Clouds of mosquitoes and gnats blow through the hot, wet air of the marsh where the Thistlewitch lives. My boots sink into the gluey mud. The trees are draped heavily in creeper and poisonous trumpet vine, swaths of it blocking the path. In the brown water, things move.
“Sit,” Oak says when we come to a stump. This is the first time he’s spoken to me since we left Queen Annet’s Court. From his pack, he takes out a brush and a pot of shimmering gold paint. “Stick out a foot.”
Tiernan walks ahead, scoping the area.
The prince marks the bottom of my one boot, then the other, with the symbol we were given. His fingers hold my calves firmly in place. A treacherous heat creeps into my cheeks.
“I know you’re angry with me . . . ,” I begin.
“Am I?” he asks, looking up at me as though there is a bitter taste in his mouth. “Maybe I’m glad that you gave me an opportunity to be my worst self.”
I am still sitting on the stump, pondering that, when Tiernan returns and yanks a twist of hair from my head.
I hiss, coming to my feet, teeth bared, hand going for a knife that I no longer have.
“You know how the bridle works as well as anyone,” Tiernan says, low, so that Oak, busy drawing symbols on the bottoms of his hooves, does not seem to hear. He holds three pale blue strands of my hair in his hand. “Do not betray us again.”
A chill goes through me at those words. The great smith Grimsen forged that bridle, and like all his creations, it has a corrupt secret. There is another way than wearing it to be controlled—wrapped hair, and a few words—that was how Lady Nore and Lord Jarel had hoped to trick the High Queen into binding herself along with the serpent king.
The strands of my hair between Tiernan’s fingers are a reminder that even if they don’t put it on me, I am not safe from it. I should be grateful that I am not wearing it already.
“Were it up to me,” he says, “I’d have left you behind and taken my chances against Lady Nore.”
“It’s not too late,” I say.
“Don’t tempt me,” the knight growls back. “If not for you, Hyacinthe would still be with us.”
Even though I know he has reason to be cross with me, I am suddenly angry, too. Hyacinthe, with his half-broken curse, reminded me too much of myself, of my desire to have someone free me, whether I was deserving of it or not. “No one in chains could ever truly love you.”
He glares. “Do you expect me to believe you know anything about love?”
The truth of that hits like a blow.
I turn away and tromp along through the muck and rotted vegetation, the song of frogs loud in my ears, reminding me that the sharpness of the knight’s tongue already cost Oak the loyalty of Jack of the Lakes. He throws his words around like knives. Recklessly. Heedlessly.
Whatever the opposite of being honey-tongued might be.
A slithering snake catches my eye, its body as black as the serpent the High King became. Out in the water, something that is perhaps the head of a crocodile, if not more monstrous, breaks the surface. The creature’s skin has become green with vegetation.
I trust that the others see it, too, although they do not slow their step.
The air is overwarm and close, and I am exhausted from the events of the night before. My ribs hurt where they met Revindra’s boot. But I bite the inside of my cheek and keep going.
We walk for a long time before we come to a clearing where a few mismatched and rusty human chairs sit. A few steps farther and we see a shriveled and ancient faerie squatting beside a fire. Over it is a spit, and threaded on the metal rod is a skinned rat. The Thistlewitch turns it slowly, making the meager fat sizzle.
The braided weeds and briars of her hair fall around her, serving as a cape. Large black eyes peer out from the tangle. She wears a gown of drab cloth and bark. When she moves, I see her feet are bare. Rings shine on several of her toes.
“Travelers,” she rasps. “I see you have made your way through my swamp. What is it that you seek?”
Oak steps forward and bows. “Honored lady, finder of lost things, we have come to ask you to use your power in our behalf.” From his pack, he pulls a bottle of honey wine, along with a bag of powdery white doughnuts and a jar of chili oil, and sets them down on the earth in front of her. “We’ve brought gifts.”
The Thistlewitch looks us over. I do not think she is particularly impressed. When her gaze falls on me, her expression changes to one of outright suspicion.
Oak’s glance goes to me, frowning in puzzlement. “This is Wren.”
She spits into the fire. “Nix. Naught. Nothing. That’s what you are. Nix Naught Nothing.” Then she indicates the gifts with a wave of her hand. “What will you have of me that you think to buy my favor so cheaply?”
Oak clears his throat, no doubt not liking how this is going so far. “We want to know about Mab’s bones and Mellith’s heart. And we want to find something.”
Mellith’s heart? I think of Hyacinthe’s warnings and the unseen message from Lady Nore. Is this the ransom she asked for in exchange for Madoc? I have heard nothing of it before.
As I look at the prince’s face, soft mouth and hard eyes, I wonder how important playing the part of the feckless courtier might be, if to show competence would be to endanger his sister?
Wonder how many people he’s killed.
“Ahhhhh,” says the Thistlewitch. “Now, there’s a story.”
“Mab’s bones were stolen from the catacombs under the palace of Elfhame,” the prince says. “Along with the reliquary containing them.”
The Thistlewitch’s ink-drop eyes watch him. “And you want them back? That’s what you mean to ask me to find for you?”
“I know where the bones are.” Beneath Oak’s calm is a grim resignation, writ in the furrow of his brow, the slant of his mouth. He means to get his father back, whatever the cost. “But not how Lady Nore can use them for what she has. And not why Mellith’s heart matters. Baphen, the Court Astrologer, told me some of the story. When I asked Mother Marrow for more, she sent me to you.”
