The Cruel Prince Read online

  Do not reveal your skill with a blade. Do not reveal your mastery over glamour. Do not reveal all that you can do.

  Little did Prince Dain know that my real skill lies in pissing people off.

  Valerian advances on me again. He’s intoxicated and furious and not all that well trained, but he’s one of the Folk, born with their cat reflexes and blessed with height that gives him better reach. My heart is hammering in my chest. I should scream for help. I should scream.

  I open my mouth, and he lunges at me. The scream comes out as a whuff of breath as I lose my balance. My shoulder hits the floor hard as I roll again. I am practiced enough that despite my surprise, I kick his knife hand when he comes toward me. The blade skitters across the floor.

  “Okay,” I say, as though I am trying to calm us both down. “Okay.”

  He doesn’t pause. Even though I am holding a knife, even though I’ve avoided his attacks twice and disarmed him, even though I’ve stabbed him once before, he grabs for my throat again. His fingers sink into the flesh of my neck, and I remember how it felt to have fruit jammed into my mouth, soft flesh parting against my teeth. I remember choking on nectar and pulp as the horrible bliss of the everapple stole over me, robbing me of caring even that I was dying. He’d wanted to watch me die, wanted to watch me fight for breath the way I am fighting for it now. I look into his eyes and find the same expression there.

  You are nothing. You barely exist at all. Your only purpose is to create more of your kind before you die.

  He’s wrong about me. I am going to make my mayfly life count for something.

  I won’t be afraid of him or of Prince Dain’s censure. If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.

  Despite his fingers against my windpipe, despite the way my vision has begun to go dark around the edges, I make sure of my strike before I drive my knife into his chest. Into his heart.

  Valerian rolls off me, making a gurgling sound. I suck in lungfuls of air. He tries to stand, sways, and falls back to his knees. Looking over at him dizzily, I see the hilt of my knife is sticking out of his chest. The red velvet of his doublet is turning a deeper, wetter red.

  He reaches for the blade as though to draw it out.

  “Don’t,” I say automatically, because that will only make the wound worse. I grab for anything nearby—there is a discarded petticoat on the floor that I can use to stanch the blood. He slides down onto his side, away from me, and sneers, although he can barely open his eyes.

  “You’ve got to let me—” I start.

  “I curse you,” Valerian whispers. “I curse you. Three times, I curse you. As you’ve murdered me, may your hands always be stained with blood. May death be your only companion. May you—” He breaks off abruptly, coughing. When he stops, he doesn’t stir. His eyes stay as they are, half-lidded, but the gleam has gone out of them.

  My wounded hand flies to cover my mouth in horror at the curse, as though to stop a scream, but I don’t scream. I haven’t screamed this whole time, and I am not going to start now, when there’s nothing more to scream about.

  As minutes slip by, I just sit there beside Valerian, watching the skin of his face grow paler as the blood no longer pumps to it, watching his lips go a kind of greenish blue. He doesn’t die very differently than mortals, although I am sure it would gall him to know that. He might have lived for a thousand years, if it wasn’t for me.

  My hand hurts worse than ever. I must have banged it in the fight.

  I look around and catch my own reflection in the mirror across the room: a human girl, hair tousled, eyes feverish, a pool of blood forming at her feet.

  The Ghost is coming. He’d know what to do with a dead body. He has certainly killed people before. But Prince Dain is already angry with me just for stabbing the child of a well-favored member of his Court. Killing that same child the night before Dain’s coronation won’t go over well. The last people I need to know about this are the Court of Shadows.

  No, I need to hide the body myself.

  I scan the room, hoping for inspiration, but the only place I can think of that will even conceal him temporarily is beneath my bed. I spread the petticoat next to Valerian’s body and then roll him onto it. I feel a little queasy. His body is still warm. Ignoring that, I drag him over to the bed and push him and all the skirts under, first with my hands and then with my feet.

  Only a smear of blood remains. I get the pitcher of water near the bedpan and splash some on the wooden planks of the floor and then some on my face. My good hand is shaking as I finish wiping up, and I sink to the floor, both hands in my hair.

  I am not okay.

  I am not okay.

  I am not okay.

  But when the Ghost arrives on my balcony, he can’t tell, and that’s the important thing.

