Across the fire, the prince watches me, reflected flames flickering in his unreadable eyes.

  Forgive me, I think. Let me come with you.

  The following afternoon, Tiernan dons Oak’s golden scale mail and sets off on his own, to set a false trail. We have a meeting place not far from the Undry Market, and I realize that I will have only one more night to persuade them to allow me to stay.

  As we fly, I try to put together my arguments. I consider speaking them into Oak’s ear as he can hardly escape me, but the wind would snatch my words. A faint drizzle dampens our clothes and chills our skin.

  As the sun begins to set, I see a darkness that is not night coming on. Clouds form in the distance, billowing upward and barreling outward, turning the sky a sickly greenish gray. Inside, I can see the flicker of lightning. They seem to reach into the stratosphere, the top of the clouds in a shape like an anvil.

  And beneath it, wind whirls, tornadoes forming.

  I give a cry, which is whipped away. Oak wheels the ragwort horse downward as the air around us becomes thick. We plunge into the fog of clouds, their wet, heavy mist sinking into my lungs. The steed shivers beneath us. And then, without warning, the ragwort horse dips sharply, then drops.

  We plummet through the sky, the speed of our descent shoving the scream back into my mouth. All I can do is hang on to the solid mass of Oak’s body and wrap my arms around him as tightly as they will go. Thunder booms in my ears.

  We plunge into a sheet of rain. It knocks us around, slicking our fingers and hair, making holding on difficult with everything so slippery. Coward that I am, I close my eyes and press my face into the prince’s back.

  “Wren,” he shouts, a warning. I look up just before we hit the ground.

  I am thrown off into mud, my breath knocked out of me. The ragwort steed crumbles away to the dried stalk of a plant under my bruised palms.

  Everything hurts, but with a dull sort of pain that doesn’t get worse when I move. Nothing seems broken.

  Standing shakily, I reach out a hand to help Oak up. He takes it, levering himself to his feet. His golden hair is dark with rain, his lashes spiky with it. His clothes are soaked through. His scraped knee is bleeding sluggishly.

  He touches my cheek lightly with his fingers. “You—I thought—”

  I stare up into his eyes, puzzled by his expression.

  “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  The prince turns away from me abruptly. “We need to get to the meeting spot,” he says. “It can’t be far.”

  “We need to find shelter.” I have to shout to be heard. Above us, lightning cuts through the sky, striking into the woods just beyond us. Thunder cracks, and I see a dim thread of smoke curl upward from the site of the hit before the rain douses the fire. “We can find Tiernan when the storm lets up.”

  “At least let’s walk in that direction,” Oak says, lifting his pack and throwing it over one shoulder. Ducking his head against the storm, he walks deeper into the woods, using the trees for cover. He doesn’t look back to see if I follow.

  We go on like that for a while before I see a promising area to stop.

  “There.” I point at an area with several large rocks, not far from where the soil dips down into a ravine. There are two trees, less than six feet apart, with branches reaching toward one another. “We can make a lean-to.”

  He gives an exhausted sigh. “I suppose you are the expert. Tell me what I need to do.”

  “We find two huge sticks,” I say, measuring with my hands. “Basically, as long as you are tall. They have to extend past the branches.”

  I discover one a few yards away that seems as though it could be partially rotted, but I drag it back anyway. Oak has caused another to bend helpfully, through some magic. I begin to tear the skirt of my dress into strips, trying not to think of how much I liked it. “Tie with this,” I say, going to work on the other end.

  Once they’re in place, I use smaller sticks as ribs, stacking them to make a roof and then piling that with moss and leaves.

  It is far from waterproof, but it’s something. He’s shivering by the time we crawl inside. Outside, the wind howls and thunder booms. I drag in a large log and start stripping away the bark to get at the drier wood within.

  Seeing the slowness of my progress, he reaches into his boot and takes out a knife, then hands it over. “Don’t make me regret giving you this.”

  “She wanted to delay you,” I say softly, aware that he probably doesn’t want to hear my justification.