The Thistlewitch shuffles to one of the chairs, her body hidden by the cape of her hair and all the briars and vines in it. I wonder, had I stayed in the woods long enough, if I might have found my hair turned into such a garment. “Come sit by my fire, and I will tell you a tale.”
We drag over a few more chairs and seat ourselves. In the light of the flames, the Thistlewitch looks more ancient than ever, and far less human.
“Mab was born when the world was young,” she says. “In those days, we Folk were not so diminished as we are now, when there is so much iron. Our giants were as tall as mountains, our trolls like trees. And hags like myself held the power to bring all manner of things into being.
“Once a century, there is a convocation of hags, where we, the witches and enchanters, the smiths and makers, come together to hone our craft. It is not for outsiders, but Mab dared enter. She besought us all for what she wanted, the power to create. Not a mere glamour or little workings, but the great magic that we alone possessed. Most turned her away, but there was one who did not.
“That hag gave unto her the power to create from nothing. And in return, she was to take the hag’s daughter and raise the witch child as her heir.
“At first, Mab did as she was bid. She took for herself the title of the Oak Queen, united the smaller Seelie Courts under her banner, and began bestowing sentience on living things. Trees would lift their roots at her beckoning. Grass would scurry around, confusing her enemies. Faeries that had never existed before grew from her hands. And she raised three of the Shifting Isles of Elfhame from the sea.”
Oak frowns at the dirt. “Has the High King inherited some of her power? Is that why he can—”
“Patience, boy,” says the Thistlewitch. “Prince or not, I will tell you in full or not at all.”
The prince puts on an imp’s grin of apology. “If I seem eager, it is only because the tale is so compelling and the teller so skilled.”
At this, she smiles, showing a cracked tooth. “Flatterer.”
Tiernan looks amused. He has his elbow propped on the arm of his chair and rests his head on his hand. When he isn’t concentrating on keeping his guard up, he looks like another person entirely. Someone who isn’t as old as he wants the people around him to believe, someone vulnerable. Someone who might have feelings that are deeper and more desperate than he lets on.
The Thistlewitch clears her throat and begins to speak again. “Mab called the child Mellith, which means ‘mother’s curse.’ Not an auspicious beginning. And yet, it was only when her own daughter was born that she began to think of ways to weasel out of the bargain.”
“Clovis,” Oak says. “Who ruled before my grandfather, Eldred.”
The Thistlewitch inclines her head. “Indeed. In the end, it was a simple trick. Mab boasted again and again that she had discovered a means for Clovis to rule until the rumors finally found their way to the hag. Enraged, she swore to kill Clovis. And so, the hag crept up on where the child slept in the night and fell upon the girl she found there, only to discover that she had murdered her own daughter. Mab had bested her.”
I shudder. The poor kid. Both kids, really. After all, if the hag had been a bit more clever, the other girl could have just as easily died. Just because a pawn is better treated doesn’t make it safer on the board.
The Thistlewitch goes on. “But the hag was able to put a final enchantment on her daughter’s heart as it beat its last, for her daughter was a hag, too, and magic sang through her blood. The hag imbued the heart with the power of annihilation, of destruction, of unmaking. And she cursed Mab, so that piece of her child would be forever tied to the queen’s power. She would have to keep the heart by her side for her magic to work. And should she not, its power would unmake all that Mab created.
“It is said that Mab put a curse on the hag, too, although that part of the story is vague. Perhaps she did; perhaps she didn’t. We are not easy to curse.”
The Thistlewitch shrugs and pokes the rat with a stick. “As for Mab, you know the rest. She made an alliance with one of the solitary fey and founded the Greenbriar line. A trickle of her power passed down to her grandson, Eldred, granting him fecundity when so much of Faerie is barren, and to the current High King, Cardan, who pulled a fourth isle from the deep. But a large amount of Mab’s power stayed trapped with her remains, confined to that reliquary.”
Oak frowns. “So Lady Nore needs this thing. The heart.”
The Thistlewitch picks off a piece of rat and puts it into her mouth, chews. “I suppose.”
“What can she do without it?” Tiernan says.
“Mab’s bones can be ground to powder, and that powder used to do great and mighty spells,” says the Thistlewitch. “But when the bones are used up, that will be the end of their power, and without Mellith’s heart, all that’s done will eventually unravel ”
She lets the moment dramatically linger, but Oak, rebuked once, does not hurry her on.
“Of course,” the Thistlewitch intones, “that unraveling could take a long time.”
“So Lady Nore doesn’t need Mellith’s heart?” I ask.
The witch fixes me with a look. “The power of those bones is great. Elfhame shouldn’t have been so careless with them. But they would be far more useful accompanied by the heart. And no one is quite sure what the heart can do alone. It has great power, too, power that is the opposite of Mab’s—and if it could be extracted, then your Lady Nore could style herself as both Oak Queen and Yew Queen.”
A horrifying thought. Lady Nore would desire power of annihilation above all else. And if she could have both, she’d be more dangerous than Mab herself. Lady Nore would unmake everyone who had ever wronged her, including the High Court. Including me. “Is that really possible?”
“How should I know?” asks the Thistlewitch. “Open the wine.”
Oak takes out a knife, using it to pry off the foil, then sticks the point of the blade into the cork and turns. “Have you a glass?”
I half-expect her to swig from the neck of the bottle, but instead, she gets to her feet and trundles off. When she returns, she’s carrying four dirty jars, a chipped platter, and a basket with two melons in it, one green and the other brown.
Oak pours while the Thistlewitch removes the rat from the spit and sets it out on the platter. She begins cutting up the melon.
“Mellith’s heart was supposed to be buried with Mab’s bones beneath the castle of Elfhame,” the prince says. “But it isn’t there. Can you tell me where it is?”
