SWNOVELS The Stolen Heir: Chapter 12
As I walk back through the woods, I am furious with all the world, but especially myself.
Even though I knew Oak had played the entire Court of Moths false and gotten himself punched in the face twice to convince them he was a vain, useless courtier, had preened and drank a trough of wine to hide his swordsmanship. Even though Oak told me the Roach had taught him the trick with the coin, still I didn’t consider that the goblin might also have taught Oak the far more practical skill of stealing.
The prince was careful to speak to me as if nothing at all was the matter, even as he lifted the bridle from around my waist. Worked it off with such deftness that I hadn’t felt more than a single touch. Lulled by his conversation, I let myself believe I had fooled him at the very moment he was fooling me.
He was as deceptive as the rest of his family. More, maybe.
He never let down his guard with me, not once.
Too late, I understand what’s terrifying about his charm. He seems entirely open when he is unknowable. Every smile is painted on, a mask.
Maybe I’m glad that you gave me an opportunity to be my worst self.
The campsite is as quiet as when I left it. Tiernan remains draped in the tree, making soft snoring sounds. Titch shadows me with shining eyes. I stare at Oak, half-hoping he will turn over and confront me, and half-dreading it.
As I pass him, I note that his breaths are even, though I bet he sleeps the way cats do, lightly. If I got too close, I bet he would spring up, ready to fight.
That is, if he’s sleeping at all.
I creep over to my own blankets and flop onto them. Despair drags me down into dreams, where I am back in the snow, walking in circles.
When I wake, it is to the smell of buttered rolls and coffee from town. Oak and Tiernan are eating and talking quietly. I hear Tiernan laugh, and I wonder how much of what they are saying is about my escape attempt, if they find my failure hilarious.
Oak wears mortal clothes over his shining golden mail. It peeks out at his collar and cuffs. Tiernan wears his armor without any cover.
When the prince glances over at me, nothing changes in his expression. Maybe that’s because, to him, nothing has changed. He’d never believed I was anything but a potential adversary or a potential sacrifice.
I bite my tongue until it bleeds.
He smiles, and finally I see the flicker of anger in his eyes. It’s satisfying that he, who hides so much, can’t hide that. He walks over and sits beside me. “You knew I was a trickster.”
Then, before I can react, he presses a finger to his lips, glancing sideways at Tiernan. It takes me a moment to understand that he hasn’t told the knight that I attempted to steal the bridle. What I don’t understand is why.
Tiernan rises and throws water onto the fire, causing a cloud of steam to rise. The late afternoon is bright, the sky almost aggressively blue after the storm.
I stick a roll in my mouth and pack up the remains of my gown, transferring the knife Oak lent me to my boot.
Tiernan mutters something and then heads off into the woods.
“Where is he going?” I ask.
“To Undry Market, ahead of us, to negotiate for the boat. Tiernan believes if the goblins know who I am, they will ask for outlandish things. We will take another path and see if anything follows.” He pauses. “You don’t mind, do you?”
I get up and brush off my legs. When someone thwarted your attempt to rob them, made it clear you were their prisoner, and then asks you a question like that, it’s not really a question.
We walk for a while in silence.
“Do you remember what I said about us being formidable, were we able to put mistrust aside?” he asks.
I nod reluctantly.
“I see we were not able,” he reminds me. “Now what, Wren?”
I feel helpless, as though he’s herding me around a chessboard to checkmate. “Why are you asking me this?”
He lets out a frustrated huff. “Fine, I will be plain. If you wanted to leave, why not go any other night?”
Another trap. “Why should I tell you anything, when you’re the one with so many secrets?”
“Everyone has secrets,” he says, although there is something like despair in his voice.
“Secrets about me,” I clarify.
“You’ve betrayed me. You’ve stolen from me. You met with the storm hag, and then hours later you snatch a powerful magical object and run. Do I deserve no answers?”
“I wanted the bridle,” I say. “So that you could never make me wear it.”
