Oak raises a single eyebrow, a trick he is almost sure he stole from Cardan. “I don’t recall mentioning Hyacinthe at all.”
Not unexpectedly, that irritates Tiernan even more. “He betrayed you, helped imprison you. And struck you. He attempted to kill the High King. You ought to dismiss me from your service for how I feel about him, not inquire about it as though it were perfectly normal.”
“But if I don’t inquire, how will I know enough to dismiss you from my service?” Oak grins, feeling a bit lighter. Tiernan said feel, not felt. Maybe Oak’s romance is doomed, but that doesn’t mean someone else’s can’t succeed.
Tiernan gives him a look.
Oak laughs. “If anyone wants to torture you, all they need to do is make you talk about your feelings.”
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.
“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.