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Jude's hand stings.

She knows how to properly throw a punch -- knows the footwork, the physics, the proper form -- but knowing how to fight does not correct the natural imbalance that exists between her and her opponent. For a mortal, punching a faerie is much like punching a brick wall. No matter how much damage you do, you're going to come out of it a little worse than you started. 

Her fist loosens and then tightens again as she fights to realign the dazed nerves in her fingers. Every panting breath from her lungs seems to scrape against her ribcage as it leaves her body -- hollowing her from the inside out until she contains nothing but rage and exhaustion. 

Taryn would be disappointed in this display of violence, but Jude does not live her life for Taryn. She tried for a while, tried to be polite and demure and subservient, but she could never follow through for very long. They may be twins in appearance, but they are not twins in nature. Taryn may be content to be a mortal in a faerie world, but there are many, many days when Jude would rather die than admit that she is lesser than any trueborn faerie in this court. Today is one of those days. 

Jude’s blazing gaze fixes on the subject of her wrath as the target of her rage straightens, raising a hand to the pulsing place on his jaw where Jude's fist struck him a second before. There is a flicker of anger in Prince Cardan's eyes -- twin to the flame that burns Jude alive every moment of every day -- but there is an unmistakable degree of amusement there, too. He has every right to be amused, Jude supposes. Few mortals confront fairies and live to tell the tale. 

Some primal instinct begs Jude to reel backwards, pleads with her to put as much space between herself and Cardan as possible before he has a chance to strike back, but Jude refuses. To run would be mean admitting weakness and confessing inferiority. It would defeat the entire purpose of striking Cardan in the first place. 

Stubbornly -- stupidly -- Jude stays exactly where she is, feet rooted to the mossy ground, and prepares to strike him a second time. It is a bad idea to hit a Prince of Faerie once. It is a worse idea to do so again, but she tries anyway. 

It is a moot point. Jude does not manage to land the blow. 

Cardan catches Jude’s fist as it travels through the space between them, twisting her arm until it's halfway behind her back and reducing the space between them to a scant matter of warm breath and bumped noses. 

The muscles and tendons in Jude's shoulder scream against the pressure, but nothing tears. Not yet. 

When Cardan speaks, his voice is perched on the edge of imminent violence. It slips across Jude's skin in a finely crafted threat. "I would not do that, were I you." 

Faeries are bound by truths. Their use of language is slippery, carefully crafted to speak without speaking, lie without lying. Cardan has baked his low opinion of her into the statement so thoroughly and obviously that it cannot be missed, but Jude is quick and clever enough to dodge it, and mortals are not bound by the same petty curse. 

"A reasonable person would expect nothing more from you. You have always been a coward." 

The fresh bruises on Jude's hand pulse and burn as Cardan's grip tightens, but she fights to keep the pain out of her expression. She is a mortal raised among faeries, a sheep thrown into the dragon's den. She is used to being afraid, used to being hunted, used to pretending to be stronger and faster and cleverer than she is. This is no different. 

Cardan tilts his head slightly -- those pitch black eyes narrowing with a degree of icy intensity that has long been reserved for those born into power. Jude has never seen that look on those who come from strife and struggle. It is cruel, dismissive, and lofty in the way that only a monarch can be. 

"Odd to be called a coward by someone who is trapped, though perhaps not when it is you." The final word drips from his tongue with scathing derision, as if Jude is some unfortunate bit of garbage that has affixed itself to the sole of his shoe. 

Moving with devilish slowness, Jude maneuvers her body so that her second hand is out of the prince's view. One of the more terrifying things about the people and creatures of Faerie is that they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. There are red caps like Madoc and hob-faced owls like the one who sometimes appears at her window. There are faeries with no eyes and faeries with many. There are faeries who look like they were born of the Earth and faeries who look as though they sprung from outer space. In that world, it does not seem so ridiculous for a faerie to forget that mortals have two arms. Especially one who is so preoccupied with himself that he never bothers to actually see anyone else, nonetheless the two mortals who dare to share a classroom with him. She doubts that he even thinks often of his friends — the group of similarly privileged goons who surround him and cheer on his ill deeds. Even with his gaze firmly fixed upon hers, Jude is absolutely certain that Cardan sees no one but himself. 

Cardan’s tongue may be slippery, but Jude’s is razor sharp. “Perhaps if you were not a coward, you would not have to consider the ramifications of being referred to as one at all.” 

The prince scoffs, a unusually light touch of breath on teeth. “There may be some mortals in the world who are above lying, Miss Duarte, but I do not for one second pretend that you are among their number.”

There is, perhaps, a touch of delight that wells in Jude’s blood. Though mortals may be inferior to the faeries in many ways — susceptible to charms and tricks and cunning deceit — she will always be able to hold the ability to lie over their heads. She will always have one advantage in a fight — whether or not the battle physical or political in nature. 

That flicker of joy must have reached her face — trespassing across eyes or lips or cheeks — because her opponent tightens his grip again. 

And instead of crying out in pain, Jude laughs. 

She can sense Cardan’s confusion plain as day as those cruel fingers slacken, feel the staccatoed rush of his inhale as it catches in the back of his throat and gets trapped in the netherspace of inaction, see a single flash of fear — real, actual fear —  as it trespasses upon his gaze for a solitary heartbeat. 

And then she raises her free, forgotten hand and strikes him again. 

This time, he lets her go. 

Jude falls backwards, tumbling into the mess of dirt and dust and tangled tree roots that makes up this secret path. On instinct, she rolls out of the way and springs back to her feet. Madoc told her to never let an enemy catch her napping, never stop moving unless your opponent is already dead upon the ground. She may resent her upbringing, may hate the man who slew her parents and stole her family, but she does not doubt his counsel. 

