She gives a harsh laugh, something that is half a snarl. “The huldu girl? You cannot truly expect me to believe you don’t have her eating out of your hand. That you didn’t put her under your spell?”
“You think Fernwaif helped me escape?” he snaps, incredulous.
“Feeling remorseful now, when it’s too late?” The storm hag’s lip curls. “You knew the risk when you used her.”
“The girl did nothing.” Fernwaif, who believed in romance, despite living in Lady Nore’s Citadel. Who he hoped was still alive. “I got the key from Straun, and that’s because he’s a fool, not because I conscripted him.”
Bogdana watches Oak’s expression, drawing out the moment. “Suren interceded on Fernwaif’s behalf. She’s safe from me, for the moment.”
Oak lets out a breath. “I shall be as unpleasant to the servants of the Citadel as you like hereafter. Now I hope our business is concluded.”
Bogdana frowns down at him. “Our business won’t be concluded until the Greenbriars have repaid their debt to me.”
“With our lives, blah, blah, I know.” Pain and despair have made the prince reckless.
The storm hag’s eyes are bright with reflected light. Her nails tap against the iron of the bars as though contemplating shoving her hand inside and slashing him with them. “You desire something from Suren, don’t you, prince? Perhaps it’s that you aren’t used to being rejected and it’s not sitting well with you. Perhaps you see the greatness in her and want to ruin it. Perhaps you truly are drawn to her. Any which way, it will make the moment she bites out your throat all the sweeter.”
Oak cannot help thinking of his dream and the fox walking beside him, prophesying his doom. Cannot help thinking of other things. “She’s bitten me before, you know,” he says with a grin. “It wasn’t so bad.”
Bogdana looks satisfyingly infuriated by the comment. “I am glad you’re still locked up tight, little bait,” she tells him, eyes flashing. “Were you less useful, I would flay your skin from your bones. I would hurt you in ways you cannot imagine.” There is a hunger in her words that unnerves him.
“Someone beat you to that.” Oak leans back onto the pillow of his own arm.
“You’re still breathing,” says the storm hag.
“If you were actually worried I was dead,” he says, recalling the first thing she said to him when she came to his cell, “I must have looked pretty bad.”
He may have been unconscious longer than he guessed. Is there still a day before Elfhame makes its move? Is it happening already? He really, really wishes the metal snake had been more specific about what Jude was planning. Three dayssssss was just not enough information.
“I don’t need you to last long,” Bogdana says. “It’s the High King I want.”
Oak snorts. “Good luck with that.”
“You’re my luck.”
“I wonder what Wren thinks,” he says, trying to hide his discomfiture. “You’re using her every bit as much as Lord Jarel and Lady Nore ever did. And you’ve been planning on using her for a long time.”
Lightning sparks along Bogdana’s fingers. “My revenge is hers as well. Her crown and throne were stolen.”
“She’s got both a crown and a throne now, hasn’t she?” Oak asks. “And it seems you’re the one likely to cost her them, again.”
The look the storm hag gives him could have boiled his blood. “For what Mab did, I will see the end of the Greenbriar reign,” snaps Bogdana. “You think you know Suren, but you do not. Her heart is that of my dead daughter. She was born to be the ruin of your kin.”
“I know her well enough to call her Wren,” he says, and watches the storm hag’s eyes glisten with deeper malice. “And we don’t always do the thing we were born for.”
“Eat up, boy,” Bogdana says, gesturing to the disgusting food she brought. “I’d hate to see you go to your slaughter hungry.”
It’s only hours later, when the footsteps of three guards wake him from another half sleep, that Oak realizes she may have meant those last words literally. His head still hurts enough that he thinks about just lying there and letting them do their worst, but then he decides that if he is going to die, at least he will do so standing.
He’s up by the time they arrive. As they open the door to his cell, he uses the tip of his hoof to flip the bowl of soup into his hands. Then he slams it into the first guard’s face.