Flopping down on my bed an hour later, I decide that I am not going to even take off the blue silk dress I am wearing. My hair is still disarranged, although I tried to improve it with a few pretty pins. I should take those out, at least, I tell myself, but I can’t seem to make any movement toward doing so.
My door opens, and Taryn comes in, hopping up onto my bed.
“Okay,” she says, poking me in the side. “What did Locke want? He said he had to talk to you.”
“He’s nice,” I say, rolling over and folding my arms behind my head, staring up at the folds of fabric gathered above me. “Not totally Cardan’s puppet like the rest of them.”
Taryn has an odd expression on her face, like she wants to contradict me but is holding herself back. “Whatever. Spill.”
“About Locke?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes. “About what happened with him and his friends.”
“They’re never going to respect me if I don’t fight back,” I tell her.
She sighs. “They’re never going to respect you, period.”
I think of crawling across the grass, my knees dirty, the savor of the fruit in my mouth. Even now I can taste the echo of it, the emptiness it would fill, the giddy, delirious joy it promises.
Taryn goes on. “You came home practically naked yesterday, smeared with faerie fruit. Isn’t that bad enough? Don’t you care?” Taryn has pulled her whole body back against one of the posts of my bed.
“I am tired of caring,” I say. “Why should I?”
“Because they could kill you!”
“They better,” I say to her. “Because anything less than that isn’t going to work.”
“Do you have a plan for stopping them?” she asks. “You said you were going to defy Cardan by being your awesome self and if he tried to take you down, you’d take him down with you. How are you going to manage that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I admit.
She throws up her hands in frustration.
“No, look,” I say. “Every day that I don’t beg Cardan for forgiveness over a feud he started is a day I win. He can humiliate me, but every time he does and I don’t back down, he makes himself less powerful. After all, he’s throwing everything he’s got at someone as weak as I am and it’s not working. He’s going to take himself down.”
She sighs and comes over to me, laying her head against my chest, putting her arms around me. Against my shoulder she whispers, “He’s flint, you’re tinder.”
I hug her closer and make no promises.