It is only once she finds her balance and the balls of her feet that she dares to breathe again, dares to take a moment to look in Cardan’s direction and take stock of the changing status quo. Cardan does not seem prepared to fight. Instead, he looks quite the same as he does whenever she has the misfortune of stumbling across him in her day to day life. He is casual, aloof, fully hidden behind a mask of cruel indifference. Jude would often like to think that Cardan is just as shallow as his affect, but the blood dripping from his nose ruins the act. 

The game is up. The magician has been unmasked. 

Jude steps forward. Her face hardens, and she acts entirely on impulse, channeling her hurt and rage into a single curt, poorly considered sentence. 

“I’m calling you out.” 

Jude memorized those words in her training, too. It was a call that she was told never to make and never to respond to. To do so would mean entering a duel that she could never win, because the only people who would dare to propose such a thing are Faeries, and she is too fragile to survive one. She took those warnings seriously as a child, but now they seem trivial. There is a scream in her chest that can only be sated by blood spilled onto the earth, and since Madoc will not allow her to become a Knight of the Court, she will have to fuel it in a less honorable way. If anyone is going to bleed out, she would very much like it to be the faerie who has made her life a living hell. 

Cardan’s bearing shifts in a manner that is nigh unreadable. Perhaps it is an expression of some emotion reserved entirely for Faeries — too old and nebulous for mortal hearts to grasp. Or perhaps Jude is simply too blinded by her own suppositions to define it with any real degree of accuracy. The former seems more likely. 

It takes a long moment before Cardan's tongue can once again manage speech. 

“Do you truly think that is a good idea?” 

Though Jude could lie, she instead chooses to speak truth. “No, but I do not care.” 

She knows that she should care. She should protect her life as if it is the most sacred thing in the world. She should not challenge faerie princes to duels over a series of petty offenses, but to step away would mean not being true to herself. It would mean surrendering. It would mean stumbling back to Madoc’s house with her proverbial tail tucked between her legs and having to face Cardan again in the morning, knowing that he told all of his friends that Jude was too frail and mortal to dare to meet him in a fight. 

Cardan straightens. His hands — a moment ago so tightly wrapped around Jude’s wrist — seem oddly slack as he brushes a bit of invisible dust from his tunic. “You should,” he says, tone cryptic and unreadable. 

That only succeeds in hardening Jude’s heart all the more. 

“Name the weapon and the place, as is your right.” 

The prince sighs — heavy and almost sad. His eyes turn skywards, gazing at the sunlit sky and the canopy of branches that bars them from it. 

“Daggers. The riverbank. Tomorrow night.” 

Jude’s toes begin to itch as she restlessly shifts her weight from foot to foot. She almost wishes that the fight was sooner. She wants to do it now — get it out of the way, know whether she emerges intact or in pieces — but there is nothing that she can do to make time move faster. She can only wait and hope that she is still just as brave and just as foolish tomorrow. 

“See you then.” 

For a moment, there seems to be a word perched upon Cardan’s lips, but he swallows it back. In silence, he turns away and strides out of this little, doomed pocket of the forest. 

Jude lingers for a moment, wrestling with an unexpected flicker of doubt before she, too, turns around and sets off for home. 

Jude does her best to avoid the members of Madoc’s household that evening. She locks her door and refuses to come down for dinner — citing illness and tiredness and a need to sleep. In truth, she is mostly dodging Madoc himself. She worries that he will be able to see the truth of what she’s done, peel back layer upon layer of her skin until the true extent of her sins is finally exposed to chill night air. He would find a way to stop the fight -- to stop her -- even if it meant murdering Cardan himself, and she cannot allow that to happen. 

If anyone is going to kill Cardan, it’s going to be her. 

It needs to be her. 

Her older sister, however, has never been one to respect the sanctity of a closed door. 

Vivi pops the lock and slips in with a smile, holding a pile of magazines in one hand and a smoking goblet in the other. 

“Heard you wound up on the wrong side of a bug.”

From her position in the bed — practically buried beneath blankets and sheets — Jude grumbles, “A locked door generally means keep out.” 

Vivi’s furred ears flick forward. “You don’t sound sick.” A smug purr runs beneath the words, as if she knew it was a ruse all along. It’s not all that surprising. Though Vivi may be the least involved in the goings-on in Faerie out of anyone in the house — preferring instead to hide away in comics and fiction between her jaunts to the mortal realm to visit her human girlfriend — she is not unperceptive. Over the years, she cared for Taryn and Jude and Oak as much as any older sister could, and that builds certain instincts, as inconvenient as they may be. 

“There are many different kinds of sick,” Jude snaps back. She rolls over, putting her back to the unwanted invader. 

Undeterred, Vivi closes the door behind her with a small backwards kick of her foot. “What did you do?” 

“What makes you think I did anything?” 

The mattress shifts slightly as Vivi takes it upon herself to sit at the foot of the bed. There’s a small tsk of tongue against teeth as she says, “When Taryn is sick, I assume that someone hurt her. When you are sick, I assume that you are hiding something. I’m not going to tell Madoc or Oriana, if that’s what you’re worried about. It stays between us.”

Jude sits up, eyes narrowing as she stares at her sister. 

“What would you do if you thought it was in my best interest to tell them?” The question is as best a test as she can manage on such short notice. She doesn’t particularly want to share her plans with anyone, but there is also a part of her that burns to alleviate the burden of a secret. Maybe if one other person knows, it’ll be easier to carry. Maybe if she dies, Vivi will manage to find her body before the small, vicious creatures of the forest destroy it with their pointed teeth and needle-sharp claws. 

Vivi thinks for a moment. “I would advise you to tell them, but I would not interfere. I would rather know than not know, even if that comes with its own price.” 

It is a very faerie answer. There are sometimes moments where Jude forgets that Vivi is only her half sister and full faerie, but there are also plenty of instances in which that illusion falls away and the truth is stripped bare. For all her fondness of the mortal realm, Vivi is more at home in Faerie than Jude will ever be. 

