As I trudge through the woods, I think about how I will escape. I have no illusions that I won’t be punished. I struck the prince. And if they knew about the curses I’ve been unraveling, they’d be even more furious.
“Next time you’ll remember not to drop your guard,” the knight says, observing the wounds on Oak’s cheek.
“My vanity took the worst of the blow,” he says.
“Worried about your pretty face?” the knight asks.
“There is too little beauty in the world,” says the prince airily. “But that is not my area of greatest conceit.”
It can’t be coincidence that they turned up clad in armor and pre-pared to fight at nearly the same time Bogdana started poking around my unfamily’s home. They were all looking for me, and whatever the reason, it cannot be one I will like.
I breathe in the familiar scent of wet bark and kicked-up leaf mold. The ferns are silvery in the moonlight, the woods full of shifting shadows.
I wriggle my wrists experimentally. Unfortunately, I am tied well. Flexing my fingers, I try to slip one underneath the binding, but the knots are even too tight for that.
The knight snorts. “Not sure this is the luckiest start to a quest. If the hob hadn’t spotted your little queen here, that hag might be wearing her skin for a coat.”
The owl-faced hob. I grimace, not certain whether I ought to be grateful. I have no idea what they mean to do to me.
“Isn’t that the very definition of luck—to have arrived in time?” Oak throws a mischief-filled glance in my direction, as though at some feral animal he wonders if it would be fun to tame.
I think of him in the High Court, as I was about to be sentenced for my crimes as queen of the traitorous Court of Teeth. I was eleven, and he’d just turned nine. I was bound then, as now. I think of him at thirteen, when he met me in the woods and I sent him away.
At seventeen, he has grown tall, towering over me, lithe and finely muscled. His hair catches the moonlight, warm gold threaded with platinum, bangs parting around small goat horns, eyes of shocking amber, and a constellation of freckles across his nose. He has a trickster’s mouth and the swagger of someone used to people doing what he wanted.
Faerie beauty is different from mortal beauty. It’s elemental, extravagant. There are creatures in Faerie of such surpassing comeliness that they’re painful to look at. Ones that possess a loveliness so great that mortals weep at the sight of them or become transfixed, haunted by the desire to see them even once more. Maybe even die on the spot.
Ugliness in Faerie can be equally extravagant. There are those among the Folk so hideous that all living things shrink back in horror. And yet others have a grotesquerie so exaggerated, so voluptuous, that it comes all the way around to beauty.
It isn’t that mortals can’t be pretty—many of them are—but their beauty doesn’t make you feel pummeled by it. I feel a little pummeled by Oak’s beauty.
If I look at him too long, I want to take a bite out of him.
I turn my gaze to my muddy feet, scratched and sore, then Oak’s hooves. I recall from a stolen school science book that hooves are made from the same stuff that makes up fingernails. Keratin. Above them, a dusting of fur the same color as his hair disappears into a pant cuff hitting just below his knees, revealing the odd curve of his lower legs. Slim-fitting trousers cover his thighs.
I shiver with the force of keeping myself from thrashing against my bindings.
“Are you cold?” he asks, offering his cloak. It’s embroidered velvet, with a pattern of acorns, leaves, and branches. It’s beautifully stitched and looks wildly out of place this far from Elfhame.
This is a pantomime I am familiar with. The performance of gallantry while keeping me in restraints, as though the chill in the air is what I am most worried about. But I suppose this is how princes are expected to behave. Noblesse oblige and all that.
Since my hands are tied, I am not sure how he expects me to put it on. When I say nothing, he drapes it over my shoulders, then ties it at my throat. I let him, even though I am used to the cold. Better to have something than not, and it’s soft.
Also, it hangs over my hands, shielding them from view. Which means that if I do manage to get my wrists loose from the knots, no one will know until it’s too late.
That’s twice he’s been foolish.
I try to concentrate on escape and on not allowing hopelessness to sweep over me. Were my hands free, I would still need to get away. But if I did, I think I could prevent them from tracking me. The knight may have been taught how to follow a trail, but I have had years of experience obscuring mine.
Oak’s skills—if he has any outside of being a lordling—are unknown to me. It’s possible that despite all his big talk and his pedigree, the prince has brought the knight along to make sure he doesn’t trip and impale himself on his own fancy sword.
