“But in time, the girl was discovered by her enemies. They came for her together and caught her unawares, locked in an embrace with her beloved. Still, in her wisdom, she always kept her matchbook in a pocket of her dress. Under threat, she drew it out and struck the first match, and those who came for her fell back. The flames that consumed them consumed her cottage, too. Yet still more enemies came. Match after match was struck and fire raged all around her, but it was not enough. And so the girl struck all the remaining matches at once.”
Oak glares at the storm hag, but she seems too swept up in her tale to even notice. Wren is plucking at a thread of her dress.
“The armies were defeated and the land scorched black. The girl went up in flames with them. And the boy burned to cinders before he could pull free from her arms.”
A respectful silence follows her final words. Then the captain clears his throat and calls for one of his crewmen to take up a fiddle and play a merry tune.
As a few begin to clap along, Wren stands and moves toward her cabin.
Oak catches up at her door, before her guards seem to have realized his intention. “Wait,” he says. “Can we speak?”
She tilts her head and regards him for a long moment. “Come in.”
One of her guards—Oak realizes, abruptly, that it’s Straun—clears his throat. “I can accompany you and make sure he doesn’t—”
“There is no need,” she says, cutting him off.
Straun attempts to keep the sting of her words from showing on his face. Oak almost feels sorry for him. Almost, except for the memory of his being party to the prince’s torture.
Because of that, he gives Straun an enormous, irritating grin as he follows Wren across the threshold and into her room.
Inside, he finds the chamber much as it was before, except that a few dresses have been spread out on her bed and a tray with tea things rests on the marble table.
“Is that what your power is like?” Oak asks. “A book of matches.”
Wren gives a soft laugh. “Is that truly why you’ve followed me? To ask that?”
He smiles. “It’s hardly a surprise that a young man would want to spend time with his betrothed.”
“Ah, so this is more playacting.” She moves across the floor gracefully, the pitch and roll of the ship not causing her a single stumble. Finding her way to the upholstered settee, she takes a seat, indicating with a gesture that he should take the chair across from her. A reversal of their positions the last time he visited this room.
“I do wish to spend time with my betrothed,” he says, going to sit.
She gives him a look of disdain, but her cheeks have a flush of pink on them. “My magic might be like the matches in the story, but I think it burns me, too. I just don’t know how much yet.”
He appreciates her admitting that to him. “She’s going to want you to keep using it. If there’s one thing I took away from her story, it’s that.”
“I do not plan on dancing to her tune,” Wren says. “Not ever again.”
His father has managed to manipulate him cannily, without Oak ever once agreeing to a single thing that Madoc proposed out loud. “And yet you haven’t ordered her to go home.”
“We’re far from shore,” Wren says with a sigh. “And she promised to be on her best behavior. Now, to be fair, since I told you about my magic, tell me about yours.”
Oak raises his brows in surprise. “What do you want to know?”
“Persuade me of something,” she says. “I want to understand how your power works. I want to know what it feels like.”
“You want me to charm you?” This seems like a terrible idea. “That suggests a great deal more trust on your part than you’ve indicated you’re willing to extend to me.”
She leans back on her cushions. “I want to see if I can break the spell.”
He thinks of all the matches set ablaze. “Won’t it hurt you to do that?”
“It should be a small thing,” she says. “And in return, you can obey an order.”
“But I’m not wearing the bridle,” he protests, hoping that she isn’t going to ask him to put it on. He won’t, and if it’s a test, it’s one he’s going to fail.
“No,” she says. “You’re not.”
Willingly following a command seems interesting and not too dangerous. But he doesn’t know how to make his gancanagh magic tame. If he tells her what she most wants to hear and it is a distortion of the truth, what then? And if the words are ones he means, how will they ever seem true when they’ve first come from his mouth as persuasion?