The Prisoner's Throne (The Stolen Heir Duology, #2)(42)

To his surprise, Wren glances up at the vulture in frustration. “Yes,” she says. “I told her to stay behind, but apparently I wasn’t clear enough. That’s why she’s hiding up there. If she came down, I could order her to go home.”

“She can’t hide from you forever,” Oak says.

The corners of Wren’s mouth twitch. “What do you think we will find when we arrive in Elfhame?”

An excellent question. “The High King and Queen will throw us some sort of party. But I suppose they may have a few concerns for me to allay first.”

Her lip lifts, showing off sharp teeth. “A polite way of putting it. But you are ever charming.”

“Am I?” he asks.

“Like a cat lazing in the sun. No one expects it to suddenly bite.”

“I am not the one fond of biting,” he says, and is gratified when she blushes, the pink coming up bright enough to show through the pale blue of her skin.

Not waiting to be dismissed, he takes that victory, makes a shallow bow, and departs, heading in the direction of Tiernan.

Her guards watch him go with angry looks. They probably blame him for Valen. Perhaps they blame him for all the things that Valen blamed him for. Might there really be some day that he and Wren were not at daggers drawn? He believed it enough to say it, but he was an eternal optimist.

“You’ve got a bruise on your face,” Tiernan says.

Oak reaches up self-consciously and prods around until he finds it, to the left of his mouth. It joins the bump on his head and the burns from the iron knife hidden by his collar. He’s a mess.

“How is my father?” he asks.

“Allowed back into Elfhame, just as he planned,” Tiernan says. “Giving your sister lots of unsolicited advice.”

Just because I’m bad doesn’t mean the advice is. That’s what Madoc told Wren, although Oak isn’t so sure he agrees on that point. Still, his father must be doing well, to be behaving like himself. That is the main thing.

He lets out a sigh of relief, his gaze going to the horizon, to the waves. His mind wanders to the last time they crossed this water and how Loana tried to distract him with a kiss and then drag him down to the watery depths. That was the second time she tried to drown him.

Drown me once, shame on me . . . He decides he doesn’t like the direction his thoughts are taking him. Nor does he like acknowledging that he has a particular sort of taste for paramours—the more dangerous, the better.

“Do you still love Hyacinthe?” the prince asks.

Tiernan looks at him in surprise. It isn’t that they never talk about their feelings, but Oak supposes it isn’t the second thing Tiernan expected him to ask about.

Or perhaps it isn’t something that Tiernan is prepared to think too closely on, because he shrugs. When Oak does not retract the question, Tiernan shakes his head, as though at the impossibility of answering. Then, finally, he gives in and speaks. “In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there’s no way to prevent it from running its course.”

“That’s a remarkably poetic and profoundly awful view of love,” Oak says.

Tiernan looks back at the sea. “I was never in love before, so all I had were ballads to go by.”

Oak is silent, thinking of all the times he thought himself to be in love. “Never?”

Tiernan gives a soft huff of breath. “I had lovers, but that’s not the same thing.”

Oak thinks about how to name what he feels about Wren. He does not wish to write her ridiculous poems as he did for so many of the people with whom he thought he was in love, except that he does wish to make her laugh. He does not want to give her enormous speeches or to make grand, empty gestures; he does not want to give her the pantomime of love. He is starting to suspect, however, that pantomime is all he knows.

“But . . . ,” Tiernan says, and hesitates again, running a hand through his short blackberry hair. “What I feel is not like the ballads.”

“Not an affiiction, then?” Oak raises an eyebrow. “No fever?”

Tiernan gives him an exasperated look—one with which the prince is very familiar. “It is more the feeling that there is a part of me I have left somewhere and I am always looking for.”

“So he’s like a missing phone?”

“Someone ought to pitch you into the sea,” Tiernan says, but he has a small smile in the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t seem like someone who would like being teased. His grimness is what often allows him to be mistaken for a knight, despite his training as a spy. But he does like it.

“I think he’s rather desperately in love with you,” Oak says. “I think that’s why he was punching me in the mouth.”

When Tiernan sighs and looks out at the sea, Oak follows his example and is silent.





CHAPTER



12

T

hree days, they are supposed to spend at sea. Three days before they land on the isles and Oak must face his family again.

As the prince drowses in a hammock with the stars far above him on the first night, he hears Randalin boasting loudly that of course he was willing to give up his private cabin to Wren, as a queen needed privacy for travel, and that he hardly minded the hardship. Of course, she nearly persuaded him not to inconvenience himself, which was quite gracious of her. And she insisted on keeping him there for several hours to eat, drink, and speak with her of the Shifting Isles and his own loyalty to the prince, whereupon she praised him greatly, one might even say excessively.