How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air)

If Aslog’s tale was an ill omen, Prince Cardan did his best to push it away with overindulgence, merriment, and an absolute refusal to think about the future.

It was working a treat when Prince Cardan awoke on a rug in the parlor of Hollow Hall. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the window. He was fully dressed, stank of wine, and felt light-headed in a way that suggested he might yet be drunk.

He was not the only one to have fallen asleep on the floor. Near him, a lilac-skinned courtier in a ball gown with tattered hems slumbered on, her thin wings twitching on her back. And next to her sprawled a trio of pixies, gold dust in their hair. On the couch was a troll, with what looked like blood crusted around his mouth.

Prince Cardan tried to recall the party, but what he mostly remembered was Balekin tipping a goblet against his lips.

The night began coming back to him in pieces. Balekin had encouraged Cardan to bring his friends to his latest revel. Usually, they spent their riotous evenings drinking wine in the moonlight and coming up with such schemes as might amuse them and horrify the populace.

Your little Grackle protégés, Balekin had called them.

Cardan was skeptical about the invitation, as his eldest brother was most generous when he would somehow become the greatest beneficiary of his largess. But Valerian and Locke were eager to compete with the legendary debauchery of the Grackles, and Nicasia was looking forward to mocking everyone, so there was no dissuading them.

She had arrived in a gown of black silk beneath a cage of fish bones and shells, her deep aquamarine hair caught up in a crown of coral. One look at her, and at his brother, and Cardan couldn’t help recalling how Balekin had once planned to win influence through her favor.

He might have worried that his brother still planned something like that. But she had assured him many times that she considered all of Elfhame beneath her, all of Elfhame save for Cardan.

Valerian arrived soon after, and Locke shortly followed. They took to Balekin’s form of merriment as ticks to blood. Much wine was poured. Courtiers shared gossip and flirtations and promises for the evening ahead. There was a brief spate of declaiming erotic poetry. Powders were pressed on Cardan’s tongue, and he passed them to Nicasia with a kiss.

As dawn broke, Cardan experienced a vast delight with the world and everyone in it. He even felt an expansiveness toward Balekin, a gratitude for being taken in and remade in his eldest brother’s image, no matter how harsh his methods. Cardan went to pour another goblet of wine with which to make a toast.

Across the room, he saw Locke sit down beside Nicasia on one of the low velvet couches, close enough that his thigh pressed against hers, and then turned to whisper in her ear. She glanced over, a guilty look flashing across her features when she saw Cardan notice.

But it was easy to let such a little thing slip from his thoughts as the evening wore on. Revelry is inherently slippery; part of its munificence is an easing of boundaries. And there were plenty of entertainments to distract him.

A treewoman got up on a table to dance. Her branches brushed against the chandeliers, her knothole eyes were closed, and her bark-covered fingers waved in the air. She took swigs from a bottle.

“It’s too bad Balekin didn’t invite the Duarte girls,” said Valerian with a curled lip, his gaze on an ensorcelled human taking a silver platter of grapes and split-open pomegranates to the table. “I would relish the chance to demonstrate their true place in Elfhame.”

“Oh no, I rather like them,” Locke said. “Especially the one. Or is it the other?”

“The Grand General would mount your head on a wall,” Nicasia informed him, patting his cheek.Text © 2024 NôvelDrama.Org.

“A very fine head,” he informed her with a wicked grin. “Suitable for mounting.”

Nicasia cut her gaze toward Cardan and said no more. Her expression was a careful blank. He marked that, when he wouldn’t have marked their words.

Cardan tipped back his goblet and drank it to the dregs, ignoring the sourness in his stomach. The evening quickly became a blur.

He recalled the treewoman crashing through a table. Sap leaked out of her open mouth as Valerian studied her with an odd, cruel expression.

A hob played a lute strung with another reveler’s hair.

Sprites swarmed around a spilled jug of mead.

Cardan stood in the gardens, staring up at the stars.

