I think I might hate him after all.
Then Cardan takes my hands in his and pulls me away from the other dancers, toward the secret chamber he showed me before, behind the dais. It is as I remember it, its walls thick with moss, a low couch resting beneath gently glowing mushrooms.
“I only know how to be cruel or to laugh when I am discomposed,” he says, and sits down on the couch.
I let go of him and remain standing. I promised myself I would do this, if I ever had the chance again. I promised I would do this the first moment I could.
“I love you,” I say, the words coming out in an unintelligible rush.
Cardan looks taken aback. Or possibly I spoke so fast he’s not even sure what I said. “You need not say it out of pity,” he says finally, with great deliberateness. “Or because I was under a curse. I have asked you to lie to me in the past, in this very room, but I would beg you not to lie now.”
My cheeks heat at the memory of those lies.
“I have not made myself easy to love,” he says, and I hear the echo of his mother’s words in his.
When I imagined telling him, I thought I would say the words, and it would be like pulling off a bandage—painful and swift. But I didn’t think he would doubt me. “I first started liking you when we went to talk to the rulers of the low Courts,” I say. “You were funny, which was weird. And when we went to Hollow Hall, you were clever. I kept remembering how you’d been the one to get us out of the brugh after Dain’s coronation, right before I put that knife to your throat.”
He doesn’t try to interrupt, so I have no choice but to barrel on.
“After I tricked you into being the High King,” I say. “I thought once you hated me, I could go back to hating you. But I didn’t. And I felt so stupid. I thought I would get my heart broken. I thought it was a weakness that you would use against me. But then you saved me from the Undersea when it would have been much more convenient to just leave me to rot. After that, I started to hope my feelings were returned. But then there was the exile—” I take a ragged breath. “I hid a lot, I guess. I thought if I didn’t, if I let myself love you, I would burn up like a match. Like the whole matchbook.”
“But now you’ve explained it,” he says. “And you do love me.”
“I love you,” I confirm.
“Because I am clever and funny,” he says, smiling. “You didn’t mention my handsomeness.”
“Or your deliciousness,” I say. “Although those are both good qualities.”
He pulls me to him, so that we’re both lying down on the couch. I look down at the blackness of his eyes and the softness of his mouth. I wipe a fleck of dried blood from the top of one pointed ear. “What was it like?” I ask. “Being a serpent.”
He hesitates. “It was like being trapped in the dark,” he says. “I was alone, and my instinct was to lash out. I was perhaps not entirely an animal, but neither was I myself. I could not reason. There were only feelings—hatred and terror and the desire to destroy.”
I start to speak, but he stops me with a gesture. “And you.” He looks at me, his lips curving in something that’s not quite a smile; it’s more and less than that. “I knew little else, but I always knew you.”
And when he kisses me, I feel as though I can finally breathe again.