Did they think he didn’t deserve this answer? That he was too much a child?
Or did they not tell him because they didn’t think there was anything wrong with what Garrett had done?
At midnight, the gardens are full of night-blooming plants, limned in moonlight. Wren’s blue skin is the same color as the petals of a flower, and as she enters the clearing, she seems as remote as a star in the sky.
He is still reeling from what he has learned. From the idea that someone he knows—someone he likes—tried to kill him. From the betrayal of his family.
“You wanted to see me?” he asks Wren, and wonders if, in the state he’s in, he should have come at all.
“I did,” she says with a sly smile. “I do.”
He remembers what it was like to be a child with her. He is half-tempted to propose a game. He wonders if he can get her to run wild through the grass with him.
“It was wrong to lock you away in my prisons,” she says.
That’s so unexpected that he laughs.
She makes a face. “Very well, I concede that’s obvious.”
“I am not sitting in judgment of you,” he says. Not with all the blood on his hands. “Does this mean you forgive me?”
She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t deny it.
“Shall I say instead that there’s peace between us at last?”
At that, he does get a smile. “Peace?”
“Not even that?” Oak puts a hand to his chest, as if wounded. Under his fingers, he can feel the thrum of his heart.
“I am not a peaceful person,” she says. “And neither are you.”
He loves that she knows he’s not peaceful. Loves that she doesn’t think him kind. He doesn’t know how, but from the first she seemed to recognize something in him that no one else does—that inner kernel of hardness, of coldness.
He never convinced her that he was a hero. He perhaps half-convinced her he was a fool, but never for long. She saw through his playacting and his smiles. Heard the riddles and schemes his charmed tongue tried to obscure.
And so, when she kissed him, it felt as though he was being kissed. Perhaps for the first time.
And he loves the way she’s watching him now, as though he fascinates her. As though she’s drawn to him. As though he’s got a chance.
Even if she doesn’t want to marry him. Even if she doesn’t love him.
Wren draws in a deep breath. “It’s beautiful here.”
Oak looks around the gardens, full of flowers. Golden evening primrose, carpets of night phlox with tiny white buds, pale moonflowers, the purple night-scented stock, and the large silvery flowers of the cereus. He cups one. “Did you know this is called Queen of the Night?”
Wren shakes her head, smiling. “I dreamed about this place sometimes.”
He thinks about her comment that she would make new nightmares and is silent. When she looks at him, there is something vulnerable in her face, though her voice is sharp with sudden anger.
“You could have kept me here, in Elfhame, but you let your sister send me away.” Wren turns her gaze to the flower, speaking to it instead of him. “You gave me the first safe place—the only safe place I had after I was stolen from my unfamily—and then you took it from me.”
He wants to object and insist that he helped her. He interceded with his sister. He hid her from the Court of Teeth. But though he did those things, he didn’t keep doing them. He helped a little, and then having done so, assumed he did enough.
“It never occurred to me that you didn’t have a home to go back to.” He didn’t understand. He didn’t ask.
“You were bored with me,” she accuses, but there isn’t much heat in her voice. He can tell that she believes it and that she has believed it for a long time. Maybe she doesn’t even condemn him for it.
“I would have hidden you in my rooms forever if I thought that’s what you wanted,” he vows. “I thought about you a lot ever since. Which you must know, since I showed up in your forest a few years later.”
She clearly wants to object.
“Whereupon you sent me away,” he concludes, and watches her expression change to one of exasperation.
“You think I did that because I didn’t like you?”
He gives her a steady look.
“I did it to help you! If you stayed in the forest with me, the best thing that could ever have happened was that your family came and dragged you back to Elfhame. I’d lose you again, and you’d gain nothing.”
“So you thought—” he starts, but she cuts him off.