Then Prince Cardan kicked dirt on our food. It coated a piece of buttered bread in your hand. You looked up at him and you didn’t manage to smother your anger before he saw it.
Mostly, we are agreed that the youngest prince is trouble we ought to avoid. Royal, terrible, and vicious. And mostly we were beneath his notice. But not that day.
“Something the matter?” Nicasia asked, draping her arm over Cardan’s shoulder. “Dirt. It’s what you came from, mortal. It’s what you’ll return to soon enough. Take a big bite.”
I wondered at Cardan, allowing her so close to him after her betrayal. And I wondered at them both, frowning down at you, Jude, when it was me they ought to be angry with. I kept expecting them to turn, kept expecting them to know something of what I’d been doing with Locke. I half-expected them to know all of it and to lay it out in hideous, humiliating detail.
But you stood in front of Nicasia and Cardan as though you were my shield. “Make me,” you snarled. I simultaneously wanted to make you shut up before things got worse and throw my arms around you in gratitude.
“I could, you know,” Prince Cardan said, something awful kindling behind his eyes. The way he looked at you made my stomach churn.
Nicasia pulled the pin from your hair. “You’ll never be our equal,” she told you, as though we needed reminding.
“Let’s leave them to their misery,” Locke urged Cardan, but it didn’t help.
You’d gone automatically into a fighting stance. I wasn’t sure if they knew it, but I did and I was terrified of what might happen next. I was pretty sure hitting Cardan was treasonous, even if he hit you first.
“Jude’s sorry,” I told them, which probably annoyed you, but that’s one thing I don’t regret. “We’re both really sorry.”
Cardan looked at me with those unsettlingly black eyes. “She can show us how sorry she is. Tell her she doesn’t belong in the Summer Tournament.”
“Afraid I’ll win?” you asked, that old urge not to back down from a dare kicking in hard.
“It’s not for mortals,” he returned, voice cold, and when he looked at me, it seemed he was talking about more than the tournament. It’s not for mortals. It’s not for you. Locke is not for you. “Withdraw, or wish that you had.”
“I’ll talk to her about it,” I put in quickly. “It’s nothing, just a game.”
Nicasia gave me the sort of smile usually reserved for a pet obediently doing a trick. For a moment I wondered if they really had only been being idly awful, if they knew nothing. But Cardan’s stare was heavy-lidded, lascivious. And when Nicasia spoke again, her words seemed to have more than one meaning. “It’s all just a game.”
That night, I resolved that if Locke came to my window, I would send him away. He should have defended me. He should have done something.
But as dawn threatened the horizon with no sign of him, I lost my resolve. If he came, I swore I would be content with that alone. I would be selfishly glad he was with me, even if it was only in secret. If he came, if only he’d come.
He didn’t.
Faeries despise humans as liars, but there are different kinds of lying. Since you and I first came to Faerie, Jude, we’ve lied to each other plenty. We pretended to be fine, pretended the possibility of being fine into existence. And when pretending seemed like it might be too hard, we just didn’t ask each other the questions that would require it. We smiled and forced laughter and rolled our eyes at the Folk, as though we weren’t afraid, when we were both scared all the time.
And if there were hairline cracks in all that pretending, we pretended those away, too.