, the one that foretold he would be the destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne, the one that set his father against him. He could not imagine being parted from her.
“The Undersea?” he murmured, turning toward her.
“When my mother returns for me, come away with us,” she said. “Live with me forever in the deep. We will ride sharks, and everyone will fear us.”
“Yes,” he agreed immediately, thrilled by the idea of abandoning Elfhame. “With pleasure.”
She laughed, delighted, and pressed her mouth to his.
Cardan kissed her back, feeling smug at the thought of being consort to the future Queen of the Undersea while the rest of his siblings squabbled over the Blood Crown. He would relish their envy.
Even the prophecy that once seemed to doom him took on a new meaning. Perhaps he would destroy Elfhame one day and be a villain above the waves but a hero beneath them. Perhaps all the hatred in his heart was good for something after all.
Princess Nicasia would be his destiny, and her kingdom would be his.
But as he moved to kiss her shoulder, she pushed him away with a grin. “Let’s dive down into the deep,” she said, springing up. “Let me show you what it will be like.”