Jude turns the words over in her mind, searching for loopholes or obfuscated truths. She doesn’t like treating Vivi with the same degree of scrutiny with which she regards Cardan and his ilk, but it is unavoidable. She has to make sure that she is safe, has to take extra steps to protect herself that non-mortals would never even have to consider. 

In the end, she speaks truth, “I called Cardan out.” 

Vivi stiffens. Jude can see a flash of regret in her sister's eyes, in the slouch of her shoulders and the new tension in her body, but it is too late for either of them to take their words back. 

Vivi is doomed to know, and Jude is doomed to have shared. 

“Why would you do that?” Vivi demands. 

Jude looks away again, reburying herself beneath the gentle comfort of feathers and fur. “Someone was bound to do it eventually. He deserves it.” 

“It’s not about whether or not he deserves it,” Vivi says, voice growing increasingly frantic as the initial shock of the reveal begins to wear thin. “You have to undo it. You’re a mortal, Jude. You cannot call out a Faerie prince. You are walking into a death trap. Grovel, beg, I don’t care what you have to do to walk back on it, but I need you to do it.” 

Jude bristles. She doesn’t know why she expects anyone in this place to understand her. If Taryn never understands her actions and they are identical twins, then there is no chance in hell that anyone else -- in either Faerie or the mortal realm -- that would understand her either. Jude stands alone, as she always has. The girl that doesn’t belong. The prey that bites back. The idiot who calls out a Prince of Faerie and thinks that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to give him a reckoning before she dies. 

“No,” she says stubbornly. 

Vivi hisses. “Pride is not something worth dying for.” 

Jude throws a blanket aside, sitting up again as she stares her half-sister squarely in the eyes. “I’m not dying for my pride. I’m doing what I have to do. He’s tormented me for my entire life, Vivi. He’s tried to kill Taryn and I in turn. We almost died in the river a week ago because he put us there. I will not step aside and let him win.” 

“You would rather die and let him win in a single fell swoop?” The question strikes as surely as a rapier seeking out the slim gap between a person’s ribs. 

“I might not die,” Jude observes. She won't die if she wins. She won't die if Cardan considers spilled blood enough to settle the fight.

Vivi, however, is unmoved. “You will most likely die.” 

Silence falls between them, as heavy and impenetrable as a funeral shroud. Not for the first time today, Jude is reminded of the last day in which they lived in the mortal realm, the last day when she had been both comfortable and unafraid. Specifically, she reflects on the moment when her childhood illusions of love and safety shattered. She thinks of the pools of her parents’ blood on the floor, of the way the crimson liquid seeped into the already stained fabric of Madoc’s cap as he added another layer of death to his ongoing record. She thinks of Taryn’s shaking hand in hers. She thinks of the hollowness in her chest when the door closed behind them for the last time. 

She has been living on borrowed time for ages, and though it may be stupid to throw it away, she cannot seem to stop herself from dancing on the knife’s edge of recklessness. 

It isn’t that she wants to die, exactly. It’s that when you live with your life on the line moment to moment, it no longer seems earth-shattering to volunteer to be slaughtered, especially not when it is her only chance to get a blow in edgewise. 

When Jude speaks, her words are grave. “It’s a miracle I’ve lived this long.” 

Vivi weighs a thought. Jude wonders if she will try again to stop her -- attempt to seek out whatever common sense still exists within the cage of rage and grief that is her ravaged human body -- but for better or for worse, Vivi stands. 

“I hope he at least picked a mode of combat you’re good at.” 

For the first time in hours, Jude smiles. She may not have fangs or teeth filed into brutal points, but her expression still manages to ring sinister. 

“I’m good at all of them.” 

Vivi does not reply. Perhaps she has nothing to say. Perhaps the only comfort she can think to offer are lies that she cannot speak. Perhaps she is merely too exhausted to care. 

She takes her magazines and drink with her when she leaves, and once the door closes, Jude is frightfully alone. 

Sleep does not come easily that night. It spurts and sputters, interrupted in alternating turns by nightmares and obsessive worrying. In the dark of night, the smug satisfaction that Jude felt in knowing that she had dared to call Cardan out wears thin. It is poor comfort against the many, many ways in which she might suffer at his hands. 

He might bleed her slowly with a deep wound to her gut that wells for hours as she grows weaker to weaker, knowing that there is no hope of healing and no way for her to win. He might kill her in a flash of a knife against her throat — ending her life so quickly that she barely registers the blow. She is not sure which option she fears more. In truth, all but one outcome seems utterly dreadful, but she would expect nothing less. Jude and Cardan were both molded by Faerie, shaped by its petty cruelty and honed into something sharp, brutal, and positively deadly. 

This is her destiny, as much as anything can be. There is no other way in which this could end. She was marked for tragedy from the outset. 

But at least she is in the right. 

Cardan is cruel, and he deserves every blow that Jude manages to land upon him before he finally eviscerates her. 

Jude skips breakfast, and she does not bother to grab the lunch that was packed for her on her way out the door. Fear and desperation do not inspire hunger. She does, however, take extra care to secret a container of salt in her pocket and double check that her necklace of rowan berries is securely tied around her neck. 

Unless Cardan skips class today, she will have to see him. She will have to see his friends, too. She wonders if they know about the fight that will happen tonight, if Cardan has bragged to them about how he’s going to kill her. She cannot imagine that he kept it to himself. He is always so confident, so arrogant, so full of himself and his own abilities that he must have told Nicasia and Locke, at the very least. Not only do they likely know of her imminent doom, but it gives them an extra excuse to try to take advantage of her, to poison her with fruit or pour wine down or throat or cast her into a thorn bush under the guise of helping their leader. She wants to make sure that she is as immune to such things as she can be. Dying before her fight with Cardan is, perhaps, the only thing worse than dying in her fight with Cardan. Nor is she interested in walking into their duel while incapacitated. 

