SWNOVELS The Stolen Heir: Chapter 4
Behind the abandoned house, two faerie horses chew on dandelions as they wait for their riders. Slight as deer, with a soft halo of light surrounding their bodies, they glide between the trees like ghosts.
Oak goes to the first. Her coat a soft gray, her mane braided into something that looks like netting, and which is hung with gold beads. Tooled leather saddlebags rest against her flanks. She nuzzles into his hand.
“Have you ridden before?” he asks me, and I return him the look he deserves.
In the Court of Teeth, I was instructed on almost none of the things that a child of royalty ought to know. I was barely taught to use my own magic, leaving me as I am, with weak spells, poor etiquette, and no familiarity with faerie horses.
“No? And yet you would look so well with your hair whipping behind you,” Oak says. “Wild as the Folk of old.”
I feel the tightening coils of embarrassment in my gut. Although he may intend it as mockery, I am pleased as much as shamed by his words.
Tiernan has his hand on Hyacinthe’s back, guiding him across the grass. An odd way of touching a prisoner. “You can’t help trying to charm every snake you come upon, no matter how cold-blooded or vicious. Let that one be.”
I want to bare my teeth, but I feel it will only justify Tiernan’s words.
“I think you’re giving me the advice you ought to have given yourself years ago,” Oak returns without real annoyance, and I can see from Tiernan’s expression that arrow struck true. The knight’s eyes narrow.
Oak rubs a hand over his face and, in that moment, looks exhausted. I blink, and his features shift to mildly amused. I am left to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. “Making pleasant conversation with one’s traveling companions leads to less miserable travel, I find.”
“Oh, do you?” says Tiernan in a parody of the prince’s drawl. “Well, then, by all means—carry on.”
“Oh, I shall,” Oak returns. Now they’re both obviously annoyed with each other, although I have no idea why.
“What’s your horse’s name?” I ask in the long silence that follows. My voice rasps only a little.
Oak strokes fingers over the velvet nap of her flank, visibly pushing off his mood. “My sister Taryn called her Damsel Fly when we were young, and it stuck. I’ll hand you up.”
“Isn’t that sweet?” Hyacinthe says, the first words I’ve heard him speak. “Riding your sister’s horse into battle. Have you anything of your own, prince? Or just girls’ castoffs and scraps?”
“Get up,” Tiernan tells Hyacinthe gruffly. “Mount.”
“As you command,” the cursed soldier says. “You do delight in giving orders, don’t you?”
“To you, I do,” Tiernan returns, heaving himself up behind the prisoner. A moment later he seems to realize what he’s said, and his cheeks pink. I don’t think Hyacinthe can see him, but I can.
“He calls his horse Rags,” Oak goes on as though neither of the others spoke, although ignoring them must take some effort.
Tiernan sees me glance in his direction and gives me a look that reminds me that, were it up to him, he’d have me bound and gagged and dragged along behind them.
“I need to get my things,” I tell them. “From my camp.”
Oak and Tiernan share a look. “Of course,” Oak says after whatever silent communication passed between them. “Lead the way, Lady Wren.”
Then the prince clasps his fingers together to make a step so I can hop up onto the horse. I do, scrambling to throw my leg over. He swings up in front of me, and I do not know where to put my hands.
“Hold on,” Oak urges, and I have no choice but to dig my nails into the flesh of his hip bones, just below the scale mail, and try not to fall off. The warmth of his skin is scalding through the thin cloth he’s wearing beneath the gold plates, and embarrassment pulls that heat to my cheeks. The faerie horse is supernaturally fleet of foot, moving so fast that it feels a little like flying. I try to speak into Oak’s ear, to give him directions, but I feel as though half the things I say are swept into the wind.
As we get close to my woven willow hut, the horse slows to a trot. A shiver goes through the prince as he hits the spell I wove to protect this place. He turns with a swift accusatory look and then reaches into the air and swipes it away as easily as if it were cobwebs.
Does he think I meant to use it to escape? To harm him? When he stops, I slide down with relief, my legs wobbly. Usually, this would be the hour when I slept, and I am more exhausted than usual as I stagger to my little home.
I feel Oak’s gaze on me, evaluating. I cannot help but see this place through his eyes. The den of an animal.
I grit my teeth and crawl inside. There, I scrounge around for an old backpack scavenged from a dumpster. Into this, I shove items, without being sure what I might need. The least-stained of my three blankets. A spoon from my unparents’ kitchen drawers. A plastic bag with seven licorice jelly beans in it. A bruised apple I was saving. A scarf, the ends unfinished, which my unmother was still knitting when I stole it.
