“Is that her?” Lady Elaine asks, and Oak realizes how close to him she stands. How her fingers close possessively on his arm.
The prince forces himself not to take a step back, not to pull free of her grip. It won’t help, and besides, what reason does he have to worry over sparing Wren’s feelings? She doesn’t want him. “I must excuse myself.”
“Tonight, then,” Lady Elaine says, even though he never agreed. “And perhaps every night thereafter.”
As she departs, he is aware he has no one to blame but himself that she ignored his words. Oak is the one who makes himself appear empty-headed and easily manipulated. He is the one who falls into bed with anyone he thinks may help him discover who is betraying Elfhame. And, to be fair, with plenty of others to help forget how many of the Folk are dead because of him.
Even those he cared for, he hid from.
Maybe that’s why Wren can’t love him. Maybe that is why it seems so believable that he may have enchanted everyone in his life into caring for him. After all, how can anyone love him when no one really knows him?
CHAPTER
17
T
he crowd ought to be familiar, but the noise of the gathered Folk is loud and strange in his ears. He tries to shake it off and hurry. His mother will be annoyed he’s late again, and not even Jude and Cardan are going to sit down to a feast in his honor without him, which means it can’t officially begin until he gets to the table.
And yet, he keeps getting distracted by his surroundings. By hearing his father’s name on certain lips. Hearing his own on others. Listening to knots of courtiers speculate about Wren, calling her the Winter Queen, the Hag Queen, the Night Queen.
The prince notes Randalin, the little horned man drinking from an enormous, carved wooden mug, chatting with Baphen, whose curling beard sparkles with a new selection of ornaments.
Oak passes tables with wines of different colors—gold and green and violet. Val Moren, the former Seneschal, and one of the few mortals in Elfhame, is standing beside one, laughing to himself and turning in circles as though playing the childish game of seeing how dizzy he can become.
“Prince,” he calls out. “Will you fall with me?”
“Not tonight, I hope,” Oak answers, but the question echoes eerily in his mind.
He passes a table with roasted pigeons, looking entirely too pigeon-y for Oak’s comfort. Several leek and mushroom tarts rest beside them, as well as a pile of crab apples being set upon by sprites.
His friend Vier spots him and raises a flagon. “A toast to you,” he cries, walking over to sling an arm over Oak’s shoulders. “I understand you’ve won yourself a northern princess.”
“Won is definitely overstating the case,” Oak says, sliding out from his friend’s arm. “But I ought to go to her.”
“Yes, don’t leave her waiting!”
The prince wades back into the crowd. He sees a flash of metal and spins, looking for a blade, but it is just a knight wearing a single sleeve of her armor over a frothy gown. Near her are several ladies of the Court with enormous, cloudlike clusters of baby’s breath for wigs. He passes faeries in mossy capelets and dresses that end in branches. Elegant gentlemen in embroidered robes and doublets of birch bark. One green-skinned girl with gills has a train on her gown long enough to catch occasionally on roots as she passes. As he’s looking, Oak realizes it isn’t a train at all but the spill of her hair.
By the time he makes it to the High Table, he sees Wren standing before his sister and Cardan. He really should have gotten here sooner.
Wren catches his gaze as he approaches. Though her expression does not alter, he thinks he sees relief in her eyes.
Jude watches them both, calculating. Still, after two months away and a long rest to clear his head, what he notices most is how young Jude looks. She is young, but he can see a difference between her and Taryn. Perhaps it is only that Taryn has been to the mortal world more recently and has caught up to her years. Or that having a young child is tiring, and she doesn’t look older so much as exhausted.
A moment later, he wonders if it was only the fancy of the moment that made him think that. But another part of him wonders if Jude is quite as mortal as she once was.
He bows to his sister and to Cardan.
“Wren was just telling us of her powers,” says Jude, voice hard. “And we asked for the return of the bridle you borrowed.”
He’s missed something and not something good. Did she refuse them?
“I have sent one of my soldiers for it,” Wren tells him, as though in answer to the question he did not ask.