Oak isn’t sure how long he has lain on the cold stone tiles, dropping in and out of consciousness. He dreams of hunting snakes that glisten with gems as they whip through the night, of girls made of ice whose kisses cool his burns. Several times, he thinks he ought to crawl toward his blanket, but just contemplating the idea of moving hurts his head.
Whatever the prince thought of himself before, however skilled he claimed to be at evading traps and laughing in the face of danger, he isn’t laughing now. He’d have been better off sitting in his cell and waiting. He’d have been better off if he ran out into the snow. He took a chance and lost, lost spectacularly, which is just about all he can say to his credit—at least it was spectacular.
It is the shift of shadows that causes him to realize someone is standing outside his cell. Feverishly, he looks up. For a moment, her face swims in front of him, and he thinks she must be part of another nightmare.
Bogdana.
The storm hag looms tall, her hair a wild mane around her head. She peers at him with black eyes that shine like chips of wet onyx.
“Prince Oak, our most honored guest. I was afraid you might have died in there,” she says, kicking a tray beneath the door of his cell with her foot. On it rests a bowl of watery soup with scales Boating on top, beside a carafe of sour-smelling wine. He has no doubt she selected the food personally.
“Well, hello,” Oak says. “What an unexpected visit.”
She smiles down in malicious glee. “You seem unwell. I thought a simple meal might be to your liking.”
He pushes himself into a sitting position, ignoring how it makes his head pound. “How long was I out?” He isn’t even sure how he got to the prisons. Had Straun been forced to carry him here, once Valen realized he wasn’t going to wake anytime soon? Had Valen brought him back, in case he never woke?
“Somewhere you need to be, Prince of Elfhame?” Bogdana asks him.
“Of course not.” Oak’s hand goes to his chest. The burn by his throat is scabbed over. He can feel the wild beat of his heart beneath his palm. He couldn’t have been unconscious long since Wren hadn’t sent anyone to drag him before her Court for a whipping.
Bogdana’s smile widens. “Good. Because I came to tell you that I will gut every servant you conscript, should you try to use one to escape your cell again.”
“I didn’t—” he begins.
She gives a harsh laugh, something that is half a snarl. “The huldu girl? You cannot truly expect me to believe you don’t have her eating out of your hand. That you didn’t put her under your spell?”
“You think Fernwaif helped me escape?” he snaps, incredulous.
“Feeling remorseful now, when it’s too late?” The storm hag’s lip curls. “You knew the risk when you used her.”
“The girl did nothing.” Fernwaif, who believed in romance, despite living in Lady Nore’s Citadel. Who he hoped was still alive. “I got the key from Straun, and that’s because he’s a fool, not because I conscripted him.”
Bogdana watches Oak’s expression, drawing out the moment. “Suren interceded on Fernwaif’s behalf. She’s safe from me, for the moment.”
Oak lets out a breath. “I shall be as unpleasant to the servants of the Citadel as you like hereafter. Now I hope our business is concluded.”
Bogdana frowns down at him. “Our business won’t be concluded until the Greenbriars have repaid their debt to me.”
“With our lives, blah, blah, I know.” Pain and despair have made the prince reckless.
The storm hag’s eyes are bright with reflected light. Her nails tap against the iron of the bars as though contemplating shoving her hand inside and slashing him with them. “You desire something from Suren, don’t you, prince? Perhaps it’s that you aren’t used to being rejected and it’s not sitting well with you. Perhaps you see the greatness in her and want to ruin it. Perhaps you truly are drawn to her. Any which way, it will make the moment she bites out your throat all the sweeter.”
Oak cannot help thinking of his dream and the fox walking beside him, prophesying his doom. Cannot help thinking of other things. “She’s bitten me before, you know,” he says with a grin. “It wasn’t so bad.”
Bogdana looks satisfyingly infuriated by the comment. “I am glad you’re still locked up tight, little bait,” she tells him, eyes flashing. “Were you less useful, I would flay your skin from your bones. I would hurt you in ways you cannot imagine.” There is a hunger in her words that unnerves him.
“Someone beat you to that.” Oak leans back onto the pillow of his own arm.
“You’re still breathing,” says the storm hag.
“If you were actually worried I was dead,” he says, recalling the first thing she said to him when she came to his cell, “I must have looked pretty bad.”
