“What will you give me if I do, Prince of Elfhame?”

  He flinched at the title. “The pleasure of my company?”

  “Why?” Though it was not a friendly question, I was honestly puzzled.

  He was a long time in answering. “Because you’re the only person I know who was ever a royal, like me.”

  “Not like you,” I called.

  “You ran away,” he said. “I want to run away.”

  I shifted into a more comfortable position. It wasn’t that I’d run. I hadn’t had anywhere else but here to go. My fingers plucked at a piece of grass. He had everything, didn’t he? “Why?” I asked again.

  “Because I am tired of people trying to assassinate me.”

  “I would have thought they’d prefer you on the throne to your sister.” Killing him didn’t seem as though it would accomplish anything useful to anyone. He was replaceable. If Jude wanted another heir, she could have a baby. She was human; she could probably have a lot of babies.

  He pressed the toe of his hoof into the dirt, digging restlessly at the edge of a root. “Well, some people want to protect Cardan because they believe that Jude means to murder him and think my not being around would discourage it. Others believe that eliminating me is a good first step to eliminating her.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Can’t you just come out so we can talk?” The prince turned, frowning, looking for me in the trees and shrubs.

  “You don’t need to see me for that,” I told him.

  “Fine.” He sat among the leaves and moss, balancing his cheek on a bent knee. “Someone tried to kill me. Again. Poison. Again. Someone else tried to recruit me into a scheme where we would kill my sister and Cardan, so I could rule in their place. When I told them no, they tried to kill me. With a knife, that time.”

  “A poisoned knife?”

  He laughed. “No, just a regular one. But it hurt.”

  I sucked in a breath. When he said there had been attempts, I assumed that meant they’d been prevented in some way, not that he merely hadn’t died.

  He went on. “So I am going to run away from Faerie. Like you.”

  That’s not how I’d thought of myself, as a runaway. I was someone with nowhere to go. Waiting until I was older. Or less afraid. Or more powerful. “The Prince of Elfhame can’t up and disappear.”

  “They’d probably be happier if he did,” he told me. “I’m the reason my father is in exile. The reason my mother married him in the first place. My one sister and her girlfriend had to take care of me when I was little, even though they were barely more than kids themselves. My other sister almost got killed lots of times to keep me safe. Things will be easier without me around. They’ll see that.”

  “They won’t,” I told him, trying to ignore the intense surge of envy that came with knowing he would be missed.

  “Let me stay in your woods with you,” he said with a huff of breath.

  I imagined it. Having him share tea with me and Mr. Fox. I could show him the places to pick the sweetest blackberries. We would eat burdock and red clover and parasol mushrooms. At night we would lie on our backs and whisper together. He would tell me about the constellations, about theories of magic, and the plots of television shows he’d seen while in the mortal world. I would tell him all the secret thoughts of my heart.

  For a moment, it seemed possible.

  But eventually they would come for him, the way that Lady Nore and Lord Jarel came for me. If he was lucky, it would be his sister’s guards dragging him back to Elfhame. If he wasn’t, it would be a knife in the dark from one of his enemies.

  He did not belong here, sleeping in dirt. Scrabbling out an existence at the very edges of things.

  “No,” I made myself tell him. “Go home.”

  I could see the hurt in his face. The honest confusion that came with unexpected pain.

  “Why?” he asked, sounding so lost that I wanted to snatch back my words.

  “When you found me tied to that stake, I thought about hurting you,” I told him, hating myself. “You are not my friend.”

  I do not want you here. Those are the words I ought to have said, but couldn’t, because they would be a lie.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well.”

  I let out a breath. “You can stay the night,” I blurted out, unable to resist that temptation. “Tomorrow, you go home. If you don’t, I’ll use the last favor you owe me from our game to force you.”

  “What if I go and come back again?” he asked, trying to mask his hurt.

  “You won’t.” When he got home, his sisters and his mother would be waiting. They would have worried when they couldn’t find him. They’d make him promise never to do anything like that again. “You have too much honor.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Stay where you are a moment,” I told him, and crept off through the grass.

  I had him there with me for one night, after all. And while I didn’t think he was my friend, it didn’t mean I couldn’t be his. I brought him a cup of tea, hot and fresh. Set it down on a nearby rock, with leaves beside it for a plate, piled with blackberries.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, prince?” I asked him. “It’s over here.”

  “Sure,” he said, walking toward my voice.

  When he found it, he sat down on the stone, settling the tea on his leg and holding the blackberries in the palm of one hand. “Are you drinking with me?”

  “I am,” I said.

  He nodded, and this time he didn’t ask me to come out.

  “Will you tell me about the constellations?” I asked him.

  “I thought you didn’t like me,” he said.

  “I can pretend,” I told him. “For one night.”

  And so he described the constellations overhead, telling me a story about a child of the Gentry who believed he’d stumbled onto a prophecy that promised him great success, only to find that his star chart was upside down.

  I told him the plot of a mortal movie I’d watched years ago, and he laughed at the funny parts. When he lay down in a pile of rushes and closed his eyes, I crept up to him and carefully covered him in dry leaves so that he would be warm.

  When I woke up in the afternoon, he was already gone.

  I am dragged through the halls and brought not to the prisons, as I supposed I would be, but to the bedroom where I readied myself for the revel. My bag is still on the hook where I left it, the comb Oak used still on the dresser. Revindra, the rose-haired knight, pushes me inside hard enough that I hit the floor with my shoulder. Then she kicks me in the stomach, twice.

  I curl around the pain, gasping. I reach into the folds of my dress, hand closing over the scissors I stole from Habetrot’s rooms.

  Here is what I learned in the Court of Teeth. It seemed, in the beginning, that fighting back would only bring me further pain. That’s the lesson they wanted me taught, but soon I realized I would be hurt anyway. Better to hurt someone else when I had a chance. Better to make them hesitate, to know it would cost them something.

  Revindra is wearing armor, so when I go for her, I slash where she is most unprotected—her face.

  The sharp edge slices her cheek, down over the corner of her lips. Her eyes go wide, and she pulls away from me with a wild shout. Her hand goes to her mouth, wiping and staring at her fingers as though it were impossible for the wetness she’s feeling to be her own blood. Another knight grabs my throat, holding me in place while a third slams my wrist on the ground until I let go of the scissors with a cry of pain.

  It would be an insult to be stabbed by them, I recall Jack of the Lakes saying. I hope he’s right.

  When Revindra kicks me in the back of the head, I don’t bother trying to muffle my anguished moan. In the Court of Teeth, they liked to hear me scream, cry out, and howl. Enjoyed seeing bruises, blood, bone. I’ve embarrassed Revindra, twice over. Of course she’s angry. There is no profit in giving her anything but what she wants.

  At least until she gives me another opening.

  “Whatever your punishment is, I will ask to be the one to administer it, little worm,” she tells me. “And I will do so with lingering thoroughness.”

  I hiss from the floor, scuttling back when she comes toward me again.

  “See you very soon.” Then she goes out, the other knights with her.

  I crawl to the bed and curl up on it miserably.

  I should have kept my temper, and I know it. If it gives me satisfaction to cause pain, that means only that I am more akin to Lady Nore and Lord Jarel than I like to suppose.

  Seeking distraction from the agony in my wrist and my side, seeking a reason not to think about Oak’s expression when he took his old gaming piece or to gauge the likelihood I will be executed in one of the ways that so horrified Gwen, I reach into my pocket for her phone. The glass isn’t cracked. It lights up as my fingers travel over it, but there is no message from Hyacinthe. As I stare at the glowing screen, I think of my home number, the one my unparents made me repeat over and over back when Bex was Rebecca and I was their child.

  We are far enough underground that the signal is very faint. A single little bar, occasionally two when I tilt it at an uncertain angle. I punch in the number. I do not expect it to ring.

  “Hello.” My unmother’s voice is staticky, as though farther away than ever. I shouldn’t have done this. I have to try to be emotionless when they come to hurt me again, and my unmother’s voice makes me feel too much. It would be better to disconnect from everything, to float free from my body, to be nothing in an endless night of nothing.

  But I want to hear her in case I never have a chance again.

  “Mom?” I say so softly that I imagine she doesn’t hear me, the connection being as bad as it is.

  “Who’s this?” she asks, voice sharp, as though she suspects me of playing a joke on her.

  I don’t speak, feeling sick. Of course this must seem like a wrong number or a prank. In her mind, she has no other daughter. I stay on the line another moment, though, tears burning the back of my eyes, the taste of them in my throat. I count her breaths.

  When she doesn’t hang up, I put the phone on the bed, speaker on. Lie down beside it.

  Her voice quavers a little. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Wren?” she asks.

  I hang up, too afraid to know what she might say next. I would rather hold her saying my name to my heart.

  I press the palm of my hand to the cold stone of the wall to ground myself, to try to remember how not to feel again.

  I don’t know how long I lie there, but long enough to doze off and wake, disoriented. Fear crawls into my belly, clawed and terrible. My thoughts have to push through a fog of it.

  And yet they come. I am afflicted with the memory of kissing Oak. Whenever I recall what I did, I wince with embarrassment. What must he think of me, to have thrown myself at him? And why kiss me in return, except to keep me docile?

  Then comes the memory of Hyacinthe urging me to come with him, warning me I wouldn’t be safe.

  And again and again, I hear my unmother saying my name.

  When the grind of the stone and the creaking of the hinges comes, I feel like a cornered animal, eager to strike. I shove the phone back into my pocket and stand, brushing myself off.

  It’s the rose-haired knight, Revindra. “You’re to come and be questioned.”

  I say nothing, but when she reaches out to grab my arm, I hiss in warning.

  “Move,” she tells me, shoving my shoulder. “And remember how much pleasure it will give me if you disobey.”

  I walk into the hall, where two more knights are waiting. They march me to an audience chamber where Queen Annet sits on a throne covered in powdery white moths, each one fluttering its wings a little, giving the whole thing the effect of a moving carpet. She is dressed in simpler black than she was when I saw her last, but Oak is in the same clothes, as though he hasn’t slept. His hands are clasped behind him. Tiernan stands at his side, his face like stone.

  I realize how used to seeing Oak’s easy smile I am, now that he no longer wears it. A bruise rests beneath one of his eyes.

  I think of him staggering back from the ogre’s blow, blood on his teeth, looking as though he was waiting for another hit.

  “You stole from me.” Annet’s eyes seem to glint with barely concealed rage. I imagine that losing a mortal and a merrow was embarrassing enough, not to mention losing Hyacinthe, whom she had practically bullied Oak into letting her keep. She must especially mislike being humiliated in front of the heir to the High Court, even if I have given her an excuse to delay him a little longer. Still, she cannot make any legitimate claim that he was a party to what I did.

  At least I don’t think she can.

  If Revindra is angry with me, Annet’s rage will be far greater and much more deadly.

  “Do you deny it?” the queen continues, looking at me with the expression of a hunting hawk ready to plunge toward a rat.

  I glance at Oak, who is watching me with a feverish intensity. “I can’t,” I manage. I am trembling. I bite the inside of my cheek to ground myself in pain that I cause. This feels entirely too familiar, to wait for punishment from a capricious ruler.

  “So,” the Unseelie queen says. “It seems you conspire with the enemies of Elfhame.”

  I will not let her put that on me. “No.”

  “Then tell me this: Can you swear to being loyal to the prince in all ways?”

  I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out. My gaze goes to Oak again. I feel a trap closing in. “No one could swear to that.”