  “Queen Annet?” he asks. “I know.”

  “And you think she almost managed it because of me?” I ask. The insides of the log are drier, and I arrange the pieces I chip off on the stones in a pyramid shape, trying to keep the worst of the water off them.

  He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, which are that strange fox color. Like gold that has been cut with copper. “I think you could have told me what you intended to do.”

  I give him a look of utter disbelief.

  “Hyacinthe told you something about me, didn’t he?” Oak asks.

  I shiver, despite not being affected by the cold. “He said that you had a kind of magic where you could make people like you.”

  Oak makes an exasperated sound. “Is that what you believe?”

  “That you inherited an uncanny ability to put people at ease, to convince them to go along with your desires? Should I not?”

  His eyebrows go up. For a moment, he’s quiet. All around us the rain falls. The thunder seems to have moved off. “My first mother, Liriope, died before I was born. After she was poisoned—at Prince Dain’s orders—Oriana cut open her belly to save me. People do say that Liriope was a gancanagh, and her love-talking was how she caught the eye of the High King and his son, but it’s not as though that power was much use to her. She paid for that charm with her life.”

  At my silence, he answers the question I did not ask. “Blusher mushroom. You remain conscious the whole time as your body slows and then stops. I was born with it in my veins, if you can call being torn out of your dead mother a birth.”

  “And Liriope and Prince Dain—”

  “Were my dam and sire,” he agrees. I knew that he was some part of the Greenbriar line, but I hadn’t known the details. With that horrifying legacy, I suppose I can understand how Madoc would seem an admirable father, how he would adore the mother who rescued and raised him. “Whatever power I have of Liriope’s, I don’t use it.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask. “Maybe you can’t help it. Maybe you do it without knowing.”

  He gives me a slow smile, as though I’ve just confessed to something. “I suppose you want to believe I charmed you into kissing me?”

  I turn away, shame heating my face. “I could have done it to distract you.”

  “So long as you know that you did it,” he says.

  I frown at the mud, wondering how far he would have gone had I not pulled away. Would he have taken me to bed, loathing in his heart? Could I even tell? “You also—”

  The sound of footsteps stops me. Tiernan stands in front of our lean-to, blinking at us in the downpour. “You’re alive.”

  The knight staggers into the shelter, collapsing onto the ground. His cloak is singed.

  “What happened?” Oak asks, checking his arm. I can see where the skin is red, but no worse.

  “Lightning, very close to where I was waiting.” Tiernan shivers. “That storm isn’t natural.”

  “No,” agrees Oak.

  I think on Bogdana’s final words. I will come for you again. And when I do, you best not run.

  “If we make it to the market tomorrow and get our ship,” Tiernan tells Oak, “we can seek the Undersea’s aid to take us through the Labrador Sea swiftly and without incident.”

  “The merrow told me—” I begin, and then stop, because both of them are staring at me.

  “Go on,” Oak says.

  I try to recall his exact words, but I cannot. “That there’s trouble in the sea, with the queen and her daughter. And warned me about someone, a name I didn’t know.”

  Oak frowns, glancing at Tiernan. “So perhaps we take our chances and do not seek the Undersea’s aid.”

  “I am not sure I trust Wren’s informant,” Tiernan says. “Either way, once we land, we ought to be able to travel from there on foot. The Citadel is perhaps thirty miles inland.”

  “Lady Nore will have those stick creatures patrolling everywhere but the Stone Forest,” Oak says.

  The knight shakes his head. “Going through those woods is a bad plan. It’s cursed, and the troll king is mad.”

  “That’s why no one will look for us there,” says Oak, as though this was part of an ongoing game in which he’d made an excellent move.

  The knight makes a gesture of exasperation. “Fine. We go through the Stone Forest. And when we’re all about to die, I look forward to your apology.”

  Oak stands. “As I have not yet sealed our doom, I am going for supplies. It’s hard to imagine I could feel any colder or wetter, and I saw the outskirts of a mortal town while we were in the air.”

