He shrugs. Wren is not precisely a nickname, but he takes his sister’s point. His use of it indicates familiarity.
“Tiernan says that you’ve known her for years.” He can see in Jude’s face that she believes he took a foolish risk recruiting Wren to his quest, that he trusts too easily, and that’s why he often winds up with a knife in his back. It’s what he wants her to believe about him, what he has carefully made her believe, and yet it still stings.
“I met her when she came to Elfhame with the Court of Teeth. We snuck off and played together. I told you back then that she needed help.”
Jude’s dark eyes are intent. She’s listening to all the nuances of what he says, her mouth a hard line. “You snuck off with her during a war? When? Why?”
He shakes his head. “The night you and Vivi and Heather and Taryn were talking about serpents and curses and what to do about the bridle.”
His sister leans forward. “You could have been killed. You could have been killed by our father.”
Oak takes an oatcake and begins tearing it apart. “I saw Wren once or twice over the years, although I wasn’t sure what she thought of me. And then, this time . . .”
He sees the change in Jude’s face, the slight tightening of the muscles of her shoulders. But she’s still listening.
“I betrayed her,” Oak says. “And I don’t know if she’ll forgive me.”
“Well, she’s wearing your ring on her finger,” Jude says.
Oak takes one of the shredded pieces of oatcake and puts it into his mouth, tasting the lie he can’t tell.
His sister sighs. “And she came here. That has to be worth something.”
And she held me prisoner. But he isn’t sure that Jude will be at all moved by that as proof of Wren’s caring about him.
“So do you really intend to go through with this marriage? Is this real?”
“Yes,” Oak says, because none of his concerns are about his own willingness.
Jude doesn’t look happy. “Dad explained that she has a unique power.”
Oak nods. “She can unmake things. Magic, mostly, but not exclusively.”
“People?” Jude asks, although if Cardan can congratulate Wren on the death of Lady Nore, he clearly knows the answer, which means she knows, too.
Still, his sister wants to hear it from him. Maybe she just wants to make him admit it. He nods.
Jude raises a brow. “And that means what exactly?”
“Scattering our guts across the snow. Or whatever landscape she has to hand.”
“Lovely,” she says. “And are you going to tell me she’s our ally? That we’re safe from that power?”
He licks dry lips. No, he cannot say that. Nor does he want to confess that he’s worried Wren will take herself apart without meaning to.
Jude sighs again. “I am going to choose to trust you, brother mine. For now. Don’t make me regret it.”
CHAPTER
15
O
ak wakes in his familiar bedroom, among a familiar mess. Papers cover his dresser and desk. Books are piled in untidy stacks, shoved back into their shelves at odd angles. On his bedside table, a volume is open facedown, its spine cracked.
The prince has very poor book etiquette. It has been remarked on before by his tutors.
Tacked up on the wall is a collage of drawings and photographs and other artifacts from both worlds that Oak occupies. A bright orange ticket from a fair hangs beside a riddle on a piece of vellum found in the gullet of a fish. A napkin with the number of a boy he met at a movie theater written in ballpoint pen. A sticky note with three books he means to pick up from a library. A golden necklace in the shape of an acorn, given by his first mother to his second and then to him, attached with gum to the wall. A silver fox figurine with twine around its middle, twin to the one Wren has. A manga-style portrait of Oak done by Heather in markers. A pencil sketch for a formal portrait of the family that hangs in one of the halls.
It all is just as it was when he left. Looking around makes him feel as though time telescoped, as though he stepped out for only a few hours. As though he couldn’t have come back so changed.
Oak hears a sound from the sitting room outside his bedroom— part of the chambers that ought to be his alone. He comes fully awake, sliding out of bed, his hand going automatically to the dagger beneath his mattress.
That’s right where he left it as well.
He creeps along the wall, careful with his hooves against the stone floor. He peers through the gap between door and frame.
Madoc is picking over the remainder of the food on the table.
With a sigh of disgust—at himself, his father, and his apparent paranoia—he stabs the dagger into the wall and grabs a robe. By the time he comes out, Madoc is sitting on a couch and drinking cold, leftover coffee from the night before. An eye patch covers a quarter of his face, and a twisted black cane rests against a side table. The reminders of his father’s suffering in the Citadel temper Oak’s rage toward him but don’t rid him of it.
“You’re alive,” Madoc says with a grin.
“I might say much the same of you,” Oak points out, sitting across from his father. He’s in a dressing gown embroidered with a pattern of deer, half of them shot with arrows and bleeding red thread on the golden cloth. Everything in Elfhame feels surreal and sinister at the moment, and the dying deer on his robe aren’t helping. “And before you make any point about anything I’ve done that you believe was risky, I suggest you recall you did something riskier and far more foolish.”
“I am chastened,” Madoc says, and then his mouth lifts in a grin. “But I did get what I wanted.”
“She pardoned you?” Oak isn’t entirely surprised. His father is here in the palace, after all.
The redcap shakes his head. “Your sister rescinded the exile. For now.” He snorts, and Oak understands that’s all Jude could do without looking as though he was getting some kind of special favor out of her. But it was enough.
“And you’re done with scheming?” Oak asks him.
Madoc waves a hand in the air. “What would I need to scheme for when my children control everything I ever wanted for them?”
In other words, no, he’s not done.
Oak sighs.
“So let’s discuss your wedding. You know several factions here are enthusiastic about it.”
Oak’s eyebrows go up. People who want him out of the way?
“If you had a powerful queen, it would be more possible to support you against the current occupants of the thrones.”
Oak should have known better. “Since I haven’t made myself look as though I would make a competent ruler.”
“Some Folk prefer incompetence. Their desire is for their rulers to have enough power to hold the throne and enough naivete to listen to those who put them there. And your queen exudes both.”
“Oh?” Madoc holding forth about politics is comforting in its familiarity, but it bothers him that Madoc so quickly identified the factions at Court that were up for treachery. It worries Oak how Madoc might respond if Oak ever indicated he was interested in becoming High King. He’s concerned that the redcap might prize naivete in Oak as much as any conspirator.
“They will sidle up to your little queen tonight,” his father goes on. “They will introduce themselves and curry her favor. They will attempt to ingratiate themselves with her people and compliment her person. And they will gauge just how much she hates the High King and Queen. I hope her vows were ironclad.”
Oak can’t help recalling the way she told Randalin she might be able to break her vows like she broke a curse. Pull it apart like a cobweb. He doesn’t like thinking how intrigued his father would be by that information. “I better get dressed.”
“I’ll ring the servants,” Madoc says, reaching for his cane and pushing himself to his feet.
“I can manage,” Oak tells his father firmly.