Tiernan’s mouth twists. “On the ship, we . . . ,” he begins, and then seems to think better about the direction of that statement. “He saved me. And he spoke to me as though we could . . . but I was too angry to listen.”
“Ah,” Oak says. Before he can go further, Lady Elaine moves toward him in the crowd. “Ah, shit.”
Her ancestry is half from river creatures and half from aerial ones. A pair of small, pale wings hangs from her back, translucent and veined in the manner of dragonfly wings. They shimmer like stained glass. On her brow, she wears a circlet of ivy and flowers, and her gown is of the same stuff. She is very beautiful, and Oak very much wishes she would go away.
“I will tell your family that you’ve arrived,” Tiernan says, and melts into the crowd.
Lady Elaine cups Oak’s cheek in one delicate, long-fingered hand. Through sheer force of will, he neither steps back nor flinches. It bothers him, though, how hard it is to steel himself to her touch. He’s never been like that before. He’s never found it hard to sink into this role of besotted fool.
Maybe it’s harder now that he actually is a besotted fool.
“You’ve been hurt,” she says. “A duel?”
He snorts at that but grins to cover it. “Several.”
“Bruised plums are the sweetest,” she says.
His smile comes more easily now. He is remembering himself. Oak of the Greenbriar line. A courtier, a little irresponsible, a lot impulsive. Bait for every conspirator. But it chafes worse than before to pretend to ineptitude. It bothers him that had he not pretended for so long, it was possible his sister would have entrusted him with the mission he had to steal.
It bothers him that he’s pretended so long he’s not sure he knows how to be anything else.
“You are a wit,” he tells Lady Elaine.
And she, oblivious to any tension, smiles. “I have heard a rumor that you are being promised in marriage to some creature from the north. Your sister wishes to make an alliance with a hag’s daughter. To placate the shy folk.”
Oak is surprised by that story, which manages to be almost wholly accurate and yet totally wrong, but he reminds himself that this is Court, where all gossip is prized, and though faeries cannot lie, tales can still grow in the telling.
“That’s not quite—” he begins.
She places a hand on her heart. Her wings seem to quiver. “What a relief. I would hate for you to have to give up the delights of Court, forever sentenced to a cold bed in a desolate land. You have already been away so long! Come to my rooms tonight, and I will remind you why you wouldn’t want to leave us. I can be gentle with your cuts and scrapes.”
It comes to Oak that he doesn’t want gentle. He isn’t sure how he feels about that, although he doesn’t want Lady Elaine, either. “Not tonight.”
“When the moon is at its zenith,” she says. “In the gardens.”
“I can’t—” he begins.
“You wished to meet my friends. I can arrange something. And afterward, we can be alone.”
“Your friends,” Oak says slowly. Her fellow conspirators. He had hoped their plans had fallen apart, given how many rumors were flying around. “Some of them seem to be speaking very freely. I’ve had my loyalty questioned.”
It is on that statement that Wren enters the brugh.
She wears a new gown, one that looks like nothing that could have come from Lady Nore’s wardrobe. It is all of white, like a cocoon of spider silk, clinging to Wren’s body in such a way that the tint of her blue skin shows through. The fabric wraps around her upper arms and widens at the wrists and the skirts, where it falls in tatters nearly to the floor.
Woven into the wild nimbus of her hair are skeins of the same pale spider silk. And on her head rests a crown, not the black obsidian one of the former Court of Teeth, but a crown of icicles, each an impossibly thin spiral.
Hyacinthe stands at her side, unsmiling, in a uniform all of black.
Oak has seen his sister reinvent herself in the eyes of the Court. If Cardan leads with his cruel, cold charm, Jude’s power comes from the promise that if anyone crosses her, she simply cuts their throat. It is a brutal reputation, but would she, as a human, have been afforded respect for anything gentler?
And if he didn’t wonder how much that myth cost Jude, how much she disappeared into it, well, he wonders now. He hasn’t been the only one playing a role. Maybe none of his family has quite been seeing one another clearly.
Wren’s gaze sweeps the room, and there’s relief in her face when she finds him. He grins before he remembers her rejection. But not before she gives him a minute grin in return, her gaze going to the woman at his side.