I say nothing. There’s nothing for me to say.
“What evidence do you have?” Oak asks with a quick glance in my direction.
“A confession from a kelpie that he gave her aid. She paid him with this.” Revindra opens her palm to show the silver fox with the peridot eyes.
His jaw tightens. “Wren?”
I don’t know how to answer for what I did.
Oak takes the playing piece, an abstracted expression coming over his face. “I thought never to see this again.”
“We’re here to take Suren,” Revindra goes on. “And we will take it ill if you attempt to prevent us.”
The gaze that Oak slants toward me is as cold as the one he bestowed on the ogres.
“Oh,” he says. “I wouldn’t dream of stopping you.”
CHAPTER
8
A
t fourteen, I learned to make tea out of crushed spruce needles along with bee balm flowers, boiled over a fire.
“Would you like a cup, Mr. Fox?” I asked my stuffed animal solicitously, as though we were very fancy.
He didn’t want any. Since stealing Mr. Fox back from my unparents’ boxes, I’d cuddled up with him every night, and his fur had become dingy from sleeping on moss and dirt.
Worse, there were a few times I’d left him behind when I went to sit underneath windows at Bex’s school or the local community college, repeating probably useless poems and snatches of history to myself, or doing sums by tracing the numbers in the earth. One night when I returned, I found he’d been attacked by a squirrel looking for material to nest in and most of his insides had been pulled out.
Since then, I’d stayed at my camp, reading him a novel about an impoverished governess I’d taken from the library when I’d picked up Foraging in the American Southeast. There was a lot about convalescing and chilblains, so I figured it might make him feel better.
Mr. Fox looked uncomfortably like the skins Bogdana hung up to dry after her kills.
“We’ll get you some new guts, Mr. Fox,” I promised him. “Feathers, maybe.”
As I flopped down, my gaze tracked a bird in the tree above us. I’d gotten fast and vicious in the wild. I could catch it easily enough, but it would be hard to be sure the feathers were clean and parasite-free. Maybe I should consider ripping apart one of my unfamily’s pillows instead.
Out in the woods, I’d often think of the games Rebecca and I used to play. Like once, when we were pretending to be fairy-tale princesses. We carted out props—a rusty axe that had probably never been taken from the garage before, two paper crowns I’d made from glitter and cut-up newspaper, and an apple, only slightly bruised, but shiny with wax.
“First, I am going to be a woodsman and you are going to plead for your life,” Rebecca told me. “I’ll be sympathetic, because you’re so pretty and sad, so I’ll kill a deer instead.”
So we played that out, and Rebecca hacked at weeds with the axe.
“Now I’ll be the evil queen,” I’d volunteered. “And you can pretend to give me—”
“I’m the evil queen,” Rebecca insisted. “And the prince. And the woodsman.”
“That’s not fair,” I whined. Rebecca could be so bossy sometimes. “You get to do everything, and all I get to do is cry and sleep.”
“You get to eat the apple,” Rebecca pointed out. “And wear a crown. Besides, you said that you wanted to be the princess. That’s what princesses do.”
Bite the bad apple. Sleep.
Cry.
A rustling sound made my head come up.
“Suren?” a shout came through the woods. No one should have been calling me. No one should have even known my name.
“Stay here, Mr. Fox,” I said, tucking him into my dwelling. Then I crept toward the voice.
Only to see Oak, the heir to Elfhame, standing in a clearing. All my memories of him were of a merry young boy. But he’d become tall and rawboned, in the manner of children who have grown suddenly, and too fast. When he moved, it was with coltish uncertainty, as though not used to his body. He would be thirteen. And he had no reason to be in my woods.
I crouched in a patch of ferns. “What do you want?”
He turned toward my voice. “Suren?” he called again. “Is that you?”
Oak wore a blue vest with silver frogging in place of buttons. Beneath was a fine linen shirt. His hooves had silver caps that matched two silver hoops at the very top of one pointed ear. Butter-blond hair threaded with dark gold blew around his face.
I glanced down at myself. My feet were bare and dark with filth. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I washed my dress. A bloodstain marred the cloth near my waist, from where I’d snagged my arm on a thorn. Grass stains on the skirt, near my knees. I recalled him finding me staked to a post, tied like an animal outside the camp of the Court of Teeth. I could not bear more of his pity.
“It’s me,” I called. “Now go away.”
“But I’ve only just found you. And I want to talk.” He sounded as though he meant it. As though he considered us friends, even after all this time.
“What will you give me if I do, Prince of Elfhame?”
He flinched at the title. “The pleasure of my company?”
“Why?” Though it was not a friendly question, I was honestly puzzled.
He was a long time in answering. “Because you’re the only person I know who was ever a royal, like me.”
“Not like you,” I called.
“You ran away,” he said. “I want to run away.”
I shifted into a more comfortable position. It wasn’t that I’d run. I hadn’t had anywhere else but here to go. My fingers plucked at a piece of grass. He had everything, didn’t he? “Why?” I asked again.
“Because I am tired of people trying to assassinate me.”
“I would have thought they’d prefer you on the throne to your sister.” Killing him didn’t seem as though it would accomplish anything useful to anyone. He was replaceable. If Jude wanted another heir, she could have a baby. She was human; she could probably have a lot of babies.
He pressed the toe of his hoof into the dirt, digging restlessly at the edge of a root. “Well, some people want to protect Cardan because they believe that Jude means to murder him and think my not being around would discourage it. Others believe that eliminating me is a good first step to eliminating her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Can’t you just come out so we can talk?” The prince turned, frowning, looking for me in the trees and shrubs.
“You don’t need to see me for that,” I told him.
“Fine.” He sat among the leaves and moss, balancing his cheek on a bent knee. “Someone tried to kill me. Again. Poison. Again. Someone else tried to recruit me into a scheme where we would kill my sister and Cardan, so I could rule in their place. When I told them no, they tried to kill me. With a knife, that time.”
“A poisoned knife?”
He laughed. “No, just a regular one. But it hurt.”
I sucked in a breath. When he said there had been attempts, I assumed that meant they’d been prevented in some way, not that he merely hadn’t died.