I glance at the prince, wanting to give him a warning but unable to come up with a way to do so without Speaker Gorga noticing. Oak drinks his in a gulp and then reaches for mine, plucking it out of my fingers and drinking it, too.
“No!” I cry, but I am too late.
“Delicious,” he announces, grabbing for Tiernan’s. “Like mother’s milk.”
Even Speaker Gorga looks alarmed. If she had measured out the doses carefully, then the prince just drank three times what she’d calculated.
“Forgive my greed,” Oak says.
“My lord,” Tiernan cautions, horror in his face.
“Perhaps you would like another round?” Speaker Gorga suggests uncertainly, holding up the half-full bottle.
“I might as well, and the others have yet to have a taste,” the prince says.
She pours more into the cups. When I look into the depths, there is sediment, but significantly less. The poison, whatever it was, was already in the vessels. Prepared ahead of us even entering the room.
I take mine and tip it against my teeth, but do not drink. I make myself visibly swallow twice. Across the table, Oak has gotten Gorga’s attention with some question about the fruits encased in ice, and so I am able to drop my hand beneath the table and surreptitiously pour out the contents onto my cloak.
I do not look down, and so I’m not sure if I’ve gotten away with it. Nor do I dare look at Tiernan to see if he has managed something similar.
“Why don’t I leave the bottle?” Speaker Gorga asks, putting it down. “Let me know if there is anything else you require.”
“What more could we ever want?” Oak muses.
With a small, tense smile, she rises and leaves.
For a moment, we sit just as we are. Then the prince stands, staggers, and falls to his knees. He begins to laugh.
“Throw it up,” Tiernan says, clapping Oak’s back.
The prince manages to make himself retch twice into a stone bowl before slumping down beside it. “Don’t worry,” he says, his amber eyes shining too brightly. Despite the cold, sweat has started on his forehead. “It’s my poison.”
“What have you done?” I ask him, my voice harsh. When he only smiles dreamily, I turn to Tiernan. “Why would he do that?”
The knight appears equally horrified. “Because he is madder than the troll king.”
I open and close drawers, hoping to find an antidote. There’s nothing that looks even vaguely promising. “What was it? What does he mean, his poison?”
Tiernan goes over to one of the cups, sniffs it, then shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“I was born with blusher mushroom in my veins,” the prince says, the words coming out slowly, as though his tongue is not quite his own. “It takes a great deal of it to affect me for long.”
I recall what he said the night he’d been poisoned with deathsweet. Alas, that it wasn’t blusher mushroom.
“How did you know what it was?” I demand, kneeling beside him, thinking of how recently he’d had another poison in his blood.
“I was desperate,” he forces out. “I was just so afraid that one of you . . . that you . . .” His words trail off, and his eyes seem to be staring at nothing. His mouth moves a little, but not enough for sound to come out.
I watch the rise and fall of his chest. It is very slow, too slow. I press my fingers to his clammy forehead, despair making everything feel as though time is speeding and crawling all at once.
Just thinking requires pushing through a fog of dread. He knows what he’s doing, I tell myself. He’s not a fool. He’s not dying. He’s not dead.
Tiernan looks up at the shadows changing in the bottle glass high above us. A pinkish, soft light filters through, showing me the anguish on his face.
Dawn.
He tries the door. There’s no visible lock, but it doesn’t open. Barred. And there are, of course, no windows through which sunlight might strike Gorga and turn her to stone. He throws his whole weight against the door suddenly, but it doesn’t budge.
“This is her house, not normally a prison, so whatever is keeping us inside has to have been moved for that purpose,” I say, standing, numbly working through the possibilities as I speak. I recall the heaviness of the door, the thickness of the wood. “It swings outward. She’s probably put something against it.”
“Does it matter?” Tiernan snaps.
I frown. “I guess not, since we should just take off the hinges.”
He stares at me for a moment and gives a panicked, despairing laugh. “I am not going to live it down, you being the one to come up with that.”
There are many things I don’t know, but I know a great deal about imprisonment.
Tiernan takes apart the hinges with a knife, making quick work of them, while I wrap Oak in a too-large woolen blanket. Giving in to temptation, I brush his bronze hair back from where it has fallen over one eye. At my touch, he gives a shiver.
See, I tell myself. Not dead.
“We won’t be able to carry him far,” I warn, although that must be obvious.
Tiernan has pried the door off to reveal a massive boulder blocking our way. It’s more round than square, though, and there are gaps along the sides.
“You’re small. Wriggle through and find something to put him on—a cart, a sleigh, anything. I’ll try to move him,” Tiernan tells me.
“I’ll be quick,” I say, and wedge myself into the gap between the boulder and the outer wall of the house. By climbing up a little and moving slowly, I manage to ease my way out.
It is strange to find the troll village so quiet as golden light spills over it. Since Gorga is the speaker, I assume that she has more than most of the others, so I figure I ought to start my search with her place. I creep around the back of her house. A small stone-and-clay outbuilding rests near the edge of the clearing. When I wedge open the door, I see a sled inside, and rope.
A sled. Exactly what we need for Oak.
He’ ll be fine, he’ ll wake in time to find his father, to be yelled at by Tiernan, and for me to . . .
The thoughts of what I will do after he wakes fade at the scent of rot in the air. The cold tamped it down, but it is definitely coming from something nearby. I move past the sled, deeper into the outbuilding. Whatever is decaying seems to be inside a chest in the back.
It’s unlatched and opens easily when I push up the lid.
Inside are clothes, armor, and other supplies. Swords. Arrows. All of them stained with gore, blackened by time. Things worn by victims who have come through this forest before. My heart thunders, imagining my own clothes among them along with Oak’s glittering golden mail. Then, gritting my teeth, I stick my hand inside and fish around until I come up with a tabard that looks like the sort worn by Madoc’s soldiers. Possibly it belonged to Lihorn, whose head we found staked out on the snowy plain. I manage to find clothing that reminds me of what the huldufólk who used to serve Lady Nore wore, some of them blood-spattered.
My heart races at the evidence of what’s happened to other travelers. I heap a few onto the sled and pull it back to the house. Tiernan is standing in the snow, Oak leaning against him as though he’s passed out after a night of too much wine.