The scarred-nose guard follows Straun and Oak down the stairs. Bran trails behind them. For a while, none of them speak.
“Let’s take him to the interrogation room,” the guard says, low-voiced. “Pay him back for the trouble we’re going to be in. Find some information to make up for it.”
Oak clears his throat loudly. “I’m a valuable possession. The queen won’t thank you for breaking me.”
One corner of the guard’s mouth turns up. “Don’t recognize me? But then, why would you? I’m just another of your father’s people, just another one who fought and bled and nearly died to put you on the throne. All for you to throw it back in our faces.”
I didn’t want the throne. Oak bites the inside of his cheek to keep from shouting the words. That isn’t going to help. Instead, he stares at the scarred man’s face, at the dark eyes and auburn hair that hangs across his forehead. At the scar itself, which pulls his mouth up, as though his lip is perpetually curled.
“Valen,” he prompts before Oak can recall his name. One of the generals who campaigned with Madoc for years. Not a friend, either. They vied against each other for the position of grand general, and Valen never forgave Madoc for winning. Madoc must have promised him something extraordinary to get Valen to betray the High King.
Oak could well believe that once coming to Madoc’s side, Valen was unwilling to return to the military in Elfhame, tail between his legs. And now he is here, after spending perhaps nine years as a falcon. Oh, yes, Oak could well believe Valen despises him. Valen may actually hate him more than Hyacinthe does.
“I was a child,” the prince says.
“A spoiled, disobedient boy. You still are. But that won’t stop me from wringing every last drop of information out of you.”
Straun hesitates, cutting his gaze toward Bran, still far enough back that he hasn’t overheard their plan. “Aren’t we going to get in more trouble? The prince said—”
“You take orders from a prisoner now?” Valen needles. “Perhaps you’re still loyal to his father, despite being abandoned by him. Or the High Court? Maybe you think you made the wrong choice, not swearing fealty to that spoiled snake boy and his mortal concubine.”
“That’s not true!” Straun spits out, mightily offended. It’s a fine piece of manipulation. Valen has made Straun feel as though he has to prove himself.
“Then let’s go strap him down,” Valen says with a crooked grin. Oak would be willing to bet that this is the soldier who took Straun’s money playing dice.
“He’s just goading you—” Oak manages to get out before he is shoved roughly forward. And, of course, he has been commanded not to resist.
“What’s going on?” asks Bran, frowning at them.
“The boy has a smart mouth,” Valen says, and Bran narrows his eyes in suspicion but doesn’t ask any further questions.
Down they go, past the prisons. No matter how Oak tries to stop himself, his body moves like an automaton, like one of those stick soldiers Lady Nore created from Mab’s bones. His heart thuds dully in his chest, his body alight with panic.
“Listen,” he tries again. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing to me—”
“Shut your mouth,” snaps Valen, kicking the prince in the back of the leg.
“This isn’t the right direction,” Bran says, seeming to notice how far they’ve descended for the first time.
Oak hopes he will do something. Order them to stop. Tattle to Hyacinthe. It would be embarrassing to be saved by him, but the prince would far prefer that to whatever Valen is planning.
“We need information,” the scarred guard says. “Something to give the queen so that we don’t look like fools. You think you’re not going to be demoted? Mocked? He got past all three of us.”
Bran nods slowly. “I suppose there’s something to that. And I am given to understand the interrogation rooms are well outfitted.”
“You hardly need to strap me down. I will tell you how I stole the key, how I got into her tower, all of it.” Oak can tell, though, how little they want to be convinced. “I—”
“Quiet.” Straun shoves him hard enough for him to overbalance, arms behind his back as they are.
The prince hits the stone floor hard, smacking his head.
Valen laughs.
Oak pushes himself back up. A cut just above his left brow is bleeding, the blood dripping down over his eye. Since his hands are bound, he can’t wipe it away. He flexes his wrists a little to test the bindings, but there is no give.
Fury chokes him.
A few more shoves and he’s down the hall and into a room he’s never seen before—one with manacles attached to a black stone table and instruments of interrogation in a glass-paned cabinet. Straun and Valen press Oak’s back down onto the slab. They cut the bindings on his wrists, and for a moment, he’s free.
Desperately, he tries to struggle, but he finds he cannot, not with the bridle’s magic holding him down more firmly than they could. Go with Straun. Do not resist him. Do not trick him. The prince has to allow them to manacle his wrists and then his ankles.
