If they don’t need the Blood Crown, then they don’t need Oak. They don’t need to foster him, don’t need him to place the crown on Balekin’s head, don’t need him alive at all.
Orlagh gives him a look that’s a reprimand. She waits for Nicasia’s answer.
“He’s a smith,” Nicasia says. “He cannot forge beneath the sea, so he will always favor the land. But with the death of the Alderking, he craves glory. He wishes to have a High King who will give him that.”
This is their plan, I tell myself to try to stifle the panic I feel. I know their plan. If I can escape, then I can stop it.
A knife in Grimsen’s back before he finishes the crown. I sometimes doubt my effectiveness as a seneschal, but never as a killer.
“Little minnow,” Orlagh says, her attention returning to me. “Tell me what Cardan promised you to help him.”
“But she—” Nicasia begins, but Orlagh’s look silences her.
“Daughter,” says the Queen of the Undersea, “you do not see what is right beneath your nose. Cardan got a throne from this girl. Stop searching for what she has over him—and start looking for what he had over her.”
Nicasia turns a petulant look on me. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve said that Cardan didn’t much care for her. And yet she made him High King. Consider that perhaps he realized she’d be useful and exploited that usefulness, through kisses and flattery, much as you’ve cultivated the little smith.”
Nicasia looks puzzled, as though all her ideas of the world are upset. Perhaps she didn’t think of Cardan as someone capable of scheming. Still, I can see something about this pleases her. If Cardan has seduced me to his side, then she need no longer worry that he cares for me. Instead, she need only worry over my usefulness.
“What did he promise you for getting him the crown of Elfhame?” Orlagh asks me with exquisite gentleness.
“I always wanted a place in Faerie. He told me he would make me his seneschal and put me at his right hand, like Val Moren in Eldred’s Court. He’d make sure I was respected and even feared.” It’s a lie, of course. He never promised me anything, and Dain promised far less than that. But, oh, if someone had—if Madoc had—it would have been very hard to turn down.
“You’re telling me that you betrayed your father and put that fool on the throne in exchange for a job?” Balekin demands incredulously.
“Being the High King of Elfhame is also a job,” I return. “And look at what has been sacrificed to get that.” For a moment, I pause, wondering if I have spoken too harshly for them to believe I am still glamoured, but Orlagh only smiles.
“True, my dear,” she says after a pause. “And aren’t we putting our faith in Grimsen, even as we offer him a not particularly dissimilar reward.”
Balekin looks unhappy, but he doesn’t dispute it. Far easier to believe that Cardan was the mastermind than a mortal girl.
I manage to eat three more slices of fish and drink some kind of toasted rice and seaweed tea through a clever straw that leaves it unmixed with sea water before I am led to a sea cave. Nicasia accompanies the merfolk guards taking me there.
This is no bedchamber, but a cage. Once I am pushed through, however, I discover that while I am still soaking wet, my surroundings are dry and filled with air I abruptly can’t breathe.
I choke, my body spasming. And up from my lungs comes all that water, along with a few pieces of partially digested fish.
Nicasia laughs.
Then, glamour heavy in her voice, she speaks. “Isn’t this a beautiful room?”
What I see is only a rough stone floor, no furniture, no nothing.
Her voice is dreamy. “You’ll love the four-poster bed, wrapped in coverlets. And the cunning little side tables and your own pot of tea, still steaming. It will be perfectly warm and delicious whenever you try it.”
She sets down a glass of sea water on the floor. I guess that’s the tea. If I drink it, as she suggests, my body will become quickly dehydrated. Mortals can go for a few days without fresh water, but since I was breathing sea water, I may already be in trouble.
“You know,” she says as I pretend to admire the room, turning around in it in awe, feeling foolish, “nothing I could do to you will be as terrible as what you’ll do to yourself.”
I turn to her, frowning in the pretense of puzzlement.
“No matter,” she says, and leaves me to spending the rest of the evening tossing and turning on the hard floor, trying to seem as though I feel it is the height of comfort.
I wake to terrible cramps and dizziness. Cold sweat beads on my brow, and my limbs shiver uncontrollably.
For the better part of a year, I have been poisoning my body every day. My blood is used to the doses, far higher than they were when I began. Addicted to them, so that now it craves what it once reviled. Now I can’t do without the poison.