Catching my hand, he slides the ring on. The exchange of rings is not a faerie ritual, and I am surprised by it.
“Your turn,” he says into the silence. He gives me a grin. “I’m trusting you to keep your word and release me from my bond of obedience after this.”
I smile back, which maybe makes up for the way that I froze after he finished speaking. I still can’t quite believe this is happening. My hand tightens on his as I speak. “I, Jude Duarte, take Cardan, High King of Elfhame, to be my husband. Let us be wed until we don’t want to be and the crown has passed from our hands.”
He kisses the scar of my palm.
I still have his brother’s blood under my fingernails.
I don’t have a ring for him.
Above us, the buds are blooming. The whole room smells of flowers.
Drawing back, I speak again, pushing away all thoughts of Balekin, of the future in which I am going to have to tell him what I’ve done. “Cardan, son of Eldred, High King of Elfhame, I forsake any command over you. You are free of your vow of obedience, for now and for always.”
He lets out a breath and stands a bit unsteadily. I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that I am… I can’t even think the words. Too much has happened tonight.
“You look as if you’ve barely rested.” I rise to be sure that if he falls over, I can grab for him before he hits the floor, although I am not so sure of myself, either.
“I will lie down,” he says, letting me guide him toward his enormous bed. Once there, he does not let go of my hand. “If you lie with me.”
With no reason to object, I do, the sense of unreality heightening. As I stretch out on the elaborately embroidered comforter, I realize that I have found something far more blasphemous than spreading out on the bed of the High King, far more blasphemous than sneaking Cardan’s signet onto my finger, or even sitting on the throne itself.
I have become the Queen of Faerie.
We trade kisses in the darkness, blurred by exhaustion. I don’t expect to sleep, but I do, my limbs tangled with his, the first restful sleep I’ve had since my return from the Undersea. When I am awakened, it is to a banging on the door.
Cardan is already up, playing with the vial of clay the Bomb brought, tossing it from hand to hand. Still dressed, his rumpled aspect gives him only an air of dissipation. I pull my robe more tightly around me. I am embarrassed to be so obviously sharing his bed.
“Your Majesty,” says the messenger—a knight, from the clipped, official sound of him. “Your brother is dead. There was a duel, from what we’ve been able to determine.”
“Ah,” Cardan says.
“And the Queen of the Undersea.” The knight’s voice trembles. “She’s here, demanding justice for her ambassador.”
“I just bet she is.” Cardan’s voice is dry, clipped. “Well, we can hardly keep her waiting. You. What’s your name?”
The knight hesitates. “Rannoch, Your Majesty.”
“Well, Sir Rannoch, I expect you to assemble a group of knights to escort me to the water. You will wait in the courtyard. Will you do that for me?”
“But the general…” he begins.
“Is not here right now,” Cardan finishes for him.
“I will do it,” the knight says. I hear the door close, and Cardan rounds the corner, expression haughty.
“Well, wife,” he says to me, a chill in his voice. “It seems you have kept at least one secret from your dowry. Come, we must dress for our first audience together.”
And so I am left to rush through the halls in my robe. Back in my rooms, I call for my sword and throw on my velvets, all the while wondering what it will mean to have this newfound status and what Cardan will do now that he is unchecked.
Orlagh waits for us in a choppy ocean, accompanied by her daughter and a pod of knights mounted on seals and sharks and all manner of sharp-toothed sea creatures. She, herself, sits on an orca and is dressed as though ready for battle. Her skin is covered in shiny silvery scales that seem both to be metallic and to have grown from her skin. A helmet of bone and teeth hides her hair.
Nicasia is beside her, on a shark. She has no tail today, her long legs covered in armor of shell and bone.
All along the edge of the beach are clumps of kelp, washed up as though from a storm. I think I see other things out in the water. The back of a large creature swimming just below the waves. The hair of drowned mortals, blowing like sea grass. The Undersea’s forces are larger than they seem at first glance.
“Where is my ambassador?” Orlagh demands. “Where is your brother?”
Cardan is seated on his gray steed, in black clothes and a cloak of scarlet. Beside him are two dozen mounted knights and both Mikkel and Nihuar. On the ride over, they tried to determine what Cardan had planned, but he has kept his own counsel from them and, more troublingly, from me. Since hearing of the death of Balekin, he’s said little and avoided looking in my direction. My stomach churns with anxiety.