Oak walks through a pattern of mushroom rings nearby, studying my packing from a distance.
“Have you been living here since last we spoke?” he asks, and I try not to read too much into the question. His expression isn’t disgusted or anything like that, but it is too carefully neutral for me to believe he isn’t hiding what he thinks.
Four years ago, it was easier to disguise how far I’d fallen. “More or less,” I tell him.
“Alone?” he asks.
Not entirely. I’d made a human friend at twelve. I’d met her rooting through trash behind a bookstore, looking for paperbacks with their covers stripped off. She’d painted my toenails a bright glittering blue, but one day I saw her talking to my sister and hid from her.
And then Bogdana showed up a few months later, hanging a human pelt over my camp and warning me not to reveal any of our secrets. I stayed away from mortals for a year after that.
But there’d been a boy I saved from the glaistig when I was fourteen and he, seventeen. We’d sit together by a pond a few miles from here, and I would carefully avoid telling him anything I thought the storm hag wouldn’t like. I think he was half-sure that he’d conjured me with his vape pen, an imaginary girlfriend. He liked to start fires, and I liked to watch. Eventually, he decided that since I wasn’t real, it didn’t matter what he did to me.
Then I demonstrated that I was very real, and so were my teeth.
The storm hag came again after that, with another pelt, and another warning about mortals, but by then I hardly needed it.
There was a silver-haired banshee I visited sometimes. As one of the sluagh, the other local faeries avoided her, but we would sit together for hours while she wept.
But when I thought of telling Oak any of that, I realized it would make my life sound worse, instead of better. “More or less,” I say again.
I pick up things and then put them down, wishing to keep them with me but knowing they won’t all fit. A chipped mug. A single earring hanging from a branch. A heavy textbook of poetry from seventh grade, with REBECCA written in thick Sharpie on the side. The butcher knife from the family kitchen, which Tiernan eyes skeptically.
I stick with the two little knives I have on my person.
There is one last thing I take, swiping it fast, so neither of them sees. A tiny silver fox with peridot eyes.
“The Court of Moths is a savage place, risky even for a prince of Elfhame,” Tiernan informs Oak from where he sits on a log, cutting bark from a branch with a wicked little blade. I sense this is not the first time they’ve had this conversation. “Sure, they’re your sister’s vassals, but they’re violent as vultures. Queen Annet eats her lovers when she tires of them.”
Hyacinthe kneels at the trickle of a nearby stream to drink. With only one hand to support himself and not a second to make a cup with, he puts his mouth directly into the water and gulps what he can. At Tiernan’s words, he lifts his face. Alert, perhaps, to an angle for escape.
“We only need to speak with the Thistlewitch,” Oak reminds him. “Queen Annet can grant us a way to navigate her swamps and find the hag. The Court of Moths is only half a day’s ride, down and east, toward the sea. We won’t dally. We can’t afford to.”
“The Thistlewitch,” Tiernan echoes. “She’s seen two queens dead in the Court of Termites. Rumor is, she had a hand in engineering it. Who knows what her game is now.”
“She was alive during Mab’s reign,” Oak says.
“She was old during Mab’s reign,” Tiernan supplies, as though that makes his point for him. “She’s dangerous.”
“The Thistlewitch’s dowsing rod can find anything.” There is a deep anxiety under the surface of this conversation. I am too well acquainted with the feeling not to recognize it. Is he more afraid than he’s letting on, a prince on his first quest, riding his sister’s pretty horse?
“And then what?” Tiernan says. “That’s a tricky gambit you’re considering.”
Oak heaves a heavy sigh and does not answer, leaving me to wonder about his motives all over again. Leaving me to wonder what part of his plan he has elided, that he needs a hag to find something for him.
Tiernan returns to whittling and doesn’t issue any further warnings. I wonder how hard it is to keep Oak out of trouble, and if Tiernan does it out of friendship or loyalty to Elfhame. If Oak is the sunlight filtering through trees in the woods, all shifting gold and shadow, then Tiernan seems like those same woods in winter, the branches barren and cold.
As I move to rise, I notice something white is tucked into the edge of my hut, pushed into the weave of the woods. A wadded-up piece of paper, unmarked by dirt. As they speak, I manage to smooth it out beneath one of my filthy blankets so I can read what’s written there.
You cannot outrun fate.
I recognize Bogdana’s spidery handwriting. I hate the thought of her intruding on the place where I feel most safe, and the note itself makes me angry. A taunt, to make it clear that she hasn’t given up hunting me. A taunt, like giving me a head start in a game she is sure to win.
I crumple the note and shove it into my backpack, settling it beside the little silver fox.