If they leave me alone for a moment, I can bring my arms down and step backward through the circle of them, bringing my bound hands to the front of my body. Then I’d chew through the rope.
I cannot think of any reason they will give me that chance. Still, under cover of Oak’s cloak, I fidget with my bindings, trying to stretch them as far as I am able.
When we depart the woods, we step onto an unfamiliar street. The houses are farther apart than in my unfamily’s neighborhood and more run-down, their lawns overgrown. In the distance, a dog is barking.
Then I am guided onto a dirt road. At the very end is a deserted house with boarded-up windows and grass so tall a mower might choke on it. Outside stand two bone-white faerie steeds, the gentle curve of their necks longer than those of mortal horses.
“There?” I ask. The word comes out clearly enunciated, even if my voice still sounds rough.
“Too filthy for Your Highness?” the knight asks, raising his brows at me as though I am unaware of the dirt on my dress and mud on my feet. As though I don’t know I am no longer a queen, that I do not remember Oak’s sister disbanding my Court.
I hunch my shoulders. I’m used to word games like this one, where there is no right answer and every wrong answer leads to punishment. I keep my mouth shut, my gaze going to the scratches on the prince’s cheek. I have made enough mistakes already.
“Ignore Tiernan. It’s not so awful inside,” Oak says, giving me a courtier’s smile, the kind that’s supposed to convince you it’s okay to relax your guard. I tense up even further. I have learned to be afraid of smiles like that. He continues, with a wave of one hand. “And then we can explain the necessity for our being so wretchedly impolite.”
Impolite. That was one way to refer to tying me up.
The knight—Tiernan—opens the door by leaning his shoulder against it. We go inside, Oak behind me so there’s no hope of running. The warped wooden floorboards groan beneath the tread of his hooves.
The house has obviously been empty for a long time. Graffiti sprawls across floral wallpaper, and a cabinet under the sink has been ripped out, probably to get at any copper pipes. Tiernan guides me toward a cracked plastic table that’s in a corner of the kitchen along with a few scuffed-looking chairs.
In one is a soldier with a wing where an arm ought to be, light brown skin, a long fall of mahogany hair, and eyes the startling purple of monkshood. I do not know him, but I think I know the curse. Oak’s sister, the High Queen, had the unrepentant soldiers who followed Madoc turned into falcons after the Battle of the Serpent. They were cursed so that if they wanted to return to their true forms, they couldn’t hunt for a year and a day, eating only what they were given. I do not know what it means that he seems half-cursed now. If I squint, I can see the trailing threads of magic around him, winding and coiling like roots trying to regrow.
No easy spell to unmake.
And against his mouth, I see the thin leather straps and golden fastenings of a bridle. A shudder of recognition goes through me. I know that, too.
Created by the great smith Grimsen, and given to my parents.
Lord Jarel placed that bridle on me long ago, when my will was an inconvenience to be cleared away like a cobweb. Seeing the bridle brings back all the panic and dread and helplessness I’d felt as the straps slowly sank into my skin.
Later, he’d tried to use it to trap the High King and Queen. He failed and it fell into their hands, but I am horrified that Oak would have made a prisoner wear it, casually, as though it were nothing.
“Tiernan captured him outside your mother’s Citadel. We needed to know her plans, and he’s been immensely helpful. Unfortunately, he’s also immensely dangerous.” Oak is speaking, but it’s hard to see anything but the bridle. “She has a motley crew of vassals. And she has stolen something—”
“More than one something,” says the bridled former falcon.
Tiernan kicks the leg of the falcon’s chair, but the falcon only smiles up at him. They can make that bridled soldier do anything, say anything. He is trapped inside himself far more securely than he could be bound by any rope. I admire his defiance, however useless.
“Vassals?” I echo the prince’s statement, my voice scratchy.
“She has reclaimed the Citadel of the Court of Teeth and, since that Court is no more, has made a new one,” Oak says, raising his brows. “And she has an old magic. She can create things. From what we understand, mostly creatures from twigs and wood, but also parts of the dead.”
“How?” I ask, horrified.
“Does it matter?” Tiernan says. “You were supposed to keep her under control.”
