“So I am to have nothing today?” she wants to know.
“Have we not fed you and clothed you in our own garments? Moreover, you may take a turn around the gardens before you return to the Tower. Drink in the scents of the flowers and feel the grass beneath your feet,” I tell her. “Let me make myself clear: I do not beg for comforting reminiscences or love stories. If you have something better to give me, then perhaps I will find something for you. But do not think I need you.”
She pouts. “Very well. There was a hag who came across Madoc’s land when your mother was pregnant with Vivienne. The hag was given to prophecy and divined futures in eggshells. And do you know what the hag said? That Eva’s child was destined to be a greater weapon than Justin could ever forge.”
“Vivi?” I demand.
“Her child,” says Asha. “Although she must have thought of the one in her belly right then. Perhaps that’s why she left. To protect the child from fate. But no one can escape fate.”
I am silent, my mouth a grim line. Cardan’s mother takes another drink of wine.
I will not let any of what I feel show on my face. “Still not enough,” I say, taking a breath that I hope isn’t too quavering and focusing on passing the information I hope will find its way to Balekin. “If you think of something better, you can send me a message. Our spies monitor notes going in and out of the Tower of Forgetting—usually at the point they’re passed to the palace. Whatever you send, no matter to whom it is addressed, if it leaves the hand of the guard, we will see it. It will be easy to let me know if your memory comes up with anything of more value.”
With that, I get up and step out of the room. The Roach follows me into the hall and puts a hand on my arm.
For a long moment, I stand there wordlessly trying to marshal my thoughts.
He shakes his head. “I asked her some questions on the way here. It sounds as though she was entranced by palace life, besotted with the High King’s regard, glorying in the dancing and the singing and the wine. Cardan was left to be suckled by a little black cat whose kittens came stillborn.”
“He survived on cat milk?” I exclaim. The Roach gives me a look, as though I’ve missed the point of his story entirely.
“After she was sent to the Tower, Cardan was sent to Balekin,” he says.
I think again of the globe I held in Eldred’s study, of Cardan dressed in rags, looking to the woman in my chamber for approval, which came only when he was awful. An abandoned prince, weaned on cat milk and cruelty, left to roam the palace like a little ghost. I think of myself, huddling in a tower of Hollow Hall, watching Balekin enchant a mortal into beating his younger brother for poor swordsmanship.
“Take her back to the Tower,” I tell the Roach.
He raises his eyebrows. “You don’t want to hear more about your parents?”
“She gets too much satisfaction in the telling. I’ll have the information from her without so many bargains.” Besides, I have planted a more important seed. Now I have only to see if it grows.
He gives me a half smile. “You like it, don’t you? Playing games with us? Pulling our strings and seeing how we dance?”
“The Folk, you mean?”
“I imagine you’d like it as well with mortals, but we’re what you’re practiced in.” He doesn’t sound disapproving, but it still feels like being skewered on a pin. “And perhaps some of us offer a particular savor.”
He looks down his curved goblin nose at me until I answer. “Is that meant to be a compliment?”
At that, his smile blooms. “It’s no insult.”
Gowns arrive the next day, boxes of them, along with coats and cunning little jackets, velvet pants and tall boots. They all look as though they belong to someone ferocious, someone both better and worse than me.
I dress myself, and before I am done, Tatterfell comes in. She insists on sweeping back my hair and catching it up in a new comb, one carved in the shape of a toad with a single cymophane gem for an eye.
I look at myself in a coat of black velvet tipped with silver and think of the care with which Taryn chose the piece. I want to think about that and nothing else.
Once, she said that she hated me a little for being witness to her humiliation with the Gentry. I wonder if that’s why I have such a hard time forgetting about what happened with Locke, because she saw it, and whenever I see her, I remember all over again how it felt to be made a fool.
When I look at my new clothes, though, I think of all the good things that come from someone knowing you well enough to understand your hopes and fears. I may not have told Taryn all the awful things I’ve done and the terrible skills I’ve acquired, but she’s dressed me as though I had.