When the hag is done arranging things to her liking, she pushes the platter toward us and picks up her jar of wine. She takes a long slug, then smacks her lips together. “You want me to discover its location with my dowsing rod? You want me to send eggshells spinning down the river and tell you your fate? But what then?”
Tiernan pulls a leg off the rat and chews on it delicately, while Oak helps himself to a slice of melon. I eat one of the doughnuts.
“I see you there, unnatural creature,” the Thistlewitch informs me.
I narrow my eyes at her. She’s probably angry I took a doughnut.
“Then I will use Lady Nore’s desire for it to get my father back. What else?” Oak asks.
The Thistlewitch grins her wicked grin. She eats the tail of the rat, crunching on the bones. “Surely you know the answer, Prince of Elfhame. You seize the power. You have some of Mab’s blood in you. Steal her remains and find Mellith’s heart, and perhaps you can be Oak King and Yew King as well.”
His sister would forgive him then, certainly. He wouldn’t just return a hero. He would return a god.
After we eat, the Thistlewitch rises and dusts the bits of burned fur and powdered sugar off her skirts. “Come,” she says to the prince. “And I will give you the answer you came here for.”
Tiernan begins to rise as well, but she motions for him to sit.
“Prince Oak is the seeker,” she says. “He will receive the knowledge, but he must also pay my price.”
“I will pay it in his stead,” Tiernan declares. “Whatever it is.”
Oak shakes his head. “You will not. You’ve done enough.”
“What is the point of bringing me along to protect you if you won’t let me risk myself in your place?” Tiernan asks, some of his frustration over the fight in the Court of Moths obviously bleeding into his feelings now. “And do not give me some silly answer about companionship.”
“If I get lost in the swamp and never return, I give you leave to be very cross with me,” Oak says.
Tiernan’s jaw twitches with the force of holding back a response.
“So, what will you have?” Oak asks the Thistlewitch.
She grins, her black eyes shining. “Ahhhhh, so many things I could ask for. A bit of your luck, perhaps? Or the dream you hold most dear? But I have read your future in the eggshells, and what I will have is this—your agreement that when you become king, you will give me the very first thing I request.”
I think of the story the Thistlewitch told and the perils of bargaining with hags.
“Done,” Oak says. “It hardly matters, since I will never be king.”
The Thistlewitch smiles her private smile, and the hair stands up all along my arms. Then she beckons to Oak.
I watch them go, his hooves sinking into the mud, his hand out to support her, should she need it. She does not, scampering over the terrain with great spryness.
I take another doughnut and do not look in Tiernan’s direction. I know he’s still furious over Hyacinthe, and as mad as probably he is with Oak right now, I don’t want to tempt him to snarl at me.
We sit in silence. I watch the crocodile creature rise in the water again and realize it must have followed us. It is larger than I supposed earlier and watches me with a single algae-green eye. I wonder if it was waiting for us to get turned around in the swamp and what might have happened if we had.
After long minutes, they return. The Thistlewitch carries a gnarled dowsing rod in her hand, swinging at her side. Oak’s expression is haunted.
“Mellith’s heart is not in a place Lady Nore is likely to find it,” Oak says when he draws close enough for us to hear him. “Nor should we waste our time looking for something we can’t get. Let’s depart.”
“You weren’t really going to give it to her, were you?” I ask.
He does not meet my eyes. “My plans require keeping it out of her reach. Nothing more.”
“But—” Tiernan begins.
Oak cuts off whatever he was about to say with a look.
Mellith’s heart must have been what Lady Nore demanded in exchange for Madoc in the correspondence Hyacinthe was talking about. And if Oak was even considering turning it over, then I have every reason to be glad it’s impossible to get. But I also have to remember that, as much as he wants to take Lady Nore down, she has something over him. In a moment of crisis, he might choose her side over mine.
At the edge of the swamp, the hob-faced owl is waiting for us, perched on the stringy roots of a mangrove tree. Nearby is a patch of ragwort, its flowers blooming caution-tape yellow.
Oak turns toward me, a grim set to his mouth. “You’re not going to continue on with us, Wren.”
He can’t mean it. The prince fought and killed an ogre to keep me with them.
Tiernan turns to him, evidently surprised as well.
“But you need me,” I say, ashamed of how plaintive I sound.
The prince shakes his head. “Not enough for the risk of bringing you. I don’t plan on dueling my way up the coast.”
“She’s the only one who can control Lady Nore,” says Tiernan grudgingly. “Without her, this is a fool’s errand.”
“We don’t need her! ” Oak shouts, the first time I have really seen his emotions out of his control. “And I don’t want her.”
The words hurt, the more because he cannot lie.
“Please.” My arms wrap around myself. “I didn’t try to run away with Hyacinthe. This is my quest, too.”
Oak lets out a long breath, and I realize he looks even more exhausted than I am. The bruise under his eye from the punches he took has darkened, the purple yellowing at the edges, spreading over the lid. He pushes a stray lock of hair back from his face. “I hope you don’t intend to continue to help us the way you did in the Court of Moths.”
“I helped the prisoners,” I tell him. “Even if it inconvenienced you.”
For a long moment, we just stare at each other. I feel as though I’ve been running, my heart is beating so hard.
“We head straight north from here,” he says, turning away. “There’s a faerie market near the human city of Portland, in Maine. I’ve visited it before; it’s not far from the Shifting Isles. Tiernan will buy a boat, and we’ll gather other supplies to make the crossing into Lady Nore’s lands.”