He may have been unconscious longer than he guessed. Is there still a day before Elfhame makes its move? Is it happening already? He really, really wishes the metal snake had been more specific about what Jude was planning. Three dayssssss was just not enough information.
“I don’t need you to last long,” Bogdana says. “It’s the High King I want.”
Oak snorts. “Good luck with that.”
“You’re my luck.”
“I wonder what Wren thinks,” he says, trying to hide his discomfiture. “You’re using her every bit as much as Lord Jarel and Lady Nore ever did. And you’ve been planning on using her for a long time.”
Lightning sparks along Bogdana’s fingers. “My revenge is hers as well. Her crown and throne were stolen.”
“She’s got both a crown and a throne now, hasn’t she?” Oak asks. “And it seems you’re the one likely to cost her them, again.”
The look the storm hag gives him could have boiled his blood. “For what Mab did, I will see the end of the Greenbriar reign,” snaps Bogdana. “You think you know Suren, but you do not. Her heart is that of my dead daughter. She was born to be the ruin of your kin.”
“I know her well enough to call her Wren,” he says, and watches the storm hag’s eyes glisten with deeper malice. “And we don’t always do the thing we were born for.”
“Eat up, boy,” Bogdana says, gesturing to the disgusting food she brought. “I’d hate to see you go to your slaughter hungry.”
It’s only hours later, when the footsteps of three guards wake him from another half sleep, that Oak realizes she may have meant those last words literally. His head still hurts enough that he thinks about just lying there and letting them do their worst, but then he decides that if he is going to die, at least he will do so standing.
He’s up by the time they arrive. As they open the door to his cell, he uses the tip of his hoof to flip the bowl of soup into his hands. Then he slams it into the first guard’s face.
The guard goes down. Oak kicks the second into the iron bars and, in a moment of hesitation from the third, grabs for the first guard’s fallen sword.
Before he can get it, a club hits him in the stomach, knocking the air out of him.
He was faster, before the iron. Before his muscles got stiff. Before getting hit in the head several times by Valen. A few weeks ago, he would have had the sword.
They’re crowded in the entrance of his cell; that’s his main advantage. Only one can really come at him at a time, but all three have weapons drawn and Oak has only his hands and hooves. Even the bowl is lying on the ground, cracked in half.
But he refuses to be dragged back to the interrogation chamber. Panic fills him at the thought of Valen starting the torture over. At the strike of an ice whip. At Bogdana’s nails peeling off his skin.
The second guard, the one who hit the bars, lunges at him with the sword. It’s a small space, though, too small to get a real swing in, and the guard is slow as a consequence. Oak ducks and barrels into the first guard, who has managed to get onto his feet. The prince slams into him, and they both sprawl onto the cold stone tiles of the prison hall. Oak attempts to scramble up, only to be hit between the shoulder blades with the club by the third guard. He is knocked down again, falling heavily onto the second guard. He goes for a knife strapped to that one’s belt. Drawing it, he rolls onto his back, ready to throw.
As he does, he feels a familiar shift in his mind. The shuttering of all other thoughts, the casting off of himself. There is a relief in letting go, allowing the future and past to drop away, to become someone without a hope or fear beyond this moment. Someone for whom there was only ever this fight and there will only ever be this fight.
It worries him, too, though, because every time it happens, he feels less and less in control of what he does when he’s outside himself. How many times now has he found himself standing over a body with blood on his clothes, blood on his face and his sword and his hands—and no memory of what happened?
It makes him think of the gancanagh power, of all the warnings he doesn’t seem able to heed anymore.
“Oak!” Hyacinthe shouts.
The prince lets his arm with the dagger in it sag. Somehow being yelled at by Hyacinthe brings him back to himself. Maybe it is just the familiarity of his scorn.
When he isn’t hit again, he lets himself lie there, breathing hard. The other guard stands.
“She wants you to sit down to supper with her,” Hyacinthe says. “I’m supposed to get you cleaned up.”
“Wren?” Oak’s sense of time is still very unclear. “I thought she was going to have me punished.”
Hyacinthe raises both his eyebrows. “Yes, Wren. Who else?”
The prince looks at the guards, who glare at him resentfully. If he’d been thinking more clearly, he would have realized he had no cause to try to murder them. They weren’t necessarily working for Valen or Bogdana, weren’t necessarily leading him to his doom. He probably would have figured that out sooner had his head not hurt so much. Had Bogdana not come and threatened him.
