Oh, he’s going to murder the spy. The Ghost thinks he knows what Oak can do, but he isn’t aware of his other lessons, from Madoc. Garrett doesn’t know what Oak has become under his father’s tutelage. Doesn’t know how many people he’s already slain.
The prince urges Jack north through the brambles, past the columns of pale trees. Finally, he comes upon a clearing. The kelpie stops short. For a moment, Oak doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.
There, in a tangle of vines, lies a body.
Oak slides down from the kelpie’s back to draw closer. The man’s mouth is stained purple. His eyes are open, staring up at the late afternoon sky as though lost in contemplation of the clouds.
“Garrett?” Oak says, leaning down to shake him.
The Ghost does not move. He does not even blink.
The prince’s fingers close on his shoulder. The spy’s body is hard beneath his hand, more like fossilized wood than flesh.
Dead. The man who murdered his mother. The spy who had trained him to move quietly, to wait. Who bounced Leander on his shoulders. Taryn’s lover. Jude’s friend.
Dead. Impossibly dead.
Which means that Garrett didn’t poison Oak. He shared his poisoned wine, all unknowing.
Could Hyacinthe have done this? He might have thought dosing the Ghost with what killed Liriope to be fitting—a symmetry of a different kind. And if he knew that Oak wouldn’t die from it, he wouldn’t be kind enough to stop him from drinking a portion of the blusher mushroom. He wouldn’t care if Oak suffered a little.
But if it wasn’t Hyacinthe, then it came down to the question of what the Ghost had learned. What he wanted to tell Oak. What they needed to go to Jude with. What couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER
20
G
uards and courtiers thunder up all around Oak. Did he cry out? Did Jack? The kelpie is standing beside the prince now, but he doesn’t remember when Jack stopped being a horse. The noise and confusion mirror Oak’s thoughts. People are shouting at one another, making Oak dizzy.
Or maybe that’s the blusher mushroom still slowing his blood.
Jack is insisting they found the Ghost like this and someone is saying how horrifying and a lot of other meaningless words that blend together in Oak’s mind.
Taryn is screaming, a high keening sound. She’s on her knees beside the spy, shaking him. When she looks up at Oak, her gaze is so full of grief and accusation that he has to look away.
I hated him, Oak thinks. But he’s not even sure that’s true. He never knew Liriope, and he knew Garrett. I should have hated him. I wanted to hate him.
He didn’t kill him, though.
He didn’t kill him, but he might have. He could have. Could he have?
Jude moves to Taryn’s side, one hand going to her twin’s shoulders. Fingers pressing reassuringly.
The Roach leans down to check the body, and when one of the guards tries to stop him, it’s Cardan who tells them to let him be. Oak didn’t even realize the Roach was at the hunt.
Taryn lies down beside Garrett’s corpse, her hair shrouding his face. One of her tears has pooled in the corner of his eye, wetting his lash.
Cardan kneels beside her, his hand going to Garrett’s chest. Taryn looks up at him.
“What are you doing?” She doesn’t sound happy, but they’ve never really gotten along.
“Blusher mushroom slows the body,” he says, his gaze Bickering to the Roach, who almost certainly taught him that. “But it slows it slowly.”
“Do you mean he’s not dead?” she asks.
“Is there something to be done?” Jude asks at almost the same time.
“Not in the way you mean,” says Cardan, answering his wife’s question and not Taryn’s. He turns to Randalin and the crowd, then waves his beringed hand exaggeratedly. “Disperse. Go on.”
Courtiers step away, heading to their horses, a buzz of rumors in the air. The Minister of Keys remains, glowering, standing beside Oriana. A few more Folk seem to believe this order doesn’t apply to them. The Roach stays, too, but he’s practically family.
Oak forces himself to scoot back, bracing against the trunk of a tree. For him, it was not much blusher mushroom, but he still feels the numbness tingling through his fingers and toes. Right now, he isn’t certain whether he would fall back down if he tried to stand.
Wren crosses to his side. Bogdana stands at the edge of the clearing, half hidden by shadows.
“You’re going to have to move as well,” Cardan tells Taryn.
“What are you going to do to him?” she asks, shielding his body as though to protect it from the High King.
Cardan raises his eyebrows. “Let’s just see if it works.”
“Taryn,” Jude says, reaching for her sister’s hand and pulling her to her feet. “There isn’t time.”
Cardan closes his gold-rimmed eyes and, for all his extravagance, right then he looks like one of the paintings of the High Kings of old, somehow moved into the realm of myth.
All around them, wildflowers sprout, uncurling from buds. Trees shiver, sending down pale leaves. Brambles coil into unlikely shapes. There is a buzz of bees in the air, and then from the earth, roots rise, turning into the sturdy trunk of a tree around Garrett’s body.
Taryn makes a sharp sound. The Roach lets out a breath, awe in his eyes. Oak feels it, too.
Bark wraps around Garrett and branches unfold, budding with leaves and fragrant blossoms the lilac of Taryn’s clothing. A tree, unlike all that grow in the Milkwood, rises from the ground, shrouding the Ghost’s body. Its limbs reach toward the sky, petals raining down around them.
Where Garrett stood, there is only the tree.
The High King opens his eyes, letting out a ragged breath. The courtiers that remained have taken several steps back. They are slackjawed in surprise, perhaps having forgotten his command of the land beneath their feet.
“Will that—” Jude begins, her eyes shining.
“I thought that if the poison makes every part of him slow, then I could turn him into something that could live like that,” says Cardan with a shudder. “But I don’t know that it will save him.”
“Will he be like this forever?” Taryn asks, her voice cracking a little. “Alive but imprisoned? Dying but not dead?”
“I don’t know,” Cardan says again, in a raw way that makes Oak think of being trapped in the royal bedchamber and overhearing him and Jude together. It’s Cardan’s real voice, the one he uses when he’s not performing.
Taryn runs her hand over the rough bark, her tears coming on a sob. “He is still lost to me. He is still gone. And who knows if he’s suffering?”
Oak feels Wren’s hand in his, her fingers cool. “Come,” she says, and at her tug, he finally rises. He’s a little unsteady on his hooves, and she narrows her eyes at him. She’s seen him poisoned before.
“We will discover who did this,” Jude is telling her twin, voice firm. “We will punish them, I promise you that.”
“Don’t we know already?” Taryn says through tears, her voice breaking on the words. Her gaze goes to Wren. “I saw her by his horse.”
“Wren had nothing to do with this,” Oak snaps, squeezing Wren’s fingers. “What possible motive could she have?”
“Queen Suren wants to destroy Elfhame,” one of the remaining courtiers interjects. “Just as her mother did.”
Jude does not speak, but Oak can tell she isn’t unmoved by the argument that Wren may have had a hand in this. And to make it worse, Wren denies none of it. She says nothing. She just listens to their accusations.
Deny it, he wants to tell her. But what if she can’t?
Just then, a cry fills the air. A vulture circles once to land heavily on Wren’s shoulder. The storm hag.
“Prince?” Tiernan asks Oak, eyeing the vulture with misgiving.
“We should quit this place,” says Randalin. “Our milling about cannot do anything in the way of helping.”
The Bomb glares at everyone. “What did he eat or drink? We should isolate the poison.”
“It was in the mead,” Oak says.
The Bomb turns toward him, white hair a nimbus around her heart-shaped face. “How do you know that?”
The prince doesn’t want to say this part out loud, not in front of even a small crowd, but he can’t see a way out, either. “I drank some.”
There is a ripple of shock through the remaining courtiers.