He kicks up a tornado of leaves. “What cause have I ever given you to accuse me of that?”
I look sullenly away.
He says nothing, merely waiting for my reply. The silence stretches on, and I am surprised that I am the one who breaks first and fills it.
“Tiernan told me he’d use the bridle on me if I betrayed you again.” I fix him with a glare.
Oak blinks in surprise and is quiet for a long moment. “He doesn’t understand why you freed Hyacinthe and the others,” he says finally. “He can’t believe you did it because you wanted to help them. Folk do not do such things where we come from.”
I kick a rock, hard.
“If you want to go, go,” the prince tells me with an elaborate swish of his hand toward the trees around us.
I look into the woods but am not so foolish as to take his offer at face value. “Then why not just let me leave last night?”
Oak gives me a slightly guilty look. “Because I don’t like being the fool who’d been tricked. I like games, but I hate to lose.”
I blink at him in surprise. “What?”
He shrugs impatiently. “It’s not my best quality,” he says. “And besides, it seemed worthwhile to ask you if you were working with Bogdana.”
“I’m not,” I say, and when he gives me a long look, I say it in full. “I am neither working for nor with Lady Nore. I am not allied with Bogdana. I want to go north and keep Lady Nore from making more monsters. I even want to see your father freed.”
“Then why leave?” This is the difficulty with Oak. He invites you to trust him, makes you feel silly for doubting, and then you find yourself in a bus station, discovering how thoroughly you’ve been played.
“Rather than be sent to Elfhame, I decided I would go north without you and face my mother alone.” I wonder if I can get away with saying only that.
When he glances in my direction, his fox eyes are bright. “That’s even more foolish than our current plan.”
My stomach twists.
“I don’t understand it,” he says, scrubbing his hand over his face. “I feel as though I ought to be angry with you, but I admired what you did back at the Court of Moths. Even when it did, as you say, inconvenience me.”
I grimace a little at my own words, but then the import of what he’s saying sinks in. “You… admired that?”
“More than I’d like to admit.” When he looks at me, I see that same intensity in his face that I remember from when he stood beside Queen Annet. “You cared about the mortal and the merrow and even Hyacinthe. You defied all of us and, as far as I can tell, got nothing in return.”
I am not sure how to answer. “Did it weigh on you, keeping Hyacinthe prisoner?”
“He tried to kill the High King.”
“What?” I recall Tiernan saying there’d been an incident.
Oak appears amused by the shock of my voice. “Once, my father said that conflicts seem as though they are between beliefs or desires. But more often conflicts are between rulers. Those that follow rulers can be perfectly nice, which is how you wind up with two perfectly nice people with daggers to each other’s throats. Hyacinthe and I might have been friends, but for the part where we were set on opposite sides of a battlefield.”
I think on that for a long moment, wondering if that’s how he sees me as well. How it would be for him to discover that I am stitched together with magic, a manikin animated by a hag? Perhaps he would feel less guilty then.
I could take him at his word and attempt to leave. But he made no promises not to chase after me. Nor did he say he wouldn’t make me wear the bridle.
I could slip away in Undry Market and find a place to hide. But I have no reason to believe that the Folk there would help me over their prince. Most likely they would give me up for a few coins.
Or I could try to get the truth out of him. “You like games,” I tell him. “How about we play one?”
“What’s the wager?”
“If I win,” I say. “You answer my question. Without evasion.”
Nothing about the way he looks at me suggests that he does not consider these to be large stakes. Still, he nods. “And what is the game?”
“You have the piece. Just as when we were children, let’s see which of us throws better.”
He nods again, taking it from his pocket. The peridot eyes glimmer. “And if I win?”
“What do you want?” I ask.
He studies me and I study him in return. No smile now can disguise the steel underneath. “You promise to dance with me so that our practice back in the Court of Moths won’t be for nothing.”
“Those are absurd stakes,” I tell him, my cheeks hot.
“And yet they are mine,” he says.
I nod quickly, unsettled. “Very well. You throw first.”