“Got everything?” Oak asks, and I straighten up guiltily, slinging my bag across one shoulder.
A gust of wind makes my threadbare dress blow around me, its hem dirtier than ever.
“If you thought we went fast before—” the prince begins to say, his smile full of mischief. Reluctantly, I walk to the horse and resign myself to getting on her back again.
That’s when arrows fly out of the dark.
One hits the trunk of a nearby maple tree, just above my head. Another strikes the flank of the knight’s horse, causing her to let out a horrible whinny. Through my panic, I note the rough, uneven wood of the shafts, the way they are fletched with crow feathers.
“Stick creatures!” the winged soldier shouts.
Tiernan gives him a look of banked fury, as though this is somehow his fault. “Ride!”
Oak reaches for my hand, pulling me up onto Damsel so that I am seated in front, my back against his metal-covered chest. I grab for the knots of the horse’s mane, and then we’re racing through the night, the horse thundering beneath us, arrows hissing through the air at our heels.
The stick creatures come into view, beasts of branches and twigs— some shaped like enormous wolves, others like spiders, and one with three snapping heads, like nothing I have seen before. A few in vaguely human shapes, armed with bows. All of them crawling with moss and vine, with stones tucked into packed earth at their centers. But the worst part is that among those pieces of wood and fen, I see what appear to be waxy mortal fingers, strips of skin, and empty mortal eyes.
Terror breaks over me like a wave.
I throw a panicked glance back at the wounded horse riding after us, carrying Tiernan and Hyacinthe. Blood stains her flank, and her steps are stumbling, uneven. Though she is moving fast, the wicker creatures are swifter.
Oak must know it, because he pulls on the reins and Damsel wheels around, back toward our attackers. “Can you get behind me?” he says.
“No!” I shout. I am having a hard enough time hanging on, pressing my thighs against the horse’s flanks as firmly as I can and clinging to its neck, my fingers tangled in its mane.
His arm encircles my waist, pressing me to him. “Then crouch down as low as you’re able,” he warns. With his other hand, he pulls a small crossbow from a saddlebag and notches a bolt with his teeth.
He fires, missing spectacularly. The bolt strikes the dirt between Tiernan and the wicker men’s deer. There isn’t time to reload, and the prince doesn’t try, just takes a sharp, expectant breath.
My heart sinks, desperately wishing for some talent other than curse breaking. Had I the storm hag’s power, I could call down lightning and singe them to cinders. Had I better control of my own magic, perhaps I could hide us behind an illusion.
Then the bolt Oak shot explodes into blue shimmering fire, and I realize he didn’t miss after all. Burning stick men fall from the backs of their stick mounts, and one of the spidery creatures darts off, aflame, into the woods.
Tiernan’s horse has nearly caught up to ours when we gallop away. I feel Oak tense behind me and I turn, but he shakes his head, so I concentrate on holding on.
It was one thing to have Lady Nore’s power described, but seeing the stick creatures with their bits of flesh made me all too aware of how easy it would be to harvest human parts from cities like she might take rocks from quarries, and carve armies from forests. Elfhame should worry. The mortal world should fear. This is worse than I imagined.
The horses break free of the woods, and we find ourselves on suburban roads, then crossing a highway. It’s late enough that there’s little traffic. Tiernan’s glamour settles over us, not quite a disguise but a piece of misdirection. The mortals still observe something out of the corner of their eyes, just not us. A white stag, perhaps. Or a large dog. Something they expect and that fits into the world they can explain. The magic makes my shoulders itch.
We ride on for what feels like hours.
“Oak?” the knight calls as we come to a crossroads. His gaze goes to me. “When was the prince hit?”
I realize that the weight on my back has grown heavier, as though Oak slumped forward. His hand is still around me, but his grip on the reins has loosened. When I shift in the saddle, I see that his eyes are shut, lashes dusting his cheeks, limbs gone slack.
“I didn’t know—” I begin.
“You fool,” mutters Tiernan.
I try to turn in the saddle and grab for the prince’s body so it doesn’t fall. He slumps against me, large and warm in my arms, his armor making him heavier than I am sure I can manage. I dig in my fingers and hope I can hold him, although it is all too easy to imagine the prince’s body dropped in the dirt.
“Halt,” Tiernan says, slowing his horse. Damsel slows, too, keeping pace with the knight’s mount.
“Get down,” he tells Hyacinthe, then pokes him in the back.
The winged soldier slides off the horse with the sort of ease that suggests he’s ridden many times before.
“So this is who you follow?” he asks sullenly, with a glare in the prince’s direction.
