The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2) - Holly Black Page 0,106
more reason not to allow myself that luxury. You made me the High King, Jude. Let me be the High King.”
I fold my arms protectively over my chest. “And what will I be? Your servant?” I hate that he’s making sense, because there is no way I can give him what he’s asking. I can’t step aside, not with Madoc out there, not with so many threats. And yet I cannot help recalling what the Bomb said about Cardan’s not knowing how to invoke his connection to the land. Or what the Roach said, about Cardan’s thinking of himself as a spy pretending to be a monarch.
“Marry me,” he says. “Become the Queen of Elfhame.”
I feel a kind of cold shock come over me, as though someone has told a particularly cruel joke, with me its target. As though someone looked into my heart and saw the most ridiculous, most childish desire there and used it against me. “But you can’t.”
“I can,” he says. “Kings and queens don’t often marry for something other than a political alliance, true, but consider this a version of that. And were you queen, you wouldn’t need my obedience. You could issue all your own orders. And I would be free.”
I can’t help thinking of how mere months ago I fought for a place in the Court, hoping desperately for knighthood and didn’t even get that.
The irony that it’s Cardan, who insisted that I didn’t belong in Faerie at all, offering me this makes it all the more shocking.
He goes on. “Moreover, since you plan on forcing me into abdicating for your brother, it’s not as though we’d be married forever. Marriages between kings and queens must last as long as they rule, but in our case, that’s not so long. You could have everything you want at the price of merely releasing me from my vow of obedience.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I fear it will stutter to a stop.
“You’re serious?” I manage.
“Of course I am. In earnest as well.”
I look for the trick, because this must be one of those faerie bargains that sound like one thing but turn out to be something very different. “So let me guess, you want me to release you from your vow for your promise to marry me? But then the marriage will take place in the month of never when the moon rises in the west and the tides flow backward.”
He shakes his head, laughing. “If you agree, I will marry you tonight,” he says. “Now, even. Right here. We exchange vows, and it is done. This is no mortal marriage, to require being presided over and witnessed. I cannot lie. I cannot deny you.”
“It’s not long until your vow is up,” I say, because the idea of taking what he’s offering—the idea that I could not only be part of the Court, but the head of it—is so tempting that it’s hard to believe it might not be a trap. “Surely the idea of a few more months tied to me can’t be such a hardship that you’d like to tie yourself to me for years.”
“As I said before, a lot can happen in a year and a day. Much has happened in half that time.”
We sit silently for a moment as I try to think. For the last seven months, the question of what would happen after a year and a day has haunted me. This is a solution, but it doesn’t feel at all practical. It’s the stuff of absurd daydream, imagined while dozing in a mossy glen, too embarrassing to even confess to my sisters.
Mortal girls do not become queens of Faerieland.
I imagine what it would be like to have my own crown, my own power. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be afraid to love him. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be scared of all the things I’ve been scared of my whole life, of being diminished and weak and lesser. Maybe I would become a little bit magic.
“Yes,” I say, but my voice fails me. It comes out all breath. “Yes.”
He leans forward in the chair, eyebrows raised, but he doesn’t wear his usual arrogant mien. I cannot read his expression. “To what are you agreeing?”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll do it. I’ll marry you.”
He gives me a wicked grin. “I had no idea it would be such a sacrifice.”
Frustrated, I flop over on the couch. “That’s not what I mean.”