Chapter 2
Kaye Fierch perched on the fire escape outside her building, espresso in her hand, breathing the iron-tinged summer scents of the city—garbage and smoke, cooking meat, the river, fresh-poured asphalt, and rot.
It was well after three in the morning and one of her favorite times to watch over the streets below, to see friends staggering home, arms thrown about one another.
To see businesspeople stumble, wondering how it got so late.
To see the traffic of excess, people wringing a few more giddy moments from a day, eager to do something memorable—whether they’d want to remember it or not—before the sun came up.
Part of her was tempted to take off her shirt and glide around the sky on the delicate moth’s wings folded tight against her back.
To follow the twinkling lights of the cars below, streaming over bridges and through the grid of roads, to soar over the river.
Another part of her wanted a second espresso.
“I didn’t see you there at first. I thought you might not be home,” came a voice from behind her, a trace of the otherworldly in his accent.
Lord Roiben, king of the Court of Termites.
Her boyfriend—or maybe something more than that since she’d completed a quest and been made his official consort, a relationship stage entirely outside the quizzes in Cosmo magazine.
She turned to grin at him. He was wearing a worn black T-shirt, making his white hair and silvery eyes look starker by the contrast. He’d recently cut his hair. It used to fall over his shoulders in a shining pool, but now it was choppy and barely long enough to hang in his eyes.
He reached out his fingers and she took them, letting him help her climb back over the windowsill as though she were a great lady atop a horse instead of on a metal stair.
“You look tired.” She slid back into her apartment and went to put the coffee cup in the sink.
“Tired of being too long from your side,” he said, which made her snort in sheer incredulity.
He gave her a smile in return. She knew he liked that she didn’t take him too seriously, when everyone else in his life treated him with vast deference.
They’d always lived apart. Kaye had started a coffee shop with her friends called Moon in a Cup, which had evolved to sell more and more magical pastries and potions.
Now there was a secret menu of gillyflower scones and espressos cut with tears, and all the magical Folk of New York stopped by to have meetings or breakfast or assignations.
Meanwhile, Roiben had been ruling over two fractious courts, merged into one highly unstable Court of Termites, named for the sprawling Unseelie palace built beneath a graveyard on a hill.
Roiben insisted that it pleased him that Kaye didn’t have to deal with the raw fury of the Unseelie Court and the delicate machinations of the Seelie Court, that he loved having an escape—her apartment, her life, her arms.
But over the years, watching the exhausted way he slept on a simple mattress in a messy apartment, hearing the surprised pleasure of his laughter, feeling the desperate hunger of his kisses, she’d become more and more afraid that he wasn’t telling her the whole truth.
He’d been given to the last Unseelie queen to be her knight, forced to do her bidding no matter how terrible, forced to endure whatever cruelties she could devise. Kaye worried that he’d developed low standards for happiness.
“So,” she asked, “how long have I got you this time?”
Roiben was skilled at keeping his own counsel, but she read something in the twitch of his lip and the set of his jaw.
She raised a single eyebrow.
“I wish for you to come with me on a journey,” he said, spreading his hands in acknowledgment of being caught out.
“There is to be a great coronation, the passing of the crown of the High King of Elfhame to his son, and I want you to accompany me. I can promise that we will dance and drink and that there will be time for very little else but merriment. And there is no one I would rather be merry with.”
She frowned at him, despite those flattering words. A week before, they’d talked about going to a lake somewhere, with a little tree house, away from everything, with only fireflies to rule over. Instead, they were going to the High Court for what was bound to be bullshit.
“There will be dozens of lords and ladies,” he said. “And we, lost among them, wholly unremarkable and entirely forgotten. Elfhame is three islands with the sea all around, where mermaids come to sun themselves on the black rocks. I am told it’s beautiful.”
“And you’re really going to swear fealty to this new guy?” she asked, dubious about Roiben’s ability to be unremarkable anywhere.
“I have promised Prince Dain that I would come and consider it. But yes, most like. A High Monarch would give me an excuse to curb the Unseelie Court’s appetites without being seen to prefer the Seelie ways.