Tiernan dismounts. “So you’re suggesting I throw in my lot with those things?”
Hyacinthe subsides, but he studies me as though he wonders if I might be on his side. I am not, and I hope my look tells him so.
Tiernan strides to Damsel. He reaches up, taking Oak’s weight in his arms and easing the prince onto the leaf-covered earth.
I slip off the saddle gracelessly, hitting the ground hard and staggering to one knee.
A bit of blood shows that one of the arrows struck Oak just above the shoulder blade. It was stopped by the scales of his golden armor, though; only the very tip punctured his flesh.
It must have been poisoned.
“Is he . . . ?” I can see the rise and fall of his chest. He’s not dead, but the poison could still be working its way through his system. He might be dying.
I don’t want to think of that. Don’t want to think that were he not behind me, I would have been the one struck.
Tiernan checks Oak’s pulse. Then he leans down and sniffs, as though trying to identify the scent. Takes a bit of blood on his finger and touches it to his tongue. “Deathsweet. That stuff can make you sleep for hundreds of years if you get enough in your system.”
“There can’t have been more than a little bit on the arrow,” I say, wanting him to tell me that couldn’t possibly have been enough.
Tiernan ignores me, though, and rummages in a bag at his belt. He takes out an herb, which he crushes under the prince’s nose and then presses onto his tongue. Oak has enough consciousness to jerk his head away when the knight’s fingers go into his mouth.
“Will that fix him?” I ask.
“We can hope,” Tiernan says, wiping his hand on his trousers. “We ought to find a place to shelter for the night. Among mortals, where Lady Nore’s stick things are unlikely to look.”
I give a quick nod.
“It shouldn’t be too long a walk.” He lifts the prince, draping Oak back over his steed. Then we proceed, with Tiernan leading Damsel Fly. Hyacinthe walks behind him, and I am left to lead the knight’s mount.
The bloodstain on her flank has grown, and her limp is noticeable. So, too, is the piece of an arrow still embedded in her side. “Was she poisoned, too?”
He gives a curt nod. “Not enough to bring this tough girl down yet, though.”
I reach into my backpack and take out the bruised apple I brought. I bite pieces off for both horses, who snuffle gently into my hands.
I stroke the hair over Rags’s nose. She doesn’t seem to be in too much pain from the arrow, so I choose to believe she’ll be okay.
“Maybe it would be better if he did sleep for a hundred years,” Tiernan says, although he seems to be talking more to himself. “Lady Nore is going to be hunting us as surely as we’re hunting her. Asleep is better than dead.”
“Why is Oak really doing this?” I ask.
The knight gives me a hard look. “Doing what?”
“This task is beneath him.” I don’t know how else to say it. In the Court of Teeth, Lady Nore made me understand that she might pierce my skin to make a leash of silver mesh run through it, might cause me agony so great that my thoughts shrunk to those of an animal, but any disrespect of me by a commoner was punished by death. Being royal mattered.
Surely, even at her worst, the High Queen cannot value the prince less than Lady Nore valued me. Jude ought to have sent a dozen knights rather than her own brother, with only a single guard to protect him.
“Maybe there’s a lady he wants to impress with his heroics,” the knight says.
“His sister, I imagine,” I say.
He laughs at that. “Or Lady Violet, with lips of carmine and a crown of living butterflies in her hair, according to a poem written about her. Oak spent three days in her bed before a jealous lover appeared, waving around a dagger and making an ugly scene. There was a Lady Sibi, too, who will declare dramatically to anyone likely to listen that Oak made her mad with passion and then, once he tired of her, splintered her heart into shards.
“Actually, now that I think on it, he’d be well served not to impress Sibi more than he already has. But there’s any of the other two dozen beauties of Elfhame, all of whom are very willing to be awed by his heroics.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “That’s a ridiculous reason.”
“Some people are ridiculous,” says Tiernan with a glance back at the sullen Hyacinthe in the bridle, trudging along. “Especially when it comes to love.”
Not a flattering assessment of Oak, but he is currently slung over the back of a horse. He also, possibly, saved the knight’s life. And mine.
“Is that what you truly believe?” I ask.
“What? That there’s a girl? Of that, I’m certain. There always is. But I’m equally certain that bravery shouldn’t be beneath a prince,” Tiernan tells me.
There are rumors that Cardan never wanted the throne, that he will hand it over to Oak willingly at some vague future time. But when I think of High King Cardan with his black curls and cruel mouth, the way he behaves—silly and dangersome all at once—I don’t believe he would relinquish power. He might, however, trick Oak into going on a quest he wouldn’t return from. Build him up with stories of honor and valiant deeds. “If the High King and Queen let him go without no more protection than you, someone wants him dead.”