“No one mentioned supper,” Oak complains.
One of the guards, the one with the club, snorts. The other two wear scowls that remain unaltered.
Hyacinthe turns to all of them. “Find something else to do. I will escort the prince.”
The guards depart, one spitting on the stone floor as he leaves.
“I warn you,” Oak says. “If you are also planning on hitting me, it will have to be quite a blow to have any effect on the swelling and bruises already coming in.”
“You might consider occasionally bowing to wisdom and keeping your tongue between your teeth,” Hyacinthe says, reaching out a hand to pull Oak to his feet.
For a moment, the prince is certain he’s going to open his mouth and say something Hyacinthe will not think is at all funny. Something that probably won’t be at all funny.
“Unlikely, but we can both live in hope,” Oak manages as he lets himself be levered up. He staggers a little and realizes that if he tries to catch himself, he will have to burn his hand on the iron bars. Dizziness washes over him. “If you intend to gloat, have at it.”
Hyacinthe’s mouth twists into a smile. “You’re being paid, Prince of Elfhame. In exactly the coin you once demanded.”
To that, Oak can make no refutation. He is staying upright by sheer force of will, taking deep breaths until he is sure he is going to stay that way.
“Well, come on,” says Hyacinthe. “Unless you want me to carry you.”
“Carry me? What a delightful offer. You can bear me in your arms like a maiden in a fairy tale.”
Hyacinthe rolls his eyes. “I can throw you over my shoulder like a sack of grain.”
“Then I suppose I shall walk,” Oak says, hoping he can. He staggers after Hyacinthe, remembering how Hyacinthe was once his prisoner, feeling the poetic justice of the moment. “Are you going to bind my hands?”
“Do I need to?” Hyacinthe asks.
For a moment, Oak thinks he’s referring to the bridle. But then the prince realizes Hyacinthe is simply offering him an opportunity to walk up the stairs without restraints. “Why are you—”
“A kinder captor than ever you were to me?” Hyacinthe supplies with a short laugh. “Maybe I am just a better person.”
Oak doesn’t bother to remind Hyacinthe of how he tried to murder the High King and, if Oak hadn’t interceded, would have been executed or sent to the Tower of Forgetting. It doesn’t matter. It is very possible that neither of them is a particularly nice person.
They move down the hall, past lit torches. Hyacinthe takes a long look at Oak and frowns. “You’ve got bruises, and it’s too soon for them to have come from the fight I just saw. Those iron burns aren’t fresh, either, and they’re the wrong shape and angle to come from your prison bars. What happened?”
“I’m a miracle of self-destructiveness,” Oak says.
Hyacinthe stops walking and folds his arms. The pose is so like one that Tiernan regularly makes that Oak is certain it’s a copy, even if Hyacinthe isn’t aware he’s doing it.
Maybe that’s what makes him talk, that familiar gesture. Or maybe it’s that he’s so tired and no small amount afraid. “You know a guy named Valen? Former general. Thick neck. More anger than sense?”
Hyacinthe’s brow furrows, and he nods slowly.
“He wants your job,” Oak says, and begins walking again.
Hyacinthe falls into step beside him. “I don’t see what that has to do with you.”
They come to the stairs and head up, out of the dungeons. The fading sunlight hits his face, hurting his eyes, but the only thing he feels is gratitude. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see the sun again. “He may have told you something about a soldier named Bran deserting. He didn’t. He’s dead.”
“Bran is—” Hyacinthe begins, and then lowers his voice to a whisper. “He’s dead?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Oak says quietly. “I didn’t kill him.”
Guards Bank an entrance a few paces ahead, and by unspoken consensus, they both fall silent. Oak’s shoulders tense as he passes them, but they do nothing to stop his progress through the halls. For the first time, as he steps into a high-ceilinged corridor, he is free to look around the Citadel without the danger of being caught. He catches the scent of melting wax and the sap of fir trees. Rose petals, too, he thinks. Without the persistent stink of the iron, his head hurts less.
Then the prince’s gaze goes to one of the large, translucent walls of ice, and he stumbles.
As through a window, he can see the landscape beyond the Citadel and the troll kings moving across it. Although distant, they are far larger than the boulders in the Stone Forest, as if those massive boulders represented only the topmost portions of their bodies and the rest were buried beneath the earth. These trolls are larger than any giant Oak saw in the Court of Elfhame, or the Court of Moths, for that matter. He watches them lurch through the snow, dragging enormous chunks of ice, and mentally recalculates Wren’s resources.
