The Cruel Prince (The Folk of t -(The Folk of the Air #1) - Holly Black Page 0,82
almost certain it isn’t him. My head swims, and I want to lie back down on the bed and close my eyes. Please, please let it be none of them. Let it be someone nice we don’t know.
I remind myself of what she said: I think you would like him.
Turning to Vivi, I am about to start making a list of safer possibilities when Madoc comes into the room. He’s holding a slim silver-sheathed blade in one hand.
“Vivienne,” he says with a little dip of his head. “Could you give me a moment with Jude here?”
“Sure, Daddy,” she says with small, poisonous emphasis as she slips out with my earrings.
He clears his throat a little awkwardly and holds the silver sword out to me. The guard and pommel are unadorned, elegantly shaped. The blade is etched along the fuller with a barely visible pattern of vines. “I have something I’d like you to wear tonight. It’s a gift.”
I think I make a little gasp. It’s a really, really, really pretty sword.
“You’ve been training so diligently that I knew it should be yours. Its maker called it Nightfell, but of course you are welcome to call it anything you like or nothing at all. It’s said to bring the wielder luck, but everyone says that about swords, don’t they? It’s something of a family heirloom.”
Oriana’s words come back to me: He’s besotted with you girls. He must have loved your mother very much. “But what about Oak?” I blurt out. “What if he wants it?”
Madoc gives me a small smile. “Do you want it?”
“Yes,” I say, unable to help myself. When I pull it from its sheath, it comes as though made for my hand. The balance is perfect. “Yes, of course I do.”
“That’s good, because this is your sword by right, forged for me by your father, Justin Duarte. He’s the one who crafted it, the one who named it. It’s your family heirloom.”
I am momentarily robbed of breath. I have never heard my father’s name spoken aloud by Madoc before. We do not talk about the fact that he murdered my parents; we talk around it.
We certainly don’t talk about when they were alive.
“My father made this,” I say carefully, to be sure. “My father was here, in Faerie?”
“Yes, for several years. I only have a few pieces of his. I found two, one for you and one for Taryn.” He grimaces. “This is where your mother met him. Then they ran away together, back to the mortal world.”
I take a shuddering breath, finding the courage to ask a question I have often wondered but never dared voice aloud. “What were they like?” I flinch as the words leave my mouth. I don’t even know if I want him to tell me. Sometimes I just want to hate her; if I can hate her, then it won’t be so bad that I love him.
But, of course, she’s still my mother. The only thing I can truly be angry with her for is being gone, and that’s certainly not her fault.
Madoc sits down on the goat-footed stool in front of my dressing table and stretches out his bad leg, looking for all the world as though he’s about to tell me a bedtime story. “She was clever, your mother. And young. After I brought her to Faerie, she drank and danced weeks away at a time. She was at the center of every revel.
“I could not always accompany her. There was a war in the East, an Unseelie king with a lot of territory and no desire to bend his knee to the High King. But I drank in her happiness when I was here. She had a way of making everyone around her feel as though every impossible thing was possible. I suppose I put it down to her mortality, but I don’t think I was being fair. It was something else. Her daring, perhaps. She never seemed cowed, not by any of the magic, not by anything.”
I thought he might be angry, but he obviously isn’t. In fact, his voice holds a totally unexpected fondness. I sit down on the bench in front of my bed, holding on to my new silver sword for support.
“Your father was interesting. I imagine you think I didn’t know him, but he came to my house—my old house, the one they burned down—many times. We drank honey wine in the gardens, the three of us. He loved swords, he said, from the