Tiernan nods. “A good place to set off from. Especially if we need to lose anyone following us in the crowds.”
“Good,” says the prince. “At Undry Market, we can decide Wren’s fate.”
“But—” I start.
“It’s four days of travel up the coast to get there,” he says. “We pass through the territory of the Court of Termites, the Court of Cicadas, and half a dozen other Courts. Plenty of time for you to convince me of the mistake I am making.”
He strides off to the patch of ragwort, taking a stalk of the plant and enchanting it into a fringed skeletal beast. When he has two, he gestures for us to mount. “We can cover a lot more distance in the sky.”
“I hate these things,” Tiernan complains, throwing a leg over the back of one.
The owl-faced hob alights on the prince’s arm, and he whispers to it for a moment before it takes to wing again. Off on some secret mission.
I climb onto the ragwort steed behind Oak, putting my hands around his waist, feeling shame at being dismissed, along with anger. No matter how fast Oak’s swordplay or how loyal Tiernan or how clever they might be, there are still only two of them. The prince will realize it makes more sense to bring me along.
As we rise into the air, I find myself as unnerved by ragwort horses as Tiernan is. They seem alive now, and though they are not an illusion, they are not quite what they seem, either. They will become ragwort stalks again and fall to earth, with no more awareness of what they were than any other plucked weed. Half-living things, like the creatures Lady Nore enchanted.
I try not to grip Oak too tightly as we fly. Despite the strangeness of the creature whose back I am on, my heart thrills in the air. The dark sky, dotted with stars, mirrors the lights of the human world below.
We glide through the night, a few of my braids coming loose and undone. Tiernan may distrust the ragwort steeds, but he and Oak sit astride them with immense ease. In the moonlight the prince’s features are more fey, his cheekbones sharper, his ears more pointed.
We make camp beside a stream in a wood redolent of pine resin, on a carpet of needles. Oak coaxes the taciturn Tiernan into telling stories of jousts. I am surprised to find that some of them are funny and that Tiernan himself, when all attention is on him, seems almost shy.
Parts of the water are deep enough to bathe in, and Oak does, stripping off his armor and scrubbing himself with the sand of the bank while Tiernan boils up some of the pine needles for tea.
I try not to look, but out of the corner of my eye, I see pale skin, wet hair, and a scarred chest.
When it is my turn, I wash my hot face primly and decline to remove my dress.
We fly through another day and night. At the next camp, we eat more cheese and bread and sleep under the stars of a meadow. I find duck eggs, and Tiernan fries them with wild onions. Oak talks some about the mortal world and his first year there, when he used magic in foolish ways and nearly got himself and his sister into a lot of trouble.
The third night, we camp in an abandoned building. The air has grown chill, and we make a fire of cardboard and a few planks of wood.
Oak stretches out beside it, arching his back like a preening cat. “Wren, tell us something about your life, if you will.”
Tiernan shakes his head, as though he thinks I won’t do it.
His expression decides me. I stumble over the words in the beginning, but I give them the tale of the glaistig and her victims. In part, I suppose, to be contrary. To see if they will fault me for helping mortals and cheating one of the Folk out of her due. But they listen and even laugh at the times I get the better of her. When I am done talking, I feel strangely lighter.
Across the fire, the prince watches me, reflected flames flickering in his unreadable eyes.
Forgive me, I think. Let me come with you.
The following afternoon, Tiernan dons Oak’s golden scale mail and sets off on his own, to set a false trail. We have a meeting place not far from the Undry Market, and I realize that I will have only one more night to persuade them to allow me to stay.
As we fly, I try to put together my arguments. I consider speaking them into Oak’s ear as he can hardly escape me, but the wind would snatch my words. A faint drizzle dampens our clothes and chills our skin.
As the sun begins to set, I see a darkness that is not night coming on. Clouds form in the distance, billowing upward and barreling outward, turning the sky a sickly greenish gray. Inside, I can see the flicker of lightning. They seem to reach into the stratosphere, the top of the clouds in a shape like an anvil.
And beneath it, wind whirls, tornadoes forming.
I give a cry, which is whipped away. Oak wheels the ragwort horse downward as the air around us becomes thick. We plunge into the fog of clouds, their wet, heavy mist sinking into my lungs. The steed shivers beneath us. And then, without warning, the ragwort horse dips sharply, then drops.
We plummet through the sky, the speed of our descent shoving the scream back into my mouth. All I can do is hang on to the solid mass of Oak’s body and wrap my arms around him as tightly as they will go. Thunder booms in my ears.
We plunge into a sheet of rain. It knocks us around, slicking our fingers and hair, making holding on difficult with everything so slippery. Coward that I am, I close my eyes and press my face into the prince’s back.
“Wren,” he shouts, a warning. I look up just before we hit the ground.
I am thrown off into mud, my breath knocked out of me. The ragwort steed crumbles away to the dried stalk of a plant under my bruised palms.
Everything hurts, but with a dull sort of pain that doesn’t get worse when I move. Nothing seems broken.
Standing shakily, I reach out a hand to help Oak up. He takes it, levering himself to his feet. His golden hair is dark with rain, his lashes spiky with it. His clothes are soaked through. His scraped knee is bleeding sluggishly.
He touches my cheek lightly with his fingers. “You—I thought—”
I stare up into his eyes, puzzled by his expression.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head.
The prince turns away from me abruptly. “We need to get to the meeting spot,” he says. “It can’t be far.”
“We need to find shelter.” I have to shout to be heard. Above us, lightning cuts through the sky, striking into the woods just beyond us. Thunder cracks, and I see a dim thread of smoke curl upward from the site of the hit before the rain douses the fire. “We can find Tiernan when the storm lets up.”
