Ahead of us, Lady Nore rides a shaggy reindeer. She is in a dress of scarlet with a cloak of deeper red over it, long enough to cover the back of the deer. The reliquary sits in her lap.
The troll king is mounted on an elk, its horns rising in an enormous branching crown of spikes over its head. Its bridle is all green and gold. He himself has coppery armor, beaten into that same strange pattern again, as though each piece contains a maze.
I think of how Tiernan must have passed these last two days. At first, hoping we would return, and then panicking as the night wore on. By the time day dawned, he would have known he had to come with the heart and play out Oak’s scheme. He might have embroidered the plans as he sat in the cold, angry with the prince and terrified for him. He had no way to tell us.
And we had no way to tell him that Madoc had recruited so many of the former falcons to his side.
Lady Nore swings down from her reindeer, her long scarlet cloak dragging through the snow like a shifting tide of blood.
“Take the storm hag,” she orders, just as we planned. Just as she was commanded.
Stick soldiers grab for Bogdana. The ancient faerie sinks her nails into one of them. Lightning strikes in the distance, but she has no time to summon it closer. Her hands are caught by more stick creatures. The storm hag rips apart a stick man, but there are too many and all are armed with iron. Soon she is pressed down in the snow, iron manacles burning on her wrists.
“What is the reason for this betrayal?” Bogdana shouts at Lady Nore.
Lady Nore glances at me but does not answer.
The storm hag croaks. “Have I not done what you asked of me? Have I not conjured you a daughter from nothing? Have I not helped you make yourself great?”
“And what a daughter you have conjured,” Lady Nore says, scorn in her voice.
Bogdana’s eyes go to me, a new gleam in them. She sees something, I think, but is not yet sure what exactly she’s seeing.
“And now, prince,” Lady Nore says, returning to the plan. “Where is Mellith’s heart?”
Oak is not armed, although the former falcon at his side carries the prince’s sword where he can easily get it. And though his wrists appear to be tied, the cords are so loose that he can free himself whenever he wishes. The prince looks up at the moon. “My companion is supposed to be here presently.”
I glance around at the assembled Folk. Part of me wants to give the signal now, to take command of Lady Nore’s stick creatures and force the trolls into a surrender. But better for Tiernan to be in sight, to be sure he won’t arrive at the wrong moment and jump into the fray, not knowing friend from foe.
I shift nervously, watching Lady Nore. Noting the hands of Lord Jarel around her neck, a reminder that if she could find comfort in something like that, her other actions may be impossible for me to anticipate. My gaze goes to King Hurclaw, tall and fierce-looking. For all the rumors of his madness, I understand his motives far better than hers. Still, the thirty trolls behind him are formidable.
“Perhaps you are used to your subjects biding at your pleasure, heir to Elfhame,” Hurclaw says, “but we grow impatient.”
“I am waiting just as you are,” Oak reminds him.
Twenty minutes pass before Tiernan appears, walking over the snow, Titch on his shoulder. It feels far longer than that with Lady Nore glaring at me and Hurclaw grumbling. Madoc leans heavily on his stick and does not complain, although I worry he might collapse. At perhaps half a league off, Titch springs into the air, flapping wide wings.
The owl-faced hob circles once, then lands on Oak’s arm and whispers in his ear.
“Well?” demands Hurclaw.
Oak turns to Lady Nore, as though she really is the one in charge. “Tiernan says that Madoc should begin walking toward him with a soldier, as a show of good faith. Tiernan will meet them.”
“And the heart?” she inquires, and I bristle. My commands had to be more open-ended for her to perform in front of Hurclaw, but she’s clever and will be looking for a loophole. I told her to behave like herself, but not to say or do anything that would give away that I had control over her. In this game of riddles and countermoves, I fear I have not been careful enough.
“He carries it in a case,” Oak says. “He’ll pass it to your soldier. Then Suren and I are to go to him.”
Lady Nore nods. “Then make haste. Let the exchange begin.”
Before, she said she wanted to keep Oak. Now she seems as if she’s planning to release him. Will that seem strange to Hurclaw? Will he even notice? I slant a look at him, but there’s no way to know his thoughts.
The hob takes to wing again, speeding over the snow toward Tiernan. “I have informed him you agreed to this plan,” Oak says.
I doubt very much that’s what he told Titch.
“With this heart, you can make the troll kings live again?” Hurclaw asks, narrowing his eyes at Tiernan and the case in his hands. “You can end the curse on my people?”
