The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2)(9)

“What am I doing here?” he finally shouts, rocking his chair back and forth. “Let me go!” The chair goes over, slamming him against the ground, where he lies on his side. He begins to struggle against the ropes in earnest.

The Roach shrugs, gets up, and pulls off Vulciber’s blindfold. “Greetings,” he says.

On the other side of the room, the Bomb is cleaning beneath her fingernails with a long, half-moon knife. The Ghost is sitting in a corner so quietly that occasionally he seems not to be there at all. A few more of the new recruits look on, interested in the proceedings—a boy with sparrow wings, three spriggans, a sluagh girl. I am not used to an audience.

Vulciber stares at the Roach, at his goblin-green skin and eyes that reflect orange, his long nose and the single tuft of hair on his head. He takes in the room.

“The High King won’t allow this,” Vulciber says.

I give him a sad smile. “The High King doesn’t know, and you’re unlikely to tell him once I cut out your tongue.”

Watching his fear ripen fills me with an almost voluptuous satisfaction. I, who have had little power in my life, must be on guard against that feeling. Power goes to my head too quickly, like faerie wine.

“Let me guess,” I say, turning backward in my chair to face him, calculated coolness in my gaze. “You thought you could strike me, and there would be no consequences.”

He shrinks a bit at my words. “What do you want?”

“Who says I want anything particular?” I counter. “Maybe just a little payback…”

As if we rehearsed it, the Roach pulls out a particularly nasty blade from his belt and holds it over Vulciber. He grins down at the guard.

The Bomb looks up from her nails, a small smile on her lips as she watches the Roach. “I guess the show is about to start.”

Vulciber fights against his bonds, head lashing back and forth. I hear the wood of the chair crack, but he doesn’t get free. After several heavy breaths, he slumps.

“Please,” he whispers.

I touch my chin as though a thought has just occurred to me. “Or you could help us. Balekin wanted to make a bargain with Cardan. You could tell me about that.”

“I know nothing of it,” he says desperately.

“Too bad.” I shrug and pick up another piece of cheese, shoving it into my mouth.

He takes a look at the Roach and the ugly knife. “But I know a secret. It’s worth more than my life, more than whatever Balekin wanted with Cardan. If I tell it, will you give me your oath that I will leave here tonight unharmed?”

The Roach looks at me, and I shrug. “Well enough,” the Roach says. “If the secret is all you claim, and if you’ll swear never to reveal you had a visit to the Court of Shadows, then tell us and we’ll send you on your way.”

“The Queen of the Undersea,” Vulciber says, eager to speak now. “Her people crawl up the rocks at night and whisper to Balekin. They slip into the Tower, although we don’t know how, and leave him shells and shark teeth. Messages are being exchanged, but we can’t decipher them. There are whispers Orlagh intends to break her treaty with the land and use the information Balekin is giving her to ruin Cardan.”

Of all the threats to Cardan’s reign, the Undersea wasn’t one I was expecting. The Queen of the Undersea has a single daughter—Nicasia, fostered on land and one of Cardan’s awful friends. Like Locke, Nicasia and I have a history. Also like Locke, it isn’t a good one.

But I thought that Cardan’s friendship with Nicasia meant Orlagh was happy he was on the throne.

“Next time one of these exchanges happen,” I say, “come straight to me. And if you hear anything else you think I’d be interested in, you come and tell me that, too.”

“That’s not what we agreed,” Vulciber protests.

“True enough,” I tell him. “You’ve told us a tale, and it is a good one. We’ll let you go tonight. But I can reward you better than some murderous prince who does not and will never have the High King’s favor. There are better positions than guarding the Tower of Forgetting—yours for the taking. There’s gold. There’re all the rewards that Balekin can promise but is unlikely to deliver.”

He gives me a strange look, probably trying to judge whether, given that he hit me and I poisoned him, it is still possible for us to be allies. “You can lie,” he says finally.

“I’ll guarantee the rewards,” the Roach says. He reaches over and cuts Vulciber’s bindings with his scary knife.

“Promise me a post other than in the Tower,” says Vulciber, rubbing his wrists and pushing himself to his feet, “and I shall obey you as though you were the High King himself.”

The Bomb laughs at that, with a wink in my direction. They do not explicitly know that I have the power to command Cardan, but they know we have a bargain that involves my doing most of the work and the Court of Shadows acting directly for the crown and getting paid directly, too.

I’m playing the High King in her little pageant, Cardan said once in my hearing. The Roach and the Bomb laughed; the Ghost didn’t.

Once Vulciber exchanges promises with us, and the Roach leads him, blindfolded, into the passageways out of the Nest, the Ghost comes to sit beside me.

“Come spar,” he says, taking a piece of apple off my plate. “Burn off some of that simmering rage.”