  “Maybe the gale-force winds will clear your head,” says the knight, wrapping his wet cloak more tightly around himself and appearing not even to consider volunteering to go along.

  Oak makes an elaborate bow, then turns to me. “He’s unlikely to make you any promises like Hyacinthe did, but if you get that fire going, he just might.”

  “Unfair,” Tiernan growls.

  Oak laughs as he tromps off through the wet forest.

  I clear off some space on the ground to make a fire, piling up the dry bits of wood I stripped out of the center of the log. I fish in my pockets until I find the matchbook I took from the motel. I strike one against the strip of phosphorus, hoping it isn’t too wet to work. When it flares to life, I cup my hand over it and try to set the small, dry pieces aflame.

  Tiernan observes all this with a small frown.

  “You’re friends,” I say, looking in the direction the prince went. “You and him.”

  He watches as the fire catches, smoke curling. “I suppose we are.”

  “But you’re his guard, too, aren’t you?” I am not sure if he’s going to be offended by the question, or by my talking to him in general, but I am curious and tired of not knowing things.

  Tiernan reaches out a hand to test the heat of the flames. “There were three before me. Two got killed protecting him. The third turned on him for a bribe. That’s how Oak got the scar on his throat. At fourteen, he decided he didn’t want any more guards. But his sister sent me anyway.

  “First, he dragged me along to absurd parties, like he was going to embarrass me out of the job. Then I think he tried to bore me out of it by not going anywhere at all for weeks at a time. But I stayed. I was proud of being chosen for the position. And I thought he was nothing more than spoiled.”

  “That’s what he wanted you to think,” I say, having recently fallen for the same trick.

  He nods to me in acknowledgment. “I didn’t know that then, though. I just turned twenty myself and was more foolish than I like to remember. But it hardly matters, because a year later things went sideways. A mortal tried to stab Oak. I grabbed the guy, but he was meant to be a distraction. To my shame, it worked. A half dozen redcaps and goblins flooded the alley from the other direction, all well-armed. I told the prince to run.

  “He stayed and fought like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Swift. Efficient. Brutal. He still wound up stabbed twice in the stomach and once in the thigh before the battle was over. I had failed him, and I knew it.

  “He could have gotten rid of me after that, easily. All he would have had to do was tell anyone the truth of what happened that night. But he didn’t. Got healing ointment in Mandrake Market so they wouldn’t guess. I don’t know when he would say I was his friend, but he was mine after that.”

  I look into the fire, thinking of Oak coming to see me in the woods, a year before he met Tiernan. I wonder if that was after his own guard turned on him and tried to cut his throat. Had I come out of hiding I might have noticed the newness of the scar.

  Tiernan shakes his head. “Of course, that was before I realized why he hadn’t wanted a guard. He’d taken up a new hobby. Decided to become a lure for the ambitious, anyone who might want to take a shot at the royal family. Did everything he could to make sure those shots were aimed at him.”

  I remember Oak coming to my woods. Someone tried to kill me. Again. Poison. Again. He’d been upset about the assassination attempts. Why would he court more of them? “Do they know?”

  Tiernan doesn’t bother asking whom I mean. “Certainly not. I wish the royal family would figure it out, though. It’s exhausting to watch someone try to be a ship that rocks will break against.”

  I recall Oak’s refusal to let Tiernan champion him in the Court of Moths, Oak’s insistence that he be the one to take on the debt with the Thistlewitch. When I first met them, I thought Tiernan might grow tired of protecting Oak; now I see how hard he has to fight for an opportunity.

  “Hyacinthe camped with the Court of Teeth during the war,” Tiernan says, and I glance at him through my lashes, evaluating the meaning of his subject change. “He told me a little about it. Not a nice place to be a child.”

  I frown at my hands, but I can’t just ignore his words. “Not a nice place to be anything.”

  “What do you suppose they were planning for you?”

  I draw my legs up and shrug.