Normally, Jude and Taryn walk to class together, but today, Jude doesn’t bother to wait for her sister. Though she told Vivi about calling out Cardan, she is not at all interested in telling Taryn. Unlike Vivi, Jude cannot trust Taryn to keep her promises, nor is she interested in feeling the waves of disapproval that will inevitably radiate from her twin’s body as soon as she finds out. No — it is better to let her think that maybe Jude is just angry at her. Maybe this is a petty disagreement. Maybe Jude is just angry and surly and there’s nothing to be done to change it. It hurts Jude’s heart that this might discolor Taryn’s final memories of her, but it is better than the alternative. 

Jude is a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain, and there is no stopping her now. There’s no need to even invite the possibility. 

Class meets outside, as they almost always do, and as soon as she sits down, Jude busies herself with a notebook. Though she is not doing anything particularly academic, it is both a good strategy for avoiding the attention of her peers and a decent time to slow down some of her racing thoughts by putting pen to paper. Of course, she does not write her specific fears — or so much as touch the reality of the potentially lethal situation that she’s inserted herself in -- lest someone try to read over her shoulder. Instead, she scribbles down vague, one to two word thoughts. Names, places, emotions, sensations. It is an incomplete picture, but it is enough to keep both her hands and her mind busy. 

At least, it works until a leather boot enters her downturned vision and kicks over her ink — sending a black puddle splattering across the page. Jude’s thoughts, incomplete though they may have been, disappear, lost amidst the mess. Whatever momentary calm she held vanishes in an instant, replaced by a thunderous storm of rage. 

Jude’s chin snaps up, and she locks eyes with Nicasia. The female faerie’s blue-green hair shines in the sunlight, and the smirk on her lips scribes deep, snide lines in her cheeks. 

“Oops,” she drawls, rolling the word around her mouth as if savoring every letter. 

Jude snaps her notebook shut and picks up the fallen bottle of ink, holding it up to the light as she seeks to evaluate how much of its contents remained ensconced inside the glass before she leans over and upends it again, staining those polished boots black. 

“Oops,” Jude says in a mocking echo of Nicasia’s own insincerity. 

Nicasia jumps backwards with a harsh word and hissed curse, promising that Jude will surely die one of these days before turning her back and stepping out of range.

Strangely, her reaction provides Jude with a small amount of relief. As unpleasant as the interaction was, it was shockingly normal. It was the same sort of abuse that Jude faces every day at the hands of her so-called peers. There were no mentions of a duel, no attempt to sabotage it, no jeers about Jude writing her last wishes. In all respects, this, incident was tame. Even if Cardan plans to tell his minions, he at least has not told them yet. A new brand of hope blossoms in Jude’s chest. 

Maybe — just maybe — Cardan is afraid of her. 

It is a delightful notion, if unlikely to be true. 

Jude picks up her scattered things, and though she tries to dab away the worst of the ink puddles with a blotting pad, her scribbles are not salvageable. It is only when the teacher starts speaking that she looks up again, taking a moment to scan the gathered class in search of her evening opponent, fully anticipating his smirk and dreadful stare. 

But he is not there. 

Jude cannot remember the last time that Cardan skipped class. Faeries do not take sick days. They are not prone to lateness. They do not wander in with written excuses for their lax behavior. Cardan is more likely to pressure their teacher into dissolving the class early than he is to not show up at all. 

This is different. 

This is new. 

And it makes Jude wary. 

She is so antsy, in fact, that she barely pays attention to the lesson. Normally she latches onto knowledge with an unparalleled amount of vigor. Class is one thing that she can be good at. She revels in the opportunity to answer questions correctly and show up her less engaged classmates. Today, however, words go in one ear and out the other. She cannot seem to keep her mind and her heart present in the moment. 

She cannot help but overanalyze Cardan’s absence. Her mind fills in the blanks, supplying worst case scenario after worst case scenario. She convinces herself that he must be scheming some way to cheat, that he is having someone forge an unbeatable dagger, that he is looking for some secret invention of the legendary Grimsen. She may not have been able to use her brain at all the afternoon that she challenged him, but today, she more than makes up the difference. 

The only thing that quiets her racing brain is an interruption partway through the morning. 

Cardan is not entirely absent from class. Instead, he stumbles into their circle incredibly late, clothes rumpled and dark circles sitting heavy beneath his smudged eyes. Jude has never seen him look like that, and for all the explanations that her mind was willing to supply to justify his absence, she is unable to summon even a single feasible excuse for this. For want of a better word, he is a mess. A beautiful mess, since it is impossible for a faerie to be anything but beautiful, but a mess nonetheless. 

He does not look at her as he takes his seat, nor does he look at anyone else. Not Locke, not Nicasia, not Taryn, and not even their teacher, who does not bother to comment on his student’s lateness. Jude, however, does not avoid looking at him. Her gaze lingers, sweeping across every inch of him as she tries to absorb every single detail. She justifies it as a hunt for weaknesses, but in reality, she is genuinely curious. 

As much as she wants to beat Cardan, she also hungers to understand him. He represents everything that she will never be, everything about this world that makes it so inhospitable to mortals like her. She resents him, she despises him, she fears him, but she cannot seem to tear her attention away for the same reason that she can never seem to stay in the mortal realm. She knows that this place and these people are dangerous, but the alternative is boring. The alternative is feeling as though she failed. The alternative is fundamentally abhorrent. 

She does not think that Cardan has slept. His dark hair is ruffled and unkempt. His shirt is mostly unbuttoned. He wears the same clothes that he wore yesterday. Though Nicasia leans over to speak to him, he neither speaks to her nor offer any other sort of acknowledgement of her presence. She leans back with a frustrated huff, and for want of something better to do, she decides to busy herself by throwing things at Taryn. Jude, apparently, has already lost her appeal as a target. 

On most days, Jude would have spoken up on Taryn’s behalf and defended her sister to the best of her ability, but today, she lacks the focus. Besides it would make Taryn want to talk to her, if only to lob criticism in her direction. Jude would prefer to avoid that, if possible. 

Working direct against every instinct she possesses, Jude keeps her head down, ignores the burning in her blood, and waits.

