The Wicked King by Holly Black
You’re styling yourself as a spymaster,” the Roach says, looking over me and then my prisoner. “That ought to include being shrewd. Relying only on yourself is a good way to get got. Next time, take a member of the royal guard. Take one of us. Take a cloud of sprites or a drunken spriggan. Just take someone.”
“Watching my back is the perfect opportunity to stick a knife in it,” I remind him.
“Spoken like Madoc himself,” says the Roach with an irritated sniff of his long, twisted nose. He sits at the wooden table in the Court of Shadows, the lair of spies deep in the tunnels under the Palace of Elfhame. He is burning the tips of crossbow bolts in a flame, then liberally coating them with a sticky tar. “If you don’t trust us, just say so. We came to one arrangement, we can come to another.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I say, putting my head down on my hands for a long moment. I do trust them. I wouldn’t have spoken so freely if I didn’t, but I am letting my irritation show.
I am sitting across from the Roach, eating cheese and buttered bread with apples. It’s the first food I’ve had that day, and my belly is making hungry noises, another reminder of the way my body is unlike theirs. Faerie stomachs don’t gurgle.
Perhaps hunger is why I am being snappish. My cheek is stinging, and though I turned the situation on its head, it was a nearer thing than I’d like to admit. Plus, I still don’t know what Balekin wanted to tell Cardan.
The more exhausted I let myself get, the more I’ll slip up. Human bodies betray us. They get starved and sick and run down. I know it, and yet there is always so much more to do.
Beside us, Vulciber sits, tied to a chair and blindfolded.
“Do you want some cheese?” I ask him.
The guard grunts noncommittally but pulls against his bindings at the attention. He’s been awake for several minutes and grown visibly more worried the longer we haven’t spoken to him.
“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.”
I give a little laugh. “Don’t disparage. It’s not easy to keep the temperature so consistent,” I tell him.
“Nor so high,” he returns, watching me carefully with hazel eyes. I know there’s human in his lineage—I can see it in the shape of his ears and his sandy hair, unusual in Faerie. But he hasn’t told me his story, and here, in this place of secrets, I feel uncomfortable asking.
Although the Court of Shadows does not follow me, the four of us have made a vow together. We have promised to protect the person and office of the High King, to ensure the safety and prosperity of Elfhame for the hope of less bloodshed and more gold. So we’ve sworn. So they let me swear, even though my words don’t bind me the way theirs do, by magic. I am bound by honor and by their faith in my having some.
“The king himself has had audience with the Roach thrice in this last fortnight. He’s learning to pick pockets. If you’re not careful, he’ll make a better slyfoot than you.” The Ghost has been added to the High King’s personal guard, which allows him to keep Cardan safe but also to know his habits.
I sigh. It’s full dark, and I have much I ought to do before dawn. And yet it is hard to ignore this invitation, which pricks at my pride.
Especially now, with the new spies overhearing my answer. We recruited more members, displaced after the royal murders. Every prince and princess employed a few, and now we employ them all. The spriggans are as cagey as cats but excellent at ferreting out scandal. The sparrow boy is as green as I once was. I would like the expanding Court of Shadows to believe I don’t back down from a challenge.
“The real difficulty will come when someone tries to teach our king his way around a blade,” I say, thinking of Balekin’s frustrations on that front, of Cardan’s declaration that his one virtue was that he was no murderer.
Not a virtue I share.
“Oh?” says the Ghost. “Maybe you’ll have to teach it to him.”
“Come,” I say, getting up. “Let’s see if I can teach you.”
At that, the Ghost laughs outright. Madoc raised me to the sword, but until I joined the Court of Shadows, I knew only one way of fighting. The Ghost has studied longer and knows far more.
I follow him into the Milkwood, where black-thorned bees hum in their hives high in the white-barked trees. The root men are asleep. The sea laps at the rocky edges of the isle. The world feels hushed as we face each other. As tired as I am, my muscles remember better than I do.
I draw Nightfell. The Ghost comes at me fast, sword point diving toward my heart, and I knock it away, sweeping my blade down his side.
“Not so out of practice as I feared,” he says as we trade blows, each of us testing the other.
I do not tell him of the drills I do before the mirror, just as I do not tell him of all the other ways I attempt to correct my defects.
