The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1)(63)

In my room, I unwrap my hand. It looks worse than I had hoped—wet and sticking instead of scabbed over. Swollen. I finally take Dain’s advice and get some moss from the kitchens, wash the wound, and rewrap it with my makeshift button brace. I wasn’t planning to wear gloves to the coronation, but I don’t have much choice. Hunting around in my drawers, I find a set in a dark blue silk and draw them on.

I imagine Locke taking my hands tonight, imagine him sweeping me around the hill. I hope I can avoid flinching if he presses on my palm. I can never let him guess what happened to Valerian. No matter how much he likes me, he wouldn’t like kissing the person who put his friend in the ground.

My sisters and I pass one another in the hall as we dart around, grabbing stray things we need. Vivienne goes through my jewelry cabinet, finding nothing adequately matching her ghostly dress in her own.

“You’re actually coming with us,” I say. “Madoc will be stunned.”

I am wearing a choker to cover the bruises blooming on my throat where Valerian’s fingers sank into my skin. When Vivi gets down on her knees to sort through a tangle of earrings, I have a terror that she will glance beneath my bed and see some smear of blood I have missed cleaning. I am so worried that I barely register her smile.

“I like to keep everyone on their toes,” she says. “Besides, I want to gossip with Princess Rhyia and see the spectacle of so many rulers of faerie Courts in one place. But most of all, I want to meet Taryn’s mysterious suitor and see what Madoc makes of his proposal.”

“Do you have any idea who he is?” I ask. With everything that’s happened, I had nearly forgotten about him.

“Not even a guess. Do you?” She finds what she is looking for—iridescent gray labradorite drops given to me by Taryn for my sixteenth birthday, forged by a goblin tinker with whom she traded three kisses.

In idle moments, I have turned over and over who might ask for her hand. I think of the way Cardan pulled her aside and made her cry. I think of Valerian’s leer. Of the way she shoved me too hard when I teased her about Balekin, although I am almost certain it isn’t him. My head swims, and I want to lie back down on the bed and close my eyes. Please, please let it be none of them. Let it be someone nice we don’t know.

I remind myself of what she said: I think you would like him.

Turning to Vivi, I am about to start making a list of safer possibilities when Madoc comes into the room. He’s holding a slim silver-sheathed blade in one hand.

“Vivienne,” he says with a little dip of his head. “Could you give me a moment with Jude here?”

“Sure, Daddy,” she says with small, poisonous emphasis as she slips out with my earrings.

He clears his throat a little awkwardly and holds the silver sword out to me. The guard and pommel are unadorned, elegantly shaped. The blade is etched along the fuller with a barely visible pattern of vines. “I have something I’d like you to wear tonight. It’s a gift.”

I think I make a little gasp. It’s a really, really, really pretty sword.

“You’ve been training so diligently that I knew it should be yours. Its maker called it Nightfell, but of course you are welcome to call it anything you like or nothing at all. It’s said to bring the wielder luck, but everyone says that about swords, don’t they? It’s something of a family heirloom.”

Oriana’s words come back to me: He’s besotted with you girls. He must have loved your mother very much. “But what about Oak?” I blurt out. “What if he wants it?”

Madoc gives me a small smile. “Do you want it?”

“Yes,” I say, unable to help myself. When I pull it from its sheath, it comes as though made for my hand. The balance is perfect. “Yes, of course I do.”

“That’s good, because this is your sword by right, forged for me by your father, Justin Duarte. He’s the one who crafted it, the one who named it. It’s your family heirloom.”

I am momentarily robbed of breath. I have never heard my father’s name spoken aloud by Madoc before. We do not talk about the fact that he murdered my parents; we talk around it.

We certainly don’t talk about when they were alive.

“My father made this,” I say carefully, to be sure. “My father was here, in Faerie?”

“Yes, for several years. I only have a few pieces of his. I found two, one for you and one for Taryn.” He grimaces. “This is where your mother met him. Then they ran away together, back to the mortal world.”

I take a shuddering breath, finding the courage to ask a question I have often wondered but never dared voice aloud. “What were they like?” I flinch as the words leave my mouth. I don’t even know if I want him to tell me. Sometimes I just want to hate her; if I can hate her, then it won’t be so bad that I love him.

But, of course, she’s still my mother. The only thing I can truly be angry with her for is being gone, and that’s certainly not her fault.

Madoc sits down on the goat-footed stool in front of my dressing table and stretches out his bad leg, looking for all the world as though he’s about to tell me a bedtime story. “She was clever, your mother. And young. After I brought her to Faerie, she drank and danced weeks away at a time. She was at the center of every revel.

“I could not always accompany her. There was a war in the East, an Unseelie king with a lot of territory and no desire to bend his knee to the High King. But I drank in her happiness when I was here. She had a way of making everyone around her feel as though every impossible thing was possible. I suppose I put it down to her mortality, but I don’t think I was being fair. It was something else. Her daring, perhaps. She never seemed cowed, not by any of the magic, not by anything.”