He doesn’t bother pretending he’s not afraid. He’s terrified.
“Hyacinthe has been dreaming of torturing me for years.” The prince is unable to keep his voice from shaking a little. “I can’t imagine what I know that would make him forgive you if you jump the line.”
Bran squints in slight confusion as he parses the human phrase, looking more worried. “Maybe we should tell—”
Valen reaches for the small handheld crossbow on his hip.
“Bran!” Oak shouts in warning.
The falcon goes for his sword, unsheathing it in a single fluid movement. But the bolt from Valen’s crossbow strikes him in the throat before he can so much as advance.
Go with Straun. Do not resist him. Do not trick him. Until you are confined again, you will follow these commands.
Now that he is confined, Oak can finally resist. He pulls against his bindings, writhing and kicking, shouting every filthy thing he can think of—but, of course, it’s too late.
Bran drops heavily to the floor as two more bolts lodge in his chest.
This doesn’t seem like a good move. It doesn’t seem clever, and Oak doesn’t like the idea that Valen may be desperate enough or paranoid enough to make decisions that don’t make strategic sense. He’s not an amateur. He must have really believed that Bran was about to betray him.
“Bar the door,” Valen tells Straun.
Straun does it, stepping over Bran’s body. He’s breathing hard. If he’d been asked to choose sides, he might have chosen Bran’s. But no one’s asking him now.
“Well,” says Valen, turning toward Oak. “Now you and I are finally going to have a conversation.”
Oak cannot repress the shudder that goes through him at those words. He has been poisoned and stabbed many times over the course of his short life. Pain is transient, he tells himself. He has endured it before—broken bones and bled and survived. Pain is better than being dead.
He tells himself a lot of things.
“It seems rude for me to be lying down during it,” Oak says, but his voice doesn’t come out as calmly as he hoped.
“There are lots of ways to hurt us Folk,” says Valen, ignoring the prince’s words as he draws on a brown leather glove. “But cold iron is the worst. Burns through faerie flesh like a hot knife through lard.”
“A grim topic to discuss, but if that’s what you’d like to talk about, you are the host of this little get-together ” Oak tries to sound light, unconcerned. He’s heard Cardan speak just this way on many occasions, and it disarms his audience. Oak can only hope it works that way now.
Valen’s hand comes down hard on the corner of his mouth. It’s more a slap than a blow, but it still stings. He tastes blood where a tooth cuts into his lip.
Straun gives a guffaw. Maybe he feels torture will be a proper vengeance for Oak’s making him look like a fool. But with Bran’s body lying by the guard’s feet, Straun is a fool if he thinks himself safe.
Still, the game that has always served Oak best is seeming feckless, and he needs to play that up. Be that spoiled boy Valen expects.
At least until he can come up with something better.
“Let’s talk about what your sister will do,” says Valen, surprising Oak by not bothering to ask a single question about his escape. “Where were you planning on meeting her forces once you escaped your cell and murdered the queen?”
Clever of him to assume guilt and only press for details. Clever, but wrong.
With the stick creatures scattered into pieces, the falcons are the entire force of Wren’s military. That gives Valen room to rise in the ranks, since those ranks are thin, but it puts him in danger, too. Whatever Elfhame sends at the Citadel, he and his falcons will have to meet it.
That’s what Valen wants above all else, Oak realizes. Power. He’s been simmering with that desire for as long as he’s been laboring under the curse. And being Wren’s military leader would have appeased him a little. But she passed him over, and now he is hungrier than ever.
“Sorry to disappoint, but I have no way to communicate with my sister,” Oak says. That was true enough since he smashed the snake.
“You can’t expect me to believe you were going to—what—murder the queen and then run off through the snow, hoping for the best?” Valen sneers.
“I’m glad you don’t think that, though Bran certainly did,” Oak says, keeping his gaze off the corpse on the floor. “I never wanted to hurt Wren, no less murder her.”
Straun frowns at the familiar form of address—Wren, rather than Queen Suren or the Winter Queen or whatever fanciful title he thinks best suits her.
Can Straun truly believe he has a chance with her? There does not seem to be much guile in him. She may like that, even if Oak thinks he’s dull as a toad.
Valen studies the prince’s face, perhaps seeing the jealousy in it. “And you didn’t intend to run, either?”