  “Marry the prince and then kill him, is that right?” He doesn’t sound accusatory, only interested.

  “I don’t think they meant either of us to live long.”

  To that, he doesn’t reply.

  I stare into the fire, watch the flames crackle.

  I sit there for a while, feeding bits of the log to the blaze, watching them catch, embers blowing up into the sky like lightning bugs.

  Then I get up, feeling restless. Living in the woods as long as I have, I ought to be gathering things. Perhaps there isn’t much I can do to make up for freeing the prisoners, but I can build up our shelter at least.

  “I’ll gather some more wood,” I say. “And see if I can find anything worth foraging.”

  “Remember that I have three strands of your hair,” the knight says, but there’s no real threat in his voice.

  I roll my eyes.

  Tiernan gives me a strange look as I walk off, gathering his wet cloak around himself.

  As the night envelops me, I scent the air, drinking in the unfamiliar forest. I don’t go far before I stumble on a patch of lemony wood sorrel and bullbrier. I gather some, tucking it into the pockets of my new dress. Pockets! Having them now, I cannot believe I went so long without them.

  Idly, I pull the human’s phone out. The screen is entirely black and will not wake. The battery has run down, and there’s no way for me to charge it unless we stay in another mortal dwelling.

  I tuck the phone away. Perhaps this is better, not having it work. It allows me to imagine that Hyacinthe and Gwen are safe, that my unmother was happy to hear from me. That perhaps she even called the number back.

  Wandering farther into the woods, I discover a tree of loquats and pick them by the handful, eating as I go and filling my bag. I walk on, hoping to find chanterelles.

  There’s a rustling. I look up, expecting to see Tiernan.

  But it is Bogdana who stands between the trees, her long fingers wrapped in the nearby branches. The storm hag looks down on me with her shining black eyes and smiles with her sharp, cracked teeth.

  There is a rushing in my ears, and for a moment, I can hear only the thundering of my blood.

  I take a branch from the floor of the woods and heft it like a bat.

  Into that moment, she speaks. “Enough foolishness, child. I’ve come to talk.”

  I wonder how she found me. Was there a spy in Queen Annet’s Court? Was it the Thistlewitch herself, out of courtesy toward another ancient power?

  “What do you want?” I growl, feeling like a beast again despite the finery I’ve been dressed in. “Have you come to kill me for my lady mother? Tell me, then, how am I to die?”

  The hag raises her eyebrows. “Well, well, look who’s all grown up and throwing accusations around.”

  I make myself breathe. The branch is heavy and wet in my hand.

  “I have come to fetch you,” Bogdana says. “There is little profit in fighting me, child. It is time to separate your allies from your enemies.”

  I take a step back, thinking to put some distance between us. “And you are my ally?”

  “I could be,” the storm hag says. “Surely you’d prefer that to making me your opponent.”

  I take another step, and she grabs for me, nails slashing through the air.

  I slam the branch against her shoulder as hard as I am able. Then I run. Through the night, between the trees, my boots sliding in the mud, thorned bushes tearing at my skin and branches catching on my clothes.

  I slip, putting my foot wrong in a puddle. I crash down onto my hands and knees. Then I am up and running.

  The solid weight of her comes down on my back.

  We crash together, rolling on the carpet of wet leaves and pine needles, rocks digging into my bruises. Her nails digging into my skin.

  The storm hag grabs my chin in her long fingers, pressing the back of my head against the forest floor. “It ought to sicken you to travel with the Prince of Elfhame.” Her face is very close to mine, her breath hot. “Oak, whom you might have forced to cower at your side. To have to take orders from him is an affront. And yet, if he does disgust you, you have done well hiding it.”

  I struggle, kicking. Trying to pull away. Her nails scratch my throat, leaving a trail of burning lines on my flesh.

  “But maybe he doesn’t disgust you,” Bogdana says, peering into my eyes like she sees something more there than her reflection. “They say that he can talk flowers into opening their petals at night, as though his face were that of the sun. He’ll steal your heart.”