As the High King’s seneschal and the de facto ruler, I have much to study. Military commitments, messages from vassals, demands from every corner of Elfhame written in as many languages. Only a few months ago, I was still attending lessons, still doing homework for scholars to correct. The idea that I can untangle everything seems as impossible as spinning straw into gold, but each night I stay awake until the sun is high in the sky, trying my hardest to do just that.
That’s the problem with a puppet government: It’s not going to run itself.
Adrenaline may turn out not to be a replacement for experience.
Done with testing me on the basics, the Ghost begins the real fight. He dances over the grass lightly, so that there is barely a sound from his footfalls. He strikes and strikes again, posing a dizzying offensive. I parry desperately, my every thought given over to this, the fight. My worries fade into the background as my attention sharpens. Even my exhaustion blows off me like fluff from the back of a dandelion.
It’s glorious.
We trade blows, back and forth, advancing and retreating.
“Do you miss the mortal world?” he asks. I am relieved to discover his breath isn’t coming entirely easily.
“No,” I say. “I hardly knew it.”
He attacks again, his sword a silvery fish darting through the sea of the night.
Watch the blade, not the soldier, Madoc told me many times. Steel never deceives.
Our weapons slam together again and again as we circle each other. “You must remember something.”
I think of my mother’s name whispered through the bars in the Tower.
He feigns to one side, and, distracted, I realize too late what he’s doing. The flat of his blade hits my shoulder. He could have cut open my skin if he hadn’t turned his blow at the last moment, and as it is, it’s going to bruise.
“Nothing important,” I say, trying to ignore the pain. Two can play at the game of distraction. “Perhaps your memories are better than mine. What do you recall?”
He shrugs. “Like you, I was born there.” He stabs, and I turn the blade. “But things were different a hundred years ago, I suppose.”
I raise my eyebrows and parry another strike, dancing out of his range. “Were you a happy child?”
“I was magic. How could I fail to be?”
“Magic,” I say, and with a twist of my blade—a move of Madoc’s—I knock the sword out of the Ghost’s hand.
He blinks at me. Hazel eyes. Crooked mouth opening in astonishment. “You…”
“Got better?” I supply, pleased enough not to mind my aching shoulder. It feels like a win, but if we were really fighting, that shoulder wound would have probably made my final move impossible. Still, his surprise thrills me nearly as much as my victory.
“It’s good Oak will grow up as we didn’t,” I say after a moment. “Away from the Court. Away from all this.”
The last time I saw my little brother, he was sitting at the table in Vivi’s apartment, learning multiplication as though it were a riddle game. He was eating string cheese. He was laughing.
“When the king returns,” the Ghost says, quoting from a ballad. “Rose petals will scatter across his path, and his footfalls will bring an end to wrath. But how will your Oak rule if he has as few memories of Faerie as we have of the mortal world?”
The elation of the win ebbs. The Ghost gives me a small smile, as though to draw the sting of his words.
I go to a nearby stream and plunge my hands in, glad of the cold water. I cup it to my lips and gulp gratefully, tasting pine needles and silt.
I think of Oak, my little brother. An utterly normal faerie child, neither particularly called to cruelty nor free of it. Used to being coddled, used to being whisked away from distress by a fussing Oriana. Now growing used to sugary cereal and cartoons and a life without treachery. I consider the rush of pleasure that I felt at my temporary triumph over the Ghost, the thrill of being the power behind the throne, the worrying satisfaction I had at making Vulciber squirm. Is it better that Oak is without those impulses or impossible for him to ever rule unless he has them?
And now that I have found in myself a taste for power, will I be loath to give it up?
I wipe wet hands over my face, pushing back those thoughts.
There is only now. There is only tomorrow and tonight and now and soon and never.
We start back, walking together as the dawn turns the sky gold. In the distance I hear the bellow of a deer and what sounds like drums.
Halfway there, the Ghost tips his head in a half bow. “You beat me tonight. I won’t let that happen again.”
“If you say so,” I tell him with a grin.
By the time I get back to the palace, the sun is up and I want nothing more than sleep. But when I make it to my apartments, I find someone standing in front of the door.
My twin sister, Taryn.
“You’ve got a bruise coming up on your cheek,” she says, the first words she’s spoken to me in five months.