Oak isn’t certain how to answer that. He’s not sure he can explain his intentions, even to himself. “I was considering it. Prison isn’t very nice, and I like nice things.”
Valen’s mouth turns down in disgust. This is what he expects a prince of Elfhame to be—vain and fussy and unused to suffering of any kind. The more Oak leans into that role, the more he will be able to hide himself.
“Although,” Oak says, “freezing isn’t particularly nice, either.”
“So you drugged Straun and broke out of the prisons,” Valen says slowly, incredulously, “with no plan at all?”
Oak cannot shrug, as tied down as he is, but he makes a gesture to indicate his nonchalance. “Some of my best ideas come to me in the moment. And I did get a bath.”
“He must know something,” Straun says, worried that they are risking all this for nothing. Worried, no doubt, about the corpse that will be hard to dispose of without anyone noticing.
Valen turns toward Oak, pressing a finger into his cheek. “The prince knows his sister.”
Oak sighs dramatically. “Jude has an army. She has assassins. She has control of the Courts of other rulers who are sworn to her. She holds all the cards and could deploy any of them. You want me to tell you that in a duel, she turns her front foot inward while lunging, giving you an opening? I don’t think you’ll ever get close enough to find that information useful.”
Straun’s eyes narrow in calculation. “She turns her front foot?”
Oak smiles up at him. “Never.”
Valen lifts an iron knife from the cabinet and presses the point of it to the hollow of Oak’s throat. It sizzles against his skin.
The prince bites back a cry as his whole body jerks with pain.
Straun flinches despite his previous eagerness. Then he sets his jaw and makes himself watch as the prince’s skin blisters.
“Ouch,” Oak says, enunciating the word slowly and deliberately in a whiny sort of voice, despite how much the hot iron against his throat burns.
Straun is startled into a snort of laughter. Valen pulls the knife back, furious.
It’s easy to make someone look foolish if you’re willing to play the fool.
“Leave,” shouts Valen, waving at Straun. “Guard from the other side of the door. Alert me if someone is coming.”
“But—” Straun begins.
“Better do as he says,” Oak tells him, breathing hard because despite his performance, the press of the iron is agony. “Don’t want to end up like Bran.”
Straun’s gaze flicks guiltily to the floor, then back to Valen. He goes out.
Oak watches him with mixed feelings. The prince has few moves, and none of them are good. He can keep at getting under Valen’s skin, but it’s likely to cost him his own. Now that Straun is out of the room, though, he could try a different tack. “Maybe I could give you something better than impressing Hyacinthe, but I’d need something in return.”
Valen smiles, letting his knife hover over Oak’s face. “Bogdana told me that you inherited your mother’s twisting tongue.”
It takes all the prince’s concentration not to look at the blade directly. He forces himself to stare up into the falcon’s eyes. “Bogdana doesn’t like me. I doubt she likes you much, either. But you want Hyacinthe’s position, and I know a great deal about him . . . his vulnerabilities, the ways he is likely to fail.”
“Tell me this,” Valen says, looming over him. “Where did you get the poison you used on Straun?”
Well, crap. That’s a very good question. Oak thinks of the jeweled snake. Imagines how he will look if he tries to explain.
“I thought I didn’t need to torture you to get you to tell me whatever I wanted to know?” Valen turns the knife so that the point hovers over Oak’s eye. He glances at it and sees the edge of one of the straps of the bridle reflected in the blade. A reminder that Wren didn’t sanction this interrogation, that she doesn’t know about it. She wouldn’t need to torture him to find out any of this. All she’d have to do, with the bridle on him, was ask. He could no more deny her than he could stop his own heart from beating.
Of course, whether she’d care if Valen hurt him was another matter. He liked to think that she would, at least for her pride. After all, ten lashes from an ice whip wouldn’t seem like much of a punishment if someone else had already gouged out one of his eyes.
He’d rather not lose the eye, though. Still, all he has going for him is his charm, and that’s a double-edged sword. “You asked me about my sister—and you’re right. I do know her. I know she’s likely to send someone to negotiate for my return. Whatever you think of me, I am valuable to Elfhame.”
“She’d pay a ransom?” Valen licks his lips. Oak can see his desire, a hunger for glory and gold and all the things that were denied him.