Then he woke on the rug. Looking around the room, he didn’t spot anyone he knew. He stumbled up the stairs and into his room.

There he found Locke and Nicasia curled up on the rug before the dying fire. They were wrapped in the tapestry blanket from his bed. Her black silk gown had been discarded in a shining puddle, the cage she’d worn over it now tucked half underneath the bed. Locke’s white coat was spread across the wooden planks of the floor.

Nicasia’s head rested on Locke’s bare chest. Fox-red hair stuck to his cheek with sweat.

As Cardan stared at them, a rush of blood heated his cheeks, and the pounding in his head grew so loud that it momentarily drowned out thought. He looked at their tangled bodies, at the glowing embers in the grate, at the half-finished work for the palace tutors that was still on his desk, sloppy blotches of ink dotting the paper.

Cardan ought to have been the boy with the heart of stone in Aslog’s story, but somehow he had let his heart turn to glass. He could feel the shattered shards of it lodged in his lungs, making his every breath painful.

Cardan had trusted Nicasia not to hurt him, which was ridiculous, since he well knew that everyone hurts one another and that the people you loved hurt you the most grievously. Since he was well aware that they both took delight in hurting everyone else that they could, how could he have thought himself safe?

He knew he had to wake them, sneer, and behave as though it didn’t matter. And since his only true talent so far had ever been in awfulness, he trusted that he could manage it.

Cardan nudged Locke with a booted foot. It wasn’t quite a kick, but it wasn’t far from one, either. “Time to get up.”

Locke’s eyelashes fluttered. He groaned, then stretched. Cardan could see the calculation flash in his eyes, along with something that might have been fear. “Your brother throws quite the revel,” he said with a deliberately casual yawn. “We lost track of you. I thought you might have gone off with Valerian and the treewoman.”

“And why would you suppose that?” Cardan asked.

“It seemed you were attempting to outdo each other in excess.” Locke gestured expansively, a false smile on his face. One of Locke’s finest qualities was his ability to recast all their lowliest exploits as worthy of a ballad, told and retold until Cardan could almost believe that staggeringly better or thrillingly worse version of events. He could no more lie than any of the Folk, but stories were the closest thing to lies the Folk could tell.

And perhaps Locke hoped to make a story of this moment. Something they could laugh over. Perhaps Cardan ought to let him.

But then Nicasia opened her eyes. And at the sight of Cardan, she sucked in her breath.

Tell me it means nothing, that it was just a bit of fun, he thought. Tell me and everything will be as it was before. Tell me and I will pretend along with you.

But she was silent.

“I would have my room,” Cardan said, narrowing his eyes and assuming his most superior pose. “Perhaps you two might take whatever this is elsewhere.”

Part of him thought she would laugh, having known him before he perfected his sneer, but she shrank under his gaze.

Locke stood up, putting on his pants. “Oh, don’t be like that. We’re all friends here.”

Cardan’s practiced demeanor went up in smoke. He became the snarling feral child that had prowled the palace, stealing from tables, unkempt and unloved. Launching himself at Locke, he bore him to the floor. They collapsed in a heap. Cardan punched, hitting Locke somewhere between the eye and the cheekbone.

“Stop telling me who I am,” he snarled, teeth bared. “I am tired of your stories.”

Locke tried to knock Cardan off him. But Cardan had the advantage, and he used it to wrap his hands around Locke’s throat.

Maybe he really was still drunk. He felt giddy and dizzy all at once.

“You’re going to really hurt him!” Nicasia shouted, hitting Cardan’s shoulder and then, when that didn’t work, trying to haul him off the other boy.

Locke made a wordless sound, and Cardan realized he was pressing so tightly on his windpipe that he couldn’t speak.

Cardan dropped his hands away.

Locke choked, gasping for air.

“Create some tale about this,” Cardan shouted, adrenaline still fizzing through his bloodstream.

“Fine,” Locke finally managed, his voice strange. “Fine, you mad, hedge-born coxcomb. But you were only together out of habit; otherwise, it wouldn’t have been so easy to make her love me.”

