The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2) - Holly Black Page 0,25

glows, a lamp the size of a small table.

The Bomb gives me a quick grin. Her white hair is pulled back into braids knotted with a few shimmering silver beads.

Someone you trust has already betrayed you.

I try to put Nicasia’s words out of my head. After all, that could mean anything. It’s typical faerie bullshit, ominous but applicable so broadly that it could be the clue to a trap about to be sprung on me or a reference to something that happened when we were all taking lessons together. Maybe she is warning me that a spy is in my confidence or maybe she’s alluding to Taryn’s having it off with Locke.

And yet I cannot stop thinking about it.

“So the assassin got away through here?” the Bomb says. “The Ghost says you chased after them.”

I shake my head. “There was no assassin. It was a romantic misunderstanding.”

Her eyebrows go up.

“The High King is very bad at romance,” I say.

“I guess so,” she says. “So you want to toss the sitting room, and I’ll take the bedroom?”

“Sure,” I agree, heading toward it.

The secret passageway is beside a fireplace carved like the grinning mouth of a goblin. The bookshelf is still shifted to one side, revealing spiraling steps up into the walls. I close it.

“You really think you can get Cardan to move in here?” the Bomb calls from the other room. “It’s such a waste to have all this glorious space go unused.”

I lean down to start pulling books off the shelves, opening them and shaking them a bit to see if there’s anything inside.

A few yellowing and disintegrating pieces of paper fall out, along with a feather and a carved-bone letter opener. Someone hollowed one of the books out, but nothing rests inside the compartment. Still another tome has been eaten away by insects. I throw that one out.

“The last room Cardan occupied caught fire,” I call back to the Bomb. “Let me rephrase. It caught fire because he lit it on fire.”

She laughs. “It would take him days to burn all this.”

I look back at the books and am not so sure. They are dry enough to burst into flames just by my looking at them too long. With a sigh, I stack them and move on to the cushions, to pulling back the rugs. Underneath, I find only dust.

I dump out all the drawers onto the massive table-size desk: the metal nibs of quill pens, stones carved with faces, three signet rings, a long tooth of a creature I cannot identify, and three vials with the liquid inside dried black and solid.

In another drawer, I find jewels. A collar of black jet, a beaded bracelet with a clasp, heavy golden rings.

In the last I find quartz crystals, cut into smooth, polished globes and spears. When I lift one to the light, something moves inside it.

“Bomb?” I call, my voice a little high.

She comes into the room, carrying a jeweled coat so heavily encrusted that I am surprised anyone was willing to stand in it. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I hold up a crystal ball.

She peers into it. “Look, there’s Dain.”

I take it back and look inside. A young Prince Dain sits on the back of a horse, holding a bow in one hand and apples in the other. Elowyn sits on a pony to one side of him, and Rhyia to the other. He throws three apples in the air, and all of them draw their bows and shoot.

“Did that happen?” I ask.

“Probably,” she says. “Someone must have enchanted these orbs for Eldred.”

I think of Grimsen’s legendary swords, of the golden acorn that disgorged Liriope’s last words, of Mother Marrow’s cloth that could turn even the sharpest blade, and all the mad magic that High Kings are given. These were common enough to be stuffed away into a drawer.

I pull out each one to see what’s inside. I see Balekin as a newborn child, the thorns already growing out of his skin. He squalls in the arms of a mortal midwife, her gaze glazed with glamour.

“Look into this one,” the Bomb says with a strange expression.

It’s Cardan as a very small child. He is dressed in a shirt that’s too large for him. It hangs down like a gown. He is barefoot, his feet and shirt streaked with mud, but he wears dangling hoops in his ears, as though an adult gave him their earrings. A horned faerie woman stands nearby, and when