“It would pain me to wait even three days,” Oak says, lightly, deflecting. “But if we must, for the sake of propriety, better the thing is done right.…”

  “There are rituals to complete,” Jude says. “And your family to gather.” She is certainly stalling, as Wren hoped she would.

  Cardan watches the interaction. Most particularly, he watches Oak. He suspects the prince of something. Oak has to get him alone. Has to explain.

  “We have rooms ready at the palace—” Jude begins.

  Wren shakes her head. “There is no need to trouble yourself for my sake. I can keep and quarter my own people.” From a pocket in her shimmering gray dress, she takes out the white walnut.

  Jude frowns.

  Oak can well believe Wren doesn’t want to be at the palace, to have them observe her every weakness. Still, to refuse the hospitality of the rulers of Elfhame makes a statement about her loyalties.

  Cardan seems distracted by the walnut itself. “Oh, very well, I will be the one to ask the obvious question—what have you there?”

  “If you will allow us a patch of grass, this is where myself and my people will stay,” Wren says.

  Jude glances toward Oak, and he shrugs.

  “By all means,” says the High Queen, gesturing toward the guard. “Clear a space.”

  A few of her knights disperse the crowd until there is an expanse of grass near the edge of the black rocks overlooking the water.

  “Is this enough room?” Jude asks.

  “Enough and more than enough,” says Bogdana.

  “We can be generous,” says Cardan, clearly choosing his words to irritate the storm hag.

  Wren takes a few steps away from them, then tosses the walnut against a patch of mossy earth, reciting the little verse under her breath. Cries of astonishment ring out around them as a pavilion the white of swan feathers, with golden feet like those of a crow, rises from the dirt.

  It reminds him of one of the tents in the encampment of the Court of Teeth. He recalls seeing something very like it when he came to cut through the ropes that tied Wren to a post. Recalls listening for Madoc’s voice among those of the other soldiers, half in longing and half in fear. He’d missed his father. He’d also been afraid of him.

  The prince wonders if Wren is reminded of the encampment, too, not far from where they currently stand. Wonders if she hates being back here.

  Mother Marrow was the one who gave her the magic walnut. Mother Marrow, who keeps a place at Mandrake Market. Who gave Oak the advice that sent him off to the Thistlewitch, who sent him straight to Bogdana, in turn. Passed him from hag to hag, perhaps with a specific plan in mind. A specific version of a shared future.

  All his thoughts are disturbing.

  “What a clever nut,” says Cardan with a smile. “If you will not stay in the palace, then we have no recourse but to send you refreshments and hope to see you tomorrow.” He gestures toward Oak. “I trust that you don’t also have a cottage in your pocket. Your family is eager to spend some time with you.”

  “A moment,” the prince says, turning to Wren.

  It’s almost impossible to say anything meaningful to her here, with many eyes on them both, but he can’t leave without promising that he will see her. He needs her to know he’s not abandoning her.

  “Tomorrow afternoon?” he says. “I will come and find you.”

  She nods once, but her face seems braced for betrayal. He understands that. Here, he has power. If he was going to hurt her, this would be the time to do it. “I really do want to show you the isles. We could go to Mandrake Market. Swim in the Lake of Masks. Picnic on Insear, if you’re feeling up to it.”

  “Perhaps,” she says, and lets him take her hand. Even lets him press a kiss to her wrist.

  He isn’t sure what to make of the tremble in her fingers as he releases them.

  And then Oak is herded toward the palace, with Tiernan behind him and Randalin complaining vociferously to the High King and Queen about the discomforts of the journey.

  “You insisted on going north,” Jude reminds the councilor.

  As soon as they pass through the doors of the Palace of Elfhame, Oriana embraces Oak, hugging him tightly. “What were you thinking?” she asks, which is so exactly what he expects her to say that it makes him laugh.

  “Where’s Madoc?” he asks between being released by his mother and Taryn sweeping him into another hug.

  “Probably waiting for us in the war room,” Jude says.

  Leander comes up to Oak, demanding to be swung around. He lifts the boy in his arms and whirls, rewarded with the child’s laughter.