Jude leaves the house after nightfall. It is not the first time that she has snuck out of her room in the dead of night -- far from it -- but it is, perhaps, the scariest. For most of her past exploits, either Vivi or Taryn has been at her side. Tonight she is entirely alone. 

Her hair is pulled off of her neck in a dark twist, and she has already slashed her dark skirts at the knees. When she was getting ready, she briefly considered donning trousers, but she thought better of it. Cardan might underestimate her if she is in a skirt, which is something that she can work to her advantage. She had everything to gain and nothing to lose, because between the two options, mobility is about the same, a fact that Jude proves when she descends the manor walls by way of the twisted ivy that covers the estate. 

She holds her breath as she circumvents the windows, doing her best to stay out of sight from any other residents who might be awake. She doesn't need another obstacle in her way. If she shows up late, she forfeits. 

Three feet from the ground, she lets go of her makeshift ladder. Her feet land in the soft bed of moss that she planted for just this purpose, and her bent knees absorb most of the blow. 

Exhaling slowly, she straightens, checks to make sure that her dagger is still securely fastened to her belt, and takes a careful step backward as she stares up at the house one last time. 

Hopefully she'll be back. 

Hopefully this isn't goodbye. 

But it's hard to tell. 

On the second floor, a shadowy figure appears in a lit window. Jude's heart vaults into her throat and she turns, breaking into a run as she flees the scene, desperately trying not to get caught. 

The air is unusually biting for this time of year. It nips at her lungs as she runs through the forest, building an ache in the center of her chest that threatens to end the fight before it has even begun. In the shadows, strange creatures leer at her. This world is malevolent during the daylight hours, but it is even worse after nightfall. Jude knows that compared to everything else that lives in Faerie, human eyesight means nothing in this darkness. She is almost blind. Belatedly, she wonders if Cardan thought of that before he picked the time. Clever of him. For a split-second, Jude almost dares to admire the effort, but that positivity falls away as she draws nearer and nearer to her intended destination. The threat of death dogs her footsteps and breathes down her neck, more prescient than it has ever been.

Step by step, she slows into first a walk and then a creep, slipping from shadow to shadow like an assassin. 

She is afraid. More afraid, perhaps, than she's ever been, but she schools that fear into silence, until there is naught but the sound of the river left roaring in her ears. Even her heartbeat seems to have gone quiet as she steps out of the darkness and onto the moonlit riverbank. Nixies chitter and scatter at her approach, disappearing into the current and taking their sharp teeth into the depths with them. 

Cardan, however, barely moves. 

Bathed in moonlight, Cardan draped across the shore, looking just as rumpled as when he walked into class. There is a faint expression of boredom etched upon his face, but it cracks as he glances up at Jude. His eyes can't even manage their usual lazy cruelty. Even for a faerie, he looks young. Delicate. Fragile. Lithe hands toy with his unsheathed dagger, bracing it between his fingers as he finds the point of balance. 

If Jude did not know better, she would think that he, too, is afraid, and though she ought to relish in that fact as surely as if it was a victory, she cannot bring herself to cheer. Instead, a hollow dread that she can neither understand nor explain threatens to gnaw a hole through her chest. 

For a horribly long time, the pair simply stares at each other — human and faerie, black eyes and brown ones, mortal and immortal. Normally, they cannot stop themselves from snapping in each other’s directions. They are always full to the brim with barbed insults. Today, however, with daggers in hand, they cannot seem to find their tongues. 

The inaction makes Jude antsy. Her skin bristles. Her weight shifts. Eventually, it begs her to be the first to break the silence. “We might as well get this over with.”

Cardan blinks once, slowly, like a cat. With what seems like an exhaustive effort, he rises to his feet. In a flash, the hilt of his dagger finds his palm. His reflexes are fast. Faster than Jude’s. Her heart rises into her throat, beating so quickly that the sound almost fades into a nonsensical buzz. 

He stalks across the space between them until he practically looms over Jude. She cranes her neck upwards, looking into his face with narrowed eyes. A loose curl of hair slips free of her bun, tickling the skin on the back of her neck. 

“If you want to leave,” he says, words lethally quiet, “I will not tell anyone that you did.” 

For the space of a single breath, Jude is almost tempted to accept the offer. Were Cardan mortal, she might be actively questioning the claim — believing that he would spread the news of her cowardice like a vicious rumor — but Cardan cannot lie. If he has spoken this, then it is the truth. Running would be their little secret. Both of them could live and breathe and pretend as though nothing happened. They could part ways beneath the moonlight and return to their usual patterns, engaging in cruel pranks and idle threats instead of challenging each other to the death by the river.

Jude, however, would still know. She would have to live with the knowledge that she backed down from this fight forever. In her heart, she would feel that she is no better than the mud and dirt from which faeries believe that humans first sprung. She hates herself enough already; she hates her mortal body and her violent nature and the sadness that so often threatens to consume her. She does not need to add another item to the list. 

With a small sigh, she reaches beneath her belt and tugs her own dagger free of its sheath. The wind and the running have turned the metal hilt to ice, and it bites into her hand so sharply that at first, she thinks that she might have accidentally grabbed it by the wrong end. She glances down, fully expecting to see blood, but there is only skin and silver and the mingling fog from both her lungs and Cardan’s. She is acutely aware of the way that his gaze follows hers, the laser focus of his attention. It draws a line of goosebumps down her spine, much akin to the ones that pop up when she feels as though she is being stalked. 

Jude schools the shakiness from her voice as she replies, “I would not have called you out was I not prepared to face the consequences.” 

She decided a long time ago, back when she was still a child, that being a coward is far, far worse than being stupid. 

A flicker of emotion passes across Cardan’s face. Jude thinks that it looks more like disappointment and grief than fear, but it is there and gone so quickly that it might as well have been a figment of her imagination. J ude’s tongue stirs from its leaden place in the center of her mouth, prepared to ask a difficult question, but the words never leave her lips.