We stop walking. He squats down and clears off the twigs and fallen leaves from a patch of grass. It feels like being children, like playing. It occurs to me that so many awful things in my life happened before that moment, and so many awful things in his life happened after.
The fox tumbles onto the ground, falling on its side. No points.
He looks over at me and raises his eyebrows.
I pick it up and throw, holding my breath. It falls on its side, too.
He reaches for it and I think he’s going to throw again, but he sets the fox on its back, with its legs pointing up. “You win.”
I shake my head, incredulous.
“You win,” he says again, more firmly. “Ask.”
Very well. If he is going to give me the game, I would be a fool not to take it. “Lady Nore asked for me in trade for Madoc, didn’t she?” I brace myself for his answer, or for whatever he does in place of giving me one. “That’s why you’re really bringing me north.”
His surprise is evident. “Is that what Bogdana told you?”
I nod.
He sighs. “No wonder you ran.”
“Is it true?” I ask.
He frowns. “What did she say, exactly? So that I may answer without evasion.”
“That Lady Nore offered to trade Madoc to the prince in exchange for the very thing he is bringing north. A foolish girl.”
“Well, it’s accurate that Lady Nore offered to trade for what the storm hag thinks I am bringing north,” Oak says. “Mellith’s heart. That’s what she asked for, and if I’ve managed to convince Bogdana that I have it, so much the better. Maybe Lady Nore will believe it as well. But what the storm hag told you—she meant to trick you with the way she put together those words.”
I think over the tangle of what Bogdana said and what she didn’t. Not simply Lady Nore offered to trade Madoc for you. If she’d been able to say that, she would have.
“So you don’t have Mellith’s heart and you’re not going to give me—or it—to Lady Nore?” I need him to say the words.
He grins. “I am not planning on handing you over to anyone. Lady Nore did not ask for you in trade. As for Mellith’s heart, I will show you what I intend when we reach the market. It’s a nice bit of trickery, I think.”
I stare into his fox eyes and feel relief so acute that I am dizzy with it.
I look up at the sky overhead, the intense blue that follows a storm, and let myself believe I am not in danger. Not right then. Not from him.
I pick up the gaming piece, and when he doesn’t seem to notice or demand it back, I slip it into my pocket. Then we resume walking.
It’s not far before a riot of colors shows through the trees. That must be Undry Market. In the wind, I hear the scrap of a song.
“What if,” he says, mischief in his eyes, “in the interest of saving time, we pretend that we’ve played twice more and I won once, so you owe me a dance. But you won the second time, so if you have anything else to ask me, you may.”
Those are teasing words, and I am suddenly in a teasing mood. “All right. Tell me about your girls, then.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Girls?”
“Tiernan says there were two ladies in particular that you wanted to impress. Violet, I think. And Sibi. But he also says you fall in love a lot.”
That surprises a laugh out of him, although he doesn’t deny any of it. “There are certain expectations of a prince in Court.”
“You cannot be serious,” I say. “You feel obliged to be in love?”
“I told you—I am a courtier, versed in all the courtly arts.” He’s grinning as he says it, though, acknowledging the absurdity of the statement.
I find myself shaking my head and grinning, too. He’s being ridiculous, but I am not sure how ridiculous.
“I do have a bad habit,” he says. “Of falling in love. With great regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.”
I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back.
“As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say.
He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would have been his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.”
Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask.
“Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.”
“Me?” I ask incredulously.
“You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.”
I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement.
He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women.”
He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.”
“Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb up into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.”
“You do like cruel women,” I say.
“Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote her terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately, she adored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to sword fight for show.”
I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words.
“That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.”
“Oh,” I say. “That is three levels of unfortunate.”
“Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.”
The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughs in the face of despair. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.”
“Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.
The threshold of Undry Market is announced by two trees leaning toward each other, their branches entangled. As we duck beneath, what had previously been scraps of song and spots of color lose their disguise and the entire panoply comes into view. Shops and stalls fill the clearing. The air is rich with perfumes, honey wines, and grilled fruits. We pass a tented area with lutes and harps, the vendor trying to call to us over the sound of one of his instruments recounting a terrible tale of how it was made.
