There is a familiar roaring in Oak’s ears, and this time he gives in to it eagerly. His limbs move, but he feels as if he’s watching himself from far away.
He stabs into the stomach of the guard nearest to him, cutting up under his breastplate. The man screams. The thought that these soldiers believed he was on their side, believed he would be their High King, makes him even angrier. He turns, stabbing out. Someone else is screaming, someone he knows, urging him to stop. He doesn’t even slow. Instead, he knocks a bolt aside as two more guards crowd around him. He pulls a dagger from one of their sheaths and uses it to stab the other while he parries a blow.
Oak can feel his consciousness slipping away, falling deeper into the trance of the fight. And it is such a relief to let go, the way he does when he allows the right words to fall from his tongue in the right order.
The last thing the prince feels before his awareness slides entirely away is a knife in his back. The last thing he sees is his sword biting through the throat of an enemy.
He finds himself with his blade pressed against Jude’s. “Stop it,” she shouts.
He staggers back, letting the sword fall from his hands. There’s blood on her face, a fine spatter. Did he strike her?
“Oak,” she says, not yelling anymore, which is when he realizes she’s scared. He never wanted her to be scared of him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. Which is true. Or at least he believes it’s probably true. His hands have started shaking, but that’s normal. That happens a lot, after.
Does she still think he’s a traitor?
Jude whirls toward Madoc. “What did you do to him?”
The redcap looks baffied, his gaze on Oak speculative. “Me?”
Oak scans the room, the adrenaline of battle still running through his veins. The guards are dead. All of them, and messily. Randalin too. Oak isn’t the only one holding a bloody sword, either. Hyacinthe has one as well, standing near Nihuar as though they had very recently been back-to-back. Fala is bleeding. The Roach and the Bomb are beside each other, having appeared from the shadows, the Bomb’s fingers curled around a curved, nasty-looking knife. Even Cardan, using the throne to prop himself upright, has a dagger in his hand with red on the blade, although his other hand, holding his chest, is stained scarlet, too.
Cardan’s not dead. The relief almost makes Oak sag to his knees, except that Cardan is still bleeding and pale.
“What did you turn Oak into?” Jude demands of Madoc. “What did you do to my brother?”
“He’s good with a sword,” the redcap tells her. “What can I say?”
“I am losing patience almost as fast as I am losing blood,” says Cardan. “Just because your brother killed Randalin, it doesn’t mean we should forget he was at the center of this conspiracy—and that he is at the center of whatever Bogdana and Wren are planning. I suggest that we lock Oak up where he won’t be so tempting to traitors.”
The prince spots Oriana, her arms still protectively around Leander, holding him turned toward her skirts so he can’t see the slaughtered bodies. She’s wearing an anguished expression. The prince feels the overwhelming urge to go to her, to bury his face in her neck as he might have done as a child. To see if she would push him away.
You wanted them to know you, his mind supplies unhelpfully.
Wren once described what she was afraid of, if she revealed herself to her family. How she imagined their rejecting her once they saw her true face. Oak sympathized, but until this moment he didn’t understand the horror of having all the people who loved you best in the world look at you as though you were a stranger.
Charm them. The thought is not just unhelpful but wrong. And yet the temptation yawns in front of him. Make them look at you as they once did. Fix this before it is broken forever.
A shudder goes through him. “It’s not Dad’s fault or anyone else’s that I’m good at killing,” he makes himself say, meeting Jude’s gaze. “I chose this. And don’t you dare tell me that I shouldn’t have. Not after what you’ve done to yourself.”
Clearly, Jude was about to say something very much like that, because she chokes off the words. “You were supposed to—”
“What? Not make the same choices the rest of you did?”
“To have a childhood,” she shouts at him. “To let us protect you.”
“Ah,” says Cardan. “But he had loftier ambitions.”
Madoc’s gaze is impassive. Does he believe Oak to be a traitor? And if so, does he applaud the ambition or scorn the failure?
“I think it’s time to get off this isle.” Cardan’s trying to sound casual, but he’s unable to hide that he’s in pain.
The rain is still battering the tent. Taryn walks to the flap and looks outside. She shakes her head. “I am not sure we can get through the storm. The councilor was right about that, if nothing else.”
Jude turns to Hyacinthe. “And what was your role in all this?”
“As though I would give any confidences to you,” Hyacinthe says.
“Kill him,” orders Cardan.
“Hyacinthe fought on your side,” protests Oak.
Cardan gives an exhausted sigh and waves one lace-cuffed hand. “Very well, truss up Hyacinthe. Find the girl and the hag and kill them, at least. And I want the prince locked up until we sort this out. Lock up Tiernan, too, if he ever comes back.”
I’m sorry, Wren said before she left him in the Milkwood.
She warned him not to trust her, and then she betrayed him. She conspired with Randalin and Bogdana. She allowed Oak to delude himself into believing that someone was controlling her, when she had all the power.
It was clever, to keep him chasing shadows.
That had been the part of the puzzle he wasn’t able to solve—what any of them could have over her, who could unmake them all. The answer should have been obvious, only he didn’t want to believe it. They had nothing over her.
A mystery with a void at its center.
“Shoot her on sight,” Jude says, as though it’s going to be that simple.
“Shoot her? She’ll unmake the arrows,” Oak says.
Jude raises her brows. “All the arrows?”
“Poison?” his sister asks.
The prince sighs. “Maybe.” If he wasn’t so busy drinking all the poison in sight, he might know.
“We’ll find her weakness,” his sister assures him. “And we will bring her down.”
“No,” says Oak.
“Another protestation of her innocence? Or yours?” asks Cardan in a silky voice, sounding like the boy Taryn and Jude used to hate, the one who Hyacinthe wouldn’t believe was any different from Dain. The one who ripped the wings off pixies’ backs and made his sister cry.
“I make no defense of myself,” Oak says, leaning down to pick up his sword from the floor. “This is my fault. And my responsibility.”
“What are you doing?” Jude asks.
“I am going to be the one to end this,” Oak says. “And you will have to kill me to stop me.”
“I’m going with you,” Hyacinthe tells him. “For Tiernan.”
The prince nods. Hyacinthe crosses the floor to stand against the prince’s back. As one, they move toward the door, blades bared.
Jude doesn’t order anyone to block their way. Doesn’t confront Oak herself. But in her eyes, he can tell she believes that her little brother— the one she loves and would do anything to protect—is already dead.
CHAPTER
21
O
ak and Hyacinthe plunge into a storm of terrifying ferocity. The fog is so thick the prince can’t even see the shore of Insmire, and the waves have become towering things, beating against the shoreline, biting off rocks and sand.
Bogdana has sealed off Insear from aid, keeping Elfhame’s military and all else who would help them at bay. And now the storm hag waits with Wren for some signal that the royal family is dead.