“So Bogdana told me, once, long ago,” Lady Nore says with a glance toward the storm hag, whom the stick soldiers have hauled to her feet. “Though I sometimes wonder if she wanted it for her own reasons. But I remembered her story of the bones and the heart, remembered that they would be entombed beneath the Castle of Elfhame. And when the heart wasn’t there, I knew that only a member of the royal family would be allowed to search through the tunnels extensively enough to find it—or to know if it had been deliberately moved. So I took Madoc and gave them a reason to look.”
She nods at a former falcon, and he begins to help Madoc across the snow. I see the general lean toward him and say something. Their pace slows. We wait with the wind whistling around us and the hour growing later. Tiernan halts when he reaches Madoc and hands the case with the deer’s heart inside to the soldier.
The soldier starts to walk back to us. Madoc and Tiernan remain, as though expecting that Oak and I will really be coming to join them in a moment.
Bogdana watches, amusement lifting a corner of her mouth despite the shackles she wears.
“What a delight it would have been,” Lady Nore says in a tone of barely concealed malice. “To have had all that power and to have known it was Madoc’s son who gave it to me.”
The troll king looks at her, and I realize my mistake. I have instructed her to say nothing that will give away the power I have over her, but I failed to take into account that she could make airy, passive-aggressive statements implying a great deal.
“What does that mean?” Hurclaw asks.
“You ought to ask my daughter,” she says with the sort of sweetness that is meant to cover the taste of rot.
His gaze goes to me. “I thought she had no tongue.”
Lady Nore only smiles, and he nods to one of his Folk.
The troll soldier lifts a bow. He shoots before I can do more than raise my hand in warding.
The arrow slices through the pad of my thumb and strikes me in the side, slicing through flesh. The impact unbalances me. I hit the snow, falling to my hands and knees. I gasp for air, feeling the agony of trying to get a breath. I think one of my lungs was struck.
Scarlet stains my side. The snow is blooming red with it.
Oak starts to run toward me when the troll archers train their bows on the prince and Hurclaw calls for him to halt. The prince stops. I can see he has his sword, the restraints tying his hands are gone.
The former falcons are fanning out, and I see Hyacinthe weaving between them, moving in my direction.
This is all wrong.
“Prince,” Hurclaw’s voice booms. “Bring that heart to me, or I will fill you both full of arrows.”
I want to call out, to order Lady Nore to command her troops to defend me, but I cannot seem to make the words come. This hurts.
It hurts like when—
The bone shard in my mouth—
My chest—
The ice spiderswebbing under my fingers as I moved—
Oak glances at me with those trickster’s eyes, panic in them. Then he inclines his head to the troll king. Walking to the former falcon, the prince takes the box with the heart from him.
And whispers something.
Hurclaw swings down from his mount.
Oak approaches him. They are close now, too close for arrows aimed at the prince not to strike their king.
Hurclaw lifts the latch with a flick of one clawed nail. A moment later the troll stumbles back, grabbing for his throat, where a needlethin pin sticks out from his skin. The heart, dark and shriveled, falls into the snow. A deer heart, nothing more.
It was the case that mattered, the case that Oak commissioned from the blacksmith in Undry Market.
Once, the Bomb told me a story about poisonous spiders kept inside a chest. When the thief opened it, he was bitten all over.
The case was the trap.
I remember the care with which Oak set the lock, back in the cave. He must have been fitting a poisoned dart, ready to kill Lady Nore if all our other plans failed.
“Now!” shouts the soldier who’d been given the prince’s whispered orders.
The falcons have made a careful circle behind the trolls. At the signal, they draw their weapons and rush in.
There is fighting all around me. Arrows and blades. Screams.
I push myself to my knees. “Mother,” I say, forcing it out.
That was the word meant to end the masquerade of control.
“All who follow me, you shall follow Suren’s commands from this moment forward and forevermore,” Lady Nore calls out, following my instructions exactly as she was supposed to, at least until she pitches her voice low. “If she can make any.”
“Stop the trolls,” I shout, pushing myself to my feet. When I cough, blood spatters my fingers.
“You are the one to order me captured, child?” Bogdana calls to me. “You?”
I snap off the end of the arrow, gritting my teeth against the pain. Freeing my other hand.
Hurclaw is trembling all over. Whatever the poison, it is acting fast.
“You played us false,” the troll king says. “You never had Mellith’s heart at all, did you?”
“He cannot lie,” says Lady Nore, standing amid the carnage, watching it as though it is distant from her. “He told us he brought it north with him. He has it.”
What happens when she discovers how you’ve deceived her? When she realizes her role in your plan?
“Call off your people,” Oak tells Hurclaw. “Call them off, and I will give you the antidote.”
