“Of course not.” Oak’s hand goes to his chest. The burn by his throat is scabbed over. He can feel the wild beat of his heart beneath his palm. He couldn’t have been unconscious long since Wren hadn’t sent anyone to drag him before her Court for a whipping.
Bogdana’s smile widens. “Good. Because I came to tell you that I will gut every servant you conscript, should you try to use one to escape your cell again.”
“I didn’t—” he begins.
She gives a harsh laugh, something that is half a snarl. “The huldu girl? You cannot truly expect me to believe you don’t have her eating out of your hand. That you didn’t put her under your spell?”
“You think Fernwaif helped me escape?” he snaps, incredulous.
“Feeling remorseful now, when it’s too late?” The storm hag’s lip curls. “You knew the risk when you used her.”
“The girl did nothing.” Fernwaif, who believed in romance, despite living in Lady Nore’s Citadel. Who he hoped was still alive. “I got the key from Straun, and that’s because he’s a fool, not because I conscripted him.”
Bogdana watches Oak’s expression, drawing out the moment. “Suren interceded on Fernwaif’s behalf. She’s safe from me, for the moment.”
Oak lets out a breath. “I shall be as unpleasant to the servants of the Citadel as you like hereafter. Now I hope our business is concluded.”
Bogdana frowns down at him. “Our business won’t be concluded until the Greenbriars have repaid their debt to me.”
“With our lives, blah, blah, I know.” Pain and despair have made the prince reckless.
The storm hag’s eyes are bright with reflected light. Her nails tap against the iron of the bars as though contemplating shoving her hand inside and slashing him with them. “You desire something from Suren, don’t you, prince? Perhaps it’s that you aren’t used to being rejected and it’s not sitting well with you. Perhaps you see the greatness in her and want to ruin it. Perhaps you truly are drawn to her. Any which way, it will make the moment she bites out your throat all the sweeter.”
Oak cannot help thinking of his dream and the fox walking beside him, prophesying his doom. Cannot help thinking of other things. “She’s bitten me before, you know,” he says with a grin. “It wasn’t so bad.”
Bogdana looks satisfyingly infuriated by the comment. “I am glad you’re still locked up tight, little bait,” she tells him, eyes flashing. “Were you less useful, I would flay your skin from your bones. I would hurt you in ways you cannot imagine.” There is a hunger in her words that unnerves him.
“Someone beat you to that.” Oak leans back onto the pillow of his own arm.
“You’re still breathing,” says the storm hag.
“If you were actually worried I was dead,” he says, recalling the first thing she said to him when she came to his cell, “I must have looked pretty bad.”
He may have been unconscious longer than he guessed. Is there still a day before Elfhame makes its move? Is it happening already? He really, really wishes the metal snake had been more specific about what Jude was planning. Three dayssssss was just not enough information.
“I don’t need you to last long,” Bogdana says. “It’s the High King I want.”
Oak snorts. “Good luck with that.”
“You’re my luck.”
“I wonder what Wren thinks,” he says, trying to hide his discomfiture. “You’re using her every bit as much as Lord Jarel and Lady Nore ever did. And you’ve been planning on using her for a long time.”
Lightning sparks along Bogdana’s fingers. “My revenge is hers as well. Her crown and throne were stolen.”
“She’s got both a crown and a throne now, hasn’t she?” Oak asks. “And it seems you’re the one likely to cost her them, again.”
The look the storm hag gives him could have boiled his blood. “For what Mab did, I will see the end of the Greenbriar reign,” snaps Bogdana. “You think you know Suren, but you do not. Her heart is that of my dead daughter. She was born to be the ruin of your kin.”
“I know her well enough to call her Wren,” he says, and watches the storm hag’s eyes glisten with deeper malice. “And we don’t always do the thing we were born for.”
“Eat up, boy,” Bogdana says, gesturing to the disgusting food she brought. “I’d hate to see you go to your slaughter hungry.”
It’s only hours later, when the footsteps of three guards wake him from another half sleep, that Oak realizes she may have meant those last words literally. His head still hurts enough that he thinks about just lying there and letting them do their worst, but then he decides that if he is going to die, at least he will do so standing.
He’s up by the time they arrive. As they open the door to his cell, he uses the tip of his hoof to flip the bowl of soup into his hands. Then he slams it into the first guard’s face.
The guard goes down. Oak kicks the second into the iron bars and, in a moment of hesitation from the third, grabs for the first guard’s fallen sword.
Before he can get it, a club hits him in the stomach, knocking the air out of him.
He was faster, before the iron. Before his muscles got stiff. Before getting hit in the head several times by Valen. A few weeks ago, he would have had the sword.
They’re crowded in the entrance of his cell; that’s his main advantage. Only one can really come at him at a time, but all three have weapons drawn and Oak has only his hands and hooves. Even the bowl is lying on the ground, cracked in half.
But he refuses to be dragged back to the interrogation chamber. Panic fills him at the thought of Valen starting the torture over. At the strike of an ice whip. At Bogdana’s nails peeling off his skin.
The second guard, the one who hit the bars, lunges at him with the sword. It’s a small space, though, too small to get a real swing in, and the guard is slow as a consequence. Oak ducks and barrels into the first guard, who has managed to get onto his feet. The prince slams into him, and they both sprawl onto the cold stone tiles of the prison hall. Oak attempts to scramble up, only to be hit between the shoulder blades with the club by the third guard. He is knocked down again, falling heavily onto the second guard. He goes for a knife strapped to that one’s belt. Drawing it, he rolls onto his back, ready to throw.
As he does, he feels a familiar shift in his mind. The shuttering of all other thoughts, the casting off of himself. There is a relief in letting go, allowing the future and past to drop away, to become someone without a hope or fear beyond this moment. Someone for whom there was only ever this fight and there will only ever be this fight.
It worries him, too, though, because every time it happens, he feels less and less in control of what he does when he’s outside himself. How many times now has he found himself standing over a body with blood on his clothes, blood on his face and his sword and his hands—and no memory of what happened?
It makes him think of the gancanagh power, of all the warnings he doesn’t seem able to heed anymore.
“Oak!” Hyacinthe shouts.
The prince lets his arm with the dagger in it sag. Somehow being yelled at by Hyacinthe brings him back to himself. Maybe it is just the familiarity of his scorn.
When he isn’t hit again, he lets himself lie there, breathing hard. The other guard stands.
“She wants you to sit down to supper with her,” Hyacinthe says. “I’m supposed to get you cleaned up.”
“Wren?” Oak’s sense of time is still very unclear. “I thought she was going to have me punished.”
Hyacinthe raises both his eyebrows. “Yes, Wren. Who else?”
The prince looks at the guards, who glare at him resentfully. If he’d been thinking more clearly, he would have realized he had no cause to try to murder them. They weren’t necessarily working for Valen or Bogdana, weren’t necessarily leading him to his doom. He probably would have figured that out sooner had his head not hurt so much. Had Bogdana not come and threatened him.
“No one mentioned supper,” Oak complains.
One of the guards, the one with the club, snorts. The other two wear scowls that remain unaltered.
Hyacinthe turns to all of them. “Find something else to do. I will escort the prince.”