“They taught you a lot of things, your family,” I say. The sleight of hand, the wall climbing, the swordsmanship.
“Not to die,” he says. “That’s what they attempted to teach me, anyway. How not to die.”
Considering how often he throws himself directly into the path of danger, I do not think they taught him well enough. “What’s the number of times that someone tried to assassinate you?”
He gives a one-shouldered shrug, his attention on the tableau below. “Hard to know, but I’d guess there were a few dozen attempts since my sister came to power.”
That would be more than twice a year for every year since I met him. And that scar on his neck suggests that someone got very, very close.
I think of him as he was in the woods at thirteen, wanting to run away. Angry and afraid. I think of him lying on the sled this morning.
I poison everything I touch.
Every time I feel as though I know him, it seems there is another Oak underneath.
I shimmy down the rope, dropping when I am close enough to the ground not to hurt myself. My feet make a soft, echoing noise when they hit the floor, and I am struck by the nausea-inducing familiarity of the place. I spent not even two years here, and yet the very smell of the air makes me sick.
A massive bone chandelier hangs in the center of the room, candle wax dripping hot enough to melt indentations in the floor.
While the exterior of the Citadel is formed of giant slabs of clear, bright ice, some of the interior walls are enhanced by having things frozen inside the ice, resulting in something like wallpaper. Stones suspended, as though forever in midfall. Bones, picked clean, occasionally used to form sculptures. Roses, their petals forever preserved in their full flowering. This room’s walls have two faerie women frozen inside them, preserved so that they never decayed into moss and stone, like the rest of the Folk. Two faerie women, dressed in finery, crowns on their heads.
The Hall of Queens.
I had never known that Lady Nore might have joined their number, if not for me. A fresh horror, on top of all the others.
I can’t help feeling like a child again, with time seeming to dilate around me. Every hour, each day had felt endless, telescopic. The spaces were distorted in my memory, the halls shorter, the ceilings less high.
My wrists still show knots of skin where Lord Jarel pierced them to drive through the thin silver chains that leashed me. If I touch my cheeks, I can still feel, right underneath the bone, the marks of scars.
I do not realize how long I have been staring until Oak lands beside me, the clatter of his hooves louder than my soft-shod feet. He takes in the room, and me.
“Do you know the way from here?” he asks.
I give a quick nod and begin to move again.
One of the dangers of the Citadel is that the ice throughout varies in translucence, so there are places where movement is visible between rooms, or even through floors and ceilings. We could be semi-exposed at all times. Therefore, we must not crouch or attempt to hide. We must move in such a way that our faint outlines do not betray us.
I lead us into a hall, and then another. We pass a thin window of ice that looks out on the interior courtyard, and I glance through it. Oak pulls me back into shadow, and after a moment, I realize why.
Lady Nore stands outside, in front of sculptures of stick and snow. A line of ten, some in the shapes of men, some beasts, some creatures that are neither. Each one’s mouth is filled with sharp, jagged icicle teeth. Each one has stones in place of eyes; a few have them pressed into sockets of flesh. I spot other horrible things: a foot, fingers, bits of hair.
From a bag, Lady Nore takes a little knife in the shape of a half moon. She slices her palm. Then she takes a pinch of bone gravel from a bag at her waist and smears it onto her bloody, open hand. One by one, she walks to the snow sculptures and presses those bits of bone, shining with wetness, into their mouths.
And one by one, they awaken.
They are like me. Whatever they are, they are like me.
And yet, these stick creatures seem like living puppets and little else. They stay in their neat rows, and when she orders them inside, they go obediently, as though they’d never had any other thought. But I do not understand why, if the magic of Mab’s bones is animating these creatures, they are not conscious in the way that I am.
Although I may have been made from snow and sticks and blood, there is some difference that allows me to behave like a disobedient faerie daughter, when these creatures seem to make no choices at all.
But then I recall the spider hunting the servant and don’t know what to suppose.
The sound of footsteps is the only warning before two guards turn the corner.
Oak puts his hands on my shoulders, pushing my back to the wall.
“Pretend with me,” he whispers. And then he presses his mouth to mine.
A soldier kissing one of the serving girls. A bored ex-falcon attempting to amuse himself. Oak hiding our faces, giving us a reason to be overlooked. I understand the game.
This is no declaration of desire. And yet, I am rooted in place by the shocking heat of his mouth, the softness of his lips, the way one of his hands goes to the ice wall to brace himself and the other to my waist, and then to the hilt of my knife as they draw closer.
He doesn’t want me. This doesn’t mean he wants me. I repeat that over and over as I let him part my lips with his tongue. I run my hands up his back under his shirt, letting my nails trail over his skin.
I have been trained in all the arts of a courtier. Dancing and dueling, kissing and deceiving.
Still, I am gratified when he shudders, when the hand he was bracing with lifts to thread through my hair, to cup my head. My mouth slides over his jaw to his throat, then against his shoulder, where I press the points of my teeth. His body stiffens, his fingers gripping me harder, pulling me closer to him. When I bite down, he gasps.
“You there,” says one of the soldiers, a troll. “Get to your post. If the lady hears of this—”
When Oak draws back, his lips are flushed red. His eyes look black beneath golden lashes. I see the marks from my teeth on his shoulder. He turns and drives a knife into the troll’s stomach. The troll falls soundlessly as Oak turns to slash the other’s throat.
Hot blood spatters the ice. Where it lands, steam rises and a constellation of pockmarks appear.
“Is there a room nearby?” the prince asks in a voice that shakes only a little. “For the bodies.”
For a moment, I stare at him stupidly. I am reeling from the kiss, from the swiftness of the violence. I am not yet used to Oak’s ability to kill without hesitation and then look chagrined about it, as though he did something in slightly poor taste. Spilled a rare vintage of wine, perhaps. Mismatched his trousers to his shirt.
Although I cannot be anything other than glad he killed them swiftly and soundlessly.
I lead him across the hall, into a strange little chamber for keeping supplies to clean and polish and provide for the needs of the Gentry in this part of the castle.
Inside, the frozen carcass of an elk hangs in one corner, slivers of meat cut off. On the opposite wall are wooden shelves, packed with linens, cups, glasses, and trays, as well as dried herbs that hang in bundles. Two barrels of wine sit on the ground, one opened, a ladle resting on the lip.
Oak drags both guards in. I grab up one of their cloaks and a tablecloth from the shelves to go back and mop up the blood.