She reminds herself that she does not care about Cardan. He has never been anything but cruel to her. She lives in an impossible situation, an impossible set of circumstances, and he has never done a single thing to make her life easier. If anything, he has made it significantly worse. He watched as his friends shoved her into rivers. He helped shove faerie fruit down her throat. He has mocked her a thousand different ways and until this very moment, he never once granted her reprieve, and this barely counts. No doubt this momentary break is just a side effect of his own fear. After all, not even faeries are immune from a sense of self-preservation. They may not be able to die from natural causes, but they can be cursed and stabbed and viciously murdered. More safe is not the same thing as entirely safe. Immortal is not the same thing as deathless. 

Cardan inclines his head. “Suit yourself, then.” 

They stand utterly still for another long moment — twin statues on either side of a negligible sliver of air — as if waiting for a command to move that will never come. It is only when a bird in a nearby bush flutters its wings and disturbs the silence that Cardan steps backward. His dagger flashes in the dappled moonlight as he moves across the clearing — stealthy and catlike. He takes up position at the very edge of the river, rippling waves lapping at his shoes as he rolls his shoulders back, lifts his chin, and speaks, “On your word or mine?” 

Jude does not know what the accepted convention is. Madoc may have taught her both how to fight and the words to avoid, but he did not walk her through duel etiquette. She does not know any of the specifics. In fact, she knows the rules for pistol duels more thoroughly than she knows those for faeries despite the fact that duels have been extinct in the mortal realms for centuries. 

Jude hesitates before saying, “Yours.” 

The first person to move often loses a fight, whether that fight is physical, mental, or emotional. She does not want to make the first move. Responding is safer. Responding lets her read the room and know what she is up against. 

In the distance, someone -- or something -- screams. 

Jude looks away, following the noise. 

It is only when their eye contact breaks that Cardan says, “Now.” 

Jude barely has time to raise her arm to parry the blow. Metal screams against metal as the clash echoes up her arm and through her shoulder. She grits her teeth, grasps the blade tighter, tries to keep it from spinning out of her too small, too delicate, too mortal fingers. Cardan obviously did not share her reservations about striking first. Logically, it should not make her doubt herself and her training, but the hole in her chest seems to widen into a gaping chasm that threatens to devour the fragile remnants of her own identity. 

With a grimace, she disengages, forcing him backwards with a shove of her forearms and a well placed kick to his shins. She did not plan to fight with dirty tricks — she thought that she could beat him with polished skill alone — but the reality was always going to be different. No matter how much training she has, no matter how long she spent in the care and keeping of a red cap, she will always be a mortal in a faerie world. Her body and her instincts know what she needs, even if her reason does not. 

With a spin, Jude moves back towards the treeline. She should have counted the trees, should have memorized them, should have made sure that she marked the paths out so that she would not accidentally find herself pinned against a rough and unforgiving wall of aging bark. 

She dares to cast a single glance over her shoulder. No tree. She digs her toe into the ground, gouging a line in the dirt before she springs forward quickly enough to disguise the action beneath her subterfuge. Her blade finds only air as Cardan steps sideways and out of the way. 

His own blade whips out at her, but Jude hears its whistle and ducks, even while her feet still scramble on the rocks and mud of the riverbank. 

Though her heart still races as adrenaline roars through her body, her mind begins to quiet. She has not fought Cardan before, never placed her own life on the line this severely, but the rhythm of combat is familiar to her. There are no more intervening tangents -- no more worries about Cardan’s expressions or memories of pools of blood on the floor of her childhood kitchen. There are no more strategies or questions of protecting her pride. There are no more regrets or biting comments or worries. There’s just her and Cardan and the knives they wield. 

They part and come back together over and over again, each of them fighting to nick the other’s skin. It is an intimate dance. Short blades mean clashes of body on body. A visceral, primal, sweaty grapple in a space that is at once both too large and too small. They fall together more than once, rolling over each other until mud coats their limbs and seeps through their clothes. 

More than once, Jude makes mistakes. She is not fast enough or practiced enough or trained enough to match Cardan step for step. But somehow, his blade never manages to touch her. It always manages to stop just out of reach, however, Jude does not linger overlong on the observation. Perhaps Cardan is making mistakes too. Perhaps not even faeries can stake their lives upon rage and laurels alone. She cannot allow herself to be distracted by it, not when her life is on the line. Not when she is already stumbling. Not when her legs are tired and her arm is getting heavy. 

As she moves, Jude continues to gouge her marks in the dirt, staking out the positions of tress and divots and areas near the river’s edge. She doesn’t want to be taken out by the environment. It is one thing to die at Cardan’s hand and quite another to be impaled by the whims and limbs of a bystanding tree. 

Still, she stumbles. Every time they fall together, a mark gets erased and rewritten. Every time her foot slips, she makes a meaningless mark in the bunch. Every time Cardan spins, he marks the ground, too. Faeries are one with the earth in a way that Jude will never be. They live and flourish alongside it, growing and changing and embracing the world. Jude runs against it. Like everything in Faerie, the ground and everything that dares to take root in it is Jude's sworn enemy. Taryn would call that kind of mindset paranoid. Jude prefers to think of it as realistic. 

She does not know whether hours or minutes pass while they fight. Time blends together, moving from moment to moment in an unparsable mass. She exists only in the present second, the past and the future utterly forgotten. She is lost in the rush and sway of the dance. 

And then, finally, Cardan breaks. 

His boot slips in the mud by the riverbank. He falls to one knee with his back to her, and clips his thigh with the point of his own knife. Blood seeps from the wound, staining his trousers and running into the dirt, mixing with grass and dirt and river water until it is indiscernible from the brown sludge. 

Jude does not have time to think. She surges forward on instinct, lunging at his back as she rips open the back of his tunic with a ruthless slash of her blade. Black fabric curls away from his body, following the path of a straight line of blood and torn skin and still pulsing veins. Jude draws back and adjusts her grip, ready to slip a blade between Cardan's ribs, but she catches sight of crisscrossing lines beneath the fresh one and stops. Her feet are one step short of the river behind her, perched directly upon her mark in the soil. 