As we walk, I see that the market stretches down to a rocky area near the shoreline, where a pier has been built out into the waves. A single ship bobs at the end of it. I wonder if that is what Tiernan is trying to buy from the goblins.
Then I am distracted by the hammering of smiths and a smattering of song. There is a forge not far from where we are standing, one with a display of swords in the front. And beside that, a maypole and a few dancers going around it, winding the ribbons. A stall selling cloaks in all the colors of the sky, from the first blush of dawn to deep as midnight and spangled with stars. A bakeshop hawking braided breads, their shining crusts decorated with herbs and flowers.
“Don’t have gold?” calls an antlered shopkeeper. “Pay with a lock of hair, a year of your life, a dream you wish to never have again.”
“Come!” calls another. “We have the finest jackets in a hundred leagues. Green as poison. Red as blood. Black as the heart of the King of Elfhame.”
Oak stops to purchase cheese wrapped in wax paper, a half dozen apples, and two loaves of bread. He also gets us warmer clothes, along with hats and gloves. Rope, new packs, and a grappling hook, the tines of which fold down like the tentacles of a squid skimming through water.
We pass a fletcher, selling barrels of arrows with different feathers affixed to the ends. Crows and sparrows, even those from a wren. Pass a display of gowns in beetle-bright green, saffron, and pomegranate red. A stall with bouquets of drying herbs hanging upside down, beside seedpods. Then a bookseller, shelves of old tomes and empty, freshly bound books open to creamy pages waiting to be written in. One stall over, an alchemist displays a shelf of poisons, including poisoned ink. A row of oddly shaped skulls sits alongside them.
Oak pauses to purchase some explosives. “Just in case,” he reassures me.
“Dear lady,” says a faerie, coming toward us from a shop that sells jewels. He has the eyes of a snake and a forked tongue that darts out when he speaks. “This hairpin looks as though it were made for you.”
It’s beautiful, woven gold and silver in the shape of a bird, a single green bead in its mouth. Had it been in a display, my eyes would have passed over it as one of a dozen unobtainable things. But as he holds it out, I can’t help imagining it as mine.
“I have no money and little to trade,” I tell him regretfully, shaking my head.
The shopkeeper’s gaze goes to Oak. I think he believes the prince is my lover.
Oak plays the part, reaching out his hand for the pin. “How much is it? And will you take silver, or must it be the last wish of my heart?”
“Silver is excellent.” The shopkeeper smiles as Oak fishes through his bag for some coins.
Part of me wants to demur, but I let him buy it, and then I let him use it to pin back my hair. His fingers on my neck are warm. It’s only when he lets go that I shiver.
He gives me a steady look. “I hope you’re not about to tell me that you hate it and you were just being polite.”
“I don’t hate it,” I say softly. “And I am not polite.”
He laughs at that. “A delightful quality.”
I admire the hairpin in every reflective surface we pass.
We cross a wide lawn where a puppet show is under way. Folk are gathered around a curtained box, watching an intricate paper cutout of a crow seem to fly above a mill. I spot a few human children and pause to wonder if they are changelings.
The crow puppet sweeps down to a painted papier-mâché tree. The hidden operator moves a pole, and the crow’s beak opens and closes.
The bird sings:
Ca-caw, ca-caw,
My mother she killed me,
My sister gathered my bones,
And buried them beneath the apple tree.
Behold! I hatched as a young crow.
Ca-caw, ca-caw, how beautiful a bird am I.
I stop to watch. It turns out that the miller loves the song so much that he gives the crow a millstone in order to hear it again. And when the bird flies home, he drops the stone onto his stepmother’s head and kills her.
The crowd is still clapping when I realize that Oak has gone on to the blacksmith shop. I arrive in time to see the bushy-eyebrowed smith returning from the back with what appears to be a metal-and-glass box, designed to display its contents. It is golden-footed and empty.