Cardan punched him. This time, Locke swung back, catching Cardan on the side of the head. They rolled around, hitting each other, until Locke scuttled back and made it to his feet. He ran for the door, Cardan right behind.

“You are both fools,” Nicasia shouted after them.

They thundered down the stairs, nearly colliding with Valerian.

His shirt was singed, and he stank of smoke. “Good morrow,” he said, apparently not noticing the bruises rising on Locke’s face or how the sight of him had brought them all up short. “Cardan, I hope your brother won’t be angry. I’m afraid I may have set one of the guests on fire.”

Cardan had no time to react or to even find out if someone died before Nicasia grabbed his arm. “Come with me,” she said, dragging him into a parlor where a faun was spread out on a divan. The faun sat up at the sight of them.

“Get out,” she commanded, pointing at the door. With a single look at her face, the faun left, his hooves clacking on the stone floor.

Then she spun on Cardan. He folded his arms over his chest protectively.

“I’m a little glad you hit him,” Nicasia said. “I’m even glad you found us. You ought to have known from the first, and it was only cowardice that kept me from telling you.”

“Do you suppose that I am glad as well? I’m not.” Cardan was having difficulty assuming his previous reserve, what with his left ear ringing from the blow Locke landed, his knuckles burning from the punches he’d thrown, and Nicasia before him.

“Forgive me.” She looked up, a little smile at the corners of her mouth. “I do care for you. I always shall.”

He wanted to ask if Locke was right, if friendship had stolen the thrill from being lovers. But looking at her, he knew the answer. And he knew the only way he could possibly keep his dignity.

“You have cast your lot with him,” he said. “There is nothing to forgive. But if you regret it, do not think that you will be able to call me back to your side like some forgotten plaything you mislaid for a while.”

Nicasia looked at him, a little frown forming between her brows. “I wouldn’t—”

“Then we understand each other.” Cardan turned and stalked from the parlor.

Valerian and Locke had disappeared from the hall.

To Cardan, there seemed little purpose to do anything but resume drinking before he properly sobered up. The shouting and punching had disturbed enough revelers to wake them. Most were glad to join Cardan in new bouts of merriment.

He licked golden dust from collarbones and drank strong, grass-scented liquor from the belly button of a phooka. By the time it occurred to him that he had missed school, he had been drunk for three days and consumed enough powders and potions to have been awake for most of that time.

If he stank of wine before, now he reeked of it, and if he’d felt light-headed then, now he was reeling.

But it seemed to him that he ought to present himself to his tutors and show the children of the Gentry that no matter what they’d heard, he was fine. In fact, he had seldom felt so fine before in his life.

He staggered through the hall and out the door.

“My prince?” The door’s wooden face was the picture of distress. “You’re not truly going out like that, are you?”

“My door,” Cardan replied. “I most certainly am.”

He promptly fell down the front steps.

At the stables, he began to laugh. He had to lie down in the hay he was laughing so hard. Tears leaked out of his eyes.

He thought of Nicasia and Locke and dalliances and stories and lies, but it all jumbled together. He saw himself drowning in a sea of red wine from which an enormous moth was steadily drinking; saw Nicasia with a fish’s head instead of a tail; saw his hands around Dain’s throat; saw Margaret looming over him with a strap, giggling, as she transformed into Aslog.

Dizzily, he climbed up onto the back of a horse. He ought to tell Nicasia she was no longer welcome on the land, that he, son of the High King, was disinviting her. And he was going to exile Locke. No, he was going to find someone to put a curse on Locke so that he vomited eels every time he spoke.

And then he was going to tell the tutors and everyone else at the palace exactly how wonderful he felt.

Riding was a blur of forest and path. At one point, he found himself hanging off the side of the saddle. He almost slipped into a thicket of briars before he managed to pull himself upright again. But nearly falling made him briefly feel clearheaded.

He looked out at the horizon, where the blue sky met the black sea, and he thought of how he no longer would spend his days beneath it.

