“Yes,” Oak said. Perhaps he should make some kind of speech, or do something that would make him seem more suitable to rule, but his mind had gone utterly blank. It must have been enough, though, because a moment later, he was asked to kneel. He felt the cold metal on his brow.
Then Jude’s soft lips were against his cheek. “You’ll be a great king when you’re ready,” she whispered.
Oak knew he owed his family a debt so large he would never be able to repay it. As cheers rose all around him, he closed his eyes and promised he would try.
Oak was a living, breathing mistake.
Seventeen years ago, the last High King, Eldred, took the beautiful, honey-tongued Liriope to his bed. Never known for fidelity, he had other lovers, including Oriana. The two might have become rivals, but instead became fast friends, who walked together through the royal gardens, dipped their feet into the Lake of Masks, and spun together through circle dances at revels.
Liriope had one son already, and few faeries are blessed twice with progeny, so she was surprised when she found herself with child again. And conflicted, because she’d had other lovers, too, and knew the father of the child was not Eldred, but his favorite son, Dain.
All his life, Prince Dain had planned to rule Elfhame after his father. He had prepared for it, creating what he called his Court of Shadows, a group of spies and assassins that answered only to him. And he had sought to hasten his ascension to the throne, poisoning his father by incremental degrees to steal his vitality until he abdicated. So, when Liriope fell pregnant, Dain wasn’t going to let his by-blow mess things up.
If Liriope bore Dain’s child, and his father discovered it, Eldred might choose one of his other children for an heir. Better both mother and child should die, and Dain’s future be assured.
Dain poisoned Liriope while Oak was still in the womb. Blusher mushrooms cause paralysis in small doses. In larger ones, the body slows its movements like a toy with a battery running down, slower and slower until it moves no more. Liriope died, and Oak would have died with her if Oriana hadn’t carved him from her friend’s body with a knife and her own soft hands.
That’s how Oak came into the world, covered in poison and blood. Slashed across the thigh by a too-deep cut from Oriana’s blade. Held desperately to her chest to smother his squalling.
No matter how loud he laughed or how merry he made, it would never drown that knowledge.
Oak knew what wanting the throne did to people.
He would never be like that.
After the ceremony, there was, of course, a banquet.
The royal family ate at a long table partially hidden from view beneath the branches of a weeping willow, not far from where the rest of the Court feasted. Oak sat at the right of Cardan, in the place of favor. His sister Jude, at the opposite head of the table, slumped in her chair. In front of family, she was totally different from the way she was in front of the Folk: a performer offstage, still wearing her costume.
Oriana was put at Jude’s right. Also a place of honor, although Oak wasn’t sure either of them was particularly happy to have to make conversation with the other.
Oak had an abundance of sisters—Jude, Taryn, Vivi—all of them no more related to him than Oriana or the exiled grand general, Madoc, who had raised them. But they were still his family. The only two people at the entire table who were kin to him by blood were Cardan and the small child squirming in the chair to his right: Leander, Taryn’s child with Locke, Oak’s half brother.
An assortment of candles covered the table, and flowers had been tied to the hanging branches of the weeping willow, along with gleaming pieces of quartz. They made a beautiful bower. He would have probably appreciated it more had it been in anyone else’s honor.
Oak realized he’d been so lost in his thoughts that he’d missed the beginning of a conversation.
“I didn’t enjoy being a snake, and yet I appear to be doomed to be reminded of it for all eternity,” Cardan was saying, black curls falling across his face. He held a three-pronged fork aloft, as though to emphasize his point. “The excess of songs hasn’t helped, nor has their longevity. It’s been what? Eight years? Nine? Truly, the celebratory air about the whole business has been excessive. You’d think I never did a more popular thing than sit in the dark on a throne and bite people who annoyed me. I could have always done that. I could do that now.”
“Bite people?” echoed Jude from the other end of the table.
Cardan grinned at her. “Yes, if that’s what they like.” He snapped his teeth at the air as though to demonstrate.
“No one is interested in that,” Jude said, shaking her head.
Taryn rolled her eyes at Heather, who smiled and took a sip of wine.
Cardan raised his brows. “I could try. A small bite. Just to see if someone would write a song about it.”
“So,” Oriana said, looking down the table at Oak. “You did very well up there. It made me imagine your coronation.”
Vivi snorted delicately.
“I don’t want to rule anything, no less Elfhame,” Oak reminded her.
Jude kept her face carefully neutral through what appeared to be sheer force of will. “No need to worry. I don’t plan on kicking the bucket anytime soon, and neither does Cardan.”
Oak turned to the High King, who shrugged elegantly. “Seems hard on pointy boots, kicking buckets.”
When Oak was Leander’s age, Oriana hadn’t wanted him to be king. But the years had made her more ambitious on his behalf. Perhaps she’d even begun to think that Jude had stolen his birthright instead of saved him from it.
He hoped not. It was one thing to flush out plots against the throne, but if he found out his mother was involved in one, he didn’t know what he’d do.
Don’t make me choose, he thought with a ferocity that unsettled him.
This was a problem that ought to solve itself. Jude was mortal. Mortals conceived children more easily than faeries. If she had a baby, it would supplant his claim to the throne.
Considering that, his gaze went to Leander.
Eight, and adorable, with his father’s fox eyes. The same color as Oak’s, amber with a lot of yellow in it. Hair dark as Taryn’s. Leander was almost the same age Oak had been when Madoc had schemed to get him the crown of Elfhame. When Oak looked at Leander, he saw the innocence that his sisters and mother must have been trying to protect. It gave him an ugly feeling, something that was anger and guilt and panic all mixed up together.
Leander noticed himself being studied and pulled on Oak’s sleeve. “You look bored. Want to play a game?” he asked, harnessing the guile of a child eager to press someone into the service of amusement.
“After dinner,” Oak told him with a glance at Oriana, who was already looking rather pained. “Your grandmother will be angry if we make a spectacle of ourselves at the table.”
“Cardan plays with me,” Leander said, obviously well prepared for this argument. “And he’s the High King. He showed me how to make a bird with two forks and a spoon. Then our birds fought until one fell apart.”
Cardan was spectacle incarnate and wouldn’t care if Oriana scolded him. Oak could only smile, though. He had often been a child at a table of adults and remembered how dull it had been. He would have loved to fight with silverware birds. “What other games have you played with the king?”
That launched a distractingly long catalog of misbehavior, from tossing mushrooms into cups of wine on the other ends of tables to folding napkins into hats to making awful faces at each other. “And he tells me funny stories about my father, Locke,” Leander concluded.