The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air Book 2)

I lie on the couch in front of the television. In front of me, a plate of microwaved fish sticks grows cold. On the screen, a cartoon ice-skater is sulking. He is not a very good skater, I think. Or maybe he’s a great skater. I keep forgetting to read the subtitles.

It’s hard to concentrate on pretty much anything these days.

Vivi comes into the room and flops down on the couch. “Heather won’t text me back,” she says.

I turned up on Vivi’s doorstep a week before, exhausted, my eyes red with weeping. Rannoch and his coterie had carried me across the sky on one of their horses and dumped me on a random street in a random town. I’d walked and walked until I had blisters on my feet, and I began to doubt my ability to navigate by the stars. Finally, I stumbled into a gas station with a taxi refueling and was startled to remember taxis existed. By then, I didn’t care that I had no money with me and that Vivi was probably going to pay him with a handful of glamoured leaves.

But I didn’t expect to arrive and find Heather gone.

When she and Vivi came back from Faerie, I guess she had a lot of questions. And then she’d had more questions, and finally, Vivi admitted to glamouring her. That’s when everything totally unraveled.

Vivi removed the glamour, and Heather got her memories back. Heather moved out.

She’s sleeping at her parents’ house, so Vivi keeps hoping she might still come back. Some of her stuff is here. Clothes. Her drafting table. A set of unused oil paints.

“She’ll text you when she’s ready,” I say, although I am not sure I believe it. “She’s just trying to get her head straight.” Just because I am bitter about romance doesn’t mean everyone else needs to be.

For a while, we just sit on the couch together, watching the cartoon skater fail to land jumps and fall in helpless and probably unrequited love with his coach.

Soon, Oak will come home from school, and we will pretend that things are normal. I will take him into the wooded part of the apartment complex and drill him on the sword. He doesn’t mind, but to him it’s only messing around, and I don’t have the heart to scare him into seeing swordplay differently.

Vivi takes a fish stick off my plate and dredges it through the ketchup. “How long you going to keep sulking? You were exhausted from being locked up in the Undersea. You were off your game. He got one over on you. It happens.”

“Whatever,” I say as she eats my food.

“If you hadn’t gotten captured, you would have mopped the floor with him.”

I am not even sure what that means, but it’s nice to hear.

She turns to me with her cat eyes, eyes just like her father’s. “I wanted you to come to the mortal world. Now you’re here. Maybe you’ll love it. Give it a chance.”

I nod noncommittally.

“And if you don’t love it,” she says, lifting an eyebrow, “you can always join Madoc.”

“I can’t,” I say. “He tried and tried to recruit me, but I kept turning him down. That ship sailed.”

She shrugs. “He wouldn’t—okay, he would care. He’d make you grovel a lot, and he’d bring it up awkwardly in war councils for the next couple of decades. But he’d take you.”

I give her a stern look. “And what? Work to put Oak on the throne? After everything we’ve done to keep him safe?”

“Work to hurt Cardan,” Vivi says with a fierce light in her eyes. She has never been particularly forgiving.

Right now I am glad of it.

“How?” I say, but the strategic part of my brain is grinding slowly back into action. Grimsen is still in play. If he could make a crown for Balekin, what could he do for me?

“I don’t know, but don’t worry about it yet,” Vivi says, getting up. “Revenge is sweet, but ice cream is sweeter.” She goes to the freezer and removes a tub of mint chocolate chip. She brings that and two spoons back to the sofa. “For now, accept this delight, unworthy though it is for the Queen of Faerie in exile.”

I know she doesn’t mean to mock me, but the title stings anyway. I pick up my spoon.

You must be strong enough to strike and strike and strike again without tiring. The first lesson is to make yourself that strong.

We eat bathed in the flickering light of the screen. Vivi’s phone is silent on the coffee table. My mind is whirling.