You hated it there, he reminded himself.

But his future stretched in front of him, and he no longer saw any path through it.

He blinked. Or closed his eyes for longer than a blink. When he opened them, he was at the edge of the palace grounds. Soon grooms would come and lead his horse to the stables, leaving him to stagger onto the green. But the distance seemed too great. No, digging his heels into the flanks of his horse, he careened toward where all the other children of the Gentry demurely waited to get their lessons.

At the sound of the horse’s hoofbeats, a few got to their feet.

“Ha!” he shouted at them as they scattered. He chased after several, then veered widdershins to run down others who’d thought themselves safe. Another laugh bubbled up.

A few more turns and he spotted Nicasia, standing beside Locke, sheltered beneath the canopy of a tree. Nicasia looked horrified. But Locke couldn’t hide his utter delight at this turn of events.

Whatever flame lived inside Cardan, it burned only hotter and brighter.

“Lessons are suspended for the afternoon, by royal whim,” he announced.

“Your Highness,” said one of his tutors, “your father—”

“Is the High King,” Cardan finished for him, pulling on the reins and pressing with his thighs so the horse advanced. “Which makes me the prince. And you one of my subjects.”

“A prince,” he heard someone say under her breath. He glanced over to see the Duarte girls. Taryn was clutching her twin sister’s hand so hard that her nails were dug into Jude’s skin. He was certain she wasn’t the one who’d spoken.

He turned his gaze on Jude.

Curls of brown hair hung to her shoulders. She was dressed in a russet wool doublet over a skirt that showed a pair of practical brown boots. One of her hands was at her hip, touching her belt, as though she thought he might draw the weapon sheathed there. The idea was hilarious. He certainly hadn’t buckled on a sword in preparation for coming here. He wasn’t even sure he could stay standing long enough to swing, and he had only beaten her when he was sober because she let him.

Jude looked up at him, and in her eyes, he recognized a hate big enough and wide enough and deep enough to match his own. A hate you could drown in like a vat of wine.

Too late to hide it, she lowered her head in the pretense of deference.

Impossible, Cardan thought. What had she to be angry about, she who had been given everything he was denied? Perhaps he had imagined it. Perhaps he wanted to see his reflection on someone else’s face and had perversely chosen hers.

With a whoop, he rode in her direction, just to watch her and her sister run. Just to show her that if she did hate him, her hatred was as impotent as his own.

The way back to Hollow Hall took far longer than the ride there. Somehow he became lost in the forest and let his horse wander through the Milkwood, branches tearing at his clothes and black-thorned bees buzzing angrily around him.

“My prince,” the door said as he stumbled up the steps, “news of your escapade has reached your brother. You might want to delay—”

But Cardan only laughed. He even laughed when Balekin ordered him into his office, expecting another servant and another strap. But it was only his brother.

“I have seen enough of your maudlin display to understand that you have lost some favor with Nicasia?” Balekin said.

Since he wasn’t sure he could stay upright, Cardan sat. And since a chair wasn’t immediately beside him, he sat on the floor.

“Do not invest a dalliance with greater significance than it warrants,” Balekin went on, coming around from behind his desk to peer down at his younger brother not entirely unsympathetically. “It is a mere nothing. No need for dramatics.”

“I am nothing,” Cardan said, “if not dramatic.”

“Your relationship with Princess Nicasia is the closest thing to power that you have,” Balekin said. “Father overlooks your excesses to keep peace with the Undersea. Do you think he would tolerate your behavior otherwise?”

“And I suppose you need me to have influence with Queen Orlagh for something or another,” Cardan guessed.

Balekin didn’t deny it. “Make sure she comes back to you when she tires of this new lover. Now take yourself to bed—alone.”

As Cardan crawled up the steps, his head ringing with hoofbeats, he thought of how he’d vowed not to be one of the fools groveling for the affections of some princess of the Undersea and of how, if he wasn’t careful, that was exactly what he would become.