She forgets how to move. 

Jude’s life has not been kind to her. She is a stranger in a strange land. She is an orphan. She watched her parents be murdered before her very eyes and fears for her own life every second of every day. Her pain often makes her blind to the pain of other people. It never occurred to her that, perhaps, beneath the sneers and the petty cruelty, Cardan might be disguising troubles of his own. She does not know which person in his life flayed him over and over again. She does not know what it is like to be the youngest son in a family full of terrors. She does not know what it is like to be anyone except herself. 

She does not follow through with the blow. 

Cardan stands, turns, and hurls himself at her with desperate abandon. Jude falls backwards — acutely aware of his body on hers and the mud on her face and the stench of sweat — and strikes the ice cold water of the river. 

Shock drives the air from her lungs and the dagger from her hands. 

Rivers in Faerie are deeper than rivers in the mortal realm. Faster. More dangerous. Jude sinks deeper and deeper into the water, propelled by the extra weight until she hits the wet silt of the riverbed below. She thinks that he might drown her. It would be a fitting end, given that he tried to drown both her and Taryn mere days ago, but after a minute, he lets go. She kicks against the water and struggles towards the surface. 

She breaks through it with a gasp and an involuntary whine of pain and cold and fear. The current swipes her into a rock and she wraps her arms around it, fighting to hold on for dear life. She whips her head up, trying to flick her wet hair out of her eyes as she looks around for Cardan. She does not know if he still has his dagger. She does not know how hurt he is. She does not know if he is still moving. 

In the dark, it takes her a long time to track him down — just a dark shadow floating along the surface of the river. 

No, not floating — being dragged. 

The Nixies. 

Jude takes a deep breath of cold air and lets go of the rock. She fought with these same nixies the other day, scared them away from Taryn with a bit of a thrashing that made them shy away. Nixies prefer easy prey over anything that struggles. Right now, Cardan is easy prey, but she can change that. 

She doesn’t question the impulse to save him. After all, she did not come to the duel with the intention of killing Cardan, not really. She dislikes him, but that doesn’t mean that she wanted him to die, even by her own hand. She just wanted him to suffer a little bit. Mostly, she wanted to defend her own honor, prove to him that mortals can stand on the same ground as faeries and hold their own. She wanted to be seen as who she wants to be for once — ambitious, powerful, strong. This wasn’t a question of revenge; it was a matter of assertion. 

And she’s done that. 

She beat him. 

She drew blood. He doesn’t need to be torn apart and devoured by river pests. Leaving him to such a fate makes her no better than he had been a week ago. 

The current carries her to him quickly. She latches onto him as surely as she latched onto the rock, and a few well placed kicks send the nixies scattering. Even as she cranes her neck, looking for a good place to exit the river as the current continues to carry them downstream, Jude holds Cardan tightly.

“You alive?” she asks. Cardan is so limp and lifeless in her grasp that he might as well be a sack of potatoes, though he is not half as useful. 

There is a mumbling groan in reply, and Cardan frees himself from her, reaching out to grab a passing root that hangs over the edge of the riverbank, leaving Jude with two empty hands, both of which she needs. She grasps onto first a boulder then a log, hauling herself to shore using handhold after handhold. 

When she reaches the safety of mud again, she allows herself a moment to breathe, crouching on her hands and knees as she tries to will the chill damp from her bones. It does not work. No amount of stubbornness can save you from the consequences of your own actions. 

She lingers there for a long time, motionless. 

She does not look up when a hob-faced owl coos nearby. She does not look up with something small and slippery rattles in the fallen leaves beside her. She does not even look up when a familiar pair of mud covered shoes come into view. 

Cardan’s voice, cool and measured, drips from his lips and down to her ears. “If you tell no one of this, I will never speak of it again.” 

It is the same offer as before the fight. 

All of this mud, all of this blood, all of the wetness, and still, he offers her an out. 

With a great huff of effort, Jude pushes herself off of the ground. She can feel bruises welling in strange, unwanted places, joining the welt on her hand from when she punched Cardan the previous day. She looks up at him warily, narrowed eyes sweeping across his mussed and dirty body. Though his back is not visible, she almost feels as though she can see directly through him, straight to the latticework of scars on the other side.

The ability to think comes back to her in a rush, as does the ability to feel something other than deadly rage. There are tears in her eyes, she thinks, though the water that drips down her face makes it tricky to tell. 

“You could have stabbed me,” she says, each word a grunt of effort. “I made mistakes. You had opportunities.” 

Cardan does not speak. 

“Why not? Why let me keep going? Is this fun for you? Watching me throw myself at a brick wall over and over again, knowing that at any moment you could cut me down and there would not be a single thing that I could do to stop it?” 

The prince’s reply is slow and careful. “You could have let me drown, and yet you did not.” 

Jude scoffs. “You would not have drowned. I just sped up the process.” 

Cardan looks at her, brows furrowed in the approximate shape of an argument. “Did you want to die?”

Every question he asks infuriates her. Every question is a refusal to acknowledge truth. It is one of the oldest pages in every faerie’s book of tricks. 

“No. I wanted to win.” 

There is a pause. Long, poignant, agonizing. 

“Would you settle for a draw?” 

Jude doubles over, coughing the remaining moisture from her lungs. “No.” That, perhaps, is one of the worst things that she has learned over the years. Never give up. Never let someone else win. A draw is simply another word for surrender. 

At last, Cardan speaks plainly. “I lost my weapon.” 

“I did, too.” 

Cardan’s head tilts. “Then we have no obligation to continue the fight. Go home, Jude.” 

The sound of her name rings in her ears. For the first time in her life, Cardan does not speak her name like an insult. It is not a jab, not a dismissal, not a drawl. It is just her name — simple, plain, unadorned, and almost pleasant. 