“No!” The troll king lunges for Oak. They topple together onto the snow. Oak is skilled, but nowhere as strong as Hurclaw.
She will have to decide how much she hates me.
Oak, who abandoned looking for the heart after he went to the Thistlewitch. Who tried to send me away, who hadn’t wanted to need me.
He’ ll steal your heart. Wasn’t that what Bogdana said in the woods?
My mind drifts dizzily back to the feeling of something inside me unraveling.
To lying on the cold ice floor of the throne room. Memories flood me until it seems as though I am in two places at once.
I am another little girl, unwanted and afraid.
Hag child, a woman’s voice says. You will take Clovis’s place in her bed tonight.
The feel of heavy blankets, embroidered with stags and forests. Warm and soft. And then waking to agony, to breathlessness. To my mother looming over me, bloody knife in her hand. To the joy, the relief I felt before the feeling of betrayal so vast it consumes me.
My real mother. My beautiful mother. Bogdana.
I hear her voice. But she is not speaking to me now; she is talking to someone else, a long time ago. I will make sure your heart beats in a new chest.
I am terrified. I feel the agony of her nails reaching into my chest.
I blink, and it is as though I am seeing double, still half in that memory, half in the snow at the edge of night.
Mellith’s heart is mine.
I ought to have known it since waking on the cold floor of the throne room. Since those dreams, which felt too real. Since the power sang through my veins, just waiting for me to reach for it.
I was afraid of magic from the first moment that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel stepped into my bedroom in the mortal world. And I couldn’t stop being afraid of myself. Afraid of the monster I saw when I glimpsed my reflection in still pools, in windows.
But all I am is magic. Unmagic.
I am not nothing. I am what is beyond nothing. Annihilation.
I am the unraveler. I can pull apart magic with a thought.
An object flies from nearby. I have a moment to tell that it is made of bronze with a cork in one end before it explodes.
Flames scorch the ground. The wicker soldiers are on fire. Lady Nore screams.
I fall again. The heat on my face is scorching. My skirts are ablaze.
Tiernan is running through the snow toward Oak.
I struggle to my feet. And as I do, I see that though some of the stick creatures burn, it doesn’t slow them. They fight on. A monstrous multilegged thing is ripping a troll apart, limb by limb, like a child taking apart a toy.
Hurclaw’s body lies in the snow. It has gone very still.
Oak wipes dirt off his mouth with one arm and looks toward me as he gets up. I feel as though I am staring at him from very far away. There’s a roaring in my ears. Now that the magic is loosed inside me, I do not think I can call it back.
And he knew. He knew. He’d known the whole time.
He used me like a coin in a trick. Used me so that he could say he brought Mellith’s heart north, because it wasn’t a lie.
I take a deep breath, pulling power toward me. The fire at the bottom of my dress goes out.
I close my eyes and focus my thoughts. When I open them, I let my power slice through enchantments. The stick things fall apart into a scattered field of blackened branches and twigs, forming a circle around me. The scent of smoke is still thick in the air.
“What have you done?” Lady Nore says, her voice coming out high.
The falcons and the trolls pause. Two run to their king and attempt to rouse him from where he lies.
Bogdana begins to cackle.
“Oak,” Tiernan says, having made it to his friend’s side. “What’s happening to Wren?”
They’re all watching me now.
Nix. Naught. Nothing. That’s what you are. Nix Naught Nothing.
“Do you want to tell them, or should I?” I ask the prince.
“When did you—” he begins, but I cut him off before he can get the question out.
“When Lady Nore and Lord Jarel wanted a child to help their schemes, Bogdana tricked them.” It is my turn to tell the fairy tale. “She made them a child of snow and sticks and droplets of blood, just as she told them she would. But she animated it with an ancient heart.”
I recall enough of the Thistlewitch’s story. I glance at Bogdana. “Mab cursed you. Is that right?”
The storm hag nods. “On my daughter’s blood, that I should never harm any of Mab’s line. Only Mellith could end my curse, but I could not give her new life without being asked to do so, nor could I speak of doing so without being questioned.”
“You couldn’t—this can’t—” Lady Nore cannot bring herself to admit how deceived she was.
“Yes,” I tell her. “I am what is left of Mellith. Me, whom you tortured and despised. Me, with more power than you’ve ever had. All of it at your fingertips. But you never bothered to look.”
“Mellith. Mother’s curse.” Lady Nore spits the words at me. “That ought to have been your name from your making.”
“Yes,” I say. “I rather think you’re right.”
Tiernan tugs at Oak’s shoulder, urging him to move. Madoc calls from across the snow. But the prince stands still, watching me.