They are building a wall. A miles-wide defensive shield, encircling the Citadel.
In less than a month, between her own newfound power and her newfound allies, Wren has made the Court of Teeth more formidable and more forbidding than it ever was during Lord Jarel’s reign. But when he thinks of her, he cannot help seeing the darkness beneath her eyes and the feverish shine of them. Cannot put aside the thought that something is wrong.
“Wren looks as though she’s been unwell,” Oak says. “Has she been sick?”
Hyacinthe frowns. “You can’t really expect me to betray my queen by telling you her secrets.”
Oak’s smile is sharp-edged. “So there’s a secret to tell.”
Hyacinthe’s frown deepens.
“I am a prisoner,” Oak says. “Whether you have me in chains or no, I can’t hurt her, and I wouldn’t if I could. I warned you about Valen. About Bran. Surely, I have proved some measure of loyalty.”
Hyacinthe huffs out a breath, his gaze going to the troll kings beyond the icy pane. “Loyalty? I think not, but I am going to tell you because you might be the one person who can help. Wren’s power takes something terrible out of her.”
“What do you mean?” Oak demands.
“It’s eating away at her,” Hyacinthe says. “And she’s going to keep having to use it, again and again, so long as you’re here.”
Oak opens his mouth to demand further explanation, but at that moment, a knot of courtiers passes, all of them pale and cold-looking, their gazes sliding over Oak as though the very sight of him is an offense.
“You’re going to the leftmost tower,” Hyacinthe says.
Oak nods, trying not to be rattled by the hate in their eyes. The tower he’s heading toward is, ironically, the same one he was caught in the day before. “Explain,” he says.
“What she does—it’s not just unbinding, it’s unmaking. She became sick after what she did to Lady Nore and her stick army. Harrowed. And Bogdana was so insistent that Wren use it again to break the curse of the Stone Forest because she’s going to need the trolls if Elfhame moves against us. But she’s formed of magic herself, and the more she unmakes, the more she is unmade.”
Oak recalls the strain in Wren’s face as she looked down from the dais in the Great Hall, the hollows beneath her cheekbones as she slept.
He assumed that Wren didn’t visit the prisons because she didn’t want to see him out of uninterest or anger. But she might not have come if she was sick. As much as she knows that looking weak in front of her newly formed Court is dangerous, it’s possible she feels it is similarly risky to look weak in front of him.
And if she doesn’t keep using her power . . .
No matter how dangerous the magic, Oak can too easily imagine Wren believing that if she doesn’t use it, she won’t be able to keep her throne. This was a land of huldufólk, nisser, and trolls, used to bowing only to strength and ferocity. They followed Lady Nore, but they were willing to hail Wren, her murderer, as their new queen.
She may be inclined to push herself past her limits to keep that support. To prove herself worthy. Has he not witnessed his sister doing just that?
You know what would really impress them? his mind supplies unhelpfully. Daring to skewer the heir to Elfhame.
“Tonight, at dinner,” Hyacinthe says, “persuade her to let you go. And if you can’t, then leave. Go. Actually escape this time, and take your political conflict with you.”
Oak rolls his eyes at the assumption that getting out of the prisons was easy and he could have done it at any time. “You could advise her to let me go. Unless she doesn’t trust you, either.”
Hyacinthe hesitates, not taking the bait. “She would trust me less if she knew we were having this conversation. Perhaps wisely, I am not sure she trusts anyone. All the Folk in the Citadel have their own agendas.”
“I am last on the list of those whose advice she’d heed,” Oak says. “As you well know.”
“You have a way of persuading people.”
It’s a barbed comment, but the prince grits his teeth and refuses to be offended. No matter how barbed, it’s also the truth. “It would be far easier if I wasn’t wearing this bridle.”
Hyacinthe gives him a sideways look. “You’ll manage.” He must have heard the specifics of her command. You will stay in my prisons until you are sent for.
Oak sighs.
“And in the interim, stop picking fights,” Hyacinthe says, making Oak want to pick a fight with him. “Is there no situation you’re not compelled to make worse?”
Oak climbs the steps of the tower, thinking of the dinner ahead of him with Wren. The idea of sitting across from her at a table seems surreal, part of his hectic, fox-filled dreams.