She stares at him, making no effort to hide her suspicion. 

He meets her gaze for only a moment before shoving his hands in his pockets and pivoting on his heel. He falls back into the easy affect that has so long plagued his every action. “We will see each other tomorrow, I’m sure.” 

And maybe it is her lingering desire to win. Maybe it is the adrenaline in her blood or the ringing in her ears or the foolish recklessness that still has a grip on her heart, but as soon as she catches a glimpse of the slash across his back, she raises her voice. “Wait.” 

Cardan stops, but he does not turn around. 

Jude dares to ask a deadly question. “Who hits you?” 

The biting wind returns, ripping down the length of the river like an arrow loosed from a bowstring. 

Honesty knots both his tongue and his words. “To speak ill of certain people in public is to invite danger.”

Jude nods. It is a confirmation of what she already suspected. Someone in his family did that to him. Someone who has spies and supporters in his employ who are willing to report even the tiniest rumor of insubordination back to them. Jude supposes that it doesn’t matter who did it. Cardan is the only royal she comes into contact with, and given his usual level of wickedness, she does not doubt that it runs in the family. An inherited trait. 

An apology leaves her mouth before she can stop it. It is a terribly human thing to pity other people, even those who have wronged you. Besides, she knows  “I am sorry for it.”

Cardan does not look at her. He does not acknowledge her. He does not throw barbs or insults or poisoned names. He merely disappears into the shadowy edges of the woods, leaving Jude alone with the rivers, the Nixies, and her racing thoughts. 

It is days before they catch each other alone again. 

In the intervening hours, they fall into similar patterns — the pranks, the insults, the jabs — but Nicasia and Locke seem to carry the burden of the lone. Cardan is quiet, detached, but at least he seems to have kept his word. Though their peers stare at their bruises and their twin limps out of the corner of their eyes when they wander into gatherings and classes, they do not comment on them. Likely, they know that if they do, then they risk becoming the new target of the prince’s wrath. 

Jude, too, tells no one — not even Vivi, who dares to ask about the duel directly the next morning. 

There is nothing to say, nothing that explains the fact that they are both still alive, nothing to justify the muddy footprints in the corridors that sent Oriana into a tailspin, nothing that succeeds in reaching past the information that Jude that she glimpsed on that fateful night. Worst of all, she cannot stop thinking about him, cannot stop contemplating the missed blows and the pain on his face and the dreadful history beaten into his body. 

She fears that obsession more than anything else. 

Hating Cardan felt safe. 

Caring about him, however, stinks with potential lethality. 

They catch each other in a sun drenched corner of the river, when Jude is scouring the mud for her lost dagger. It is unlikely that she will ever find it again — far too many fae folk have sticky fingers and an eye for shiny things — but she owes it to herself to try. She does not want to be forced to ask Madoc for a replacement, does not want to have to come up with a convincing lie that covers her actions. 

Cardan, however, seems almost aimless as he floats through the trees, a demeanor that only changes when he catches sight of Jude and suddenly freezes. 

“Back again already?” he asks, though his usual drawl feels surface level. 

“Need my dagger back,” Jude says as she kicks over a rock. “Madoc will notice that it’s gone.”

The Prince of Faerie considers her for a moment, pitch black eyes glittering. “Tell him that a pixie stole it.” 

A centipede slithers out from beneath the overturned rock. “Why are you helping me?” 

Cardan’s shoulders lift in the ghost of a shrug. “A debt is a debt.” 

The statement is close enough to a riddle that Jude lets out a bark of laughter. “Consider it settled. I neither want nor need your help.” 

Silence echoes, full of words that neither of them are brave enough to say and thoughts that neither of them can admit to. 

“You fought well. The weapon does not deserve to be in anyone else’s hands.” 

Jude does not know how to take the compliment. Instead, she scrutinizes it, turning it this way and that as she checks for flaws. Finding none, she merely hums a nondescript acknowledgment and returns to her searching. 

Before she knows it, Cardan is alongside her. 

Her wrist is in his hand again, but not because she tried to hit him. His touch is firm, yet oddly gentle. Her pulse flutters beneath the press of his fingers. 

They spent a lot of time in each other’s air recently — swapping breaths and blows in turn — but this feels different. There is no anger in the air, yet it still crackles with energy. Jude knows she should pull away, knows that it is dangerous to be this close to a man who hates her, but she stays. 

For whatever reason, she doesn’t let go. 

The kiss is so brief that it barely registers, and then just as quickly as he had descended upon her, Cardan is gone, and the search for the dagger is forgotten. 

Jude, oddly, wishes the kiss lasted longer. 

She tastes him on her lips long after they part. 

And when nightfalls and she retires to her bed, her thoughts are plagued by him as surely as if he was a nightmare. 

…Or a fantasy.

The next morning, a carved wooden box awaits her on the table. Jude dares not open it in front of her family, just in case it contains a curse or a spell or some other unkind thing, and chooses instead to spirit it up to her room where she might uncover the contents in peace. 

Her hands tremble slightly as she undoes the latch, ready to hit the ground should the mechanism be rigged as a trap. 

She does not have to bother. 

Perched on a field of blue velvet is her dagger — polished until it shines. 

Directly beneath it is a folded piece of parchment. She unfolds it carefully, revealing the finely scripted words beneath. 

For you. 

Jude pulls the dagger free from the box, intending to return it to its sheath, but a mark on the blade catches her eye. There in the metal is a single painted kiss. Faint, pink, taunting. Her cheeks flush. Her heart pounds. 

She pulls out the chair of her desk slowly and pens a response, her letters spiky and unbalanced. She seals it with a drip of wax and Madoc’s seal and tucks it away in her pocket. She will deliver it herself later, drop it in a bag when he’s not looking. She would rather die than tell anyone in the household that she is communicating with Cardan. 

She leaves it unsigned, just as he had left his own note. 

Cardan will know who it is from.

It was not a draw.