I hope he can see the hate in my eyes. Just because the High Queen forced Lady Nore to swear fealty to me after the battle, just because I could command her, didn’t mean I’d had the first idea of what to actually do.
“She was a kid, Tiernan,” Oak says, surprising me. “As was I.”
A few embers glow in the fireplace. Tiernan huffs and moves to kneel beside it. He adds logs from a pile, along with balled-up pages he rips from an already-torn cookbook. The edge of a page catches, and flames blaze up. “You’d be a fool to trust the former queen of the Court of Teeth.”
“Are you so sure you know our allies from our enemies?” Oak takes out a long stick from the pile of wood, thin enough to be kindling. He holds it in the fire until the end sparks. Then he uses it to light the wicks of candles set around the room. Soon warm pools of light flicker, making the shadows shift.
Tiernan’s gaze strays to the bridled soldier. It rests there a long moment before he turns to me. “Hungry, little queen?”
“Don’t call me that,” I rasp.
“Grouchy, are we?” Tiernan asks. “How would you like this poor servant to address you?”
“Wren,” I say, ignoring the taunt.
Oak watches the interaction with half-lidded eyes. I cannot guess at his thoughts. “And do you desire repast?”
I shake my head. The knight raises his eyebrows skeptically. After a moment, he turns away and takes out a kettle, already blackened by fire, and fills it from the tap in the bathroom sink. Then he hangs it on a prop stick they must have rigged up. No electricity, but the house still has running water.
For the first time in a very long while, I think about a shower. About how my hair felt when it was combed and detangled, my scalp spared from the itch of drying mud.
Oak walks to where I am sitting, my tied wrists forcing my shoulders back.
“Lady Wren,” he says, amber eyes like those of a fox meeting mine directly. “If I undo your bindings, may I rely upon you to neither attempt escape nor attack one of us for the duration of our time in this house?”
I nod once.
The prince gives me a quick, conspiratorial grin. My mouth betrays me into returning the smile. It makes me recall how charming he was, even as a child.
I wonder if somehow I have misread this situation, if somehow we could be on the same side.
Oak takes a knife from a wrist guard hidden beneath his white linen shirt and applies it to the rope behind me.
“Don’t cut it,” the knight warns. “Or we’ll have to get new rope, and we may have to restrain her again.”
I tense, expecting Oak to be angry at being told what to do. As royalty, it is out of order for him to be directed by someone of lower status, but the prince only shakes his head. “Worry no more. I’m only using the point of my blade to help me pry apart your too-clever knots.”
I study Tiernan in the half light of the fire. It is hard to gauge age among the Folk, but he looks to be only a little older than Oak. His blackberry hair is mussed; one of his pointed ears has a single piercing through it, a silver hoop.
I bring my hands to my lap, rubbing my fingers over the indentations the rope left in my skin. Had I not been straining so hard against the bindings, they wouldn’t be half so deep.
Oak puts the knife away and then says with great formality, “My lady, Elfhame requires your assistance.”
Tiernan looks up from the fire but does not speak.
I don’t know how to reply. I am unused to attention and find myself flustered to be the focus of his. “I have already sworn fealty to your sister,” I manage to croak out. I wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t. “I am hers to command.”
He frowns. “Let me try to explain. Months before the Battle of the Serpent, Lady Nore managed to cause an explosion underneath the castle.”
I glance over at the former falcon, wondering if he was part of it. Wondering if I should remember him. Some of my memories of that time are terribly vivid, while others are blotted out like ink running over paper.
“At the time, it was thought to be an attack on Elfhame’s spies and a coincidence that Queen Mab’s resting place was disturbed.” Oak pauses, watching me as though he’s trying to determine if I am following along. “Most faerie bodies break down into roots and flowers, but Mab’s did not. Her remains, from her ribs to her finger bones, were imbued with a power that kept them from crumbling—a power to bring things to life. That’s what Lady Nore stole, and that’s what she’s drawing her new power from.”
The prince gestures toward the bridled soldier. “Lady Nore has attempted to recruit more Folk to her cause. For those who were cursed to be falcons, if they come to her Citadel, she offers to feed them from her own hand for the year and a day during which they are forbidden from hunting. And when they return to their original form, she demands their loyalty. Between them, her own Folk who remained loyal to her, and the monsters she’s making, her plans for revenge on Elfhame seem well under way.”
