Chapter Text
Never will I admit: I’m glad to see Cardan. He’s a ridiculous peacock of blacks and blues – tall enough to blot the sun, irritating enough to incur its wrath – but he takes me away from Locke, and moments later, my pulse settles. The choking nerves relax; I can breathe again.
Cardan takes my wounded hand in his. He’s wearing black leather gloves; I can feel the warmth of them through the silk of my own gloves. For a fleeting moment, I wonder how much he can feel. The coin in my palm, the bandages wrapping my wound, the tremble in my fingers – pain that refuses to abate.
He’s watching me. He’s looking for something.
“What do you want?” I ask him, forcing the words out. Fear of his answer pales in comparison to my unadulterated desire to get away, sit down, briefly cease to exist. I’m reeling, and I can’t let Cardan see. “Go ahead. Insult me.”
His eyebrow kicks up. “I don’t take commands from mortals,” he says, smiling that cruel snarl. White teeth, red lips, malicious intent.
“So you’re going to say something nice? I don’t think so. Faeries can’t lie.” The fight in me kicks up, a sleepy beast yawning and stretching after a nap. This is better than Locke. This is what I know how to do.
Cardan’s hand slides lower on my hip, and I narrow my eyes at him.
“You really do hate me, don’t you?” he asks, smile growing.
“Almost as much as you hate me,” I say. That page with my name scratched onto it comes to mind – spilled ink, torn paper. I resist a familiar shiver that always chases the memory.
I should’ve thrown that paper away, but it’s still in a drawer in my room. Last night, while Valerian’s corpse was cooling on my rug, his bloodless eyes watched me pull out the page and whisper a heinous threat, hoping it would reach Cardan. Hoping he knew I intended vengeance.
Looking at Cardan now, I can say he doesn’t know. His grip is tightening down on my injured hand – I swear I can feel blood oozing from the wound – but he makes no show of noticing the flicker of fear in my eyes.
Maybe he won’t notice. We’re still dancing, the song has slowed. My feet are faltering even as the music forces me on.
“Jude,” he says. My name – I hardly thought he knew it. And again, harder, “Jude.”
Cardan’s head cocks to the side, and his gaze sharpens. No – my gaze sharpens. I didn’t realize it was blurry until adrenaline kicked me back into focus. Cardan isn’t smiling; he’s scowling. He’s watching me again; I don’t know what he’s looking for.
A faint brush against my palm. The gentleness of that touch frightens me, and I dare to break eye contact, glancing briefly at our joined hands. He’s drawing a very soft circle on my palm. The edges of the coin, he’s tracing them.
Terror sings up my spine. Cardan was looking for a weakness, and he just found it. The pain doubles, then triples, as the heat of panic lashes through my blood, pounding into the wound.
I lock eyes with him again. Wickedness is written into every line of his face.
“Cardan,” I try, “No—”
He releases my hand, switching out for a vise-grip on my wrist. Before my body’s even registered that we aren’t dancing anymore, he drags me out off the floor. I swear under my breath as my vision sparks. The pressure, so close to the wound, is blinding. My knees are weak as I race to keep up with Cardan.
A guard flashes a curious look at us but doesn’t bar Cardan from entering a different wing of the palace. He pulls me up a flight of stairs – bastard – and unlocks a door. A hallway, empty and echoey, stretches out before us.
Alone. The last time I was alone with one of my peers, it ended with homicide. Not really boding well for Cardan’s fate, or mine.
Cardan surveys the area only once before his attention is back on me like a hammer falling. He uses a forearm to press me against a wall. He uses the rest of his body to ensure I stay there – he’s too close, I can smell his skin, I can feel his body heat, I’m going to vomit. But I don’t fight. I bide my time, waiting for my bones to return to their usual solid state so I can run.
Still holding my wrist, Cardan sets to prying the glove off my hand. I curl my fingers to make it harder for him. If the only power I hold is irritation, I will wield it as my sword.
He rips the glove away all the same. A good thing, perhaps, as blood is seeping into my bandages. That glove would’ve been ruined if I’d worn it any longer.
I’m growing delirious. I feel nothing, I swear to the echoing cavern of my mind. I feel nothing. I feel nothing. I feel feverish chills; I feel nauseous; I feel the floor swaying. I feel nothing.
