Now I am paying attention to what he doesn’t say. “Did she tell you she wanted to help him?”

  “No,” he admits slowly.

  “And does she want you to help him?”

  He’s caught and knows it. “Jude didn’t know what I was planning, but if I were to guess how she’s feeling right now—I’d go with enraged. But Madoc would have come for us if we were the ones that were trapped.”

  I’ve seen the High Queen angry, and no matter how she loves him, I am not sure she will forgive choosing their father over her. When she punishes the prince, though Oak believes otherwise, she will very probably punish those who helped him, too.

  But when he reaches for my hand, I take it and feel the nervous, awful pleasure of his fingers threading through mine. “Trust me, Wren,” he says. “Help me.”

  Love-talker.

  Schemer.

  My gaze goes to the scratches on his cheek, still raw-looking. My doing, for which he has not rebuked me. However secretive his nature, however foolish his reasons for loving his father, I like that he does. “I’ll come with you,” I say. “For now.”

  “I’m glad.” The prince looks out at the hall, at the Gentry of the Court of Moths, at the dances and the revelry. Then he gives me his quicksilver smile, the kind that makes me feel as though we are friends conspiring together. “Since you’re in a benevolent mood, perhaps you’ll also dance with me.”

  My surprise must be evident. “Why?”

  He grins. “To celebrate you continuing with this quest. Because we’re at a party. So that Queen Annet believes we’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Do we have something to hide?” I ask.

  He smiles wider, giving me a tug toward the revelers. “Always.”

  I hesitate, but there is a part of me that wants to be convinced. “I don’t know how.”

  “I have been trained in all the arts of the courtier,” he says. “Let me show you.”

  I allow him to lead me into the crowd. Instead of going into one of the circle dances, though, he steers me to one side of them, so that we have room to practice. Turns me in his arms and shows me a movement, waiting for me to mirror it.

  “Do you ever think about what it would be like to be a queen again?” he whispers against my cheek as we practice the steps.

  I pull away to glare at him.

  He holds up his hands in surrender. “It wasn’t meant to be a trick question.”

  “You’re the one that’s going to rule,” I remind him.

  “No,” he says, watching the other dancers. “I don’t think I will.”

  I suppose he’s been avoiding the throne for most of his life. I think of cowering beneath the bed in his room during the Battle of the Serpent and shove the memory from my mind. I don’t want to think about back then. Just as I do not want to think about how, despite Hyacinthe’s warnings, I am ready to eat out of the prince’s hand as tamely as a dove.

  It’s too easy. I’m hungry for kindness. Hungry for attention. I want and want and want.

  “We ought to eat something,” I say. “We have a long journey ahead of us.”

  Although he must know it is an excuse, he releases me from his arms.

  We wend through the crowd to a banquet table laden with delicacies. Oak takes a tart filled with golden faerie fruit and cuts it in half, giving a portion to me. Though I was the one who suggested food, I realize how hungry I am only after taking the first bite. Self-consciously, I pour a glass of water from the pitcher set out to mix with the wine and gulp that down.

  Oak pours himself wine, undiluted.

  “Will you tell me how you came to be living…” He stops, as if trying to find the words. “As you were.”

  I remember the care I’d given that he not know. How could I explain the way time seemed to slip from my fingers, the way I became incrementally more detached, more unable to reach out a hand to take anything I wanted? I will not allow him to pity me any more than he does.

  “You could have come to see me,” he says. “If you needed something.”

  I laugh at that. “You?”

  He frowns down at me with his amber eyes. “Why not?”

  The enormity of the reasons catches in my mouth. He’s a prince of Elfhame, and I am the disgraced child of traitors. He befriends everyone, from the troll guard at the entrance to all those Tiernan mentioned back in the High Court, while I have spent years alone in the woods. But most of all, because he could have asked his sister to allow me to stay on the Shifting Isles and didn’t.

  “Perhaps I wanted to save that favor you still owe me,” I say.

  He laughs at that. Oak liking me is as silly as the sun liking a storm, but that doesn’t stop my desire for it.

  Me, with my sharp teeth and chilly skin. It’s absurd. It’s grotesque.

  And yet, the way he looks at me, it almost seems possible. I imagine that’s his plan. He wants me to be charmed by him so that I will stay by his side and do what he asks of me. No doubt he believes that a little attention and a few smiles will be all it requires of him. He expects me to be as malleable as one of the ladies of the Court.

  So much of me wants to give in and pretend with him that it makes me hot with rage.

  If he wants to charm me, the least I can do is make it cost him. I won’t settle for smiles and a dance. I am going to call his bluff. I am going to prove to myself—prove to us both—that his flirtation isn’t sincere. I lean toward him, expecting him to unconsciously move away. To be repulsed. But he only watches me curiously.

  As I draw closer, his eyes widen a little.

  “Wren,” he whispers. I am not sure if it’s a warning or not. I hate that I don’t know.

  At every moment, I expect him to flinch or pull back as I put one hand on his shoulder, then go up on my toes, and kiss him.

  This is ridiculous. Kissing him is profane. It gives me all the horrible satisfaction of smashing a crystal goblet.

  It’s quick. Just the press of my dry mouth against his lips. A brief sense of softness, the warmth of breath, and then I pull away, my heart thrumming with fear, with the expectation that he will be disgusted.

  With the certainty that I have well and truly punished him for trying to flirt with me.

  The angry, feral part of me feels so close to the surface that I can almost scent its blood-clotted fur. I want to lick the scratches I made.

  He doesn’t look alarmed, though. He’s studying my face, as though he’s trying to work something out.

  After a moment, his eyes close, pale lashes against his cheek, and he dips forward to press his mouth to mine again. He goes slower, one of his hands cupping my head. A shivery feeling courses down my spine, a flush coming up on my skin.

  When he draws back, he is not wearing his usual complicated smile. Instead, he looks as though someone just slapped him. I wonder if a kiss from me is like being clawed on the cheek.

  Did he force himself to go through with it? For the sake of keeping me on this quest? For the sake of his father and his plans?

  I thought to punish him, but all I have succeeded in doing is punishing myself.

  I take a breath and let it out slowly. My gaze slides from his, and I spot Tiernan, coming toward us. I am not certain how much he saw, but I do not want to hear anything he might have to say just now. “Your pardon,” I tell Oak. “But I’ve had enough dancing. I think I will take my leave.”

  The corner of his mouth quirks. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

  I hate the way those words make my skin flush.

  I head into the crowd, hoping he will lose sight of me. Cursing myself for being foolish. Cursing him for addling my thoughts.

  As my eyes slide across the dancers, I know I must talk to Hyacinthe.

  As long as everyone is well behaved, I will return him anon. That was what Queen Annet said, but it was possible we had already failed at being well behaved. That coming here against the wishes of the High Queen might be excuse enough to keep him locked away.

  Imprisoned as he is, though, I can go and speak with him right now with no one the wiser. He can give me his warning in full, can tell me everything he knows.

  I scoop up a handful of roasted chestnuts and eat them slowly, dropping peels onto the floor as I move toward an exit. A cat-faced faerie tears at a piece of raw meat on a silver platter. A two-headed ogre drinks from a goblet that looks, pinched between his fingers, small enough to belong to a doll.

  I aim a look in Oak’s direction. He’s being pulled into one of the dances by a laughing girl with golden hair and deer antlers. I imagine he will swiftly forget our kiss in her arms. And if the thought makes my stomach hurt, that only makes me think of getting to Hyacinthe again.

  A mortal man leaps up onto a table near me, hair in thin locs. He has an expressive face and a rangy vulnerability that draws the eye. Pushing his glasses up higher onto his nose, he begins to play a fiddle.

  The song he sings is of lost places and homes so far away that they are no longer home. He sings of love so intense it is indistinguishable from hate, and chains that are like riddles of old, no longer holding him, and yet unbroken.

  Automatically, I look for ensorcellment, but there is none. He seems here of his own volition, although I dread to think how mistaken he may be in his audience. Still, Queen Annet says she is a fair host. So long as he keeps to the baroque rules of Faerie, he might find himself back in his bed in the morning, his pockets full of gold.

  Of course, no one will tell him the rules, so he won’t know if he breaks one.

  Turning away at that thought, I move the rest of the way through the crowd as fast as I can.

  I pass bored guards, who throw hungry looks in my direction. They do not follow me, though, either because they are forbidden from leaving their post or because I look too stringy to make much of a meal.

  Once they are out of sight, I begin to run. I veer through the three turns to where Lupine spoke of the gem-encrusted rooms near the prisons so fast that I nearly trip.

  My thoughts are racing as fast as my feet. I kissed two people before Oak. There was the boy who liked fires and, later, one of the treefolk. Neither of those kisses felt quite as doomed as the one I shared with the prince, and they had been doomed enough.

  This is the problem with living by instinct. I don’t think.

  The lower level has a damp, mineral smell. I hear guards ahead, so I creep carefully to the bend in the corridor and peer around it. The enormous, copper-banded door they guard is almost certainly to the prisons, as it is carved with the words Let Suffering Ennoble. One is a knight with hair the color of red roses. She seems to be losing a game of dice to a snickering, large-eared bauchan. Both wear armor. She has a long sword at her hip, while his is curved and strapped to his back.

  I am used to sliding into and out of a forest without being observed, but I have little experience in the sort of fast-talking trickery that might get me past guards. I draw myself up, though, and hope that my tongue does not betray me.

  Then I feel a tap on the shoulder. Spinning, swallowing a scream, I come face-to-face with Jack of the Lakes.

  “I can guess what you’re about,” he says, looking maliciously pleased, like someone who has ferreted out a delicious bit of gossip. “You intend to free Hyacinthe.”

  “I just want to ask him some questions,” I say.

  “So you don’t want to break him out of the prisons?” His green eyes are sly.

  I’d like to deny that, but I cannot. Like all the Folk, my tongue seizes up when I start to lie, and unlike Oak, no clever deception comes easily to my lips. Just because I want to, though, it doesn’t mean I will.

  “Oooooooh,” says Jack, correctly interpreting my silence for a confession. “Is he your lover? Is this a ballad we’re in?”

  “A murder ballad maybe,” I growl.

  “No doubt, by the end,” he says. “I wonder who will survive to compose it.”

  “Have you come to gloat?” I ask, frustrated. “To stop me?” I am not sure how powerful a kelpie is out of the water and in the shape of a man.

  “To surprise you,” he says. “Aren’t surprises wonderful?”

  I grind my teeth but say nothing for a long moment. I may not be able to charm him with honey-mouthed words, but I understand resentment. “It must gall you, the way Tiernan talked to you.”

  Jack might be a merry wight, but I bet he’s also a petty one.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t bother you so much to see him looking foolish in front of the prince? And if their prisoner was gone, the one noble knight who checked on him last would look very foolish indeed.”

  I don’t plan on freeing Hyacinthe. I don’t even think I can. Still, Jack doesn’t need to know that. I am only playing into what he thinks about me.

  He considers my words, a smile growing on his mouth. “What if I were to make a loud noise? Perhaps the guards would abandon their posts to follow. What would you give me to make the attempt?”

  “What do you want?” I ask, digging in my pockets. I take out the swan-shaped scissors I stole from Habetrot. “These are pretty.”

  “Put them away,” he scoffs. “It would be an insult to be stabbed by them.”

  “Then do not court that fate,” I growl softly, rummaging a bit more, past Bogdana’s note and the motel matchbook. I couldn’t fit much in the pockets of my dress, and it is not as though I had much in the first place. But then my fingers close on the silver fox with the peridot eyes.

  I take it out and hold it on my palm, reluctant to show it to him.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  I open my hand. “One of only three. A game piece of the Gentry.” I am proud of my answer, which is both true and yet missing the most important detail. I am learning how to speak like them.

  “You didn’t steal it?” he asks, perhaps thinking of how disheveled I was when he first met me.

  “It’s mine,” I tell him. “No one would dispute that.”

  He plucks it up between two fingers. “Very well. Now it shall be mine, I suppose, since you have nothing finer. And in return I will lead the guards on a merry chase.”

  I clench my hand to force myself not to snatch the little fox back. He sees the gesture and smiles. I can tell he likes the trinket better now that he knows I didn’t want to give it to him.

  “On my signal,” he says. “Hide!”

  “Wait,” I caution, but he is already moving.

  The hall is lit with orbs that glow a sickly green, giving the stone walls a mossy cast. The orbs are spaced far enough apart that it is possible for me to push myself into a bend of the corridor and be concealed by darkness, so long as no one looks too closely.

  I hold my breath. I hear the pelting of hoofbeats, then a great and foolish whooping accompanied by shouts.

  “That’s my sword!” the rose-haired knight yells, and then I see Jack of the Lakes streak by, running hell-for-leather in his horse form, laughing and gripping a bright silver sword in his teeth.

  The knight comes into view. “When I catch you, I am going to turn you inside out, like a toad!” she shouts as she gives chase. The bauchan follows at her heels, his blade drawn.

  When they are far enough, I slip out of the dark.

  I head swiftly to the copper-banded door to the prisons. The rocks around the door are studded with crystals that gleam bright against the dull gray stone.

  I turn the latch and walk inside. All the rooms are like chambers of a cave, with massive stalagmites and stalactites functioning as bars. It appears not unlike looking at rows and rows of mouths with rows and rows of awful teeth.

  Figures move in some of the cells, shifting to blink at me from the gloom within.

  A clawed hand darts out, grabbing for my arm. I jump out of its reach, jerking the cloth of my dress from its grip. I step on, shuddering.

  Most of the chambers are empty, but in one I see a merrow. The floor of his cell is wet, but not enough for him to be comfortable. His scales have grown dull and dry. He watches me with eyes that are pale all the way through, the pupils barely discernible from the irises or scleras.

  There is a scuffing sound from the other side, and I see a girl tossing a piece of rock into the air and catching it. For a moment, I think I am looking at a glamour, but a moment later I realize that she’s actually human.

  She looks as though she might be around my age, with hair the color of straw. There’s a bruise on her cheek. “Can I have some water? Will you tell me how much longer I have to be here?” Her voice trembles.

  I follow her gaze to the wooden tub in the corner of the room, a copper ladle hanging off one side, its body streaked with verdigris. She pushes a ceramic bowl toward the bars and looks up at me plaintively.

  “Is a man with a single wing for an arm here?” I ask.

  The human comes eagerly to her feet. “You’re not one of the guards.”

  I dip the ladle into the tub and haul up some water, then pour it into her bowl. Across the way, the merrow makes a low moan. I dip the ladle again and splash him.

  “The winged guy?” the human whispers. “He’s down there.” She points toward the end of the corridor. “See? I can be helpful. Let me out, and I could be of service to you.”

  It is tragic that she has only me to beseech. Does she not see my predator’s teeth? How afraid must she already be for me to seem like a possible ally?

  I splash the merrow again. With a sigh, he sinks down to the floor, gills flexing.

  I need to see Hyacinthe, but looking at the girl, I cannot stop myself from thinking of Bex, my unsister. Imagining her in a place like this, with no one to help her and no way out.

  “How did you come to be here?” I ask, knowing that more information is only going to make it harder to walk away.

  “My boyfriend,” she says. “He was taken. I met a creature, and he told me I could win Dario back if I threatened to dig down into their—” She stops, possibly at the remembrance that I am one of them.

  I nod, though, and that seems enough to get her speaking again. “I got a shovel and came out to the haunted hill, where everyone says weird things happen.”

  While she talks, I evaluate the stalagmites and stalactites of her prison. Perhaps one could be cracked if someone very strong swung something very heavy at it, but since these prisons must have been constructed to hold even ogres, there’s no way I would be able to do it.