I look at the prisoner. The High Queen granted clemency to any soldier who repudiated what they’d done and swore fealty to her. Anyone who repented. But he’d refused.
I recall standing before the High Queen myself the night Oak spoke on my behalf. Remember when you said we couldn’t help her. We can help her now. Pity in his voice.
I’d bragged to the High Queen that I knew all Lady Nore and Lord Jarel’s secrets, hoping to be useful, thinking that since they spoke in front of me heedlessly, treating me as a dumb animal instead of a little girl, they’d kept nothing back. Still, they’d never spoken of this. “I can’t recall any mention of Mab’s bones.”
Oak gives me a long look. “You lived in the Ice Needle Citadel for more than a year, so you must know its layout, and you can command Lady Nore. You’re her greatest vulnerability. No matter her other plans, she has good reason to want to eliminate you.”
I shudder at that thought because it should have occurred to me before now. I remember Bogdana’s long nails, the panic of her chasing me through the streets.
“We need you to stop her,” Oak says. “And you need our help to fend off whomever she sends to kill you.”
I hate that he’s right.
“Did you make Lady Nore promise you anything before she left Elfhame?” Tiernan asks hopefully.
I shake my head, looking away in shame. As soon as she was able, Lady Nore slipped off. I never had a chance to tell her anything. And when I realized she was gone, what I felt had been mostly relief.
I think of the words she swore before the High Queen, when Jude demanded she give me her vow: I, Lady Nore, of the Court of Teeth, vow to follow Suren and obey her commands. Nothing about not sticking a dagger in my back, unfortunately. Nothing about not sending a storm hag after me.
Tiernan frowns, as though my failing to give Lady Nore any orders has confirmed his suspicion that I am untrustworthy. He turns to Oak. “You know the grudge Lady Nore bears against Madoc, justified or not. Who knows what slights this one won’t forget.”
“Let’s not discuss my father right at the moment,” Oak returns.
Madoc, the traitor who marched on Elfhame with the Court of Teeth. Before that, the Grand General who was responsible for the slaughter of most of the royal family. And Oak’s foster father.
Madoc had sought to put Oak on the throne, where he could rule through him. Though the crown would have rested on Oak’s head, all the power would have belonged to the redcap. At least until Lord Jarel and Lady Nore tricked Madoc and took over.
I know how precarious it is to be a queen without power, controlled and thoroughly debased. That could have been Oak’s fate. But if the prince bears his father any ill will, it doesn’t show on his face.
Tiernan leans forward to take the metal kettle off the prop stick with a poker, setting it gingerly on a folded-up towel. It steams steadily.
Then he takes out several foam containers of instant ramen from a kitchen cabinet, along with an already-opened box of mint tea. Noticing me looking, he nods toward Oak. “The prince introduced me to this delicacy of the mortal world. Bollockses up your magic for a while—all that salt—but I can’t deny it is addictive.”
The smell makes me recall the satisfaction of something burn-yourmouth hot, something straight from an oven instead of congealed in a garbage bin.
I don’t take one of the noodle cups, but when Oak hands me a mug of tea, I accept that. I stare into the depths and see silt at the bottom. Sugar, he would tell me if I asked, and at least some of it would be, but I can’t be sure the rest isn’t a drug of some kind, or a poison.
They do not want me dead, I try to tell myself. They need me.
And I need them, too, if I want to live. If Lady Nore is hunting me, if Bogdana is helping her, the prince and his companion are my only hope of staying out of reach.
“So, what would you have me to do?” I am proud to get the whole sentence out without my voice cracking.
“Go north with me,” Oak says, sitting on the plastic chair beside mine. “Command Lady Nore to tie a big bow around herself and make a present to Elfhame. We’ll steal back Mab’s bones and end the threat to—”
“With you?” I stare at him, sure I have misunderstood. Princes stay in palaces, enjoying revels and debauchery and the like. Their necks are too valuable to risk.
“And my brave friend Tiernan.” Oak inclines his head toward Tiernan, who rolls his eyes. “Together, the four of us—counting Hyacinthe—will take back the Citadel and end the threat to Elfhame.”
