Oak dozes off and wakes to the tread of soft footfalls. He surges to his hooves, moving as close to the iron bars as he dares.
A huldu woman comes into view, bearing a tray, her tail swishing behind her.
Disappointment is a pit in his stomach.
“Fernwaif,” he says, and her eyes go to his. He can see the wariness in them.
“You remember my name,” she says, as though it’s some kind of trick. As though princes have the attention spans of gnats.
“Most certainly I do.” He smiles, and after a moment, she visibly relaxes, her shoulders lowering.
He wouldn’t have noted that reaction before. After all, smiles were supposed to reassure people. Just maybe not quite so much as his smiles did.
Maybe you can’t help it. Maybe you do it without knowing. That’s what Wren had said when he claimed he didn’t use his honey-mouthed charm, his gancanagh ability, anymore. He’d stuck to the rules Oriana had given him. Sure, he knew the right things to say to make someone like him, but he’d told himself that wasn’t the same as just giving himself over to the magic, not the same as enchanting them.
But sitting in the dark, he has reconsidered. What if the power leaches out of him like a miasma? Like a poison? Perhaps the seducing of conspirators he’d done wasn’t his being clever or companionable; instead, he was using a power they couldn’t fight against. What if he is a much worse person than he’s supposed?
And as though to prove it, he presses his advantage, magical or not. He smiles more broadly at Fernwaif. “You’re far superior company to the guard who brought my food yesterday,” he tells her with utter sincerity, thinking of a troll who wouldn’t so much as meet his gaze. Who spilled half his water on the ground and then grinned at him, showing a set of cracked teeth.
Fernwaif snorts. “I don’t know if that’s much of a compliment.”
It wasn’t. “Shall I tell you instead that your hair is like spun gold, your eyes like sapphires?”
She giggles, and he can see her cheeks are pink as she pulls out the empty bowls near the slot at the bottom of the cell and replaces them with the new tray. “You best not.”
“I can do better,” he says. “And perhaps you might bring me a little gossip to cheer the chilly monotony of my days.”
“You’re very silly, Your Highness,” she says after a moment, biting her bottom lip a little.
His gaze travels, evaluating the pockets of her dress for the weight of keys. Her blush deepens.
“I am,” he agrees. “Silly enough to have gotten myself into this predicament. I wonder if you could take a message to Wr—to your new queen?”
She looks away. “I dare not,” she says, and he knows he ought to leave it at that.
He remembers Oriana’s warning to him when he was a child. A power like the one you have is dangerous, she said. You can know what other people most want to hear. Say those things, and they will not only want to listen to you. They will come to want you above all other things. The love that a gancanagh inspires—some may pine away for desire of it. Others will carve the gancanagh to pieces to be sure no one else has it.
He made a mistake when he first went to school in the mortal world. He felt alone at the mortal school, and so when he made a friend, he wanted to keep him. And he knew just how. It was easy; all he had to do was say the right things. He remembers the taste of the power on his tongue, supplying words he didn’t even understand. Soccer and Minecraft, praise for the boy’s drawings. Not lies, but nowhere near the truth, either. They had fun together, running around the playground, drenched in sweat, or playing video games in the boy’s basement. They had fun together until he found that when they were apart, even for a few hours, the boy wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t eat. Would just wait until he saw Oak again.
With that memory in his mind, Oak stumbles on, forcing his mouth into a smile he hopes looks real. “You see, I wish to let your queen know that I await her pleasure. I am hers to command, and I hope she will come and do just that.”
“You don’t want to be saved?” Fernwaif smiles. She’s the one teasing him now. “Shall I inform my mistress that you are so tame she can let you out?”
“Tell her . . . ,” Oak says, keeping his astonishment at the news she’s returned to the Citadel off his face through sheer force of will. “Tell her that I am wasted in all this gloom.”
Fernwaif laughs, her eyes shining as though Oak is a romantic figure in a tale. “She asked me to come today,” the huldu girl confides in a whisper.