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Cardan couldn’t breathe.
(That happened when Jude was under the ocean, too, but he had always had the reassurance that he would get her back. And he did. He did.)
Now everything was different.
Cardan tried to conjure up metaphors to distract himself from the suffocating weight on his chest. It was like a landslide, watching the earth come tumbling down and knowing that there was nothing to stop it.
But it was a landslide that he had made.
Jude was gone, just as he planned, but when he had imagined this moment, there wasn’t a sharp ache in his chest. That was rather uncomfortable, and he didn’t like it. But she had to go—there were all these plans swirling around his head now, even if most of them had been planned out in Jude’s imaginary voice. Cardan hadn’t been deceiving her in that, at least. Everything he did was prefaced by a thorough debate with an invisible Jude.
He hadn’t told her how much he had missed hearing her real voice. He hadn’t mentioned how he had raged, how he had thrown and broken and burned things when she was gone, because it was easier to feel angry than to acknowledge the fear in his heart. He hadn’t told Jude that towards the end of the month she was away (the month she was stolen from him) he had to resolve a conflict, a minor squabble really, and he hadn’t been able to imagine how she would react. Her voice had been gone from his head. Cardan waited until he was back in his room before crouching to the floor, fisting his hair in his hands and pulling as hard as he could until his wheezing breaths subsided and he could breathe again.
Cardan hadn’t told Jude a lot of things.
She was gone from him now, and in a sick way it was worse than before. Cardan knew that it should be better—it had been his decision to exile her. He had been in control, as much as he could be. Jude wasn’t being tortured and she would never again have those same hollowed cheeks and dull eyes as she had when she came back from Orlagh.
But in a way, for those same reasons, it felt worse to Cardan. Of course he wasn’t angry that Jude was safe—he wasn’t that twisted…right?—but the fact that it had been his decision alone to exile Jude hurt him.
Cardan had done his best. He had talked through every scenario with his imaginary Jude, both before the real Jude returned to him and after. Cardan knew certain things had to be done: he needed to quell the rumor that Jude was the real power behind the throne. He needed to assert control, over Orlagh and the smaller kingdoms. Then he needed to deal with the factions in his own court. Locke. Madoc. The countless other conspirators who sought to weaken his rule or remove him entirely. Small matters, really.
Then Jude came back, and everything was better and so much worse. She murdered his brother. An understandable impulse, Cardan had thought when she came back with a grim face and blood on her sleeve. There were still traces of that drug in his system, rendering his body loose and his mind less sharp than usual. But the thought still stung and the blood ran cold in his veins.
He made her his queen, and it had been easy enough to pretend to sleep until she fell asleep next to him. Then he stared at her, taking in every detail that he could, and he made the decision to exile her.
The way she looked at him the next day, when his knights were dragging her away—that hurt. That hurt more than the poison rushing through his body, more than the beatings that Balekin had given him. Jude was so surprised, so betrayed and horrified and every emotion showed on her face.
Cardan knew that nothing was showing on his face. Nothing at all.
He knew what she thought of him now. She would think that it had been an act of revenge, Cardan getting back at her for what she had done to him less than a year ago. She would think it was done out of spite, or anger, or perhaps even just a bone-deep coldness. Jude wasn’t stupid; she knew there were many who thought that she held a worrying amount of power over Cardan. For all Jude knew, Cardan might have exiled her simply to extinguish those rumors and solidify his power. After all, with Madoc’s most recent betrayal, Cardan’s control of Elfhame was running thinner than ever.
Maybe he had exiled her for those reasons, at least partly. When Cardan lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling in an empty room, he hoped that she thought that.
(That was new to him, too—hope. He had learned early on how useless of an emotion it was. Hope was longing for change without doing anything to change it. Only cowards mooned over hope, Balekin had said. The strong were the ones who shaped reality to their wishes. Yet here he was.)
Cardan hoped that Jude hadn’t heard any news of Elfhame. He hoped that she had heard nothing of the destructive storm that had rolled in the day she left, or none of the whispering rumors of the flowers that had been found dead all around the palace. He hoped that Jude thought him indifferently cold, or seething with burning rage. It mattered not to him which one she chose to believe.
It was better than the truth. Behind all of Cardan’s motives, behind all of the schemes upon schemes that he had dreamed up, there was one simple reason for Jude’s exile.
She had been in danger. And there was only one way that Cardan knew how to protect her.
It doesn’t matter what it’s doing to him. It doesn’t matter that sometimes Cardan feels like a vise is being wrapped around his chest and he can’t breathe, or that sometimes he drinks so much liquor he thinks he’ll drown in it and he still feels that ache in his chest, or that he sometimes he has to bite down on his knuckles until they bleed to keep himself from ordering her return.
At the end of every day, Cardan does the same thing. He imagines her hurt. Her pain. Her anger. Then he imagines her quietly whispering in his ear, and the sound of imaginary Jude’s voice is what finally coaxes him to sleep.
“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”