“At least let’s walk in that direction,” Oak says, lifting his pack and throwing it over one shoulder. Ducking his head against the storm, he walks deeper into the woods, using the trees for cover. He doesn’t look back to see if I follow.
We go on like that for a while before I see a promising area to stop.
“There.” I point at an area with several large rocks, not far from where the soil dips down into a ravine. There are two trees, less than six feet apart, with branches reaching toward one another. “We can make a lean-to.”
He gives an exhausted sigh. “I suppose you are the expert. Tell me what I need to do.”
“We find two huge sticks,” I say, measuring with my hands. “Basically, as long as you are tall. They have to extend past the branches.”
I discover one a few yards away that seems as though it could be partially rotted, but I drag it back anyway. Oak has caused another to bend helpfully, through some magic. I begin to tear the skirt of my dress into strips, trying not to think of how much I liked it. “Tie with this,” I say, going to work on the other end.
Once they’re in place, I use smaller sticks as ribs, stacking them to make a roof and then piling that with moss and leaves.
It is far from waterproof, but it’s something. He’s shivering by the time we crawl inside. Outside, the wind howls and thunder booms. I drag in a large log and start stripping away the bark to get at the drier wood within.
Seeing the slowness of my progress, he reaches into his boot and takes out a knife, then hands it over. “Don’t make me regret giving you this.”
“She wanted to delay you,” I say softly, aware that he probably doesn’t want to hear my justification.
“Queen Annet?” he asks. “I know.”
“And you think she almost managed it because of me?” I ask. The insides of the log are drier, and I arrange the pieces I chip off on the stones in a pyramid shape, trying to keep the worst of the water off them.
He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, which are that strange fox color. Like gold that has been cut with copper. “I think you could have told me what you intended to do.”
I give him a look of utter disbelief.
“Hyacinthe told you something about me, didn’t he?” Oak asks.
I shiver, despite not being affected by the cold. “He said that you had a kind of magic where you could make people like you.”
Oak makes an exasperated sound. “Is that what you believe?”
“That you inherited an uncanny ability to put people at ease, to convince them to go along with your desires? Should I not?”
His eyebrows go up. For a moment, he’s quiet. All around us the rain falls. The thunder seems to have moved off. “My first mother, Liriope, died before I was born. After she was poisoned—at Prince Dain’s orders—Oriana cut open her belly to save me. People do say that Liriope was a gancanagh, and her love-talking was how she caught the eye of the High King and his son, but it’s not as though that power was much use to her. She paid for that charm with her life.”
At my silence, he answers the question I did not ask. “Blusher mushroom. You remain conscious the whole time as your body slows and then stops. I was born with it in my veins, if you can call being torn out of your dead mother a birth.”
“And Liriope and Prince Dain—”
“Were my dam and sire,” he agrees. I knew that he was some part of the Greenbriar line, but I hadn’t known the details. With that horrifying legacy, I suppose I can understand how Madoc would seem an admirable father, how he would adore the mother who rescued and raised him. “Whatever power I have of Liriope’s, I don’t use it.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. “Maybe you can’t help it. Maybe you do it without knowing.”
He gives me a slow smile, as though I’ve just confessed to something. “I suppose you want to believe I charmed you into kissing me?”
I turn away, shame heating my face. “I could have done it to distract you.”
“So long as you know that you did it,” he says.
I frown at the mud, wondering how far he would have gone had I not pulled away. Would he have taken me to bed, loathing in his heart? Could I even tell? “You also—”
The sound of footsteps stops me. Tiernan stands in front of our lean-to, blinking at us in the downpour. “You’re alive.”
The knight staggers into the shelter, collapsing onto the ground. His cloak is singed.
“What happened?” Oak asks, checking his arm. I can see where the skin is red, but no worse.
“Lightning, very close to where I was waiting.” Tiernan shivers. “That storm isn’t natural.”
“No,” agrees Oak.
I think on Bogdana’s final words. I will come for you again. And when I do, you best not run.
“If we make it to the market tomorrow and get our ship,” Tiernan tells Oak, “we can seek the Undersea’s aid to take us through the Labrador Sea swiftly and without incident.”
“The merrow told me—” I begin, and then stop, because both of them are staring at me.
“Go on,” Oak says.
I try to recall his exact words, but I cannot. “That there’s trouble in the sea, with the queen and her daughter. And warned me about someone, a name I didn’t know.”
Oak frowns, glancing at Tiernan. “So perhaps we take our chances and do not seek the Undersea’s aid.”
“I am not sure I trust Wren’s informant,” Tiernan says. “Either way, once we land, we ought to be able to travel from there on foot. The Citadel is perhaps thirty miles inland.”
“Lady Nore will have those stick creatures patrolling everywhere but the Stone Forest,” Oak says.
The knight shakes his head. “Going through those woods is a bad plan. It’s cursed, and the troll king is mad.”
“That’s why no one will look for us there,” says Oak, as though this was part of an ongoing game in which he’d made an excellent move.
The knight makes a gesture of exasperation. “Fine. We go through the Stone Forest. And when we’re all about to die, I look forward to your apology.”
Oak stands. “As I have not yet sealed our doom, I am going for supplies. It’s hard to imagine I could feel any colder or wetter, and I saw the outskirts of a mortal town while we were in the air.”
“Maybe the gale-force winds will clear your head,” says the knight, wrapping his wet cloak more tightly around himself and appearing not even to consider volunteering to go along.