  That night, the Ghost shows me how to climb far higher than the landing where Taryn and I tarried the last time. We climb all the way up to the rafters above the great hall and perch on heavy wooden beams. They are coiled around with a lattice of roots, which sometimes form the shapes of cages, sometimes balconies, and sometimes what appear more like tightropes. Beneath us, the preparations for the coronation go on. Blue velvet and hammered silver and braided gold tablecloths are rolled out, each one decorated with the House of Greenbriar’s standard, a tree of flowers, thorns, and roots.

  “Do you think things will be better after Prince Dain becomes the High King?” I ask him.

  The Ghost gives me a vague smile and shakes his head sadly. “Things will be as they always are,” he tells me. “Only more so.”

  I don’t know what that means, but it’s a fey enough answer that I figure I am unlikely to get more out of him. I think of Valerian’s body under my bed. The Folk do not rot the way mortals do. Sometimes their bodies grow over with lichen or bloom with mushrooms. I’ve heard stories about battlefields turning into green hills. I wish I could go back and find that he’d turned into mulch, but I doubt I will be that lucky.

  I shouldn’t be thinking about his body; I should be thinking about him. I should be worrying over more than getting caught.

  We walk across roots and beams, unnoticed, jumping silently high above swarms of liveried servants. I turn to the Ghost, watching his calm face and the expert way he places each foot. I try to do the same. I try not to use my sore hand for anything more than balance. He seems to notice, but he doesn’t ask. Maybe he already knows what happened.

  “Now wait,” he says as we settle onto a heavy beam.

  “For anything in particular?” I ask.

  “I have word that a messenger is coming from Balekin’s estate, disguised in the High King’s livery,” he says. “We’re to kill it before it enters the royal quarters.”

  The Ghost says this without particular emotion. I wonder how long he has worked for Dain. I wonder if Dain ever asked him to drive a knife through his palm, if he tested them all that way, or if that was a special test, just for mortals.

  “Is the messenger going to assassinate Prince Dain?” I ask.

  “Let’s not find out,” he says.

  Below me, spun-sugar creations are being finished off with high crystalline spires. Apples painted with nevermore are piled on the banquet tables in such quantity as to send half the Court dreaming.

  I think of Cardan’s mouth, flaked with gold. “Are you sure they’re coming this way?”

  “I am,” he says, and no more than that.

  So we wait, and I try not to fidget as minutes slide into hours, moving just enough to keep my muscles from stiffening. This is part of my training—probably the aspect the Ghost thinks is most essential, after slyfooting. He has told me again and again that most of being a killer and a thief is waiting. The hardest thing, according to him, is not letting your mind drift to other things. He seems to be right. Up here, watching the ebb and flow of the servants, my thoughts turn to the coronation, to the drowned girl, to Cardan riding up on his horse as I fled Hollow Hall, to Valerian’s frozen,
dying smile.

  I wrench my thoughts back to the present. Beneath me, a creature with a long, hairless tail that drags in the dirt scuttles across the ground. For a moment, I think it is part of the kitchen staff. But the bag it carries is too filthy, and there is something subtly wrong with its livery. It isn’t dressed like one of Balekin’s servants, and neither is its uniform the same as the other palace staff.

  I glance over at the Ghost.

  “Good,” he says. “Now shoot.”

  My hands feel sweaty as I draw out the miniature crossbow, seeking to steady it against my arm. I have grown up in a house of butchery. I have trained for this. My principal childhood memory is of bloodshed. I have killed already tonight. And yet, for a moment, I am not sure I can do it.

  You’re no killer.

  I take a breath and loose the bolt. My arm spasms from the recoil. The creature topples over, a flailing arm sending a pyramid of golden apples spilling to the dirt. I press myself down against a thick cluster of roots, camouflaging myself as I’ve been taught. Servants scream, looking around for the shooter.

  Next to me, the Ghost has a smile on the corner of his mouth. “Was that your first?” he asks me. And then when I look at him blankly, he clarifies. “Have you ever killed anyone before?”

  May death be your only companion.

  I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak the lie out loud convincingly.

  “Sometimes mortals throw up. Or cry,” he says, clearly pleased I am doing neither of those things. “It shouldn’t shame you.”

  “I feel fine,” I say, taking a deep breath and fitting a new bolt into the bow.

  What I feel is a kind of nervous adrenaline-soaked readiness. I seem to have passed some kind of threshold. Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far.

  He raises both brows. “You’re good at this. Nice marksmanship and a stomach for violence.”

  I am surprised. The Ghost is not given to compliments.

  I have vowed to become worse than my rivals. Two murders completed in a single night mark a descent I should be proud of. Madoc could not have been more wrong about me.

