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I am afraid of what he will say.
    When we get home, pushing open the enormous wooden door with its looping ironwork, someone is shouting upstairs, as though in distress. I run toward the sound, heart in my mouth, only to find Vivi in her room, chasing a cloud of sprites. They streak past me into the hall in a blast of gossamer, and she slams the book she was swinging at them into the door casing.
    â€œLook!” Vivi yells at me, pointing toward her closet. “Look what they did.”
    The doors are open, and I see a sprawl of things stolen from the human world, matchbooks, newspapers, empty bottles, novels, and Polaroids. The sprites had turned the matchbooks into beds and tables, shredded all the paper, and ripped out the centers of the books to nest inside. It was a full-on sprite infestation.
    But I am more baffled by the quantity of things Vivi has and how many of them don’t seem to have any value. It’s just junk. Mortal junk.
    â€œWhat
is
all that?” Taryn asks, coming into the room. She bends down and extracts a strip of pictures, only gently chewed by sprites. The pictures are taken one right after the other, the kind you have to sit in a booth for. Vivi is in the photos, her arm draped over the shoulders of a grinning, pink-haired mortal girl.
    Maybe Taryn isn’t the only one who has decided to fall in love.

    At dinner, we sit at a massive table carved along all four sides with images of piping fauns and dancing imps. Fat wax pillar candles burn at the center, beside a carved stone vase full of wood sorrel. Servants bring us silver plates piled with food. We eat fresh broad beans, venison with scattered pomegranate seeds, grilled brown trout with butter, a salad of bitter herbs, and, for after, raisin cakes smothered in apple syrup. Madoc and Oriana drink canary wine; we children mix ours with water.
    Next to my plate and Taryn’s is a bowl of salt.
    Vivi pokes at her venison and then licks blood from her knife.
    Oak grins across the table and starts to mimic Vivi, but Oriana snatches the cutlery from his grasp before he can slice his tongue open. Oak giggles and picks up his meat with his fingers, tearing at it with sharp teeth.
    â€œYou should know that the king will soon abdicate his throne in favor of one of his children,” Madoc says, looking at all of us. “It is likely that he will choose Prince Dain.”
    It doesn’t matter that Dain is third-born. The High Ruler chooses their successor—that’s how the stability of Elfhame is ensured. The first High Queen, Mab, had her smith forge a crown. Lore has it that the blacksmith was a creature called Grimsen, who could shape anything from metal—birds that trill and necklaces that slither over throats, twin swords called Heartseeker and Heartsworn that never missed a strike. Queen Mab’s crown was magically and wondrously wrought so that it passes only from one blood relation to another, in an unbroken line. With the crown passes the oaths of all those sworn to it. Although her subjects gather at each new coronation to renew their fealty, authority still rests in the crown.
    â€œWhy’s he abdicating?” Taryn asks.
    Vivi’s smirk has turned nasty. “His children got impatient with him for remaining alive.”
    A wash of rage passes over Madoc’s face. Taryn and I don’t dare bait him for fear that his patience with us stretches only so far, but Vivi is expert at it. When he answers her, I can see the effort he’s making to bite his tongue. “Few kings of Faerie have ruled so well for so long as Eldred. Now he goes to seek the Land of Promise.”
    As far as I can tell, the Land of Promise is their euphemism for death, although they do not admit it. They say it is the place that the Folk came from and to which they will eventually return.
    â€œAre you saying he’s leaving the throne because he’s
old
?” I ask, wondering if I’m being impolite.