At fourteen, I learned to make tea out of crushed spruce needles along with bee balm flowers, boiled over a fire.
“Would you like a cup, Mr. Fox?” I asked my stuffed animal solicitously, as though we were very fancy.
He didn’t want any. Since stealing Mr. Fox back from my unparents’ boxes, I’d cuddled up with him every night, and his fur had become dingy from sleeping on moss and dirt.
Worse, there were a few times I’d left him behind when I went to sit underneath windows at Bex’s school or the local community college, repeating probably useless poems and snatches of history to myself, or doing sums by tracing the numbers in the earth. One night when I returned, I found he’d been attacked by a squirrel looking for material to nest in and most of his insides had been pulled out.
Since then, I’d stayed at my camp, reading him a novel about an impoverished governess I’d taken from the library when I’d picked up Foraging in the American Southeast. There was a lot about convalescing and chilblains, so I figured it might make him feel better.
Mr. Fox looked uncomfortably like the skins Bogdana hung up to dry after her kills.
“We’ll get you some new guts, Mr. Fox,” I promised him. “Feathers, maybe.”
As I flopped down, my gaze tracked a bird in the tree above us. I’d gotten fast and vicious in the wild. I could catch it easily enough, but it would be hard to be sure the feathers were clean and parasite-free. Maybe I should consider ripping apart one of my unfamily’s pillows instead.
Out in the woods, I’d often think of the games Rebecca and I used to play. Like once, when we were pretending to be fairy-tale princesses. We carted out props—a rusty axe that had probably never been taken from the garage before, two paper crowns I’d made from glitter and cut-up newspaper, and an apple, only slightly bruised, but shiny with wax.
“First, I am going to be a woodsman and you are going to plead for your life,” Rebecca told me. “I’ll be sympathetic, because you’re so pretty and sad, so I’ll kill a deer instead.”
So we played that out, and Rebecca hacked at weeds with the axe.
“Now I’ll be the evil queen,” I’d volunteered. “And you can pretend to give me—”
“I’m the evil queen,” Rebecca insisted. “And the prince. And the woodsman.”
“That’s not fair,” I whined. Rebecca could be so bossy sometimes. “You get to do everything, and all I get to do is cry and sleep.”
“You get to eat the apple,” Rebecca pointed out. “And wear a crown. Besides, you said that you wanted to be the princess. That’s what princesses do.”
Bite the bad apple. Sleep.
Cry.
A rustling sound made my head come up.
“Suren?” a shout came through the woods. No one should have been calling me. No one should have even known my name.
“Stay here, Mr. Fox,” I said, tucking him into my dwelling. Then I crept toward the voice.
Only to see Oak, the heir to Elfhame, standing in a clearing. All my memories of him were of a merry young boy. But he’d become tall and rawboned, in the manner of children who have grown suddenly, and too fast. When he moved, it was with coltish uncertainty, as though not used to his body. He would be thirteen. And he had no reason to be in my woods.
I crouched in a patch of ferns. “What do you want?”
He turned toward my voice. “Suren?” he called again. “Is that you?”
Oak wore a blue vest with silver frogging in place of buttons. Beneath was a fine linen shirt. His hooves had silver caps that matched two silver hoops at the very top of one pointed ear. Butter-blond hair threaded with dark gold blew around his face.
I glanced down at myself. My feet were bare and dark with filth. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I washed my dress. A bloodstain marred the cloth near my waist, from where I’d snagged my arm on a thorn. Grass stains on the skirt, near my knees. I recalled him finding me staked to a post, tied like an animal outside the camp of the Court of Teeth. I could not bear more of his pity.
“It’s me,” I called. “Now go away.”
“But I’ve only just found you. And I want to talk.” He sounded as though he meant it. As though he considered us friends, even after all this time.
“What will you give me if I do, Prince of Elfhame?”
He flinched at the title. “The pleasure of my company?”
“Why?” Though it was not a friendly question, I was honestly puzzled.
He was a long time in answering. “Because you’re the only person I know who was ever a royal, like me.”
“Not like you,” I called.
“You ran away,” he said. “I want to run away.”
I shifted into a more comfortable position. It wasn’t that I’d run. I hadn’t had anywhere else but here to go. My fingers plucked at a piece of grass. He had everything, didn’t he? “Why?” I asked again.
“Because I am tired of people trying to assassinate me.”