  “Most of the children of the Gentry don’t have the patience,” he says. “And they’re not used to getting their hands dirty.”

  I do not know what to say to that, with Valerian’s curse fresh in my mind. Maybe there’s something broken in me from watching my parents being murdered. Maybe my messed-up life turned me into someone capable of doing messed-up things. But another part of me wonders if I was raised by Madoc in the family business of bloodshed. Am I like this because of what he did to my parents or because he was my parent?

  May your hands always be stained with blood.

  The Ghost reaches out to grab my wrist, and before I can snatch it back, he points to the pale half moons at the base of my nails. “Speaking of hands, I can see what you’ve been doing in the discoloration of your fingers. The blue cast. I can smell it in your sweat, too. You’ve been poisoning yourself.”

  I swallow, and then, because there’s no reason to deny it, I nod.

  “Why?” The thing I like about the Ghost is that I can tell he’s not asking to set me up for a lecture. He just seems curious.

  I am not sure how to explain it. “Being mortal means I have to try harder.”

  The Ghost studies my face. “Someone’s really sold you a bill of goods. Plenty of mortals are better at plenty of stuff than the Folk. Why do you think we steal them away?”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s serious. “So I could be…?” I can’t finish the sentence.

  He snorts. “Better than me? Don’t press your luck.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” I protest, but he only grins. I look down. The body is still lying there. A few knights have gathered around it. As soon as they move the body, we will move, too. “I just need to be able to vanquish my enemies. That’s all.”

  He looks surprised. “Do you have a lot of enemies, then?” I am sure he imagines me among the children of the Gentry, with their soft hands and velvet skirts. He thinks of little cruelties, small slights, minor snubs.

  “Not many,” I say, thinking of the lazy, hateful look Cardan gave me by torchlight in the hedge maze. “But they’re quality.”

  When the knights finally bear the body away and no one is searching for us anymore, the Ghost leads me across the roots again. We slip through corridors until he can get close enough to the messenger bag to light-finger the papers inside. Up close, though, I realize something that chills my blood. The messenger was disguised. The creature is female, and while her tail is fake, her long parsnip nose is entirely real. She’s one of Madoc’s spies.

  The Ghost tucks the note into his jacket and doesn’t unroll it until we’re out in the woods, with only moonlight to see by. When he looks, though, his expression turns stony. He’s gripping the paper so hard it’s crinkling in his fingers.

  “What does it say?” I ask.

  He turns the page toward me. There, six words are scrawled: KILL THE BEARER OF THIS MESSAGE.

  “What does that mean?” I ask, feeling sick.

  The Ghost shakes his head. “It means that Balekin set us up. Come on. We need to go.”

  He pulls me along into the shadows, and together we slink away. I do not tell the Ghost that I thought she worked for Madoc. Instead, I try to puzzle through things myself. But I have too few pieces.

  What does the murder of Liriope have to do with the coronation? What does Madoc have to do with any of this? Could his spy have been a double agent, working for Balekin as well as Madoc? If so, does that mean she was stealing information from my household?

  “Someone is trying to distract us,” the Ghost says. “While they set their trap. Be alert tomorrow.”

  The Ghost doesn’t give me any more specific orders, doesn’t even tell me to stop taking my tiny doses of poison. He doesn’t direct me to do anything differently; he leads me home to catch scraps of sleep just after dawn. As we’re about to part, I want to stop and throw myself on his mercy. I’ve done a terrible thing, I want to say. Help me with the body. Help me.

  But we all want stupid things. That doesn’t mean we should have them.

  I bury Valerian near the stables, but outside the paddock, so that even the most carnivorous of Madoc’s sharp-toothed horses are unlikely to dig him up and gnaw on his bones.

  It’s not easy to bury a body. It’s especially not easy to bury a body without your whole household finding out. I must roll Valerian onto my balcony and hurl him into the brush below. Then, one-handed, I must drag him away from the house. I am straining and sweating by the time I get to a likely plot of dew-covered grass. Newly woken birds call to one another beneath the brightening sky.

  For a moment, all I want to do is lie down myself.

  But I still have to dig.

  The next afternoon is a sleep-deprived blur of being painted and braided, corseted and cinched. Three fat gold earrings run up the side of one of Madoc’s green ears, and he wears long gold claws over his fingers. Oriana looks like a rose in bloom beside him, wearing a massive necklace of rough- cut green emeralds at her throat, large enough to nearly count as armor.

  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 aroun
d, 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?”