Randalin clears his throat and turns, giving me a pointed look. “Convey our regrets to the High King that we were unable to advise him directly, and let him know we stand ready to come to his aid. If you fail to impress this upon him, we will find other means of doing so.”

I make a short bow and no reply to what is clearly a threat.

As I leave, Madoc falls into step alongside me.

“I understand you’ve spoken with your sister,” he says, thick eyebrows lowered in at least a mimicry of concern.

I shrug, reminding myself that he didn’t speak a word on my behalf today.

He gives me an impatient look. “Don’t tell me how busy you are with that boy king, though I imagine he takes some looking after.”

Somehow, in just a few words, he has turned me into a sullen daughter and himself into her long-suffering father.

I sigh, defeated. “I’ve spoken with Taryn.”

“Good,” he says. “You’re too much alone.”

“Don’t pretend at solicitude,” I say. “It insults us both.”

“You don’t believe that I could care about you, even after you betrayed me?” He watches me with his cat eyes. “I’m still your father.”

“You’re my father’s murderer,” I blurt out.

“I can be both,” Madoc says, smiling, showing those teeth.

I tried to rattle him, but I succeeded only in rattling myself. Despite the passage of months, the memory of his final aborted lunge once he realized he was poisoned is fresh in my mind. I remember his looking as though he would have liked to cleave me in half. “Which is why neither of us should pretend you’re not furious with me.”

“Oh, I’m angry, daughter, but I am also curious.” He makes a dismissive gesture toward the Palace of Elfhame. “Is this really what you wanted? Him?”

As with Taryn, I choke on the explanation I cannot give.

When I do not speak, he comes to his own conclusions. “As I thought. I didn’t appreciate you properly. I dismissed your desire for knighthood. I dismissed your capacity for strategy, for strength—and for cruelty. That was my mistake, and one I will not make again.”

I am not sure if that’s a threat or an apology.

“Cardan is the High King now, and so long as he wears the Blood Crown, I am sworn to serve him,” he says. “But no oath binds you. If you regret your move, make another. There are games yet to play.”

“I already won,” I remind him.

He smiles. “We will speak again.”

As he walks off I can’t help thinking that maybe I was better off when he was ignoring me.

I meet the Bomb in High King Eldred’s old rooms. This time I am resolved to go over every inch of the chambers before Cardan is moved into them—and I am determined he should stay here, in the most secure part of the palace, whatever his preferences might be.

When I arrive, the Bomb is lighting the last of the fat candles above a fireplace, the runnels of wax so established that they make a kind of sculpture. It is strange to be in here now, without Nicasia to buttonhole or anything else to distract me from looking around. The walls shimmer with mica, and the ceiling is all branches and green vines. In the antechamber, the shell of an enormous snail glows, a lamp the size of a small table.

The Bomb gives me a quick grin. Her white hair is pulled back into braids knotted with a few shimmering silver beads.

Someone you trust has already betrayed you.

I try to put Nicasia’s words out of my head. After all, that could mean anything. It’s typical faerie bullshit, ominous but applicable so broadly that it could be the clue to a trap about to be sprung on me or a reference to something that happened when we were all taking lessons together. Maybe she is warning me that a spy is in my confidence or maybe she’s alluding to Taryn’s having it off with Locke.

And yet I cannot stop thinking about it.

“So the assassin got away through here?” the Bomb says. “The Ghost says you chased after them.”

I shake my head. “There was no assassin. It was a romantic misunderstanding.”

Her eyebrows go up.

“The High King is very bad at romance,” I say.

“I guess so,” she says. “So you want to toss the sitting room, and I’ll take the bedroom?”

“Sure,” I agree, heading toward it.

The secret passageway is beside a fireplace carved like the grinning mouth of a goblin. The bookshelf is still shifted to one side, revealing spiraling steps up into the walls. I close it.

“You really think you can get Cardan to move in here?” the Bomb calls from the other room. “It’s such a waste to have all this glorious space go unused.”

I lean down to start pulling books off the shelves, opening them and shaking them a bit to see if there’s anything inside.

A few yellowing and disintegrating pieces of paper fall out, along with a feather and a carved-bone letter opener. Someone hollowed one of the books out, but nothing rests inside the compartment. Still another tome has been eaten away by insects. I throw that one out.

“The last room Cardan occupied caught fire,” I call back to the Bomb. “Let me rephrase. It caught fire because he lit it on fire.”

She laughs. “It would take him days to burn all this.”

I look back at the books and am not so sure. They are dry enough to burst into flames just by my looking at them too long. With a sigh, I stack them and move on to the cushions, to pulling back the rugs. Underneath, I find only dust.

I dump out all the drawers onto the massive table-size desk: the metal nibs of quill pens, stones carved with faces, three signet rings, a long tooth of a creature I cannot identify, and three vials with the liquid inside dried black and solid.

In another drawer, I find jewels. A collar of black jet, a beaded bracelet with a clasp, heavy golden rings.

In the last I find quartz crystals, cut into smooth, polished globes and spears. When I lift one to the light, something moves inside it.

“Bomb?” I call, my voice a little high.

She comes into the room, carrying a jeweled coat so heavily encrusted that I am surprised anyone was willing to stand in it. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I hold up a crystal ball.

She peers into it. “Look, there’s Dain.”

I take it back and look inside. A young Prince Dain sits on the back of a horse, holding a bow in one hand and apples in the other. Elowyn sits on a pony to one side of him, and Rhyia to the other. He throws three apples in the air, and all of them draw their bows and shoot.

“Did that happen?” I ask.

“Probably,” she says. “Someone must have enchanted these orbs for Eldred.”

I think of Grimsen’s legendary swords, of the golden acorn that disgorged Liriope’s last words, of Mother Marrow’s cloth that could turn even the sharpest blade, and all the mad magic that High Kings are given. These were common enough to be stuffed away into a drawer.

I pull out each one to see what’s inside. I see Balekin as a newborn child, the thorns already growing out of his skin. He squalls in the arms of a mortal midwife, her gaze glazed with glamour.

“Look into this one,” the Bomb says with a strange expression.