” Roiben touched her hair lightly in that odd way he had, as though he half-expected his fingers to pass through her, as though she might be made of glamour and smoke and his own hopeless longings.
“And because it is wearying to be always at war.”
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll go to your thing. You promise we’re going to have fun?”
“How could it be otherwise?” he asked, which ought to have been her first warning.
That was how she wound up at the High Court in Elfhame, dressed in a silky slip, combat boots, and a lot of eyeliner.
Standing near Dulcamara, she couldn’t help noticing the nervous looks courtiers kept throwing in Roiben’s direction and the wide berth their whole party was getting.
Roiben himself was in serious conference with the new Alderking and seemed to be politely pretending not to notice how many of the Folk were terrified of him.
Wholly unremarkable, my ass, she thought.
“What’s their problem?” Kaye asked Dulcamara, glaring at a troll until he turned his gaze elsewhere.
Dulcamara shrugged. Her red hair was braided into an elaborate and somehow menacing knot on top of her head, her black armor polished to a shine.
Kaye, in deference to the fanciness of the occasion, had put a sparkly green clip in her hair to match the color of her skin, but she was feeling that maybe she should have dressed up a lot more.
“Lord Roiben makes a menacing figure,” Dulcamara said finally, when it became clear that Kaye was waiting for some kind of response. “And one with a reputation for popping off the heads of monarchs.”
Kaye couldn’t actually argue with that. “Which one is Prince Dain?” she asked.
Dulcamara frowned in concentration. “Not here yet. The princesses are—that’s Elowyn, Caelia, and Rhyia. And beside them is the eldest prince, Balekin.”
“Eldest, but not inheriting?” Kaye asked.
“The High King passed over his two eldest and chose the third. To sire six children is unusual in Faerie,” Dulcamara said. “Most Folk are lucky if, in a hundred years, they beget a single child. Two is considered a great blessing. Six is vulgar fortune.”
“You named only five,” Kaye said.
Dulcamara gestured toward the crowd. “The sixth is there. The youngest prince, Cardan, dancing with that mortal girl.”
Kaye’s eyebrows went up. She’d met the only other mortal she’d noticed, a nervous-looking redhead who’d come along with the new Alderking.
He’d been a little startled by the contrast between Kaye’s green skin, inkdrop eyes, and mortal way of speaking, but had quickly decided she might know the answers to some of his questions about the reels that were being played.
Despite her own mother being in a band for pretty much ever, Kaye hadn’t, and the boy had wandered off to find someone who did.
This mortal was a girl, dressed in gloves and a long gown that appeared like the sky at night. She was of medium height, with hair the red-brown of a willow tree. She had soft features and the solid grace of someone used to living in her body. An acrobat perhaps. Or a soldier.
The tall faerie boy who held her in his arms had a mess of black hair.
His cheeks were painted in silver, his eyes edged in black kohl, and he looked drunk, his crown askew.
The girl was glaring at him, and Kaye wondered how they wound up dancing together.
Then she noticed the way he was looking at her.
But that made things even more puzzling.
“Who’s the girl?” Kaye asked.
“The general has two human wards,” Dulcamara returned. “That’s one of them. They’re twins, but I can’t tell them apart.”
“Like widderkins changelings,” Kaye said.
She’d been a changeling herself, dropped into the mortal world with a lot of warding, not even discovering she was a pixie until she was a teenager.
What would it be like to be a human who didn’t understand human stuff, the way she still wasn’t sure she understood Faerie?
Maybe if she’d grown up in this world, parties like this coronation would make more sense to her.
She looked over at Roiben and he caught her eye, his smile easy.
If she walked over to him, he would draw her into the conversation, but trying to talk would only highlight her ignorance.
At times like this, she felt the strain of having a foot in two worlds.
Roiben belonged here and she wanted to believe she belonged with Roiben, but that turned out to be no simple calculation.
Across the room, the prince walked away from the human girl, leaving her standing alone as figures whirled around her.
After a moment, she headed toward the dais.
The prince paused his retreat to watch her go with an expression Kaye recognized—the look of someone who wondered if the other person might be made of glamour and smoke, if they might fade away with a touch. Roiben had looked at her that way.