Tiernan’s eyebrows raise. “You’ve got a suspicious mind.”
“Says the lover of a traitor.” I hadn’t been certain I was right, but then I saw Tiernan glance at Hyacinthe when he spoke of love, and recalled what Oak said to him before about trust.
It’s satisfying when I see the blow land.
Tiernan gapes at me, stunned, as though it never occurred to him that just because my voice is scratchy with disuse, just because I seem more beast than girl, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been paying attention.
Hyacinthe gives a hollow laugh.
“You think the High King is making a move against Oak through me?” asks the knight.
I shrug. “I think that even if you want to take every risk for the prince, there’s only one of you. And I think it’s odd for the royal family to allow a prince to gamble on glory with his life.”
The knight looks away and does not respond.
We walk on for the better part of a mile before Oak makes a low moan and tries to sit up. “Jude,” he mutters. “Jude, we can’t just let him die.” \
“You’re all right,” Tiernan says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We lost them.”
The prince opens his tawny fox eyes and looks around. When he sees me, he slumps back down, as though relieved that I am still here.
Near dawn we come to a windswept beach.
“Wait here with the prince,” Tiernan tells me as we close on a jetty of black stone. “Hyacinthe, your commands stand. My enemies are yours. Defend her if necessary.”
The prisoner gives a thin-lipped smile. “It’s not I who has forgotten all I vowed.”
I cannot see Tiernan’s face, so I cannot tell if Hyacinthe’s bitterness bothers him.
The air is thick with salt. I lick it off my top lip and watch as Tiernan leads his wounded horse onto the sand. Rags’s hoof touches the edge of a wave. At the brush of sea-foam, she tosses her mane and gives a whinnying sound that causes the hair to stand up along my arms.
Hyacinthe turns to me. The crash of the surf makes it impossible for him to be heard by Tiernan, but he lowers his voice anyway. “There are things I could tell you, were I not bridled. Free me, and I’ll help you.”
I say nothing. I pity him, bridled as he is, but that doesn’t make him my ally.
“Please,” he says. “I would not live like this. When I was caught, Oak removed the curse, but he didn’t have the power to keep it from creeping back. First my arm, then I know not what. It is worse than being a falcon entire, to lose oneself again slowly.”
“Let me be clear. I hate Lady Nore,” I say, a snarl in my voice, because I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to sympathize with him more than I do already. “And if you’re loyal to her, I hate you, too.”
“I followed Madoc,” Hyacinthe says. “And now I am his son’s prisoner. Because I was more constant, not less. More loyal than my lover, who became twisted around the finger of another and forswore me. Lady Nore promised to remove the curse on any falcon who would join her, but I never gave her any oath. You can trust me, lady. Unlike the others, I will not play you false.”
Across the beach, Tiernan’s horse charges into the black water, heedless of the swells breaking over her.
More loyal than my lover, who became twisted around the finger of another.
“Is Rags drowning?” I ask.
Hyacinthe shakes his head. “The sea folk will take her back to Elf-hame, and she will be made well there.”
I let out my breath. My gaze goes to Oak, his cheek pillowed on Damsel’s flank. His armor glinting in the moonlight. The flutter of his lashes. The calluses on his hands. “Removing the bridle will neither halt nor hasten your curse,” I remind Hyacinthe.
“Do not fall under Prince Oak’s spell,” he warns as the knight climbs up the rocks to us. “He’s not what he seems.”
Several questions are on the tip of my tongue, but there is no time to ask them. As Tiernan draws close, I look out at the sea. Rags has disappeared. I can’t see so much as her head above the waves.
“We’re down to one steed,” Tiernan informs us.
We don’t have a place to rest, either. I study the shadowy space beneath the boardwalk. We could curl up there on the cool, soft sand without being bothered. Just the thought of it makes me freshly aware of how exhausted I am.
The knight points up toward the road. “There’s a motel that way. I saw the sign from the shoreline.”
He takes the reins of Oak’s horse and leads her up the hill. I follow, ahead of the winged soldier. I note how stiff they are with each other, how carefully they keep separate, as magnets must keep a safe distance or be slammed together by their very nature.
We walk, fading stars overhead, brine in the air. I wonder if the hum of traffic or the smell of iron bothers them. I am used to it. So long as we remain here, I am on solid ground. Once we get to the Court of Moths, we will be far enough into Faerie for things to grow slippery and uncertain.
At the thought, I kick a desiccated fast-food drink cup, sending it spinning along the gutter.