“Oh yes,” Oak agrees. “But it hardly matters if Wren won’t agree to give me up. Whatever my sister offers now could have always been Wren’s, along with the Citadel, as a reward for removing Lady Nore.”
Valen’s mouth twists into a harsh smile. “But you seem to have made Queen Suren angry enough to prefer your being brought low to her own rise.”
That stung, being uncomfortably true. “You could make your own bargain with the High Queen.”
The tip of the iron knife presses against Oak’s cheek. It burns like a lit match against his skin. He jerks again, a puppet on a string.
“How about you answer the question about the poison, and then we can discuss what deals I am going to make.”
Panic Roods Oak. He’s going to refuse to talk. And he’s going to be tortured until he gives in and talks anyway. Once Hyacinthe learns about the snake, he will tell Wren, and she’ll believe Oak is her enemy, no matter what he says in his defense. And whatever his sister’s plan is, it’s sure to become exponentially more lethal.
But with enough pain and enough time, anyone will say almost anything.
Perhaps, Oak thinks, perhaps he can get himself hurt so badly the questioning can’t continue. It’s a terrible plan, but no other idea presents itself. He can hardly smile at Valen as he did at Fernwaif and have that be enough to persuade him to let Oak leave the dungeon.
Unless . . .
It’s been a long time since he used his twisting tongue, as Bogdana put it. His true gancanagh power. Let his mouth speak for him, let the words come without his will. Say all the right things in the right way at the right time.
It’s terrifying, like letting go in a sword fight and allowing pure instinct to take over, not being entirely sure whose blood will wind up on his hands.
But whatever Valen is going to do next is more terrifying. If Oak can escape this room in one piece and without putting anyone he cares about in danger, he can figure out the rest from there.
Of course, part of the problem is that his power isn’t one of pure persuasion. He can’t just make someone do what he wants. He can only make himself into what they want and hope that is enough. Worse, he is never sure what that will be. Once he gives in, his mouth makes the words, and he is left with the consequences.
“The trolls of the Stone Forest have blusher mushroom. It’s not so very hard to come by. Forget the poison. Think of your future,” Oak says, his voice sounding strange, even to his own ears. There’s a rough hum underneath and a buzz on his lips, like the sting of electricity. It’s been a long time since he has reached for this power, but it uncurls languorously at his command. “You only want command of Lady Wren’s army? You were meant for greater things.”
Valen’s eyes dilate, the irises blowing wide. He scowls in confusion, shaking his head. “The trolls? That’s where you got the poison.”
Oak doesn’t like how eager the enchantment feels, now that it’s awakened. How easily it Rows through him. He’s felt trickles of this magic before, but not since he was a child has he let himself feel the full force of it. “I am closer to the center of power than anyone at this Citadel,” he says. “Madoc is out of favor, and many in the High Court do not like our armies being led by Grima Mog. Many would prefer you—and isn’t that really what you want?”
“I have lost all chance of that.” Valen’s words aren’t scornful, though. He sounds frightened by his own hopes. The iron knife dips low enough in his gloved hand that he seems in danger of burning his own thigh with the tip.
“You have lived as a falcon for nine years,” Oak says, the words dragging against his tongue. “You were strong enough not to stagger beneath that burden. You are free, and yet if you are not careful, you will be caught in a new net.”
Valen listens as though fascinated.
“You are headed toward a conflict with Elfhame, yet you have no army of stick and stone and no authority of command. But with me, things could change. Elfhame could reward you instead of targeting you. I could help. Unbind me, and I will give you what you have long deserved.”
Valen backs himself against the wall, breathing hard, shaking his head. “What are you?” he asks with a tremor in his voice and an ocean of wanting in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” The words come out of Oak’s mouth without the basilisk charm in them.
“You—what did you do to me?” Valen growls, a spark of hot anger in his gaze.
“I was just talking.” Oak reaches desperately for the honey-tongued roughness to his voice. He’s too panicked to find it. Too unused to using it.
“I am going to make you suffer,” Valen promises.
Back to Oak’s first, worse plan, then. He gives Valen his most careless, insouciant grin. “I almost had you, though. You were almost mine.”
Valen slams his forehead into the prince’s face. Oak’s skull snaps back to knock against the slab to which he’s been bound. Pain blooms between his eyes, and his head feels as though it rattles on his neck. Valen’s fist connects next, and Oak counts it as a win that the third blow is hard enough to knock him unconscious.
