Page 24 of The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air 3)

He snorts. “I want my work to endure just as Queen Mab wanted her line to endure. But I care for even the least of my creations.” He reaches out to touch the earrings with his sooty fingers. He brushes the lobe of my ear, his skin warm and rough. I duck out of his grasp with what I hope is a demure laugh and not a snarl.

“Take these, for example,” he says. “Prize out the gems, and your beauty would fade—not just the extra smidge they grant, but all your beauty, until you were so wretched that the sight of you would set even the Folk to screaming.”

I try to control the urge to rip the earrings from my ears. “You cursed them, too?”

His grin is sly. “Not everyone is properly respectful of a craftsman the way you are, Taryn, daughter of Madoc. Not everyone deserves my gifts.”

I ponder that for a long moment, wondering at the array of creations that have come from his forge. Wondering how many of them were cursed.

“Is that why you were exiled?” I ask.

“The High Queen disliked my taking quite so much artistic license, so I was not much in favor when I followed the Alderking into exile,” he says, and I figure that means yes, pretty much. “She liked to be the clever one.”

I nod, as though there is nothing at all alarming about that story. My mind is racing, trying to recall all the things he’s made. “Didn’t you gift an earring to Cardan when you first came to Elfhame?”

“You have a good memory,” he says. Hopefully, I have a better memory than he does, because Taryn didn’t attend the Blood Moon revel. “It allowed him to overhear those speaking just outside of range. A wonderful device for eavesdropping.”

I wait expectantly.

He laughs. “That’s not what you want to know, is it? Yes, it was cursed. With a word, I could turn it into a ruby spider that would bite him until he died.”

“Did you use it?” I ask, recalling the globe I saw in Cardan’s study, in which a glittering red spider scrabbled restlessly at the glass. I am filled with cold horror at a tragedy already averted—and then blinding anger.

Grimsen shrugs. “He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

A very faerie answer. It sounds like no, when the truth is that the smith tried and it didn’t work.

I ought to press him for more, ought to ask him about a way for me to escape the camp, but I can’t bear to speak with him for another minute and not stab him with one of his own weapons. “Can I visit again?” I grit out, the false smile I am wearing feeling a lot more like a grimace.

I don’t like the look he gives me, as though I am a gemstone he wishes to set into metal. “I would like that,” he says, sweeping his hand around the forge, at all the objects there. “As you can see, I like beautiful things.”