A few blocks and we come to a motel with scrubby weeds pushing through the cracks of the parking lot. A few run-down cars are parked near the one-level stucco building. A sign overhead promised vacancies, cable, and little else.
The prince attempts to sit up again.
“Just stay where you are,” says Tiernan. “We’ll be back with the keys.”
“I’m fine,” Oak says, sliding off the horse and immediately collapsing onto the asphalt.
“Fine?” the knight echoes, eyebrows raised.
“I couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” says the prince, and manages to stagger to his feet. He leans heavily on a nearby car.
“Hyacinthe,” Tiernan says, pointing. “Do not let him fall again. Wren, you’re with me.”
“I could only dream of letting so important a personage drop,” Hyacinthe sneers. “Or I would never dream. Or something.”
“Flying is what you ought to dream of, falcon,” Oak says, with enough heat that I wonder if he overheard part of our conversation.
Hyacinthe flinches.
“Wren,” Tiernan says again, beckoning toward the motel.
“I’m bad at glamours,” I warn him.
“Then we won’t bother with one.”
The reception area stinks of stale cigarettes despite the no smoking sign over the door. Behind the desk is an exhausted-looking woman playing a game on her phone.
She glances up at us, and her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens to scream.
“You see totally normal people here for totally normal reasons,” Tiernan tells her, and as I watch, her features smooth out into a glassy-eyed calm. “We want two rooms, right next to each other.”
I think of how my unparents were glamoured and hate this, even though he’s not asking her to do anything awful. Yet.
“Sure,” says the woman. “Not too many tourists this time of year; you’ll have most places to yourselves.”
The knight nods vaguely as the woman shoves a blank motel key into the machine.
She says something about how she still needs a card for incidentals, but a few words later, she’s forgotten all about that. Tiernan pays with bills that don’t have the suspiciously crisp look of glamoured leaves. I cut him a strange glance and pocket a matchbook.
Outside, our remaining horse stands on a patch of scrubby grass, glowing softly, eating a dandelion. No one seems inclined to tie Damsel up.
Oak sits on the bumper of a car, looking a bit better. Hyacinthe leans against a dirty stucco wall.
“That money,” I ask. “Was it real?”
“Oh, yes,” the prince confirms. “My sister would be wroth with us otherwise.”
“Wroth.” I echo the archaic word, although I know what it means. Pissed off.
“Super wroth,” he says with a grin.
To faeries, mortals are usually either irrelevant or entertainment. But I suppose his sister can be relegated to neither. Many of the Folk must hate her for that.
Tiernan leads us to our rooms—131 and 132. He opens the first and ushers us all inside. There are two twin beds, with scratchy-looking coverlets. A television sits on the wall over a saggy desk that’s been bolted to the floor, causing the carpet to be stained with small circles of rust around the screws. The heater is on, and the air smells vaguely of burning dust.
Hyacinthe stands beside the door, wing closed tight to his back. His gaze follows me, possibly to avoid resting on the knight.
Oak crawls onto the nearest bed but doesn’t shut his eyes. He smiles up at the ceiling instead. “We learned something of her capabilities.”
“And you want me to tell you that was worth you being poisoned?” the knight demands.
“I’m always being poisoned. Alas, that it wasn’t blusher mushroom,” the prince says nonsensically.
Tiernan nods his chin at me. “That girl thinks you’re a fool for even being here.”
I scowl, because that’s not what I meant.
“Ah, Lady Wren,” Oak says, a lazy smile on his mouth. Marigold hair brushing his forehead, half-hiding his horns. “You wound me.”
I doubt I hurt his feelings. His cheeks are still slashed from my nails, though. Three lines of dried blood, pink around the edges. Nothing he says is a lie, but all his words are riddles.
Tiernan kneels and starts to unbuckle the sides of Oak’s armor. “Give me a hand, will you?”
I squat on the other side of the prince, worried I am going to do something wrong. Oak’s gaze slants to me as, with fumbling fingers, I try to work off the scale mail where it has stuck to his wound. He makes a soft huff of pain, and I can see the way his lips are white at the edges, from being pressed together as he bites back whatever other sounds he wants to make.
Underneath, his stained linen shirt is pushed up over the flat plane of his stomach, the dip of his hip bones. His sweat carries the scent of crushed grass, but mostly he smells like blood. He watches me, lashes low over his eyes.
Without his golden armor, he almost looks like the boy I remember.
Tiernan gets up, gathering towels.
“How did Lady Nore know you were coming for me?” I ask, trying to distance myself from the strange intimacy of the moment, from the heat and nearness of his body.
