The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2) - Holly Black Page 0,81

one. Sometimes he slept stretched out on the ground, head pillowed on a clump of weeds and his own arms. Sometimes he was wounded and fought on anyway. He didn’t die.

I am not going to die, either.

I keep telling myself that, but I am not sure I believe it.

For days, no one comes.

I give up and drink the sea water.

Sometimes I think about Cardan while I am lying there. I think about what it must have been like to grow up as an honored member of the royal family, powerful and unloved. Fed on cat milk and neglect. To be arbitrarily beaten by the brother you most resembled and who most seemed to care for you.

Imagine all those courtiers bowing to you, allowing you to hiss and slap at them. But no matter how many of them you humiliated or hurt, you would always know someone had found them worthy of love, when no one had ever found you worthy.

Despite growing up among the Folk, I do not always understand the way they think or feel. They are more like mortals than they like to believe, but the moment I allow myself to forget they’re not human, they will do something to remind me. For that reason alone, I would be stupid to think I knew Cardan’s heart from his story. But I wonder at it.

I wonder what would have happened if I told him that he wasn’t out of my system.

They come for me eventually. They allow me a little water, a little food. By then, I am too weak to worry about pretending to be glamoured.

I tell them the details I remember about Madoc’s strategy room and what he thinks about Orlagh’s intentions. I go over the murder of my parents in visceral detail. I describe a birthday, pledge my loyalty, explain how I lost my finger and how I lied about it.

I even lie to them, at their command.

And then I have to pretend to forget when they tell me to forget. I have to pretend to feel full when they have told me I feasted and to be drunk on imaginary wine when all I’ve had is a goblet of water.

I have to allow them to slap me.

I can’t cry.

Sometimes, when lying on the cold stone floor, I wonder if there’s a limit to what I will let them do, if there is something that would make me fight back, even if it dooms me.

If there is, that makes me a fool.

But maybe if there isn’t, that makes me a monster.

“Mortal girl,” Balekin says one afternoon when we’re alone in the watery chambers of the palace. He does not like using my name, perhaps because he doesn’t like having to recall it, finding me as disposable as all the human girls who have come through Hollow Hall.

I am weak with dehydration. They regularly forget to give me fresh water and food, enchanting me illusory sustenance when I beg for it. I am having difficulty concentrating on anything.

Despite the fact that Balekin and I are alone in a coral chamber, with guards swimming patrols at intervals that I count automatically, I do not even try to fight and flee. I have no weapon and little strength. Even were I able to kill Balekin, I am not a strong enough swimmer to make it to the surface before they caught me.

My plan has narrowed to endurance, to surviving hour by hour, sunless day by day.

Perhaps I cannot be glamoured, but that doesn’t mean I cannot be broken.

Nicasia has said that her mother has many palaces in the Undersea and that this, built into the rock of Insweal and along the seafloor beneath it, is only one of them. But for me, it is a constant torment to be so close to home and yet leagues beneath it.

Cages hang in the water all through the palace, some of them empty, but many of them containing mortals with graying skin, mortals who seem as though they ought to be dead but occasionally move in ways that suggest they are not. The drowned ones, the guards sometimes call them, and more than anything, that’s what I fear becoming. I remember thinking I’d spotted the girl I pulled out of Balekin’s house at Dain’s coronation, the girl that threw herself into the sea, the girl who’d certainly drowned. Now I am not so sure I was wrong.

“Tell me,” Balekin says today. “Why did my brother steal my crown? Orlagh thinks she understands,