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Someone is really unused to being at the bottom of a power dynamic.

I pat his cheek patronizingly. “Now, be a good boy and let’s cooperate for a change.” My hand drops to one of his necklaces, and I finger a small bone. “You said that the shadow retrieved Galleghar. What was Galleghar doing while this was happening?”

“Walking.” He says this so derisively, like there is no other way a previously dead body could leave a tomb. After a brief pause, he adds, “My reports said he walked out of the tomb alongside a shadow.”

So Galleghar lay undying in his tomb until one night a shadow came and presumably awakened him. Then the two skipped off into the night, and the rest of us were none the wiser.

“Good,” I say absently, patting his cheek once more. “Good.”

I begin to climb off of Typhus’s lap, my thoughts racing ahead to sleeping bodies and shadows, when I pause. “Oh, I almost forgot. There was one more thing.” I sit back down on the king’s lap, cocking my head to the side. He doesn’t know it yet, but this is how a bird sizes up a particularly juicy worm.

“How is it you are so strong?” I ask, my skin still glowing, my voice still harmonizing. I’m burning through magic like I’m a sorority girl throwing back tequila in Cabo.

“I already told you,” he says between gritted teeth, “I am cobound to my subjects.”

“How does one …cobindthemselves to another?” I glance over at Des, who’s beginning to pose frozen fairies like they’re Christmas reindeer, each position a little more compromising than the last.

I face forward again, just as Typhus replies, “Say a short oath, exchange a little bodily fluid, and briefly embrace—that’s all it takes.”

“All it takes for fairies to what, give you their power?”

“If that’s the oath they’ve sworn.”

“And all these fairies just happily gave you their magic?” It’s hard even voicing such a ridiculous question.

“They don’t justgiveme it.”

It sounds like I’ve come close to ruffling this king’s feathers. Poor little Typhus, getting accused is just theworst.

“That’s right,” I say slowly, “you offer them protection in return—and I’m guessing a place to stay in your underground city. How magnanimous of you.”

The air thickens with Typhus’s magic.

Definitely hit on a sore spot. His eyes no longer look just angry; they seem wild with panic.

Right now, he can only answer my questions, and I’m curious to see what’s going on behind those eyes.

“What is it, Typhus?”

“Fairies die out here all the time.”

“And I bet you havenothingto do with that.”

Again, he looks desperate to explain himself. Too bad we’re not playing this game by his rules.

We’re playing it by mine.

“Do you or the fae who work for you have anything to do with the deaths of the fairies who ‘die out here all the time’?” I ask, throwing his words back at him.

Again, that panic is in his eyes.

You made your shitty-ass bed, buddy. Now you have to lie in it.

Typhus holds out responding for a whopping three seconds.

“Sometimes,” he finally hisses out.

We’re not talking loudly, but his words still echo throughout the room.