If she’d sent both Bogdana and stick creatures, she must suddenly want me very much, after ignoring me for eight years.
Oak tries to sit up higher on the pillows and winces, a hectic flush on his cheeks. “She’s likely to have realized that asking you to come with me would be the clever thing to do,” he says. “Or she could have had spies that saw the direction in which we were headed when we left Elfhame.”
Tiernan nods toward Hyacinthe from the bathroom, where he’s soaking cloth under steaming water from the tap. “Spies like him, I imagine.”
I frown at the bridled former falcon.
“There’s not a lot of work for birds out there,” Hyacinthe says, putting up his hand in defense. “And I didn’t spy on you.”
Tiernan brings over the towels, picking one up as though he intends to wash the prince’s wound. Before he can, Oak takes and presses it to his own shoulder, closing his eyes against the pain. The water trickles down his back to stain the sheets pink.
“We’re within a few days’ ride of the Court of Moths, but we’re down to one horse,” Tiernan says.
“I’ll bargain for another,” Oak tells us distractedly. I am not sure he realizes that in the mortal world, horses are not something you can just pick up at a local farmers’ market.
When the prince begins to bind up his wound, Tiernan nods in my direction. “Come,” he says, ushering me out of the room. “Let’s leave him to dream of all the things he will do tomorrow.”
“Like issue a royal decree that you won’t mock me when I’ve been poisoned,” says Oak.
“Keep dreaming,” Tiernan tells him.
I glance back at Hyacinthe, since it doesn’t seem to me that the knight is wrapped around the prince’s finger. If anything, they seem like friends who’ve known each other a long time. But the former falcon is picking his fingernails with a dagger and ignoring all of us.
Tiernan uses his second key to open the way to a nearly identical space. Two beds, one television. Rust stains where the bolts have sat in contact with the rug. A polyester coverlet that looks as though spilled water might bead up on top of it.
There, the knight loops rope around my ankle, tying me to the bed with enough slack that I can lie down, even roll over. I hiss at him as he does it, pulling against the bonds.
“He might trust you,” says Tiernan. “But I trust no one from the Court of Teeth.”
Then he speaks a few words over the knot, a bit of enchantment that I am almost certain I can break, what with all the practice I’ve had at unraveling the glaistig’s spells.
“Sleep tight,” he tells me, and goes out, closing the door hard after him. He’s left his pack behind, and I bet he’s planning on returning and sleeping here, where he can keep an eye on me. And where he can avoid whatever he’s feeling about Hyacinthe.
Spitefully, I get up and throw the bolt lock, letting the rope pull taut.
Dawn has lengthened into day, and all around the motel, the mortal world is coming awake. A car engine fires to life. Two people argue near a vending machine. A slammed door sounds from the room next to mine. I peer out the window, imagining slipping away into the morning and disappearing. Imagining the look on Tiernan’s face when he returns to find me gone.
But I would be foolish to try to face the storm hag or Lady Nore on my own. I would have been felled by the same poison that struck the prince, except without armor, the bolt would have sunk deeper into my flesh. And no one would have been there to give me an antidote or carry me on a horse.
Still, I don’t want to be dragged along like an animal, worrying about being put on a leash.
If I cannot have respect, if I cannot be treated as their equal, then at least I want Oak to see that I have as much right as he does to this quest, more reasons to hate Lady Nore, and the power to stop her.
But it’s hard to think of how I will manage to convince them of that when my ankle is tied to the leg of the bed, and my thoughts are woolly with exhaustion. Taking one of the blankets from my bag, I scrabble into the dusty space between mattress and floor, curling up there. The awareness of the slats over me and the familiar, forest smell of my blanket is comforting.
Pillowing my head on my arms, I try to settle in. It ought to be hard to fall asleep in this unfamiliar place, filled with strange sounds. My thighs hurt from the ride, and my feet are sore from walking. But as warm, buttery sunlight flows into the room like yolk from a cracked egg, my eyes drift closed. I do not even dream.
When I wake, the sky is dark. I crawl out from underneath the bed, hunger gnawing my belly.
Tiernan must have been in and then gone without my noticing, because the bolt lock is undone, his pack missing. I make quick work of his stupid enchanted knot, then go into the bathroom and fill the plastic cup I find there with water. I guzzle it, refill it, and drink again.
As I look up, I catch sight of my own reflection and take an automatic step back. Unglamoured, my skin is the pale blue-gray of hydrangea blooms, smeared with dirt along one cheek and across my nose. My hair is so woven with leaves and twigs and mud that it would be almost impossible to know that underneath it is an even darker blue. I have the same pointy chin I had when I thought I was mortal. A thin face, with large eyes, and an expression of startlement, as though I expect someone else when I look in the mirror.