They come to a wooden door with two locks on the outside. Hyacinthe moves past the prince to fit a key inside the first one and then the other.
One key. Two locks. Oak notes that. And none of it iron.
The room it opens onto is well appointed. Low couches are arranged on a rug looking so much softer than anything he’s seen in weeks that he could sink down onto that and be happy. Blue flames burn in the grate of a fireplace. They seem hot, and yet when he puts a hand to the ice wall above the fire, there is none of the slickness that would indicate melting. Where the rug doesn’t cover, the floor is inset with stone. If you didn’t look carefully, you could suppose that you weren’t in an ice palace at all.
“A far finer class of prison,” Oak says, moving to lean against one of the posts of the bed. While he was moving, he wasn’t dizzy, but now that he’s stopped, he feels the immense need to be supported by something.
“Get dressed,” Hyacinthe says, pointing to a set of clothes laid out on the bed. He holds the key in his palm pointedly, then places it on the mantel. “If you can’t persuade her, it may interest you to know there’s a shift in the guard at dawn. I left you a book on the table over there as well. It’s mortal literature, and I understand you like that sort of thing.”
Oak stares at the key as Hyacinthe leaves. Part of him wants to dismiss this as a trick, a way for the former falcon to prove the prince untrustworthy.
His gaze goes to the clothing left for him and then the mattress beneath, stuffed with goose down or perhaps duck feathers. He feels almost sick with the desire to lie down, to allow his throbbing temple to rest on a pillow.
He takes a deep breath and forces himself to pick up the book that Hyacinthe indicated—a hardback with a dust jacket that proclaims Magic Tricks for Dummies. He ruffies the pages, thinking of how he once made a coin disappear and reappear in front of Wren. Remembering his fingers brushing against her ear, her surprised laugh.
He should have let her leave that night. Let her take the damned bridle, get on the bus, and go, if that was what she wanted.
But no, he had to show off. Be clever. Manipulate everyone and everything, just the way he’d been taught. Just the way his father had manipulated him to come here.
With a sigh, he frowns down at the book again. There doesn’t seem to be anything tucked inside. He isn’t sure what it means then, except that Hyacinthe thinks he’s a dummy. Just in case, he goes through the pages again, more slowly this time.
On 161, he finds an almost thoroughly dried stalk of ragwort.
Guards wait for him in the hall when he emerges from the room, dressed in the clothes he was given.
The doublet is of some silvery fabric that feels sturdy and stiff, as though there might be silver threads woven into the cloth. His shoulders are a little broader and his torso a little longer than the original owner, and it feels even more uncomfortably tight than the uniform. The pants are black as a starless sky and have to be pushed up a little because of the curve of his leg above his hooves.
He says nothing to the guards, and their faces are grim as they escort him to a high-ceilinged dining room where their new queen is waiting.
Wren stands at the head of a long table in a dress of some material that seems to be black and then silver, depending on the light. Her hair is pulled away from her pale blue face, and while she does not wear a crown, the ornaments in her hair suggest one.
She looks every bit a terrifying Queen of Faerie, beckoning him to some final supper of poisoned apples.
He bows.
Her gaze rests on him, as though trying to decide if the gesture is mockery or not. Or maybe she’s only inspecting his bruises.
He’s certainly noting how fragile she looks. Harrowed.
And something else. Something he ought to have noted in her bedroom, when she’d given him orders, but he’d been too panicked to think about. There’s a defensiveness in her posture, as though she’s bracing for his anger. After having held him prisoner, she believes he hates her. She might still be angry with him, but she quite obviously expects him to be furious with her.
And every time he behaves as though he isn’t, she thinks he’s playing a trick.
“Hyacinthe told me you were reluctant to explain how you came to be hurt,” Wren says.
Oak doesn’t need to glance at the entrances to note the guards. He saw them upon his arrival. Not knowing their loyalties, he can hardly mention Valen, or even Straun, without stripping Hyacinthe of the element of surprise. Did she know that? Was this a play put on for their benefit? Or was this another test? “What would you say if I told you I grew so bored that I hit myself in the face?”
Her mouth becomes an even grimmer line. “No one would believe that lie, could you even tell it.”
Oak’s head dips forward, and he cannot keep the despair out of his voice. This is off to a bad start, and yet he truly does seem unable to keep himself from making it worse. “What lie would you believe?”
