“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.