Oak makes an elaborate bow, then turns to me. “He’s unlikely to make you any promises like Hyacinthe did, but if you get that fire going, he just might.”
“Unfair,” Tiernan growls.
Oak laughs as he tromps off through the wet forest.
I clear off some space on the ground to make a fire, piling up the dry bits of wood I stripped out of the center of the log. I fish in my pockets until I find the matchbook I took from the motel. I strike one against the strip of phosphorus, hoping it isn’t too wet to work. When it flares to life, I cup my hand over it and try to set the small, dry pieces aflame.
Tiernan observes all this with a small frown.
“You’re friends,” I say, looking in the direction the prince went. “You and him.”
He watches as the fire catches, smoke curling. “I suppose we are.”
“But you’re his guard, too, aren’t you?” I am not sure if he’s going to be offended by the question, or by my talking to him in general, but I am curious and tired of not knowing things.
Tiernan reaches out a hand to test the heat of the flames. “There were three before me. Two got killed protecting him. The third turned on him for a bribe. That’s how Oak got the scar on his throat. At fourteen, he decided he didn’t want any more guards. But his sister sent me anyway.
“First, he dragged me along to absurd parties, like he was going to embarrass me out of the job. Then I think he tried to bore me out of it by not going anywhere at all for weeks at a time. But I stayed. I was proud of being chosen for the position. And I thought he was nothing more than spoiled.”
“That’s what he wanted you to think,” I say, having recently fallen for the same trick.
He nods to me in acknowledgment. “I didn’t know that then, though. I just turned twenty myself and was more foolish than I like to remember. But it hardly matters, because a year later things went sideways. A mortal tried to stab Oak. I grabbed the guy, but he was meant to be a distraction. To my shame, it worked. A half dozen redcaps and goblins flooded the alley from the other direction, all well-armed. I told the prince to run.
“He stayed and fought like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Swift. Efficient. Brutal. He still wound up stabbed twice in the stomach and once in the thigh before the battle was over. I had failed him, and I knew it.
“He could have gotten rid of me after that, easily. All he would have had to do was tell anyone the truth of what happened that night. But he didn’t. Got healing ointment in Mandrake Market so they wouldn’t guess. I don’t know when he would say I was his friend, but he was mine after that.”
I look into the fire, thinking of Oak coming to see me in the woods, a year before he met Tiernan. I wonder if that was after his own guard turned on him and tried to cut his throat. Had I come out of hiding I might have noticed the newness of the scar.
Tiernan shakes his head. “Of course, that was before I realized why he hadn’t wanted a guard. He’d taken up a new hobby. Decided to become a lure for the ambitious, anyone who might want to take a shot at the royal family. Did everything he could to make sure those shots were aimed at him.”
I remember Oak coming to my woods. Someone tried to kill me. Again. Poison. Again. He’d been upset about the assassination attempts. Why would he court more of them? “Do they know?”
Tiernan doesn’t bother asking whom I mean. “Certainly not. I wish the royal family would figure it out, though. It’s exhausting to watch someone try to be a ship that rocks will break against.”
I recall Oak’s refusal to let Tiernan champion him in the Court of Moths, Oak’s insistence that he be the one to take on the debt with the Thistlewitch. When I first met them, I thought Tiernan might grow tired of protecting Oak; now I see how hard he has to fight for an opportunity.
“Hyacinthe camped with the Court of Teeth during the war,” Tiernan says, and I glance at him through my lashes, evaluating the meaning of his subject change. “He told me a little about it. Not a nice place to be a child.”
I frown at my hands, but I can’t just ignore his words. “Not a nice place to be anything.”
“What do you suppose they were planning for you?”
I draw my legs up and shrug.
“Marry the prince and then kill him, is that right?” He doesn’t sound accusatory, only interested.
“I don’t think they meant either of us to live long.”
To that, he doesn’t reply.
I stare into the fire, watch the flames crackle.
I sit there for a while, feeding bits of the log to the blaze, watching them catch, embers blowing up into the sky like lightning bugs.
Then I get up, feeling restless. Living in the woods as long as I have, I ought to be gathering things. Perhaps there isn’t much I can do to make up for freeing the prisoners, but I can build up our shelter at least.
“I’ll gather some more wood,” I say. “And see if I can find anything worth foraging.”
“Remember that I have three strands of your hair,” the knight says, but there’s no real threat in his voice.
I roll my eyes.
Tiernan gives me a strange look as I walk off, gathering his wet cloak around himself.
As the night envelops me, I scent the air, drinking in the unfamiliar forest. I don’t go far before I stumble on a patch of lemony wood sorrel and bullbrier. I gather some, tucking it into the pockets of my new dress. Pockets! Having them now, I cannot believe I went so long without them.
Idly, I pull the human’s phone out. The screen is entirely black and will not wake. The battery has run down, and there’s no way for me to charge it unless we stay in another mortal dwelling.
I tuck the phone away. Perhaps this is better, not having it work. It allows me to imagine that Hyacinthe and Gwen are safe, that my unmother was happy to hear from me. That perhaps she even called the number back.
Wandering farther into the woods, I discover a tree of loquats and pick them by the handful, eating as I go and filling my bag. I walk on, hoping to find chanterelles.
There’s a rustling. I look up, expecting to see Tiernan.
But it is Bogdana who stands between the trees, her long fingers wrapped in the nearby branches. The storm hag looks down on me with her shining black eyes and smiles with her sharp, cracked teeth.
There is a rushing in my ears, and for a moment, I can hear only the thundering of my blood.
I take a branch from the floor of the woods and heft it like a bat.
