Nicasia’s jaw is red, and her throat is flushed. I have to choke down a wholly inappropriate laugh.

“You best not defend a pixie,” she tells me grandly.

The redheaded knight is mortal, wearing the livery of the Alderking’s Court. She’s got a bloody nose, which I assume means that she and the selkies already got into it. Lord Roiben looks ready to draw the blade at his hip. Since he was just talking about fighting until the breath left his body, that’s something I’d rather avoid.

Kaye is wearing a more revealing gown than she did the last time I saw her. It shows a scar that starts at her throat and runs down over her chest. It looks half like a cut, half like a burn, and definitely something it makes sense for her to be angry about. “I don’t need any defending,” she says. “I can handle my own business.”

“You’re lucky all she did was hit you,” I tell Nicasia. Her presence makes my pulse thrum with nerves. I can’t help remembering what it was to be her captive in the Undersea. I turn to Kaye. “But this is over now. Understood?”

Roiben puts his hand on her shoulder.

“I guess,” Kaye says, and then stomps off in her big boots. Roiben waits a moment, but I shake my head. Then he follows his consort.

Nicasia touches fingers to her jaw, regarding me carefully.

“I see you got my note,” I say.

“And I see you are consorting with the enemy,” she returns with a glance in Madoc’s direction. “Come with me.”

“Where?” I ask.

“Anywhere no one can hear us.”

We walk off together through the gardens, leaving both our guard behind. She grabs hold of my hand. “Is it true? Cardan is under a curse? He is transformed into a monster whose scales have broken the spears of your Folk.”

I give a tight nod.

To my astonishment, she sinks down to her knees.

“What are you doing?” I say, aghast.

“Please,” she says, her head bent. “Please. You must try to break the curse. I know that you are the queen by right and that you may not want him back, but—”

If anything could have increased my astonishment, it was that. “You think that I’d—”

“I didn’t know you, before,” she says, the anguish clear in her voice. There is a hitch in her breath that comes with weeping. “I thought you were just some mortal.”

I have to bite my tongue at that, but I don’t interrupt her.

“When you became his seneschal, I told myself that he wanted you for your lying tongue. Or because you’d become biddable, although you never were before. I should have believed you when you told him he didn’t know the least of what you could do.

“While you were in exile, I got more of the story out of him. I know you don’t believe this, but Cardan and I were friends before we were lovers, before Locke. He was my first friend when I came here from the Undersea. And we were friends, even after everything. I hate that he loves you.”

“He hated it, too,” I say with a laugh that sounds more brittle than I’d like.

Nicasia fixes me with a long look. “No, he didn’t.”

To that, I can only be silent.

“He frightens the Folk, but he’s not what you think he is,” Nicasia says. “Do you remember the servants that Balekin had? The human servants?”

I nod mutely. Of course I remember. I will never forget Sophie and her pockets full of stones.

“They’d go missing sometimes, and there were rumors that Cardan hurt them, but it wasn’t true. He’d return them to the mortal world.”

I admit, I’m surprised. “Why?”

She throws up a hand. “I don’t know! Perhaps to annoy his brother. But you’re human, so I thought you’d like that he did it. And he sent you a gown. For the coronation.”

I remember it—the ball gown in the colors of night, with the stark outlines of trees stitched on it and the crystals for stars. A thousand times more beautiful than the dress I commissioned. I had thought perhaps it came from Prince Dain, since it was his coronation and I’d sworn to be his creature when I joined the Court of Shadows.

“He never told you, did he?” Nicasia says. “So see? Those are two nice things about him you didn’t know. And I saw the way you used to look at him when you didn’t think anyone was watching you.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, embarrassed despite the fact that we were lovers, and wed, and it should hardly be a secret that we like each other.

“So promise me,” she says. “Promise me you’ll help him.”

I think of the golden bridle, about the future the stars predicted. “I don’t know how to break the curse,” I say, all the tears I haven’t shed welling up in my eyes. “If I could, do you think I would be at this stupid banquet? Tell me what I must slay, what I must steal, tell me the riddle I must solve or the hag I must trick. Only tell me the way, and I will do it, no matter the danger, no matter the hardship, no matter the cost.” My voice breaks.

She gives me a steady look. Whatever else I might think of her, she really does care for Cardan.

And as tears roll over my cheeks, to her astonishment, I think she realizes I do, too.

Much good it does him.

When we finish talking, I go back to the banquet and find the new Alderking. He looks surprised to see me. Beside him is the mortal knight with the bloody nose. A red-haired human I recognize as Severin’s consort is stuffing her nose with cotton. The consort and the knight are twins, I realize. Not identical, like Taryn and me, but twins all the same. Twin humans in Faerie. And neither of them looking particularly discomfited by it.

“I need something from you,” I tell Severin.

He makes his bow. “Of course, my queen. Whatever is mine is yours.”

That night, I lie on Cardan’s enormous bed in his enormous bedchambers. I spread out, kick at the covers.

I look at the golden bridle sitting on a chair beside me, glowing in the low lamplight.

If I got it on the serpent, I would have him with me always. Once bridled, I could bring him here. He could curl up on the rug in this very room, and though it might make me as much a monster as he is, at least I wouldn’t be alone.

Eventually I sleep.

In my dreams, Cardan the snake looms over me, his black scales gleaming.

“I love you,” I say, and then he devours me.

You’re not healed enough,” Tatterfell gripes, poking my scar with her sharp fingers. The imp has been seeing to me since I got out of bed, getting me ready to face the serpent as though I was going to another banquet, and complaining the whole way. “Madoc nearly cut you in half not so long ago.”

“Does it bother you that you were sworn to him, but you’re still here with me?” I ask as she finishes the tight braid on top of my head. The sides are pulled back, and the rest of it is pinned into a bun. No ornamentation in my ears or around my throat, of course, nothing that can be grabbed.

“This is where he sent me,” Tatterfell says, taking a brush from the table where she has laid out her tools and touching it to a pot of black ash. “Maybe he regrets it. After all, I could be scolding him right now, instead of you.”