The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2)(62)

He moves his hands and makes a few sounds I don’t understand. Then, obviously adjusting his expectations, he speaks again. “I am here to prepare you to join Queen Orlagh for dinner. If you give me any trouble, I can render you equally easily unconscious. That’s how I’d hoped to find you.”

I nod my head. “No trouble. Got it.”

More merfolk come into the room, ones with green tails and yellow tails and black-tipped tails. They swim around me, staring with their large, shining eyes.

One unshackles me from the bed, and another guides my body upright. I have almost no weight in the water. My body goes where it is pushed.

When they begin undressing me, I panic again, a kind of animal response. I twist in their arms, but they hold me firm and pull a diaphanous gown on over my head. It is both short and thin, barely a garment at all. It flows around me, and I am sure most of my body is visible through it. I try not to look down, for fear that I will blush.

Then I am wrapped in ropes of pearls, my hair pulled back with a crown of shells and a net of kelp. The wound on my leg is dressed with a bandage of sea grass. Finally, I am guided through the vast coral palace, its dim light punctuated by glowing jellyfish.

The merfolk lead me into a banquet room without a ceiling, so that when I look up, I see schools of fish and even a shark above me, and above that, the glimmering light of what must be the surface.

I guess it’s daytime.

Queen Orlagh sits on an enormous throne-like chair at one end of the table, the body of it encased with barnacles and shells, crabs and live starfish crawling over it, fanlike coral and bright anemone moving in the current.

She herself looks impossibly regal. Her black eyes rake over me, and I flinch, knowing that I am looking at someone who has ruled longer than the span of generations of mortal lives.

Beside her sits Nicasia, in an only slightly less impressive chair. And at the other end of the table is Balekin, in a chair much diminished from either of theirs.

“Jude Duarte,” he says. “Now you know how it feels to be a prisoner. How is it to rot in a cell? To think you will die there?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I always knew I was getting out.”

At that, Queen Orlagh tips back her head and laughs. “I suppose you have, in a manner of speaking. Come to me.” I hear the glamour in her voice and remember what Nicasia said about my not remembering whatever she did to me. Truly, I should be glad she didn’t do worse.

My flimsy gown makes it clear I am not wearing any charms. They do not know the geas Dain put on me. They believe I am entirely susceptible to glamours.

I can pretend. I can do this.

I swim over, keeping my face carefully blank. Orlagh gazes deeply into my eyes, and it’s excruciatingly hard not to look away, to keep my face open and sincere.

“We are your friends,” Orlagh says, stroking my cheek with long nails. “You love us very much, but you must never tell anyone how much outside of this room. You are loyal to us and would do absolutely anything for us. Isn’t that right, Jude Duarte?”

“Yes,” I say readily.

“What would you do for me, little minnow?” she asks.

“Anything, my queen,” I tell her.

She looks down the table at Balekin. “You see? That’s how it’s done.”

He appears sullen. He thinks a lot of himself and mislikes being put in his place. The eldest of Eldred’s children, he resented his father for not seriously considering him for the throne. I am sure he hates the way Orlagh talks to him. If he didn’t need this alliance, and if he wasn’t in her domain, I doubt he would allow it.

Perhaps here is a divide for me to exploit.

Soon a parade of dishes is brought out in cloches full of air, so that even under the water, they are dry until about to be eaten.

Raw fish, cut into artful rosettes and cunning shapes. Oysters, perfumed with roasted kelp. Roe, glistening red and black.

I don’t know if it’s allowed for me to eat without being explicitly granted permission, but I am hungry and willing to risk being reprimanded.

The raw fish is mild and mixed in some peppery green. I didn’t anticipate liking it, but I do. I quickly swallow three pink strips of tuna.

My head still hurts, but my stomach starts to feel better.

As I eat, I think about what I must do: listen carefully and act in every way as though I trust them, as though I am loyal to them. To do that, I must imagine myself into at least the shadow of that feeling.

I look over at Orlagh and imagine that it was she instead of Madoc who brought me up, that I was Nicasia’s sort-of sister, who was sometimes mean but ultimately looked out for me. At Balekin, my imaginings balk, but I try to think of him as a new member of the family, someone I was coming to trust because everyone else did. I turn a smile on them, a generous smile that almost doesn’t feel like a lie.

Orlagh looks over at me. “Tell me about yourself, little minnow.”

The smile almost wavers, but I concentrate on my full stomach, on the wonder and beauty of the landscape.

“There’s little to know,” I say. “I’m a mortal girl who was raised in Faerie. That’s the most interesting thing about me.”

Nicasia frowns. “Did you kiss Cardan?”

“Is that important?” Balekin wants to know. He is eating oysters, spearing them one after another with a tiny fork.