If they leave me alone for a moment, I can bring my arms down and step backward through the circle of them, bringing my bound hands to the front of my body. Then I’d chew through the rope.
I cannot think of any reason they will give me that chance. Still, under cover of Oak’s cloak, I fidget with my bindings, trying to stretch them as far as I am able.
When we depart the woods, we step onto an unfamiliar street. The houses are farther apart than in my unfamily’s neighborhood and more run-down, their lawns overgrown. In the distance, a dog is barking.
Then I am guided onto a dirt road. At the very end is a deserted house with boarded-up windows and grass so tall a mower might choke on it. Outside stand two bone-white faerie steeds, the gentle curve of their necks longer than those of mortal horses.
“There?” I ask. The word comes out clearly enunciated, even if my voice still sounds rough.
“Too filthy for Your Highness?” the knight asks, raising his brows at me as though I am unaware of the dirt on my dress and mud on my feet. As though I don’t know I am no longer a queen, that I do not remember Oak’s sister disbanding my Court.
I hunch my shoulders. I’m used to word games like this one, where there is no right answer and every wrong answer leads to punishment. I keep my mouth shut, my gaze going to the scratches on the prince’s cheek. I have made enough mistakes already.
“Ignore Tiernan. It’s not so awful inside,” Oak says, giving me a courtier’s smile, the kind that’s supposed to convince you it’s okay to relax your guard. I tense up even further. I have learned to be afraid of smiles like that. He continues, with a wave of one hand. “And then we can explain the necessity for our being so wretchedly impolite.”
Impolite. That was one way to refer to tying me up.
The knight—Tiernan—opens the door by leaning his shoulder against it. We go inside, Oak behind me so there’s no hope of running. The warped wooden floorboards groan beneath the tread of his hooves.
The house has obviously been empty for a long time. Graffiti sprawls across floral wallpaper, and a cabinet under the sink has been ripped out, probably to get at any copper pipes. Tiernan guides me toward a cracked plastic table that’s in a corner of the kitchen along with a few scuffed-looking chairs.
In one is a soldier with a wing where an arm ought to be, light brown skin, a long fall of mahogany hair, and eyes the startling purple of monkshood. I do not know him, but I think I know the curse. Oak’s sister, the High Queen, had the unrepentant soldiers who followed Madoc turned into falcons after the Battle of the Serpent. They were cursed so that if they wanted to return to their true forms, they couldn’t hunt for a year and a day, eating only what they were given. I do not know what it means that he seems half-cursed now. If I squint, I can see the trailing threads of magic around him, winding and coiling like roots trying to regrow.
No easy spell to unmake.
And against his mouth, I see the thin leather straps and golden fastenings of a bridle. A shudder of recognition goes through me. I know that, too.
Created by the great smith Grimsen, and given to my parents.
Lord Jarel placed that bridle on me long ago, when my will was an inconvenience to be cleared away like a cobweb. Seeing the bridle brings back all the panic and dread and helplessness I’d felt as the straps slowly sank into my skin.
Later, he’d tried to use it to trap the High King and Queen. He failed and it fell into their hands, but I am horrified that Oak would have made a prisoner wear it, casually, as though it were nothing.
“Tiernan captured him outside your mother’s Citadel. We needed to know her plans, and he’s been immensely helpful. Unfortunately, he’s also immensely dangerous.” Oak is speaking, but it’s hard to see anything but the bridle. “She has a motley crew of vassals. And she has stolen something—”
“More than one something,” says the bridled former falcon.
Tiernan kicks the leg of the falcon’s chair, but the falcon only smiles up at him. They can make that bridled soldier do anything, say anything. He is trapped inside himself far more securely than he could be bound by any rope. I admire his defiance, however useless.
“Vassals?” I echo the prince’s statement, my voice scratchy.
“She has reclaimed the Citadel of the Court of Teeth and, since that Court is no more, has made a new one,” Oak says, raising his brows. “And she has an old magic. She can create things. From what we understand, mostly creatures from twigs and wood, but also parts of the dead.”
“How?” I ask, horrified.
“Does it matter?” Tiernan says. “You were supposed to keep her under control.”
I hope he can see the hate in my eyes. Just because the High Queen forced Lady Nore to swear fealty to me after the battle, just because I could command her, didn’t mean I’d had the first idea of what to actually do.
“She was a kid, Tiernan,” Oak says, surprising me. “As was I.”
A few embers glow in the fireplace. Tiernan huffs and moves to kneel beside it. He adds logs from a pile, along with balled-up pages he rips from an already-torn cookbook. The edge of a page catches, and flames blaze up. “You’d be a fool to trust the former queen of the Court of Teeth.”
“Are you so sure you know our allies from our enemies?” Oak takes out a long stick from the pile of wood, thin enough to be kindling. He holds it in the fire until the end sparks. Then he uses it to light the wicks of candles set around the room. Soon warm pools of light flicker, making the shadows shift.
Tiernan’s gaze strays to the bridled soldier. It rests there a long moment before he turns to me. “Hungry, little queen?”
“Don’t call me that,” I rasp.
“Grouchy, are we?” Tiernan asks. “How would you like this poor servant to address you?”
“Wren,” I say, ignoring the taunt.
Oak watches the interaction with half-lidded eyes. I cannot guess at his thoughts. “And do you desire repast?”
I shake my head. The knight raises his eyebrows skeptically. After a moment, he turns away and takes out a kettle, already blackened by fire, and fills it from the tap in the bathroom sink. Then he hangs it on a prop stick they must have rigged up. No electricity, but the house still has running water.
For the first time in a very long while, I think about a shower. About how my hair felt when it was combed and detangled, my scalp spared from the itch of drying mud.
Oak walks to where I am sitting, my tied wrists forcing my shoulders back.
“Lady Wren,” he says, amber eyes like those of a fox meeting mine directly. “If I undo your bindings, may I rely upon you to neither attempt escape nor attack one of us for the duration of our time in this house?”
I nod once.
The prince gives me a quick, conspiratorial grin. My mouth betrays me into returning the smile. It makes me recall how charming he was, even as a child.
I wonder if somehow I have misread this situation, if somehow we could be on the same side.
Oak takes a knife from a wrist guard hidden beneath his white linen shirt and applies it to the rope behind me.
“Don’t cut it,” the knight warns. “Or we’ll have to get new rope, and we may have to restrain her again.”