Parts of the water are deep enough to bathe in, and Oak does, stripping off his armor and scrubbing himself with the sand of the bank while Tiernan boils up some of the pine needles for tea.
I try not to look, but out of the corner of my eye, I see pale skin, wet hair, and a scarred chest.
When it is my turn, I wash my hot face primly and decline to remove my dress.
We fly through another day and night. At the next camp, we eat more cheese and bread and sleep under the stars of a meadow. I find duck eggs, and Tiernan fries them with wild onions. Oak talks some about the mortal world and his first year there, when he used magic in foolish ways and nearly got himself and his sister into a lot of trouble.
The third night, we camp in an abandoned building. The air has grown chill, and we make a fire of cardboard and a few planks of wood.
Oak stretches out beside it, arching his back like a preening cat. “Wren, tell us something about your life, if you will.”
Tiernan shakes his head, as though he thinks I won’t do it.
His expression decides me. I stumble over the words in the beginning, but I give them the tale of the glaistig and her victims. In part, I suppose, to be contrary. To see if they will fault me for helping mortals and cheating one of the Folk out of her due. But they listen and even laugh at the times I get the better of her. When I am done talking, I feel strangely lighter.
Across the fire, the prince watches me, reflected flames flickering in his unreadable eyes.
Forgive me, I think. Let me come with you.
The following afternoon, Tiernan dons Oak’s golden scale mail and sets off on his own, to set a false trail. We have a meeting place not far from the Undry Market, and I realize that I will have only one more night to persuade them to allow me to stay.
As we fly, I try to put together my arguments. I consider speaking them into Oak’s ear as he can hardly escape me, but the wind would snatch my words. A faint drizzle dampens our clothes and chills our skin.
As the sun begins to set, I see a darkness that is not night coming on. Clouds form in the distance, billowing upward and barreling outward, turning the sky a sickly greenish gray. Inside, I can see the flicker of lightning. They seem to reach into the stratosphere, the top of the clouds in a shape like an anvil.
And beneath it, wind whirls, tornadoes forming.
I give a cry, which is whipped away. Oak wheels the ragwort horse downward as the air around us becomes thick. We plunge into the fog of clouds, their wet, heavy mist sinking into my lungs. The steed shivers beneath us. And then, without warning, the ragwort horse dips sharply, then drops.
We plummet through the sky, the speed of our descent shoving the scream back into my mouth. All I can do is hang on to the solid mass of Oak’s body and wrap my arms around him as tightly as they will go. Thunder booms in my ears.
We plunge into a sheet of rain. It knocks us around, slicking our fingers and hair, making holding on difficult with everything so slippery. Coward that I am, I close my eyes and press my face into the prince’s back.
“Wren,” he shouts, a warning. I look up just before we hit the ground.
I am thrown off into mud, my breath knocked out of me. The ragwort steed crumbles away to the dried stalk of a plant under my bruised palms.
Everything hurts, but with a dull sort of pain that doesn’t get worse when I move. Nothing seems broken.
Standing shakily, I reach out a hand to help Oak up. He takes it, levering himself to his feet. His golden hair is dark with rain, his lashes spiky with it. His clothes are soaked through. His scraped knee is bleeding sluggishly.
He touches my cheek lightly with his fingers. “You—I thought—”
I stare up into his eyes, puzzled by his expression.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head.
The prince turns away from me abruptly. “We need to get to the meeting spot,” he says. “It can’t be far.”
“We need to find shelter.” I have to shout to be heard. Above us, lightning cuts through the sky, striking into the woods just beyond us. Thunder cracks, and I see a dim thread of smoke curl upward from the site of the hit before the rain douses the fire. “We can find Tiernan when the storm lets up.”
“At least let’s walk in that direction,” Oak says, lifting his pack and throwing it over one shoulder. Ducking his head against the storm, he walks deeper into the woods, using the trees for cover. He doesn’t look back to see if I follow.
We go on like that for a while before I see a promising area to stop.
“There.” I point at an area with several large rocks, not far from where the soil dips down into a ravine. There are two trees, less than six feet apart, with branches reaching toward one another. “We can make a lean-to.”
He gives an exhausted sigh. “I suppose you are the expert. Tell me what I need to do.”
“We find two huge sticks,” I say, measuring with my hands. “Basically, as long as you are tall. They have to extend past the branches.”
I discover one a few yards away that seems as though it could be partially rotted, but I drag it back anyway. Oak has caused another to bend helpfully, through some magic. I begin to tear the skirt of my dress into strips, trying not to think of how much I liked it. “Tie with this,” I say, going to work on the other end.
Once they’re in place, I use smaller sticks as ribs, stacking them to make a roof and then piling that with moss and leaves.
It is far from waterproof, but it’s something. He’s shivering by the time we crawl inside. Outside, the wind howls and thunder booms. I drag in a large log and start stripping away the bark to get at the drier wood within.
Seeing the slowness of my progress, he reaches into his boot and takes out a knife, then hands it over. “Don’t make me regret giving you this.”
“She wanted to delay you,” I say softly, aware that he probably doesn’t want to hear my justification.
“Queen Annet?” he asks. “I know.”
“And you think she almost managed it because of me?” I ask. The insides of the log are drier, and I arrange the pieces I chip off on the stones in a pyramid shape, trying to keep the worst of the water off them.
He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, which are that strange fox color. Like gold that has been cut with copper. “I think you could have told me what you intended to do.”
I give him a look of utter disbelief.
“Hyacinthe told you something about me, didn’t he?” Oak asks.
I shiver, despite not being affected by the cold. “He said that you had a kind of magic where you could make people like you.”
Oak makes an exasperated sound. “Is that what you believe?”
“That you inherited an uncanny ability to put people at ease, to convince them to go along with your desires? Should I not?”
His eyebrows go up. For a moment, he’s quiet. All around us the rain falls. The thunder seems to have moved off. “My first mother, Liriope, died before I was born. After she was poisoned—at Prince Dain’s orders—Oriana cut open her belly to save me. People do say that Liriope was a gancanagh, and her love-talking was how she caught the eye of the High King and his son, but it’s not as though that power was much use to her. She paid for that charm with her life.”
At my silence, he answers the question I did not ask. “Blusher mushroom. You remain conscious the whole time as your body slows and then stops. I was born with it in my veins, if you can call being torn out of your dead mother a birth.”