“Do you still love Hyacinthe?” the prince asks.
Tiernan looks at him in surprise. It isn’t that they never talk about their feelings, but Oak supposes it isn’t the second thing Tiernan expected him to ask about.
Or perhaps it isn’t something that Tiernan is prepared to think too closely on, because he shrugs. When Oak does not retract the question, Tiernan shakes his head, as though at the impossibility of answering. Then, finally, he gives in and speaks. “In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there’s no way to prevent it from running its course.”
“That’s a remarkably poetic and profoundly awful view of love,” Oak says.
Tiernan looks back at the sea. “I was never in love before, so all I had were ballads to go by.”
Oak is silent, thinking of all the times he thought himself to be in love. “Never?”
Tiernan gives a soft huff of breath. “I had lovers, but that’s not the same thing.”
Oak thinks about how to name what he feels about Wren. He does not wish to write her ridiculous poems as he did for so many of the people with whom he thought he was in love, except that he does wish to make her laugh. He does not want to give her enormous speeches or to make grand, empty gestures; he does not want to give her the pantomime of love. He is starting to suspect, however, that pantomime is all he knows.
“But . . . ,” Tiernan says, and hesitates again, running a hand through his short blackberry hair. “What I feel is not like the ballads.”
“Not an affiiction, then?” Oak raises an eyebrow. “No fever?”
Tiernan gives him an exasperated look—one with which the prince is very familiar. “It is more the feeling that there is a part of me I have left somewhere and I am always looking for.”
“So he’s like a missing phone?”
“Someone ought to pitch you into the sea,” Tiernan says, but he has a small smile in the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t seem like someone who would like being teased. His grimness is what often allows him to be mistaken for a knight, despite his training as a spy. But he does like it.
“I think he’s rather desperately in love with you,” Oak says. “I think that’s why he was punching me in the mouth.”
When Tiernan sighs and looks out at the sea, Oak follows his example and is silent.
CHAPTER
12
T
hree days, they are supposed to spend at sea. Three days before they land on the isles and Oak must face his family again.
As the prince drowses in a hammock with the stars far above him on the first night, he hears Randalin boasting loudly that of course he was willing to give up his private cabin to Wren, as a queen needed privacy for travel, and that he hardly minded the hardship. Of course, she nearly persuaded him not to inconvenience himself, which was quite gracious of her. And she insisted on keeping him there for several hours to eat, drink, and speak with her of the Shifting Isles and his own loyalty to the prince, whereupon she praised him greatly, one might even say excessively.
Oak is certain that her evening was stultifyingly dull and yet he can’t help wishing he’d been there, to share a glance over the obsequious councilor’s head, to watch her smother her smiles at his puffery. He craves her smiles. The shine of her eyes when she is trying to hold back laughter.
He is no longer locked in a cell, no longer barred from seeing her. He may go to the door of the room where she is resting and bang on it until she opens up. But somehow knowing that he can and being afraid he wouldn’t be welcome make her seem even farther away.
And so he lies there, listening to Randalin going on and on about his own consequence. The councilor falls silent only after the Ghost throws a balled-up sock at him.
That reprieve lasts only the night.
Invigorated by the success of their mission and certain of his elevated status with Wren, Randalin spends much of the second day trying to talk everyone into a version of the story where he can take credit for brokering peace. Maybe even for arranging a marriage with Oak.
“Lady Suren just needed a little guidance. I really see the potential in her to be one of our great leaders, like a queen of old,” he is saying to the captain of the ship as Oak passes.
The prince’s gaze goes to Wren, standing at the prow. She wears a plain dress the color of bone, dotted with sea spray, its skirts fluttering around her. Her hair is blown back from her face, and she bites her lower lip as she contemplates the horizon, her eyes darker and more fathomless than the ocean.