At least my eyes could pass for human. They’re green, deep and dark.
I smile a little to see the awfulness of my sharp teeth. A mouth full of knives. They make even the Folk flinch.
My gaze goes to the tub, thinking about what I must seem like to Oak, now that we’re both grown. Turn the faucet and let the hot water run over my hand. As dirt washes off, I see that the skin underneath is a warmer, lighter blue.
But I am no Court lady with lips of carmine and butterflies in my hair. I am scrawny, like a stick bug.
I put the stopper in the tub and let it fill. Then slowly I lower myself in. The heat is almost more than I can bear. Still, I scrub at my skin with my jagged nails. In minutes the water is so filthy that I have to let it drain out. Then I do it again. Sinking my fingers into my hair, I try to pick apart the tangles. It’s painful, and slathering it with the contents of the tiny bottle of conditioner does little to help. I am still not totally clean when I get out of the water, despite the fine layer of grit remaining behind in the tub.
Now that I’ve washed, my dress looks dirtier than ever, worn as thin as tissue in places, and discolored by both sun and mud. There’s nothing else, so I pick it up and run it under the tap of the sink, scrubbing at it gently with soap and hoping it doesn’t tear. Then I drape it over the shower-curtain rod and aim the hair dryer onto it. It’s still damp when I take it down.
I start stepping into it when I see a shadow move outside the window.
I drop to the floor, but not before I recognize the long fingers. As I crawl naked underneath the bed, I hear the sound of nails scratching against glass. I brace for Bogdana to shatter the window or kick in the door.
Nothing happens.
I draw in a breath. Then another.
Minutes later, there’s a knock. I don’t move.
Oak’s insistent voice comes from the other side. “Wren, open up.”
“No,” I shout, crawling out from underneath the bed and scrambling into my clothes.
I hear shuffling and a thud, and then something metal slides down the gap between door and jamb. It opens.
“I thought you were . . .” I start to explain, but I am not sure he’s paying attention. He’s put away what he was using to jimmy the door and is gathering back up a cardboard drink holder of coffees and a large paper bag.
When he looks up, he freezes for a moment, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he averts his gaze, turning it toward something just over my shoulder.
I glance down, at the way the damp cloth of my dress has stuck to my body, and flinch. My breasts are visible, even my nipples. Could he think I did this for his attention? Shame heats my cheeks, crawls down my neck.
Walking past me, he sets down the sack on the bed. His golden curls are only slightly mussed, his fresh linen shirt white and unwrinkled, as though he’d never been poisoned, or shot, or fallen off a horse. He certainly hadn’t cleaned his clothes in the sink. And his mouth is twisted in an expression of insufferable amusement.
I wrap myself in the coverlet from the bed.
“I wasn’t sure what you liked.” Oak proceeds to take out a mango, three green apples, a handful of dried figs, a bag of crackers in the shapes of goldfish, frozen pizza bites, and four foil-wrapped hot dogs. He does all this without looking at me. “They seem like meat, but they’re not.”
I am hungry enough to accept one of his weird vegan hot dogs. “You don’t eat meat? Your father must hate that.”
He shrugs, but there’s something in his face that tells me it’s been discussed before. “More for him.”
Then I am distracted by eating. I gobble three out of the four hot dogs so quickly that when I stop, I see Oak has his hand curved protectively over the remaining one. I pick up a fig and try to take smaller bites.
Leaving the remainder of the food on the mattress, he goes to the door. “Tiernan told me I should be grateful for your unwillingness to drop me on my head, however tempted you were,” he says. “They’ll sing ballads to your restraint.”
“And why would you think I was tempted?” There’s a growl in my voice I can’t seem to get out.
“Many are. It must be something about my face.” He smiles, and I think of the jealous lover with the knife.
“Maybe you keep dragging them on quests,” I say.
He laughs. “This isn’t how I thought to see you again.”
“I imagine you thought you’d never see me again,” I say, to remind myself of the many, many differences between our positions in life.
His grin slides off his mouth. “That did seem to be what you wanted.”
I wish it didn’t bother me that he isn’t smiling anymore, but it does.
The door opens. Tiernan is on the other side, glowering at us. “Let’s get moving. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Outside, I see that we have acquired a new horse, black as ink and smelling of seawater. Oak’s faerie steed shies away from it, blowing panicked breaths from flared nostrils.
The new mount catches my eye hungrily, and I realize what I’m looking at. The creature is one of the solitary Folk, a devourer of flesh. A kelpie.