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“Can we try this again?” he said after a moment. “I handled things badly last night.”
I continued to cross my arms, with more emphasis. My silence flustered him. I supposed kings weren’t used to having to explain themselves.
“I didn’t invite you last night to mock you,” he said hastily. “I owe you a debt worth more than a feather and a song. I offered you your freedom in exchange for saving my life.”
“I didn’t actually save your life, though, did I? You could have magicked your way out. You don’t owe me anything.”
“You didn’t know that at the time, and yet you saved me at the cost of your own pain. I will stand the debt. Will you tell me how you came to be part of House Bloodthorn?”
“You’ve been demanding a lot of personal information. That’s not how normal conversation works, you know.”
His feathers rustled as he considered this. “Fair. You may ask me something personal as well, then, and I will answer as best I can.”
I laughed. “Is everything in your life a series of carefully measured exchanges?”
“A great deal of it.” He smiled. The smile transformed him, revealing a glimpse of a real person in the heart of the arrogant fae king. “I will be generous and not count that as your question. Ask.” A fine thread of tension gathered in his body.
What should I ask him? The twelve houses would want to know who he was going to pick—that would be a valuable piece of information to have, but I couldn’t see how I’d use it. Besides, everyone would find that out anyway in another two days.
“What would you choose to do, if you weren’t a king?” I asked.
The line of tension eased, his wings flexing in and out. He looked taken aback. “I have never thought about it before; I’ve always been destined for the throne.” He looked down at his hands. “I like making things,” he said, as if he were confessing a state secret. “Perhaps I would be a woodworker, though I suspect I would be a rather poor one.”
“Most people don’t start off being brilliant at things. I’d expect you’d get better with practice.”
The intensity of his regard made me suck in a breath. He had long, inky-dark eyelashes, and in the bright morning I could see that his irises were deep brown rather than true black. The world slowed, the only sound the cicadas and the occasional calls of birds. I had that peculiar feeling of being seen again, as if my soul lay bare beneath his gaze.
“I will comfort myself with that thought in my hypothetical carpentry career,” he said, and for a moment I wondered what on earth he was talking about, I’d become so distracted. “What would you do, if you were free to choose?”
I was tempted to point out this wasn’t the information he’d bargained for but decided to be generous, since he was making an effort at conversation. “Find some sort of job, I suppose. Try to make a living. I’d enjoy having my own house and managing it, if I could afford to have one. Go out in public as myself—” I cut myself off before I revealed too much. “A very boring answer.”
“A very practical answer. Would you return to the mortal world, then, if you could?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there would be any more place for me there than here.” I looked beyond the meadow, to the wildness of the Golden Wood, where ponga ferns and young tarata saplings grew beneath ancient linden trees. “I’d miss the wood. And my stepsisters. Have you ever been to Mortal?”
He looked at his hands. “Once, as a boy. My father took me to see one of the great festivals, and we cast illusions so that we might pass as humans. It was…interesting. I haven’t had time to return since. Will you tell me how you came to Faerie?”
I sighed, sank down onto the stump, and told him the story.
I was supposedto be royalty.
Lord Bloodthorn thought that’s what he’d bargained for when he agreed to aid my human father in a bloody succession war in the mortal world. Firstborns are a traditional price for fae bargains.
Lord Bloodthorn helped make my father a king and in exchange expected control of the infant prince, the royal heir. I think Lord Bloodthorn had some notion of one day marrying my stepsisters into royalty or at least holding significant sway over a human nation. Even humans can be acceptable if they’re titled enough, I suppose.
This, however, was where I came in. I was born out of wedlock a month before the young prince, to one of the castle’s scullery maids. My father knew about it—he’d organized to have my mother packed off and wed to a farmer, far from the capital, the moment he learnt of her pregnancy. They tell tales of his cleverness in his kingdom, how he outsmarted a fae, won a throne, and saved his heir.
If the stories mention me at all, it’s generally assumed I got a good bargain too. After all, surely a servant’s bastard ought to be grateful to be adopted by a lord, even a fae one?
Tawhiri gave mea sidelong glance after I’d finished. “How do you know what tales they tell, if you’ve never been back?”
“Lord Bloodthorn.”
“He told you they tell tales about him being outsmarted?”
“No, but he wouldn’t be so sore about it if they didn’t. I filled in the blanks from what he did say: my real father didn’t want me, I ought to be endlessly grateful to House Bloodthorn, and so on and so forth.”
“Your real father cared enough to make Lord Bloodthorn promise to adopt you into his household and raise you as his own. That’s not traditionally part of a firstborn bargain,” Tawhiri said. He saw my expression. “But that doesn’t make up for what he did. I am sorry.”