Hyacinthe. So that’s the cursed soldier’s name.
“And when we complete our quest, you can ask a boon of me, and if it is within my power and not too terrible, I will grant it.” I wonder at the prince’s motive. Perhaps ambition. If he delivers Lady Nore, he could ask a boon of his own from the High King and cement his position as heir, effectively cutting any future children out of the line of succession.
I can imagine a prince might do a lot for an unwavering path to the throne. One that by some accounts should have been his in the first place.
And yet, I cannot help thinking of the sprite saying he would be unsuitable as a ruler. Too spoiled. Too wild.
Of course, since she’s a companion of the glaistig and the glaistig is awful, perhaps what she thinks shouldn’t matter.
Tiernan takes out a wooden scroll case carved with a pattern of vines. It contains a map, which he unfurls on the table. Oak weighs down the edges with teacups, spoons, and a brick that might have been thrown through one of the windows. “First we must go a ways south,” the prince says. “To a hag who will give us a piece of information that I hope will help us trick Lady Nore. Then we head north and east, over water, into the Howling Pass, through the Forest of Stone, to her stronghold.”
“A small group is nimble,” Tiernan says. “Easier to hide. Even if I think crossing through the Stone Forest is a fool’s notion.”
Oak traces the route up the coast with a finger and gives us a roguish grin. “I am the fool with that notion.”
Neither seems inclined to tell me more about the hag, or the trickery she is supposed to inspire.
I stare at the path, and at its destination. The Ice Needle Citadel. I suppose it is still there, gleaming in the sun as though made of spun sugar. Hot glass.
The Stone Forest is dangerous. The trolls living there belong to no Court, recognize no authority but their own, and the trees seem to move of their own accord. But everything is dangerous now.
My gaze goes to Hyacinthe, noting his bird wing and the bridle sinking into his cheeks. If Oak leaves it on him long enough, it will become part of him, invisible and unable to be removed. He will forever be in the prince’s thrall.
The last time I wore it, Lady Nore and Lord Jarel’s plan to move against the High Court was the only reason they cut the bridle’s straps from my skin, leaving the scars that still run along my cheekbones. Leaving me with the knowledge of what they would do to me if I disobeyed them.
Then they marched me before the High Queen and suggested that I be united in marriage with her brother and heir, Prince Oak.
It is hard to explain the savagery of hope.
I thought she might agree. At least two of Oak’s sisters were mortal, and while I knew it was foolish, I couldn’t help thinking that being mortal meant they would be kind. Maybe an alliance would suit everyone, and then I would have escaped the Court of Teeth. I kept my face as blank as possible. If Lady Nore and Lord Jarel thought the idea pleased me, they would have found a way to turn it to torment.
Oak was lounging on a cushion beside his sister’s feet. No one seemed to expect him to act with any kind of formal decorum. At the mention of marriage, he looked up at me and flinched.
His eldest sister’s lip curled slightly, as though she found the thought of me even coming near him repulsive. Oak shouldn’t have anything to do with these people or their creepy daughter, she said.
In that moment, I hated him for being so precious to them, for being cosseted and treated as though he was deserving of protection when I had none.
Maybe I still hate him a little. But he was kind when we were children. It’s possible there’s a part of him that’s still kind.
Oak could always remove the bridle from Hyacinthe. As he might, if he decides he wants to put it on me. If I am Lady Nore’s greatest vulnerability, then he might well consider me a weapon too valuable to chance letting slip away.
It is too great a risk to think of a prince as so kind that he wouldn’t.
But even if he wouldn’t use the bridle to control me, or invoke his sister’s authority, I still have to go north and face Lady Nore. If I don’t, she will send the storm hag again or some other monster, and they will end me. Oak and Tiernan are my best chance at surviving for long enough to stop her, and they are my only chance at getting close enough to command her.
“Yes,” I say, as though there was ever a choice. My voice doesn’t break this time. “I’ll go with you.”
After all, Lady Nore ripped away everything I cared about. It will give me no small pleasure to do the same to her.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know that, no matter how courteously they behave, I am as much a prisoner as the winged soldier. I can command Lady Nore, but the Prince of Elfhame has the authority to command me.
