The Prisoner's Throne (The Stolen Heir Duology, #2)(23)

“A kinder captor than ever you were to me?” Hyacinthe supplies with a short laugh. “Maybe I am just a better person.”

Oak doesn’t bother to remind Hyacinthe of how he tried to murder the High King and, if Oak hadn’t interceded, would have been executed or sent to the Tower of Forgetting. It doesn’t matter. It is very possible that neither of them is a particularly nice person.

They move down the hall, past lit torches. Hyacinthe takes a long look at Oak and frowns. “You’ve got bruises, and it’s too soon for them to have come from the fight I just saw. Those iron burns aren’t fresh, either, and they’re the wrong shape and angle to come from your prison bars. What happened?”

“I’m a miracle of self-destructiveness,” Oak says.

Hyacinthe stops walking and folds his arms. The pose is so like one that Tiernan regularly makes that Oak is certain it’s a copy, even if Hyacinthe isn’t aware he’s doing it.

Maybe that’s what makes him talk, that familiar gesture. Or maybe it’s that he’s so tired and no small amount afraid. “You know a guy named Valen? Former general. Thick neck. More anger than sense?”

Hyacinthe’s brow furrows, and he nods slowly.

“He wants your job,” Oak says, and begins walking again.

Hyacinthe falls into step beside him. “I don’t see what that has to do with you.”

They come to the stairs and head up, out of the dungeons. The fading sunlight hits his face, hurting his eyes, but the only thing he feels is gratitude. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see the sun again. “He may have told you something about a soldier named Bran deserting. He didn’t. He’s dead.”

“Bran is—” Hyacinthe begins, and then lowers his voice to a whisper. “He’s dead?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Oak says quietly. “I didn’t kill him.”

Guards Bank an entrance a few paces ahead, and by unspoken consensus, they both fall silent. Oak’s shoulders tense as he passes them, but they do nothing to stop his progress through the halls. For the first time, as he steps into a high-ceilinged corridor, he is free to look around the Citadel without the danger of being caught. He catches the scent of melting wax and the sap of fir trees. Rose petals, too, he thinks. Without the persistent stink of the iron, his head hurts less.

Then the prince’s gaze goes to one of the large, translucent walls of ice, and he stumbles.

As through a window, he can see the landscape beyond the Citadel and the troll kings moving across it. Although distant, they are far larger than the boulders in the Stone Forest, as if those massive boulders represented only the topmost portions of their bodies and the rest were buried beneath the earth. These trolls are larger than any giant Oak saw in the Court of Elfhame, or the Court of Moths, for that matter. He watches them lurch through the snow, dragging enormous chunks of ice, and mentally recalculates Wren’s resources.

They are building a wall. A miles-wide defensive shield, encircling the Citadel.

In less than a month, between her own newfound power and her newfound allies, Wren has made the Court of Teeth more formidable and more forbidding than it ever was during Lord Jarel’s reign. But when he thinks of her, he cannot help seeing the darkness beneath her eyes and the feverish shine of them. Cannot put aside the thought that something is wrong.

“Wren looks as though she’s been unwell,” Oak says. “Has she been sick?”

Hyacinthe frowns. “You can’t really expect me to betray my queen by telling you her secrets.”

Oak’s smile is sharp-edged. “So there’s a secret to tell.”

Hyacinthe’s frown deepens.

“I am a prisoner,” Oak says. “Whether you have me in chains or no, I can’t hurt her, and I wouldn’t if I could. I warned you about Valen. About Bran. Surely, I have proved some measure of loyalty.”

Hyacinthe huffs out a breath, his gaze going to the troll kings beyond the icy pane. “Loyalty? I think not, but I am going to tell you because you might be the one person who can help. Wren’s power takes something terrible out of her.”

“What do you mean?” Oak demands.

“It’s eating away at her,” Hyacinthe says. “And she’s going to keep having to use it, again and again, so long as you’re here.”

Oak opens his mouth to demand further explanation, but at that moment, a knot of courtiers passes, all of them pale and cold-looking, their gazes sliding over Oak as though the very sight of him is an offense.

“You’re going to the leftmost tower,” Hyacinthe says.

Oak nods, trying not to be rattled by the hate in their eyes. The tower he’s heading toward is, ironically, the same one he was caught in the day before. “Explain,” he says.

“What she does—it’s not just unbinding, it’s unmaking. She became sick after what she did to Lady Nore and her stick army. Harrowed. And Bogdana was so insistent that Wren use it again to break the curse of the Stone Forest because she’s going to need the trolls if Elfhame moves against us. But she’s formed of magic herself, and the more she unmakes, the more she is unmade.”

Oak recalls the strain in Wren’s face as she looked down from the dais in the Great Hall, the hollows beneath her cheekbones as she slept.

He assumed that Wren didn’t visit the prisons because she didn’t want to see him out of uninterest or anger. But she might not have come if she was sick. As much as she knows that looking weak in front of her newly formed Court is dangerous, it’s possible she feels it is similarly risky to look weak in front of him.