The Cruel Prince (The Folk of t -(The Folk of the Air #1) - Holly Black Page 0,40
a little confused. “Pretty eye mirrors.”
He makes a disgusted sound, which I guess means I am doing a good enough job of pretending to be an ensorcelled human servant, although I feel I went weird and over the top in my nervousness. I am not as good at improvising as I had hoped I would be.
“Are you new?” he asks, saying the words slowly.
“New?” I echo, trying to figure out what someone brought here might think about the experience. I cannot stop remembering the sickly sweet taste of faerie fruit on my tongue, but instead of getting me deeper into character, I just want to throw up. “Before I was somewhere else,” I blurt out, “but now I have to clean the great hall with polish until every inch of it shines.”
“Well, I guess you best, then,” he says, letting me go.
I try to control the shudder building up under my skin. I don’t flatter myself that my acting convinced him; he was convinced because I’m human and he expects humans to be servants. Again, I can see why Prince Dain thought I would be useful. After the guard, it is fairly easy to move around Hollow Hall. There are dozens of humans drifting through their chores, lost in sickly dreams. They sing little songs to themselves and whisper words out loud, but it’s obviously just snatches of a conversation happening in their dreams. Their eyes are shadowed. Their mouths, chapped.
No wonder the guard thought I was new.
Besides the servants, however, are the fey. Guests of some fete that seems to have ebbed rather than ended. They sleep in various states of undress, draped over couches and entwined on the floors of the parlors I pass through, their mouths stained gold with nevermore, a glittering golden powder so concentrated that it stupefies faeries and gives mortals the ability to glamour one another. Goblets lie on their side, mead pooling to run over the uneven floor like tributaries into great honey-wine lakes. Some of the Folk are so still I worry that they have debauched themselves into death.
“Excuse me,” I say to a girl about my age carrying a tin bucket. She passes me without even seeming to notice I have spoken.
With no idea what else to do, I decide to follow. We pad up a wide stone staircase without rails. Three more of the Folk lie in a dissipated stupor beside a thimble-sized bottle of spirits. Above, from the other end of the hall, I hear an odd cry, like someone in pain. Something heavy hits the ground. Rattled, I try to school my face back to dreamy nonchalance, but it isn’t easy. My heart beats like a trapped bird.
The girl opens a door to a bedroom suite, and I slip in behind her.
The walls are stone and hung with no paintings or tapestries. A massive half-tester bed takes up most of the space in the first room, the headboard panel carved with various animals with women’s heads and bare breasts—owls and snakes and foxes—doing some kind of weird dance.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since Balekin heads the profligate Circle of Grackles.
The books piled up on the wooden desk are ones I recognize—the same books Taryn and I study for our classes. These are spread out, with a few pieces of paper scattered over the wood between them, beside an open inkpot. One of the books has careful notations along one side, while the other is covered in blots. A broken pen, snapped in half deliberately—or at least I can’t think of a way it could have happened that’s not deliberate—is lying in the hinge of the ink-stained book.
Nothing that looks treasonous.
Prince Dain gifted me the uniform, knowing I could walk in as I had done. He was counting on my ability to lie for the rest. But now that I am inside, I hope there is something in Hollow Hall to find.
Which means that no matter how frightened I am, I must pay attention.
Along the wall are more books, some of them familiar from Madoc’s library. I pause in front of a shelf, frowning, and kneel down. Stuffed into a corner is a copy of a book I know but didn’t expect to see here in this place—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, bound together in one volume. Mom read to us from one a lot like that back in the mortal world.
Opening the book, I see the familiar illustrations and then the words: