“Give me three guesses,” he says, though he is far from certain he can succeed at this. “Three guesses to where you put her, and if I’m right, you give her to me.”
“And if you fail?” Her eyes glitter. He knows she is intrigued.
“Then I will return here at the new moon and serve for a year and a day. I will wash your floors. I will scour your cauldron and trim your toenails. So long as it harms no one, I will do whatever you ask as a servant in your household.”
He can feel the air shift around him, feel the rightness of these words. He isn’t using his charm in the usual way, but he allows himself to feel the contortions that power urges on him, the way it wants him to reshape himself for Mother Marrow. The gancanagh part of him knows that she will believe herself to be more wily than he, that her pride will urge her to take the bet.
“Whatever I ask of you, Prince of Elfhame?” Her grin is wide and delighted at the anticipation of his humiliation.
“So long as I guess wrong three times,” he says.
“Then guess away,” she says. “For all you know, I’ve turned her into the lid on a pot.”
“I would feel very stupid if I didn’t guess that first, then,” Oak says.
Mother Marrow looks extremely pleased. “Wrong.”
Two guesses. He’s good at games, but it’s hard to think when it feels as though there’s no time left, when he can hear the storm in the background and the rattling of the . . .
He thinks of the white walnut cottage and Tiernan. And he recalls who gave Wren that gift. Getting to his feet, Oak walks to the cabinet. “She’s trapped in one of the nuts.”
Rage washes across Mother Marrow’s face briefly, only to be replaced by a smile. “Very good, prince,” she says. “Now tell me which one.”
There has to be a half dozen in the bowl. “I guessed correctly,” Oak protests. “I got the answer.”
“Did you?” she says. “That would be like saying I turned her into a flower and not being sure if it was a rose or a tulip. Choose. If you’re wrong, you lose.”
He opens the cabinet, takes out the bowl, then goes to her kitchen for a knife.
“What are you doing?” she shouts. “Stop that!”
He selects a filbert and jams the point of the blade into the seam. It bursts open, scattering an array of dresses around the room, each in a different diaphanous color. They drift gently to the floor.
“Put that one down,” she says as he reaches for a hazelnut. “Immediately.”
“Will you give me the girl?” Oak demands. “Because I don’t need you to get her out now. I will open every one of these and destroy them in the process.”
“Foolish boy!” Mother Marrow says, then intones:
Be trapped inside with no escape
Your fate is cast in acorn shape
In the shadows, you’ ll dwell and wait
The world seems to grow larger and smaller at the same time. Darkness rushes up and over him. He does, in fact, feel quite foolish. And very disoriented.
Inside of the nut are curved walls, polished to a high mahogany-like shine. The floor is covered in straw. Thin light seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once.
He hears a sharp gasp from behind him. His hand goes automatically to his sword as he turns, and he has to force himself not to draw it from the rag sheath.
A mortal girl stands among baskets and barrels and jars, against the curved wall of her prison. In the dim glow, her skin is the pale brown of early fall leaves, and she wears a white puffer coat, which swallows her up. Her arms are crossed over each other as though she’s holding herself for comfort or warmth or to keep herself from coming apart.
“Don’t scream,” Oak says, holding up his hands to show that they’re empty.
“Who are you, and why are you here?” the girl asks.
Oak takes a breath and tries to think of what he ought to say. He doesn’t want to frighten her, but he can see from the way she’s looking at his hooves and horns that it’s possible that ship has already sailed. “I’d like to believe that we’re going to be friends,” he says. “If you tell me who you are, I will do the same.”
The mortal girl hesitates. “There was a witch, and she brought me here to see my sister. But I haven’t seen her yet. The witch says she’s in trouble.”
“A witch . . . ,” he echoes. He wonders how aware the girl has been of the passage of time. “You’re Wren’s sister, Bex?”
“Bex, yes.” A small smile pulls at her mouth. “You know Wren?”
“Since we were quite young,” he says, and Bex relaxes a little. “Do you know what she is? What I am?”
“Faeries.” Monsters, her expression says. “I keep rowan on me at all times. And iron.”
When Oak was a child, living in the mortal world with his oldest sister, Vivi, he was super excited to show her girlfriend, Heather, magic. He took his glamour off and was crushed when she looked at him in horror, as though he wasn’t the same little boy she took to the park or tickled. He thought of the news as a surprise present, but it turned out to be a jump scare.
He didn’t realize then how vulnerable a mortal in Faerie can be. He should have, though, living with two mortal sisters. He should have, but he didn’t.
“That’s good,” he says, thinking of the burn of the iron bars in the Citadel. “Rowan to break spells, and iron to burn us.”
“Your turn,” Bex says. “Who are you?”
“Oak,” he says.
“The prince,” Bex says flatly, all the friendliness gone from her voice.
He nods.
She takes two steps forward and spits at his feet. “The witch told me about you,” Bex says. “That you steal hearts, and you were going to steal my sister’s. That if I ever saw you, I ought to run.”
Used to people liking him, or at least used to having to court dislike, Oak is a little stunned. “I would never—” he begins, but she’s already moving across the room, flattening herself against the curved wall as though he’s going to come after her.
There’s a sound in the distance, loud and sharp. The walls shake.
“What’s that?” she demands, stumbling.
“My friends,” Oak says. “I hope.”
Bright light flashes, and the prison tilts to one side. Bex is thrown against him, and then they’re both on the floor of Mother Marrow’s cottage.
Hyacinthe has a crossbow pointed at Mother Marrow. The window Oak unlatched is open, and Jack is inside. The kelpie stoops down to lift an acorn, unbroken.
Mother Marrow glowers. “A bad-mannered lot,” she grouses.
“You found her!” says Jack. “And what a toothsome morsel—I mean mortal.”
Bex jumps up and pulls an antique-looking wrench from her back pocket—that must be the iron to which she was referring. She appears to be considering hitting the kelpie over the head with it.
In two strides, Oak is across the room. He claps his hand against the girl’s mouth hard enough for her teeth to press against his palm.
“Listen to me,” he says, feeling like a bully almost certainly because he was behaving like one. “I am not going to hurt Wren. Or you. But I don’t have time to fight you, nor do I have time to chase you if you run.”
She struggles against him, kicking.
He leans down and whispers in her ear, “I am here for Wren’s sake, and I am going to take you to her. And if you try to get away again, remember this—the easiest way to make you behave would be to make you love me, and you don’t want that.”
She must really not, because she goes slack in his arms.
He takes his hand from her mouth, and she pulls away but doesn’t scream. Instead, she studies him, breathing hard.
“I should have known something was wrong when you knew my name,” Bex says. “Wren would have never told you that. She says that if you know my name, it would give you power over me.”
He gives a surprised laugh. “I wish,” he says, then winces. He should have found a better way to phrase that, one that didn’t make him sound quite so much like an actual monster. But there is little for him to do but forge on. “You need someone’s full name, their true name. Mortals don’t have those. Not in the way that we do.”