“What is that?” I ask as he carefully places it into his bag.
“A reliquary,” he says. “Enchanted to keep whatever is inside forever preserved. It’s much like the one that contained Mab’s bones. I sent ahead Titch to commission it.”
“And that’s for—”
He signals me away from the shop. Together we walk toward the pier. “A deer heart,” he says. “Because that’s what I am going to bring Lady Nore. In a fancy reliquary, she won’t know the difference for some amount of time, hopefully enough for us to be able to accomplish our goal and get you close to her.”
“A deer heart?” I echo.
“That’s what I am bringing north. A trick. Sleight of hand, like the coin.”
I smile up at him, believing, for once, that we are on the same side.
When we come to the edge of the water, we find Tiernan still haggling with three goblins. One has golden hair and a pointy chin, the second has black hair and bushy eyebrows, and the third has very large ears and no hair on his head at all. The hairless one has a skin of wine and stares at me with the seriousness of the very drunk. He is passing his booze back and forth with a redheaded giant, who sits on the pier, dangling enormous feet in the sea.
The black-haired goblin holds up a silver-handled knife and tests its weight. “What else have you got?”
There is a small pile of treasure on a nearby boulder—a fat pearl, at least sixteen pieces of gold, and a stone that might be an emerald.
“You overestimate the value of what you’re selling,” says Tiernan.
The drunk goblin laughs uproariously.
In the water is a boat carved in the shape of a cormorant. At the front, the long curve of its neck makes it appear rampant, and the wings rise on either side, protecting those resting in the hull. It’s beautifully made, and if I squint, I can see that it’s also magical.
“Ahhhh,” says the golden-haired goblin to Oak as we approach. “You must explain to your friend here that he cannot purchase one of our finest crafts with a few trinkets.”
Tiernan is obviously frustrated. “We’ve come to a price, but I’m a little short of it, that’s all. Now that you’re here, we can make up the difference and go.”
Whatever his reason for believing he would be better at negotiation than Oak, he’s mistaken. It’s not in his nature to dress up the truth, or slither around it.
The golden-haired goblin looks at us expectantly. “We would like the remainder of our payment now, please.”
Oak reaches into his bag and pulls out several more gold coins, as well as a handful of silver ones. “Is this enough?”
“We’ll have your rings,” says the golden-haired goblin, pointing at the three encircling Oak’s fingers.
I am not sure if they have any significance, but I suppose they mustn’t since Oak heaves a sigh and starts to twist them off. Not only that, but he places his circlet beside them. Surely a crown is enough payment.
The golden-haired goblin shakes his head.
I see the shift of the prince’s smile. Honey-tongued. “Mayhap your boat is too beautiful for our needs. We need seaworthy and little more.”
Two of the goblins exchange glances. “Our craft is as seaworthy as they come,” says the black-haired one.
“And yet, one might weep to see such a beautiful vessel as this battling the elements.” Oak’s expression turns thoughtful. “Perhaps you have something less fine you could sell us.”
At this the black-haired goblin sniffs, offended. “We do not make ugly things.”
“No, no,” Oak says, acting as if he’s disappointed. “Of course not.”
I twig his game. “Maybe we should seek a boat elsewhere,” I suggest.
Tiernan looks like he wants to strangle us. I can’t decide if he’s not sure what Oak is about or only skeptical that it will work.
The golden-haired goblin watches Oak. “You truly have nothing more to trade? I can hardly believe it, handsome travelers like yourselves. What’s that in her hair?”
Oak frowns as I remove it from my braids. Regretfully, I set it down on the pile with the rest of our treasures. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter. It would have been useless anyway, where we’re going.
The bushy-browed goblin snorts, picking up the hairpin and turning it over. “Very well. If this assortment of baubles is all you can give us, I suppose we will take pity on you and make the trade. Your rings, the knife, the pearl, the coins, the emerald that’s in no way the size of a duck egg, the circlet, and the hairpin. For these, we’ll sell you the boat.”
