The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1)(31)

I know I am not being fair to Vivi, who hasn’t done anything. She just wanted to help.

Maybe I don’t know how to be a good sister anymore.

At the stables, I have to stop and lean against a wall while I take deep breaths. For more than half my life, I’ve been fighting down panic. Maybe it’s not the best thing for a constant rattle of nerves to seem normal, even necessary. But at this point, I wouldn’t know how to live without it.

The most important thing is to impress Prince Dain. I can’t let Cardan and his friends take that from me.

To get to Hollow Hall, I decide to take one of the toads, since only the Gentry ride silver-shod horses. Although a servant would probably not have a mount of any kind, at least the toad is less conspicuous.

Only in Faerieland is a giant toad the less conspicuous choice.

I saddle and bridle a spotted one and lead her out onto the grass. Her long tongue lashes one of her golden eyes, making me take an involuntary step back.

I hook my foot in the stirrup and swing up onto the seat. With one hand, I pull on the reins, and with the other, I pat the soft, cool skin of her back. The spotted toad launches us into the air, and I hang on.

Hollow Hall is a stone manor with a tall, crooked tower, the whole thing half-covered in vines and ivy. There’s a balcony on the second floor that seems to have a rail of thick roots in place of iron. A curtain of thinner tendrils hangs down from it, like a scraggly beard clotted with dirt. There is something misshapen about the estate that ought to make it charming but instead makes it ominous. I tie up the toad, stuff my cloak into her saddlebags, and start toward the side of the manor, where I believe I will find a servants’ door. On the way, I stop to pick mushrooms, so it will seem as though I had a reason for being out in the woods.

As I get close, my heart speeds anew. Balekin won’t hurt me, I tell myself. Even if I’m caught, he’ll simply turn me over to Madoc. Nothing bad is going to happen.

I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but I manage to persuade myself enough to approach the servants’ entrance and slip inside.

A hallway goes to the kitchens, where I deposit the mushrooms on a table beside a brace of bloody rabbits, a pigeon pie, a bouquet of garlic scapes and rosemary, a few cloudy-skinned plums, and dozens of bottles of wine. A troll stirs a large pot alongside a winged pixie. And cutting up vegetables are two sunken-cheeked humans, a boy and a girl, both of them with small, stupid smiles on their faces and glazed-over looks in their eyes. They don’t even look down as they chop, and I’m surprised they don’t cut off their own fingers by accident. Worse, if they did, I am not sure they’d notice.

I think of how I felt yesterday, and the echo of faerie fruit comes unbidden into my mouth. I feel my gorge rise, and I hurry past, down the hall.

I am stopped by a pale-eyed faerie guard, who grabs my arm. I look up at him, hoping I can school my expression to be as blank and pleasant and dreamy as that of the mortals in the kitchens.

“I haven’t seen you before,” he tells me, making it an accusation.

“You’re lovely,” I say, trying to sound awed and a little confused. “Pretty eye mirrors.”

He makes a disgusted sound, which I guess means I am doing a good enough job of pretending to be an ensorcelled human servant, although I feel I went weird and over the top in my nervousness. I am not as good at improvising as I had hoped I would be.

“Are you new?” he asks, saying the words slowly.

“New?” I echo, trying to figure out what someone brought here might think about the experience. I cannot stop remembering the sickly sweet taste of faerie fruit on my tongue, but instead of getting me deeper into character, I just want to throw up. “Before I was somewhere else,” I blurt out, “but now I have to clean the great hall with polish until every inch of it shines.”

“Well, I guess you best, then,” he says, letting me go.

I try to control the shudder building up under my skin. I don’t flatter myself that my acting convinced him; he was convinced because I’m human and he expects humans to be servants. Again, I can see why Prince Dain thought I would be useful. After the guard, it is fairly easy to move around Hollow Hall. There are dozens of humans drifting through their chores, lost in sickly dreams. They sing little songs to themselves and whisper words out loud, but it’s obviously just snatches of a conversation happening in their dreams. Their eyes are shadowed. Their mouths, chapped.

No wonder the guard thought I was new.

Besides the servants, however, are the fey. Guests of some fete that seems to have ebbed rather than ended. They sleep in various states of undress, draped over couches and entwined on the floors of the parlors I pass through, their mouths stained gold with nevermore, a glittering golden powder so concentrated that it stupefies faeries and gives mortals the ability to glamour one another. Goblets lie on their side, mead pooling to run over the uneven floor like tributaries into great honey-wine lakes. Some of the Folk are so still I worry that they have debauched themselves into death.

“Excuse me,” I say to a girl about my age carrying a tin bucket. She passes me without even seeming to notice I have spoken.

With no idea what else to do, I decide to follow. We pad up a wide stone staircase without rails. Three more of the Folk lie in a dissipated stupor beside a thimble-sized bottle of spirits. Above, from the other end of the hall, I hear an odd cry, like someone in pain. Something heavy hits the ground. Rattled, I try to school my face back to dreamy nonchalance, but it isn’t easy. My heart beats like a trapped bird.