Now I know the game he was playing, and who was the pawn. And flowing through me, I feel the endless power of nothingness, of negation.
“Will you trade Greenbriar blood for your own?” Lady Nore says. “You could have brought Elfhame to its knees. But I suppose it’s me you want on my knees.”
“I want you dead,” I roar, and with no more than the force of that desire, she is spread apart on the snow. Taken apart. Unmade as surely and easily as a stick man.
I look at the red stain. At the storm hag, whose black eyes are glittering with satisfaction.
Horror chokes me. I hadn’t meant to . . . I didn’t think that would . . . I didn’t know she would die just because I wished it. I didn’t know I could do that.
The urge to shrink into myself, to hide from what I have done, is overwhelming. My shoulders hunch, my body curling in on itself. If I was afraid of my anger before, now it has become something terrible beyond measure. Now that I can take all the pain I have ever felt and make everyone else feel it, too, I am not sure how to stop.
Hurclaw stirs. Either the poison wasn’t meant to be lethal, or the dosage was for Lady Nore and is not enough to kill someone so much larger.
“Free Bogdana,” I tell Hyacinthe. He does, removing the iron shackles from her wrists. His expression is wary, though. I wonder if he regrets his vow. I told him he would.
“Now take the antidote from Oak and give it to the troll king.”
Hyacinthe stomps through the snow. The prince hands over a vial from his pocket without protest, his gaze still on me.
It takes a few moments for Hyacinthe to administer the liquid and a few more for Hurclaw to sit up.
I turn to the troll king as he staggers to his feet with the support of one of his subjects. “I can give you what she could not. I can break the curse.”
He gives a grunt of assent.
“And in return, you will follow me.”
Hurclaw, seeing the destruction around him, nods. “I await your orders, my lady.”
“As for you three,” I say, and look in the direction of Tiernan, Madoc, and Oak.
It is too late for them to run, and we all know it. No one can escape me now.
Go, I could tell him, and send him back to the safety of the isles of Elfhame, where he can return to being charming and beloved. A hero, even, bringing with him his father and the news of Lady Nore’s demise. He could say he had an adventure.
Or I can keep him here, a hostage to force Elfhame to keep away.
And mine.
Mine the only way I can ever trust, the only way I can be sure of.
“Heir to Elfhame,” I say. “Get on your knees.”
Prince Oak goes down smoothly, his long legs in the snow. Even bows his horned head, although I think he believes I am playing. He’s not afraid. He thinks this is my revenge, to humiliate him a little. He thinks that, in a moment, all will be as it was.
“The others may go,” I say. “The general, Tiernan, and any falcon who wishes to depart with them. Tell the High King and Queen that I have taken the Citadel in their name. Oak stays here.”
“You can’t keep him,” warns Madoc.
Sink those pretty teeth into something.
I reach for the bridle, moved from around my waist when I dressed so that I might have it at hand. The leather is smooth in my fingers.
“Wren,” Oak says, with the kindling of fear in his voice.
“There will be no more betrayals, prince,” I tell him. He struggles at first, but when I whisper the word of command, he stops. The straps settle against his skin.
Madoc looks at me as though he would like to cut me to pieces. But he cannot.
“You don’t need to do this,” Oak tells me, softly. A lover’s voice.
Bogdana grins from where she stands near the red stain of Lady Nore’s remains. “And why not? Are you not the Greenbriar heir, the thief of her inheritance?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Tiernan says, ignoring the storm hag. He glances at the gathered soldiers, at the trolls, at everything he would have to fight if he tried to stop me, and narrows his eyes. “Jude might not have come for her father, but she will bring all the armies she can muster here to war with you for her brother. This can’t be what you want.”
I stare at him for a long moment. “Go,” I say. “Before I change my mind.”
“Best to do as she says.” I can see Oak weigh his options and make the only real choice left to him. “Get my father back to Elfhame, or if Jude won’t lift his exile, to somewhere else where he can recover. I told Wren I wouldn’t leave without her.”
Tiernan’s gaze rests on the prince, then on me, then goes to Hyacinthe. He nods once, his expression grim, and turns away.
A few of the other knights and soldiers follow. Hyacinthe strides across the snow to my side.
“You may go with them, if you wish,” I tell him. “With Madoc, and with Tiernan.”
He watches as his former lover helps his former general across the snow. “Until my debt to you is paid, my place is here.”
“Wren,” Oak says, causing me to turn toward his voice. “I’m not your enemy.”
A small smile turns up a corner of my mouth. I feel the sharpness of my teeth and roll my tongue over them. For the first time, I like the feeling.