Smiling, Oak walks forward to shake the goblin’s hand and seal the bargain.
Tiernan hops down into the sea craft, motioning for me to throw him down my bag. He looks relieved that the negotiations are finally over and we can get moving.
The drunk giant lumbers to his feet, fixing the prince with an accusatory stare. “Look at what he’s wearing beneath his clothes. Armor of gold,” he grunts. “We’ll have that, too. Tell him!”
“We’ve agreed to a price,” Tiernan warns.
Oak’s hand goes to his sword hilt, and I see something wild in his eyes. “I don’t want to fight,” he says, and I am sure part of him means that.
“You meant to cheat us,” the giant shouts.
Frantically, I kneel and begin to unknot the rope binding the boat to the dock. It is wet and pulled tight, with some magic on it besides.
“Rangi,” one of the goblins says to the giant. “We’ve made a deal.”
The giant is very drunk, though, too drunk to bother with further negotiations. He grabs for the prince, who jumps back, out of reach. Tiernan shouts a warning, although I am not sure to which of them. The prince’s expression has turned cold and blank.
Finally, I get the knot loose and the boat begins to drift free of the moorings.
I grab for Oak’s shoulder, and he looks at me with empty eyes. For a moment, I don’t think he knows me at all.
“Can you swim?” I ask.
He nods once, as though coming out of a dream. A moment later, he lunges.
Not to stab the giant, as I expect. Or me. He grabs my hairpin. Then, turning, he races for the water.
“Thieves!” yells a goblin as we jump off the side of the pier together.
I land with a splash and a yelp about two feet from the boat. I go under, sinking until my feet hit the mud, then kick off toward the surface.
When I bob up through the waves, I see the prince holding on to the wing of the carved cormorant. He reaches out his hand.
I paddle toward him, spitting out muddy water.
Behind us, the goblins are shouting. Tiernan ignores them as he hauls me up onto the deck. Then he reaches for Oak.
Enraged, the giant jumps down and begins to wade through the waves.
The prince stumbles to the mast and unfurls a cloth sail. As soon as it goes up—despite the afternoon not being all that windy—it billows and then fills. Whatever magic speeds us out to sea cannot seem to be called back by the goblins. In moments, we are well out of the giant’s reach.
I lick salt off my top lip. Tiernan takes the tiller, steering us away from the shoreline. With a whistling noise, Titch comes flying out of the market, circling once before settling on the mast.
It is not long before we are out of sight of the pier.
Oak walks to the prow, wrapping himself in a cloak. Staring into the sea.
I remember the voyage to the isles of Elfhame on a much larger boat. I was kept below for most of the trip but brought up once or twice to breathe the salty sea air and listen to the calls of gulls.
If you marry the boy, Lady Nore told me, you can’t carve out his heart right away. I know how bloodthirsty you are, but you’ll have to be patient. And she laughed a little.
I nodded, trying to look as though I was bloodthirsty, and that I could be patient. Wanting anything that would let me sit a little longer in the sun.
I wasn’t looking forward to murdering a boy I had never met, but by then I hadn’t thought much of it, either. If that was what she wanted me to do and it would spare me pain, I’d do it.
It’s hard to believe how swiftly I became unrecognizable to myself.
I wonder how Oak sees himself when he’s about to fight. And then I wonder how he sees himself after.
“Wren,” Tiernan says, pulling me out of those thoughts. “What can you tell me about where we’re going?”
I cast my mind further through that painful blur of time. “The Citadel has three towers and three entrances, if you count the aerial one.” I sketch them with a wet finger on the wood of the hull.
Tiernan frowns.
“What?” I ask. “I know the place as well as Hyacinthe.”
“I was only wondering over the aerial entrance,” Tiernan says carefully. “I don’t think I’ve heard that before.”
I nod. “I mean, it’s not a proper door. There’s an arched opening in one of the towers, and flying things come in through it.”
“Like birds,” he says. “Hyacinthe might have mentioned that was what he used.”