  “Ahhh,” says Annet. “Interesting.”

  There has to be an answer that won’t implicate me further. “The prince doesn’t need Hyacinthe, when he has me.”

  “It seems I have you,” Queen Annet says, making Oak look at her sideways.

  “Won’t he go immediately to Lady Nore and tell her everything we plan?” asks Oak, speaking for the first time. I startle at the sound of his voice.

  I shake my head. “He swore an oath to me.”

  Queen Annet looks at the prince. “Right under your nose, not only does your lady love take him from you, but uses him to build her own little army.”

  My cheeks heat. Everything I say just makes what I’ve done sound worse. Much, much worse. “It was wrong to lock Hyacinthe up like that.”

  “Who are you to tell your betters what is right or wrong?” demands Queen Annet. “You, traitorous child, daughter of a traitorous mother, ought to be grateful you were not turned into a fish and eaten after your betrayal of the High Court.”

  I bite my lip, my sharp teeth worrying the skin. I taste my own blood.

  “Is that really why you did it?” Oak asks, looking at me with a strange ferocity.

  I nod once, and his expression grows remote. I wonder how much he hates that I was called his lady love.

  “Jack of the Lakes says that you were to escape with Hyacinthe,” the queen goes on. “He was very eager to tell us all about it. Yet you’re still here. Did something go wrong with your plan, or have you remained to commit further betrayal?”

  I hope Jack of the Lakes’ pond dries up.

  “That’s not true,” I say.

  “Oh?” says Annet. “Didn’t you mean to escape, too?”

  “No,” I say. “Never.”

  She leans forward on her throne of moths. “And why is that?”

  I look at Oak. “Because I have my own reasons to go on this quest.”

  Queen Annet snorts. “Brave little traitor.”

  “How did you persuade Jack to help you?” Oak asks, voice soft. “Did he truly do it for the game piece? I would have paid him more silver than that to tell me what you intended.”

  “For his pride,” I say.

  Oak nods. “All my mistakes are coming home to me.”

  “And the mortal girl?” asks Queen Annet. “Why interfere with her fate? Why the merrow?”

  “He was dying without water. And Gwen was only trying to save her lover.” I may be in the wrong by the rules of Faerie, but when it comes to Gwen, at least, I am right by any other measure.

  “Mortals are liars,” the Unseelie queen says with a snort.

  “That doesn’t mean everything they say is a lie,” I return. My voice shakes, but I force myself to keep speaking. “Do you have a boy here, a musician, who has not returned to the mortal world in days, and yet through enchantment believes far less time has passed?”

  “And if I have?” Queen Annet says, as close to an admission as I am likely to get. “Liar or no, you will take her place. You have wronged the Court of Moths, and we will have it out of your skin.”

  I shiver all over, unable to stop myself.

  Oak’s gaze goes to the Unseelie queen, his jaw set. Still, when he speaks, his voice is light. “I’m afraid you can’t have her.”

  “Oh, can’t I?” asks Queen Annet in the tone of someone who has murdered most of her past lovers and is prepared to murder again if provoked.

  His grin broadens, that charming smile, with which he could coax ducks to bring their own eggs to him for his breakfast. With which he could make delicate negotiations over a prisoner seem like nothing more than a game. “As annoyed as you may be over the loss of Hyacinthe, it is I who will be inconvenienced by it. Wren may have stolen him from your prisons, but he was still my prisoner. Not to say that you weren’t a wronged party.” He shrugs apologetically. “But surely we could get you another mortal or merrow, if not something better.”

  Honey-mouthed. I think of how he’d spoken to that ogre in the brugh, how he could have used this tone on him but didn’t. It appears to work on the Unseelie queen. She looks mollified, her mouth losing some of its angry stiffness.

  It’s a frightening power to have a voice like that.

  She smiles. “Let us have a contest. If you win, I return her and the kelpie. If you fail, I keep them both, and you as well, until such time as Elfhame ransoms you.”