How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5)(6)

His sister closed her mouth abruptly, looking comically surprised.

Nicasia laughed.

For all the charm and distinction of his siblings, it was Cardan who won the Undersea’s favor. It was the first time he’d won anything.



With Nicasia by his side, Cardan drew others to him, until he formed a malicious little foursome who prowled the isles of Elfhame looking for trouble. They unraveled precious tapestries and set fire to part of the Crooked Forest. They made their instructors at the palace school weep and made courtiers terrified to cross them.

Valerian, who loved cruelty the way some Folk loved poetry.

Locke, who had a whole empty house for them to run amok in, along with an endless appetite for merriment.

Nicasia, whose contempt for the land made her eager to have all of Elfhame kiss her slipper.

And Cardan, who modeled himself on his eldest brother and learned how to use his status to make Folk scrape and grovel and bow and beg, who delighted in being a villain.

Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted.

And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming.

But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in all the land.





P

rince Cardan wasn’t feeling nearly villainous enough as he flew over the sea on the back of an enormous moth late one afternoon. The moth had been his mother’s creature, hand-tamed out of the Crooked Forest with honey and wine. Once she was imprisoned in the Tower of Forgetting, the moth languished and was easily tempted into his service by a few sips of mead.

The powder of its wings kept making him sneeze. He cursed the moth, cursed his poor planning, and doubly cursed the middle-aged human woman clutching him too tightly around the waist.

He told himself this was nothing more than a prank, a way to pay Balekin back for ill treatment, by stealing away one of his servants.

Cardan wasn’t saving her, and he would never do this again.

“You know I don’t like you,” he told Margaret with a scowl.

She didn’t reply. He wasn’t even sure she’d heard with the wind whipping around them. “You made Balekin a promise, a foolish promise, but a promise all the same. You deserve—” He couldn’t get out the rest of the sentence. You deserved everything you got. That would have been a lie, and while the Folk could trick and deceive, no untruth could pass their lips.

He glared out at the stars, and they twinkled back at him accusingly.

I am not weak, he wanted to shout, but he wasn’t sure he could say that aloud, either.



The sight of the human servants unnerved him. Their empty eyes and chapped lips. Nothing like the twins from the palace school.

He thought of one of those girls frowning over a book, pushing a lock of brown hair back over one oddly curved ear.

He thought of the way she looked at him, brows narrowed in suspicion.

Scornful, and alert. Awake. Alive.

He imagined her as a mindless servant and felt a rush of something he couldn’t quite untangle—horror, and also a sort of terrible relief. No ensorcelled human could look at him as she did.

The glow of the electronic lights shone from the shoreline, and the moth dipped toward them, sending a fresh gust of wing powder into Cardan’s face. He was drawn out of his thoughts by a choking fit.

“Onto the beach,” he managed between coughs.

Margaret’s grip tightened at his waist. It felt as though she was trying to hang on to one of his rib bones. His tail was squashed at an odd angle.

“Ouch,” he complained, and was, once again, ignored.

Finally, the moth set down on a black boulder half submerged, its sides scabbed over with white limpets. Prince Cardan slid off the creature’s back, landing in a tide pool and soaking his fancy boots.

“What happens to me now?” Margaret asked, looking down at him.

Cardan hadn’t been sure he’d successfully removed the glamour on her when he’d left Elfhame, but it seemed that he had. “How ought I know?” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the shore. “You do whatever it is mortals do in your land.”

She clambered off the moth’s back, wading onto the beach. Then she took a deep, shuddering breath. “So this isn’t a trick? I can really go?”

“Go,” Cardan said, making a shooing motion with his hands. “Indeed, I wish you would.”

“Why me?” she asked. She was neither the youngest nor the oldest. She was not the strongest and far from the most pitiable. They both knew the one thing that distinguished her, and it was nothing for either of them to like.

“Because I don’t want to look at you anymore,” Cardan said.

The woman studied him. Licked her chapped lips.

“I never wanted to...” She let the sentence fall away, doubtless seeing the expression on his face. It had the unsettling effect, however, of mimicking how the Folk spoke when they began a sentence and realized they couldn’t speak the lie.

It didn’t matter. He could finish it for her: I never wanted to take a strap to your back and flay it open. It was just that I was glamoured by your brother, because part of Balekin’s punishment is always humiliation, and what’s more humiliating than being beaten by a mortal? But of course, I do hate you. I hate all of you, who took me away from my own life. And some part of me delighted in hurting you.