As dawn breaks, I open the windows to my bedroom and let the last of the
cool night air flow in as I strip off my Court dress. I feel hot all over. My skin
feels too tight, and my heart won’t stop racing.
I’ve been to Court before many times. I’ve been witness to more awfulness
than wings being torn or my person insulted. Faeries make up for their inability
to lie with a panoply of deceptions and cruelties. Twisted words, pranks,
omissions, riddles, scandals, not to mention their revenges upon one another for
ancient, half-remembered slights. Storms are less fickle than they are, seas less
capricious.
Like, for example, as a redcap, Madoc needs bloodshed the way a mermaid
needs the salt spray of the sea. After every battle, he ritually dips his hood into
the blood of his enemies. I’ve seen the hood, kept under glass in the armory. The
fabric is stiff and stained a brown so deep it’s almost black, except for a few
smears of green.
Sometimes I go down and stare at it, trying to see my parents in the tide
lines of dried blood. I want to feel something, something besides a vague
queasiness. I want to feel more, but every time I look at it, I feel less.
I think about going to the armory now, but I don’t. I stand in front of my
window and imagine myself a fearless knight, imagine myself a witch who hid
her heart in her finger and then chopped her finger off.
“I’m so tired,” I say out loud. “So tired.”
I sit there for a long time, watching the rising sun gild the sky, listening to
the waves crash as the tide goes out, when a creature flies up to alight on the
edge of my window. At first it seems like an owl, but it’s got hob eyes. “Tired of
what, sweetmeat?” it asks me.
I sigh and answer honestly for once. “Of being powerless.”
The hob studies my face, then flies off into the night.
**the next day**
I sleep the day away and wake disoriented, battling my way out of the long,
embroidered curtains around my bed. Drool has dried along one of my cheeks.
I find bathwater waiting for me, but it has gone tepid. Servants must have
come and gone. I climb in anyway and splash my face. Living in Faerie, it’s
impossible not to notice that everyone else smells like verbena or crushed pine
needles, dried blood or milkweed. I smell like pit sweat and sour breath unless I
scrub myself clean.
When Tatterfell comes in to light the lamps, she finds me dressing for a
lecture, which begins in the late afternoons and stretches on into some evenings.
I wear gray leather boots and a tunic with Madoc’s crest—a dagger, a crescent
moon turned on its side so it rests like a cup, and a single drop of blood falling
from one corner embroidered in silk thread.
Downstairs, I find Taryn at the banquet table, alone, nursing a cup of nettle
tea and picking at a bannock. Today, she does not suggest anything will be fun.
Madoc insists—perhaps out of guilt or shame—that we be treated like the
children of Faerie. That we take the same lessons, that we be given whatever
they have. Changelings have been brought to the High Court before, but none of
them has been raised like Gentry.
He doesn’t understand how much that makes them loathe us.
Not that I am not grateful. I like the lessons. Answering the...