“There were guards at all the gates but that one,” I say. “Mostly huldufólk then. Maybe stick creatures now.”
Tiernan nods encouragingly, and I go on. “The foundation and the first level of the Citadel are all black rock. The walls beyond that are ice, translucent in some places—often closer to transparent—and opaque in others. It’s hard to be certain there will be anywhere to hide where your shadow won’t give you away,” I say, knowing this fact all too well. “The prisons are in the black rock part.”
Tiernan fishes a piece of lead from his pocket. “Here, see what you can draw with this.”
I sketch out the garrison gate and the courtyard in the center of the Citadel in dull marks on the wood deck.
I know the Citadel, know where Lady Nore sleeps, know her throne room and banquet hall. Hyacinthe might have been better suited to explain its current defenses, but I know the number of steps to the top of every spire. I know every corner that a child could hide in, every place she could be dragged out from.
“If I could get into her chambers, I could command her,” I say. “Lady Nore won’t have many guards with her there.”
What Lady Nore will have, though, is ferocity, ambition, and no hesitation about spilling an abundance of blood. She and Lord Jarel hated weakness as if it were a disease that could be caught.
I imagine the bridle sinking into Lady Nore’s skin. My satisfaction at her horror. The moment before she realizes the trap is sprung, when she still wears her arrogance like armor, and the way her face will change as panic sets in.
Perhaps I am more like them than I would care to believe, to find the image pleasing.
At that upsetting thought, I rise and go to the prow of the boat, where Oak sits, wrapped in a sodden cloak.
Wet locks of hair kiss Oak’s cheeks and are plastered to his throat and the small spikes of his horns. His lips look as blue as mine. “You should put on dry clothes,” he tells me.
“Take your own advice, prince.”
He looks down at himself, as though surprised to find himself half-frozen. Then he looks over at me. “I have something for you.”
I put out my hand, expecting him to return my hairpin, but it’s the bridle that he places in my palm.
“Why?” I ask, staring.
“One of us has to hold on to it. Let it be you,” he says. “Just come to the Citadel by our side, and try to believe, whatever happens, whatever I say or do or have done, that my intention is for us to all survive this. For us to win.”
I want to trust him. I want to trust him so much.
My hand closes over the leather straps. “Of course I’m coming to the Citadel.”
His eyes meet mine. “Good.”
I let myself relax into the moment, into friendship. “Now what about my hairpin?”
He grins and hands it over. I smooth my thumb over the silver bird, then use it to pull back his hair, instead of mine. As my fingers skim over his neck, threading through the silk of his locks, he shudders from something I do not think is cold. I am suddenly too aware of the physicality of him, his long legs and the curve of his mouth, the hollow of his throat and the sharp point of his ears, where earrings once hung. Of the hairs hanging loose from my pin, falling across one light brown horn to rest on his cheekbone.
When his eyes meet mine, desire, as keen as any blade, bends the air between us. The moment slows. I want to bite his lip. To feel the heat of his skin. To slide my hands beneath his armor and trace the map of his scars.
The owl-faced hob takes off from the mast, startling us. I stand up too quickly, jolted into awareness of where I am. I have to grab the wooden wings of the cormorant to keep from pitching into the sea.
Tiernan is perhaps twenty feet away, his gaze on the horizon, but my cheeks heat as though he can read my thoughts.
“Wren?” Oak is looking at me strangely.
I head to the cockpit, ducking under the boom as I go. But even with distance between us, the longing to touch him persists.
I can only be glad Oak does not follow me but heads below to put on dry clothes. Later, when he makes his way to the stern, he wordlessly takes the tiller from Tiernan.
The faerie boat, blown by unseen winds, flies across the sea. We catch sight of mortal schooners and tankers, pleasure barges, and fishing skiffs. Heading north, we skim the edge of the Eastern Seaboard, passing Maine on one side and the isles of Elfhame on the other. Then we sail farther north, through the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Labrador Sea.