“I would have thought they’d prefer you on the throne to your sister.” Killing him didn’t seem as though it would accomplish anything useful to anyone. He was replaceable. If Jude wanted another heir, she could have a baby. She was human; she could probably have a lot of babies.
He pressed the toe of his hoof into the dirt, digging restlessly at the edge of a root. “Well, some people want to protect Cardan because they believe that Jude means to murder him and think my not being around would discourage it. Others believe that eliminating me is a good first step to eliminating her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Can’t you just come out so we can talk?” The prince turned, frowning, looking for me in the trees and shrubs.
“You don’t need to see me for that,” I told him.
“Fine.” He sat among the leaves and moss, balancing his cheek on a bent knee. “Someone tried to kill me. Again. Poison. Again. Someone else tried to recruit me into a scheme where we would kill my sister and Cardan, so I could rule in their place. When I told them no, they tried to kill me. With a knife, that time.”
“A poisoned knife?”
He laughed. “No, just a regular one. But it hurt.”
I sucked in a breath. When he said there had been attempts, I assumed that meant they’d been prevented in some way, not that he merely hadn’t died.
He went on. “So I am going to run away from Faerie. Like you.”
That’s not how I’d thought of myself, as a runaway. I was someone with nowhere to go. Waiting until I was older. Or less afraid. Or more powerful. “The Prince of Elfhame can’t up and disappear.”
“They’d probably be happier if he did,” he told me. “I’m the reason my father is in exile. The reason my mother married him in the first place. My one sister and her girlfriend had to take care of me when I was little, even though they were barely more than kids themselves. My other sister almost got killed lots of times to keep me safe. Things will be easier without me around. They’ll see that.”
“They won’t,” I told him, trying to ignore the intense surge of envy that came with knowing he would be missed.
“Let me stay in your woods with you,” he said with a huff of breath.
I imagined it. Having him share tea with me and Mr. Fox. I could show him the places to pick the sweetest blackberries. We would eat burdock and red clover and parasol mushrooms. At night we would lie on our backs and whisper together. He would tell me about the constellations, about theories of magic, and the plots of television shows he’d seen while in the mortal world. I would tell him all the secret thoughts of my heart.
For a moment, it seemed possible.
But eventually they would come for him, the way that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel came for me. If he was lucky, it would be his sister’s guards dragging him back to Elfhame. If he wasn’t, it would be a knife in the dark from one of his enemies.
He did not belong here, sleeping in dirt. Scrabbling out an existence at the very edges of things.
“No,” I made myself tell him. “Go home.”
I could see the hurt in his face. The honest confusion that came with unexpected pain.
“Why?” he asked, sounding so lost that I wanted to snatch back my words.
“When you found me tied to that stake, I thought about hurting you,” I told him, hating myself. “You are not my friend.”
I do not want you here. Those are the words I ought to have said, but couldn’t, because they would be a lie.
“Ah,” he said. “Well.”
I let out a breath. “You can stay the night,” I blurted out, unable to resist that temptation. “Tomorrow, you go home. If you don’t, I’ll use the last favor you owe me from our game to force you.”
“What if I go and come back again?” he asked, trying to mask his hurt.
“You won’t.” When he got home, his sisters and his mother would be waiting. They would have worried when they couldn’t find him. They’d make him promise never to do anything like that again. “You have too much honor.”
He didn’t answer.
“Stay where you are a moment,” I told him, and crept off through the grass.
I had him there with me for one night, after all. And while I didn’t think he was my friend, it didn’t mean I couldn’t be his. I brought him a cup of tea, hot and fresh. Set it down on a nearby rock, with leaves beside it for a plate, piled with blackberries.
“Would you like a cup of tea, prince?” I asked him. “It’s over here.”
“Sure,” he said, walking toward my voice.
When he found it, he sat down on the stone, settling the tea on his leg and holding the blackberries in the palm of one hand. “Are you drinking with me?”
“I am,” I said.
He nodded, and this time he didn’t ask me to come out.
“Will you tell me about the constellations?” I asked him.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” he said.
“I can pretend,” I told him. “For one night.”
And so he described the constellations overhead, telling me a story about a child of the Gentry who believed he’d stumbled onto a prophecy that promised him great success, only to find that his star chart was upside down.
I told him the plot of a mortal movie I’d watched years ago, and he laughed at the funny parts. When he lay down in a pile of rushes and closed his eyes, I crept up to him and carefully covered him in dry leaves so that he would be warm.
When I woke up in the afternoon, he was already gone.
