“You’re littering in a magical lake,” she tells me.
“It’ll rot,” I say. “And so will we. They’re right. We are the Circle of Worms. We’re mortal. We don’t have forever to wait for them to let us do the things we want. I don’t care if they don’t like my being in the tournament. Once I become a knight, I’ll be beyond their reach.”
“Do you think Madoc’s going to allow that?” Taryn asks, giving up on the bush after the brambles make her fingers bleed. “Answering to someone other than him?”
“What else has he been training us for?” I ask. Wordlessly, we fall into step together, making our way home.
“Not me.” She shakes her head. “I am going to fall in love.”
I am surprised into laughter. “So you’ve just decided? I didn’t think it worked like that. I thought love was supposed to happen when you least expected it, like a sap to the skull.”
“Well, I have decided,” she says. I consider mentioning her last ill-fated decision—the one about having fun at the revel—but that will just annoy her. Instead, I try to imagine someone she might fall in love with. Maybe it will be a merrow, and he will give her the gift of breathing underwater and a crown of pearls and take her to his bed under the sea.
Actually, that sounds amazing. Maybe I am making all the wrong choices.
“How much do you like swimming?” I ask her.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
She, suspecting some sort of teasing, elbows me in the side.
We head through the Crooked Forest, with its bent trunks, since the Milkwood is dangerous at night. We have to stop to let some root men pass, for fear they might step on us if we didn’t keep out of their way. Moss covers their shoulders and crawls up their bark cheeks. Wind whistles through their ribs.
They make a beautiful and solemn procession.
“If you’re so sure Madoc is going to give you permission, why haven’t you asked him yet?” Taryn whispers. “The tournament is only three days away.”
Anyone can fight in the Summer Tournament, but if I want to be a knight, I must declare my candidacy by wearing a green sash across my chest. And if Madoc will not allow me that, then no amount of skill will help me. I will not be a candidate, and I will not be chosen.
I am glad the root men give me an excuse not to answer, because, of course, she’s right. I haven’t asked Madoc because I am afraid of what he will say.
When we get home, pushing open the enormous wooden door with its looping ironwork, someone is shouting upstairs, as though in distress. I run toward the sound, heart in my mouth, only to find Vivi in her room, chasing a cloud of sprites. They streak past me into the hall in a blast of gossamer, and she slams the book she was swinging at them into the door casing.
“Look!” Vivi yells at me, pointing toward her closet. “Look what they did.”
The doors are open, and I see a sprawl of things stolen from the human world, matchbooks, newspapers, empty bottles, novels, and Polaroids. The sprites had turned the matchbooks into beds and tables, shredded all the paper, and ripped out the centers of the books to nest inside. It was a full-on sprite infestation.
But I am more baffled by the quantity of things Vivi has and how many of them don’t seem to have any value. It’s just junk. Mortal junk.
“What is all that?” Taryn asks, coming into the room. She bends down and extracts a strip of pictures, only gently chewed by sprites. The pictures are taken one right after the other, the kind you have to sit in a booth for. Vivi is in the photos, her arm draped over the shoulders of a grinning, pink-haired mortal girl.
Maybe Taryn isn’t the only one who has decided to fall in love.
At dinner, we sit at a massive table carved along all four sides with images of piping fauns and dancing imps. Fat wax pillar candles burn at the center, beside a carved stone vase full of wood sorrel. Servants bring us silver plates piled with food. We eat fresh broad beans, venison with scattered pomegranate seeds, grilled brown trout with butter, a salad of bitter herbs, and, for after, raisin cakes smothered in apple syrup. Madoc and Oriana drink canary wine; we children mix ours with water.
Next to my plate and Taryn’s is a bowl of salt.
Vivi pokes at her venison and then licks blood from her knife.
Oak grins across the table and starts to mimic Vivi, but Oriana snatches the cutlery from his grasp before he can slice his tongue open. Oak giggles and picks up his meat with his fingers, tearing at it with sharp teeth.
“You should know that the king will soon abdicate his throne in favor of one of his children,” Madoc says, looking at all of us. “It is likely that he will choose Prince Dain.”
It doesn’t matter that Dain is third-born. The High Ruler chooses their successor—that’s how the stability of Elfhame is ensured. The first High Queen, Mab, had her smith forge a crown. Lore has it that the blacksmith was a creature called Grimsen, who could shape anything from metal—birds that trill and necklaces that slither over throats, twin swords called Heartseeker and Heartsworn that never missed a strike. Queen Mab’s crown was magically and wondrously wrought so that it passes only from one blood relation to another, in an unbroken line. With the crown passes the oaths of all those sworn to it. Although her subjects gather at each new coronation to renew their fealty, authority still rests in the crown.
“Why’s he abdicating?” Taryn asks.
Vivi’s smirk has turned nasty. “His children got impatient with him for remaining alive.”
A wash of rage passes over Madoc’s face. Taryn and I don’t dare bait him for fear that his patience with us stretches only so far, but Vivi is expert at it. When he answers her, I can see the effort he’s making to bite his tongue. “Few kings of Faerie have ruled so well for so long as Eldred. Now he goes to seek the Land of Promise.”
As far as I can tell, the Land of Promise is their euphemism for death, although they do not admit it. They say it is the place that the Folk came from and to which they will eventually return.
“Are you saying he’s leaving the throne because he’s old?” I ask, wondering if I’m being impolite. There are hobs born with lined faces like tiny, hairless cats and smooth-limbed nixies whose true age shows only in their ancient eyes. I didn’t think time mattered to them.
Oriana doesn’t look happy, but she isn’t actively shushing me, either, so maybe it’s not that rude. Or maybe she doesn’t expect any better than bad manners out of me.
“We may not die from age, but we grow weary with it,” Madoc says with a heavy sigh. “I have made war in Eldred’s name. I have broken Courts that denied him fealty. I have even led skirmishes against the Queen of the Undersea. But Eldred has lost his taste for bloodshed. He allows those under his banners to rebel in small and large ways even as other Courts refuse to submit to us. It’s time to ride to battle. It’s time for a new monarch, a hungry one.”