Everything ought to be as it was before, except it isn’t. Whenever my hand brushes Oak’s as he passes me a piece of bread or a skin of water, I can’t help but notice. When we sleep in shifts, one of us left to navigate by the stars, I am drawn to watching his face, as though through his dreams, I will learn his secrets.
Something is very wrong with me.
On the third day, as we eat, I turn to throw an apple core into the sea and notice sharks circling the boat. Their fins cut smoothly through the swells. This close to the surface of the water, even their long, pale bodies are visible.
I suck in a breath.
Oak puts a hand up to shade his eyes from the sun just as a mermaid surfaces. Her hair is as silvery as the shine on the waves.
“Loana,” he says with a smile that looks only slightly forced. I remember her name. She is one of the girls he fell in love with, the one who wanted to drown him.
I glance at Tiernan, who is gripping the hilt of his sword, though it is still sheathed. I do not think a blade is going to be particularly useful here.
“You sent for me and I came, Prince Oak. And lucky that I did, for the Undersea has challengers on all sides as Queen Orlagh weakens, each of them looking for an edge. Soon I may be your only friend beneath the waves.”
“The treaty with the land still stands,” Oak reminds her.
“For now, beautiful one.” Her hair floats around her in a silver halo. Her eyes are the bright blue of chipped beach glass. Her tail surfaces lazily behind her, slapping the water before slipping beneath it again. “It is said that Nicasia intends to have a contest and marry the winning challenger.”
“Ah,” says Oak carefully. “Fun?”
“Or perhaps she will call on the treaty.” A shark swims to the mermaid, and she strokes its side. I stare in fascination. The jaws of the beast look as though they could bite the boat in half. “And once she has all the contestants in one place, let the land destroy them.”
“Alas,” says Oak. “The land is trying to remedy its own problems. Which is why I sought your help. We would like to be concealed as we travel over the seas so that we may arrive onshore undetected.”
“You could travel more swiftly beneath them.” Her tone is all temptation.
“Nonetheless,” he says.
Her expression turns into a pout. “Very well, if that’s all you will have of me. I shall do as you ask for the price of a kiss.”
“Oak—” Tiernan begins, a warning in his voice.
I take a step closer to the prince, who is going down on his knees on the hull.
“Easy enough,” Oak says, but there is something in his face that cuts against those words. “And no hardship.”
I spot a rope attached to the mast. As the prince speaks, I push the end in Oak’s direction with my foot.
He does not look down when it hits his thigh. He loops it around one arm stealthily as he bends toward Loana.
She reached up with her webbed fingers, cupping the back of his head. Pressing her lips to his. They must be colder than the sea, colder than mine. His eyes almost close, lashes dipping low. Her tongue is in his mouth. Her grip on him tightens.
I hate watching, but I cannot look away.
Then she yanks him toward her sharply, thrashing with her tail. The rope goes taut, the only thing keeping him from being pulled into the sea.
He scrambles backward onto the boat, breathing hard. His shirt is wet with sea spray. His lips are flushed from her kiss.
“Come with me beneath the waves,” she calls to him. “Drown with me in delight.”
He laughs a little shakily. “A compelling offer, but I must see my quest to its conclusion.”
“Then I will hasten to help you get it done,” she says, diving down and away. The sharks follow, disappearing into the depths. I can see the shimmer of a mist just at the edges of my vision.
“I hope it was worth nearly being dragged down to the bottom of the sea,” Tiernan says, shaking his head.
“We’re concealed from Bogdana and Lady Nore,” Oak says, but does not look either of us in the eye.
At nightfall we sail past floating chunks of ice, landing on a windswept beach just short of the Hudson Strait. Oak pulls the sea craft high onto the black rocks. Tiernan secures a rope to keep it there when the tide comes in. They do not ask me to help, and I do not volunteer.
Above us, a waning moon shines down on my homecoming.
I recall the words from the puppet show, when the crow sang for his millstone. Ca-caw, ca-caw. How beautiful a bird am I.