Page 11 of How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

Across the room, he saw Locke sit down beside Nicasia on one of the low velvet couches, close enough that his thigh pressed against hers, and then turned to whisper in her ear. She glanced over, a guilty look flashing across her features when she saw Cardan notice.

But it was easy to let such a little thing slip from his thoughts as the evening wore on. Revelry is inherently slippery; part of its munificence is an easing of boundaries. And there were plenty of entertainments to distract him.

A treewoman got up on a table to dance. Her branches brushed against the chandeliers, her knothole eyes were closed, and her bark-covered fingers waved in the air. She took swigs from a bottle.

“It’s too bad Balekin didn’t invite the Duarte girls,” said Valerian with a curled lip, his gaze on an ensorcelled human taking a silver platter of grapes and split-open pomegranates to the table. “I would relish the chance to demonstrate their true place in Elfhame.”

“Oh no, I rather like them,” Locke said. “Especially the one. Or is it the other?”

“The Grand General would mount your head on a wall,” Nicasia informed him, patting his cheek.

“A very fine head,” he informed her with a wicked grin. “Suitable for mounting.”

Nicasia cut her gaze toward Cardan and said no more. Her expression was a careful blank. He marked that, when he wouldn’t have marked their words.

Cardan tipped back his goblet and drank it to the dregs, ignoring the sourness in his stomach. The evening quickly became a blur.

He recalled the treewoman crashing through a table. Sap leaked out of her open mouth as Valerian studied her with an odd, cruel expression.

A hob played a lute strung with another reveler’s hair.

Sprites swarmed around a spilled jug of mead.

Cardan stood in the gardens, staring up at the stars.

Then he woke on the rug. Looking around the room, he didn’t spot anyone he knew. He stumbled up the stairs and into his room.

There he found Locke and Nicasia curled up on the rug before the dying fire. They were wrapped in the tapestry blanket from his bed. Her black silk gown had been discarded in a shining puddle, the cage she’d worn over it now tucked half underneath the bed. Locke’s white coat was spread across the wooden planks of the floor.

Nicasia’s head rested on Locke’s bare chest. Fox-red hair stuck to his cheek with sweat.

As Cardan stared at them, a rush of blood heated his cheeks, and the pounding in his head grew so loud that it momentarily drowned out thought. He looked at their tangled bodies, at the glowing embers in the grate, at the half-finished work for the palace tutors that was still on his desk, sloppy blotches of ink dotting the paper.

Cardan ought to have been the boy with the heart of stone in Aslog’s story, but somehow he had let his heart turn to glass. He could feel the shattered shards of it lodged in his lungs, making his every breath painful.

Cardan had trusted Nicasia not to hurt him, which was ridiculous, since he well knew that everyone hurts one another and that the people you loved hurt you the most grievously. Since he was well aware that they both took delight in hurting everyone else that they could, how could he have thought himself safe?

He knew he had to wake them, sneer, and behave as though it didn’t matter. And since his only true talent so far had ever been in awfulness, he trusted that he could manage it.

Cardan nudged Locke with a booted foot. It wasn’t quite a kick, but it wasn’t far from one, either. “Time to get up.”

Locke’s eyelashes fluttered. He groaned, then stretched. Cardan could see the calculation flash in his eyes, along with something that might have been fear. “Your brother throws quite the revel,” he said with a deliberately casual yawn. “We lost track of you. I thought you might have gone off with Valerian and the treewoman.”

“And why would you suppose that?” Cardan asked.

“It seemed you were attempting to outdo each other inexcess.” Locke gestured expansively, a false smile on his face. One of Locke’s finest qualities was his ability to recast all their lowliest exploits as worthy of a ballad, told and retold until Cardan could almost believe that staggeringly better or thrillingly worse version of events. He could no more lie than any of the Folk, but stories were the closest thing to lies the Folk could tell.

And perhaps Locke hoped to make a story of this moment. Something they could laugh over. Perhaps Cardan ought to let him.

But then Nicasia opened her eyes. And at the sight of Cardan, she sucked in her breath.

Tell me it means nothing, that it was just a bit of fun, he thought.Tell me and everything will be as it was before. Tell me and I will pretend along with you.

But she was silent.

“I would have my room,” Cardan said, narrowing his eyes and assuming his most superior pose. “Perhaps you two might take whatever this is elsewhere.”

Part of him thought she would laugh, having known him before he perfected his sneer, but she shrank under his gaze.

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