“What is this?” Cardan snarls. It’s the first he’s spoken in so long; I’d started to forget the sound of his voice. Harsh, cold, dangerous.
He holds my hand up to my face, close to bonking me in the nose with it. I’m definitely delirious, because I laugh at that. “My hand,” I say.
If looks could kill. “What is this?” he repeats.
Deftly plucking the coin from my palm, he pockets it. Then he’s unwrapping the bandage to study the wound. His lip curls into a disgusted grimace. Mine does, too. I’m reminded that I wanted to vomit earlier.
Cardan isn’t gentle, but I’m struck that he isn’t not gentle. The pain in my hand is slowing, dulling into an aching thrum. I’m dizzy from the initial shock; I’m weak from fear; but I’m not crying or screaming or committing murder. I remember Cardan being… worse.
“I got hurt,” I mutter noncommittally.
“Hurt.” There’s that wickedness again. “This isn’t hurt—” he visibly refrains from calling me something, no doubt nasty “—this is mutilated. Who did this to you?”
I hesitate. I try turning a gear, try kicking my mind back into action to figure out why the hell he wants to know. Many of my first thoughts are entirely too fanciful—born of nothing but cowardice, aching palms, and the stinging of Dain's strike to my trust. My mouth hangs half open for a collection of too-many-seconds, and I realize it’s too late to skirt the question effectively.
“I did it.” I say, Dain’s geas cutting off the ‘on Dain’s command,’ at the end of the sentence.
That nasty name-calling brims back into Cardan's eyes. A string of curses I’ve never heard him say before slips off of his lips. “You stabbed yourself in the hand? Don’t play me for a fool, Jude.”
“I did. I stabbed my own hand.”
“Why?”
I feel for words that I can say – words that aren’t lies. A threat is hanging in the air, and I don’t want to bring it on myself with clumsy lying. But there’s nothing. All the pretty words are gone, and all the useful ones are stuck in my throat. I just stare at Cardan.
And he stares back. His brows draw together tightly, and he tips back. I take a deep breath of the air between us – glad for the space.
He’s taking off his gloves. “You were glamoured.” Why is he taking off his gloves?
I answer, though he hasn’t asked me a question. “Yes.”
“By whom?”
I should make a break for it now. If I can get back to the floor, I can find Vivi or Madoc. I can hide behind them like the scared child I am and hope Cardan loses interest in the conversation before tomorrow’s lessons.
Bridling, reaching for my resentment for Cardan and splashing it across my voice, I snap, “I hardly think you’ve got any business knowing.”
For his part, Cardan doesn’t even manage to look bothered by my disrespect. His lips purse into a thin, bored line. “I’m a prince.”
“One of several.” I see my way out. I just have to reach the stairwell. “Frankly, we have a whole bushel of princes around here.”
Cardan shakes his head – at me, at himself. Silence falls as he re-wraps my bandages, securing them tighter than they were before. He snatches my uninjured hand and pulls the glove off of it, leaving my hands bare. Then he begins fitting his leather gloves onto me. They’re comically large, but I’m unexpectedly comforted by them.
The gloves are soft on the inside, caressing my skin. And the warmth of them spreads through my injury, soothing the pain, if only a little.
In the moment before he releases me, he murmurs, “You’re mine.”
My breath catches – fear, fury, something darker. “What?”
“You’re my mortal.” There’s something intimate about those words, but I can’t place his meaning. I doubt he can place his own meaning.
I’m reeling, my mind scrambling to make any sense of the sights and sounds and smells of a world that I thought I’d grown familiar to. Who flipped everything upside down? I don’t know this Cardan.
He’s gone so suddenly; I could almost believe he was a fever dream. He leaves the door open for me, but he doesn’t wait. I don’t have to run for the stairwell or make a break for Madoc’s side. I push through the door, clomp down the stairs, and rejoin the party like nothing happened.
Something definitely happened.
And I’m still wearing his absurdly large leather gloves when I put a knife to his throat in that familiar hallway not two hours later. And six months later, my body weak and tired from my time in the undersea, I sneak into Cardan’s rooms, and I see a wink of metal. Sitting atop his bedside table, almost reverently, is the coin he took from my palm.