I wanted Oak to give me an opportunity to be a good winner.
When he returned, it was with a whole pie and a pitcher of cream. He’d forgotten spoons and plates and cups, so we had to scoop handfuls of blueberry filling and crust into our mouths and drink from the jug. We stained our fingers and then the edges of the game cards.
So lost in the joy of that moment, I didn’t think of danger until the latch of the door turned. I was barely able to roll underneath Oak’s bed, putting my sticky, stained fingers over my mouth, before Oriana came into the room.
I tried to remain as still as possible. Madoc’s wife had camped with us when we were in the north and would know me instantly if she saw me.
For a moment, I even considered throwing myself on her mercy. I might have made a useful hostage. If Oriana turned me over to the High Queen, she might not be cruel. Certainly, I had heard no rumors of her being awful in that way.
But if there were to be a truce, then I would be handed back to Lord Jarel and Lady Nore. The High Queen would want to give them all the easy things they asked for so that she’d have half a chance at denying them the hard ones.
Moreover, I wasn’t entirely sure whose side Oriana was on.
“Where were you?” she asked Oak, voice sharp. “Is this what Vivi and that Heather girl let you get up to in the mortal world? Running off without telling anyone?”
“Go away,” Oak said.
“The guards said you had someone with you. And there’s a rumor that monster child from the Court of Teeth is missing.”
He gave her a bored look.
“You are not to go near her alone.”
“I am the prince,” he said. “I can do whatever I like.”
Oriana looked momentarily surprised, then hurt. “I left Madoc’s side for you.”
“So what?” He didn’t appear at all sorry. “I don’t have to listen to you or do what you say. And I don’t have to tell you anything.”
I expected her to slap him or call the guards to do it for her, but then I realized the guards would follow the prince’s commands over those of Lady Oriana. He was the one his sisters loved and they had all the power now.
But I could not have predicted how his mother went to him and touched his forehead, fingers pushing back his dark gold hair from his horns. “I know,” she said. “I cannot hope for one side to win, either. I used to wish that Madoc never went looking for those girls, and now all I wish is that we could be together again as we once were.”
Despite what he’d told her, Oak leaned his head against her hand and closed his eyes. In that moment, I understood how little I knew about any of them. But I recognized love, and I envied the brush of her hands through his hair.
She sighed. “Stay in your room tonight, if not because I ask you, then because the banquet will be dull and your sister cannot handle one more distraction.”
With a kiss upon his brow, she left.
The closing of the door recalled me to the precariousness of my position. I needed to find a way to persuade Oak to keep me in the palace. A reason for him to stand up to his mother and sisters in my behalf. I was certain I knew the mortal games better than he did, even if he’d been in the mortal world more recently, and moreover, I knew how to cheat at them. I could count the number of blueberry stains, could shuffle so that the first few cards most benefited me. Rebecca used to do that all the time.
“Let’s play Go Fish,” I said.
He appeared relieved that I didn’t ask him questions about his mother, like why he was upset with her or why she’d been kind despite it. I wondered again if he’d been looking for Madoc when he found me the night before.
I began to shuffle the cards and talked as I did so he wouldn’t notice my hands. “What else was there in the kitchens?”
He frowned a little, and it made me nervous until I realized he was just concentrating. “Pheasant,” he said. “Acorn cakes. Oh, and I think I have Ring Pops somewhere here, from trick-or-treating. I went as myself.”
There was something horrifying about that, but some part of me wished I could have done it, too.
I dealt to him from the bottom of the deck and to myself from the top, where I’d been careful to put plenty of matches. He won once anyway. But I won twice.
He let me hide under his bed that day, and the next, after I learned that there hadn’t ever been a chance at peace, that the Court of Teeth had lost the war, and that Lord Jarel, my father, was dead.
That was the first time in over a year that I slept through the night and deep into the afternoon without waking.
I will always be grateful for that, even after guards dragged me out of his room three days later in chains. Even after the High Queen sent me away from Elfhame, and Oak said not a single word to stop her.
CHAPTER
4
B
ehind 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?”