Into that moment, she speaks. “Enough foolishness, child. I’ve come to talk.”
I wonder how she found me. Was there a spy in Queen Annet’s Court? Was it the Thistlewitch herself, out of courtesy toward another ancient power?
“What do you want?” I growl, feeling like a beast again despite the finery I’ve been dressed in. “Have you come to kill me for my lady mother? Tell me, then, how am I to die?”
The hag raises her eyebrows. “Well, well, look who’s all grown up and throwing accusations around.”
I make myself breathe. The branch is heavy and wet in my hand.
“I have come to fetch you,” Bogdana says. “There is little profit in fighting me, child. It is time to separate your allies from your enemies.”
I take a step back, thinking to put some distance between us. “And you are my ally?”
“I could be,” the storm hag says. “Surely you’d prefer that to making me your opponent.”
I take another step, and she grabs for me, nails slashing through the air.
I slam the branch against her shoulder as hard as I am able. Then I run. Through the night, between the trees, my boots sliding in the mud, thorned bushes tearing at my skin and branches catching on my clothes.
I slip, putting my foot wrong in a puddle. I crash down onto my hands and knees. Then I am up and running.
The solid weight of her comes down on my back.
We crash together, rolling on the carpet of wet leaves and pine needles, rocks digging into my bruises. Her nails digging into my skin.
The storm hag grabs my chin in her long fingers, pressing the back of my head against the forest floor. “It ought to sicken you to travel with the Prince of Elfhame.” Her face is very close to mine, her breath hot. “Oak, whom you might have forced to cower at your side. To have to take orders from him is an affront. And yet, if he does disgust you, you have done well hiding it.”
I struggle, kicking. Trying to pull away. Her nails scratch my throat, leaving a trail of burning lines on my flesh.
“But maybe he doesn’t disgust you,” Bogdana says, peering into my eyes like she sees something more there than her reflection. “They say that he can talk flowers into opening their petals at night, as though his face were that of the sun. He’ll steal your heart.”
“I doubt he would have the least interest in anything like that,” I tell her, flinching away from her fingers.
This time she lets me go, grabbing one of my braids instead. She hauls me to my feet, using it like a leash.
I reach into my pockets and find the knife that Oak lent me to strip the log and pull it from its sheath.
The hag’s eyes flare with anger at the sight of me with a weapon pointed at her. “The prince is your enemy.”
“I don’t believe you,” I shout, slashing through the braid she’s holding me by. Then I take off through the woods again.
And again, she gives chase.
“Halt,” she calls to me, but I don’t even slow. We crash through the brush. I have lost track, but I think I am headed in the direction of the lean-to. I hope I am headed toward the mortal town.
“Halt,” she calls. “Hear me out, and when I am done, you may choose to stay or go.”
Twice before she has nearly had me. I slow my step and turn, knife still gripped in my palm. “And no harm will come to me or my companions by your hand?”
She gives a wicked smile. “Not this day.”
I nod but still make sure to leave plenty of space between us.
“You’d be well served to listen, child,” she says. “Before it’s too late.”
“I’m listening,” I say.
The hag’s smile grows. “I’ll wager your prince never told you the bargain Lady Nore offered. That she would trade Madoc to the prince in exchange for the very thing he is bringing north. A foolish girl. You.”
I shake my head. That can’t be true.
No, Lady Nore must have asked for Mellith’s heart. That was why he went to the Thistlewitch to find it. What use would Lady Nore have for me, who could command her? But then I recall Oak’s words in the abandoned human house: You’re her greatest vulnerability. No matter her other plans, she has good reason to want to eliminate you.
If Lady Nore wants me, she wants me dead.
And hadn’t I wondered if it was me she asked for, when I was in the prisons with Hyacinthe? Suspected and then dismissed the idea. I hadn’t wanted to believe it.
But the more I think on it, the more that I realize Oak never said that Lady Nore had asked for Mellith’s heart. Only that he hoped to use her need for it against her. That he planned to trick her.
If it were me that Lady Nore wanted, I can see why he would have hidden so much of his plan. Why he was willing to risk his own neck to keep me out of Queen Annet’s hands. Maybe even why he’d gone looking for Mellith’s heart, if he thought that was something he could give to Lady Nore instead.
He must have wavered between wanting to save his father and knowing that turning me over to Lady Nore was monstrous.
At Undry Market, we can decide Wren’s fate. That was what he said. And now I know what decision he will come to.
“Do not forget your place.” She pokes me in the side. “You’re not his servant. You’re a queen.”
“No longer,” I remind her.
“Always,” she says.
But my thoughts are on Oak, on the power I have over Lady Nore, and on how my death might be worth Madoc’s life.
“I don’t understand—why did she send those creatures against us if Oak was doing as she asked?”
Bogdana grins. “The message was sent to the High Queen, not to Oak. By the time the prince began his quest, Lady Nore had become frustrated, waiting. You need to wake up to the danger you’re in.”
“You mean from someone other than you?” I ask.
“I am going to tell you a story,” Bogdana says, ignoring my words. “Would that I could say more, but certain constraints on me prevent it.”
I blink at her, but I find it hard to concentrate on what she’s saying, when her accusations toward Oak hang heavily in the air.
“It’s a fairy tale of sorts,” the storm hag begins. “Once upon a time, there was a queen who desperately wanted a child. She was the third bride of a king who’d murdered the two before her when they failed to conceive, so she knew her fate if she could not give him an heir. His need for a child was different than that of most monarchs in fairy tales—he planned for his issue to be his means of betraying the High Court—but his desire was as acute as any stemming from family feeling. And so the queen consulted alchemists, diviners, and witches. Being magical herself, she wove spells and brought she and her husband together on propitious nights, on a bed spread with herbs. And yet no child quickened in the queen’s womb.”
