He gives me a smile, a strange light in his eyes. ‘If we were capable of putting mistrust aside, we might be a formidable pair.
Idly, I wonder what sort of execution Cardan might order. Maybe he’d strap me to some rocks and let the sea do the work. Nicasia would like that. If he’s not in the mood, though, there’s always beheading, hanging, exsanguination, drawn and quartered, fed whole to a riding toad...
Cardan lies on the rug with one arm propping up his head and the other slung across Jude’s waist. He understands everything and nothing he sees on the screen- just as he understands everything and nothing about being here with her family. He feels like a feral cat that might bite out of habit.
His cuffs are jewelled, and the moth pin that holds his cloak in place has wings that move on their own.
Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women.
In this hair, and with this dress, I look pretty. The kind of pretty that allows monsters to deceive people into forests, into dances where they will find their doom.
I do have a bad habit,” he says. “of falling in love. With regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.
Oh, tell me the rest. I like tricks and snares. Even ones I was nearly caught in.
I think of all the good things that come from someone knowing you well enough to understand your hopes and fears.
Hollow Hall is a stone manor with a tall, crooked tower, the whole thing half-covered in vines and ivy. There’s a balcony on the second floor that seems to have a rail of thick roots in place of iron. A curtain of thinner tendrils hangs down from it, like a scraggly beard clotted with dirt. There is something misshapen about the estate that ought to make it charming but instead makes it ominous.
But my heart keeps beating harder, and I shrink into myself, as though if I am still enough, anxiety will stop gnawing on my insides.
Have you ever heard that virtue is its own reward?′ Cardan says pleasantly. ‘That’s because there’s no other reward in it.
At seventeen, he has grown tall, towering over me, lithe and finely muscled. His hair catches the moonlight, warm gold threaded with platinum, bangs parting around small goat horns, eyes of shocking amber, and a constellation of freckles across his nose. He has a trickster’s mouth and the swagger of someone used to people doing what he wanted.
Most of their mother’s visits to psychics had been about relationships. The Hall women fell in love like they were falling off a cliff. They were terrible at picking men, as though there were some kind of ancestral curse that started with Nana’s marriage to a guy so awful that she was still in prison for shooting him in the back of the head while he was in his BarcaLounger, watching TV.
I spot the Roach and the Bomb, sitting in the shadows of the re-formed thrones. He is tossing grapes into her mouth and never missing, not once.
Their smiles hurt. Everything hurt.
There are many things I don’t know, but I know a great deal about imprisonment.
They say faeries weep at weddings and laugh at funerals, but I thought your wedding and funeral were equally funny.
The revel will go on, I realize. Everything will go on. But I am not sure that I can.
Fire wants to burn, Call thought to himself. Water wants to flow. Air wants to rise. Earth wants to bind. Chaos wants to devour. Call wants to live.