No one had ever spoken to me of my birth before, nor of the danger Lady Nore had been in from Lord Jarel. I had heard none of this, and my skin prickles all over with the premonition that whatever comes next, I won’t like it.
Bogdana points a clawed finger at me. Behind her in the sky, I see a strike of lightning. “In time, they sought out a wise old hag. And she told them that she could give them the child that they’d wanted, but that they would have to do exactly what she said. They promised her any reward, and she only smiled, for her memory was long.”
“What did you—” I start, but she holds up her finger in warning, and I close my mouth on the question.
“The wise old hag told them to gather up snow and form it into the shape of a daughter.
“They did this. The girl they made was delicate in form, with eyes of stone, and lips of frozen rose petals, and the sharply pointed ears of their people. When they finished sculpting her, they smiled at each other, captivated by her beauty.
“The hag smiled, too, for other reasons.”
This seems like a bad jest. I am not made of snow. I am not some being who was sculpted just as Lord Jarel and Lady Nore wished. I never captivated them with my beauty.
And yet, Bogdana is telling me this story for a reason. Sluagh. Is that what I am? A soul given a body, one of the half-dead Folk that wail outside houses or promise doom in mirrors.
“Now we must give her life, the hag told them. For this, she needs a drop of blood, for she is to be your child. Second, she needs my magic.
“The first was easy to supply. The king and queen pricked their fingers and let their blood stain the snow.
“The second was easy for them as well because I gave it willingly. When my breath blew across the girl, the spark of life lit within her, and they could see her eyelashes twitch, her tresses shiver. The child began to move. Her little limbs were slender and nearly as pale a blue as the reflection of the sky on the snow she’d been made from. Her hair, a deeper blue, like the flowers that grew nearby. Her eyes, that of the lichen that clung to rocks. Her lips, the red of that fresh-spilled blood.
“You will be our daughter, the king and queen told her. And you will give us Elfhame.
“But when the girl opened her mouth and spoke for the first time, they were afraid of the thing that they had made.”
I shake my head. “That can’t be true. That can’t be how I was born.”
I don’t want to be a creature, shaped by their hands and quickened with their blood. Something made like a doll, from snow and sticks. An assemblage of parts, stranger even than the sluagh.
“Why tell me this now?” I ask her, trying to keep my voice even. “Why tell me this at all?”
“Because I need you,” says Bogdana. “Lady Nore is not the only one who can seize power. There is myself as well. Myself, to whom you owe your life far more than you owe it to her. Forsake the others. Come with me, and we can take everything for ourselves.”
I think of the Thistlewitch and the tale she told of Mab and Mellith’s heart. Could Bogdana have been the hag who slaughtered her own daughter? Perhaps it is only that I heard the story days before, but Lady Nore must have been told about the bones from someone who remembered what had happened, who knew their true value.
And if Bogdana was that hag, then her belief that I owe her my life puts me in greater danger than ever. She murdered her own child, and even though it was by accident, I can only imagine what she’d be willing to do to something like me.
My ability to command Lady Nore is more curse than blessing. Anyone who wants Mab’s bones will find me the easiest means to get them.
“You spoke of constraints,” I say. “What are they?”
The storm hag gives me a fierce look. “For one, I may not harm that Greenbriar boy, nor any of the line.”
I shiver. That would explain why she fled at the sight of him. Why she sent lightning only at Tiernan. And it would be the sort of curse that Mab might have put on the hag who’d intended the murder of her daughter.
I must keep my wild thoughts in check. “Is this story of my origins what you came to tell me that night on my unfamily’s lawn?”
She gives me a crooked, frightening smile. “I came to warn you that Prince Oak was coming so that you could avoid him.”
“Not about Lady Nore’s stick creatures?” I demand.
Bogdana snorts. “Those, I thought you could handle on your own. Perhaps they’d wake you up to what you could be.”
More likely, they would have shot me through with arrows, or the stick spiders would have ripped me apart. “You’ve told me your story. I listened. Now I am going to go. That was our agreement.”
“Are you certain?” Her eyes are hard, and she asks the question with such weight in her voice that I am certain there will be consequences for my answer.
I nod, feeling as though that is safer than speaking. Then I begin to turn away.
“You know, the girl saw me.”
I freeze. “What girl?”
Her smile is sly. “The mortal one whose house you creep around.”
“Bex?” I was so sure she was asleep in bed. She must have been terrified to see a monster on her lawn.
“When the prince started waving his little toothpick sword, I doubled back. I thought I’d seen her face in the window. But she was outside.”
I can barely breathe.
“She didn’t scream. She’s a brave girl.” The storm hag seems to enjoy drawing out this moment. “Said she was looking for you.”
“For me?”
“I told her that last I saw, you were in the company of a prince, and that he had taken you prisoner. She wanted to help, of course. But mortals will make a muddle of most anything, don’t you find?”
“What did you do?” My voice is almost all breath.
“Gave her some advice, is all,” says Bogdana, stepping into the shadows of the trees. “And now I am giving you some. Get away from that Greenbriar boy before it’s too late. And when I see you again, you’d best do what I ask. Or I can snuff out that spark I put inside you. And snuff out your little unfamily, too, while you watch.”
I am shaking all over. “Don’t you dare touch—”
At that moment, Tiernan steps through the branches. “Traitor!” he shouts at me. “I caught you.”