  Cardan yawns. “I hate the war room.”

  Jude rolls her eyes. “He’s probably arguing with Grima Mog’s second-in-command.”

  “Well, if there’s an actual fight to watch, that’s different, obviously,” Cardan says. “But if it’s just pushing little wooden people around on maps, I will leave that to Leander.”

  At the mention of his name, Leander capers over. “I’m bored and you’re bored,” he says. “Play with me?” It’s half request, half demand.

  Cardan touches the top of the child’s head, brushing back his dark coppery hair. “Not now, imp. We have many dull adult things to do.”

  Oak wonders if Cardan sees Locke in the boy. Wonders if he sees the child he and Jude do not—and will not anytime soon, it seems—have.

  When she turns toward him, Oak holds up a hand to forestall whatever his sister is about to say. “May I speak with Cardan for a moment?”

  The High King looks at him with narrowed eyes. “Your sister has precedence, and she would like some time with you.”

  At the thought of Jude’s lecture and then the lectures of all the other family members who took precedence, Oak feels exhausted.

  “I haven’t been home in almost two months and am sticky with salt spray,” he says. “I want to take a bath and put on my own clothes and sleep in my own bed before you all start yelling at me.”

  Jude snorts. “Pick two.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You can sleep and then have a bath, but I am going to be there the moment you’re done, not caring a bit about your being naked. You can bathe and put on fresh clothes, and see me before you sleep. Or you could sleep and change your garments, no bath, although I admit that’s not my preference.”

  He gives her an exasperated look. She smiles back at him. In his mind, she has always been his sister first, but right at that moment it’s impossible to forget that she’s also the Queen of Elfhame.

  “Fine,” he says. “Bath and clothes. But I want coffee and not the mushroom kind.”

  “Your wish,” she tells him, like the liar she is, “is my command.”

  “Explain this to me from the beginning,” Jude says, sitting on a couch in his rooms. Her arms are crossed. On the table beside her is an assortment of pastries, a carafe of coffee, cream so fresh that it is still warm and golden, along with bowls of fruit. Servants keep coming with more food—oatcakes, honey cakes, roasted chestnuts, cheeses with crystals that crunch between his teeth, parsnip tarts glazed in honey and lavender—and he keeps eating it.

  “After I left Court, I went to see Wren because I knew she could command Lady Nore,” he begins, distracted by someone putting a cup of hot coffee into his hand. His hair is wet and his body relaxed from soaking in hot water. The abundance that he has taken for granted all his life surrounds him, familiar as his own bed.

  “You mean Suren?” Jude demands. “The former child-queen of the Court of Teeth? Whom you call by a cute nickname.”

  He shrugs. Wren is not precisely a nickname, but he takes his sister’s point. His use of it indicates familiarity.

  “Tiernan says that you’ve known her for years.” He can see in Jude’s face that she believes he took a foolish risk recruiting Wren to his quest, that he trusts too easily, and that’s why he often winds up with a knife in his back. It’s what he wants her to believe about him, what he has carefully made her believe, and yet it still stings.

  “I met her when she came to Elfhame with the Court of Teeth. We snuck off and played together. I told you back then that she needed help.”

  Jude’s dark eyes are intent. She’s listening to all the nuances of what he says, her mouth a hard line. “You snuck off with her during a war? When? Why?”

  He shakes his head. “The night you and Vivi and Heather and Taryn were talking about serpents and curses and what to do about the bridle.”

  His sister leans forward. “You could have been killed. You could have been killed by our father.”

  Oak takes an oatcake and begins tearing it apart. “I saw Wren once or twice over the years, although I wasn’t sure what she thought of me. And then, this time…”

  He sees the change in Jude’s face, the slight tightening of the muscles of her shoulders. But she’s still listening.

  “I betrayed her,” Oak says. “And I don’t know if she’ll forgive me.”

  “Well, she’s wearing your ring on her finger,” Jude says.

  Oak takes one of the shredded pieces of oatcake and puts it into his mouth, tasting the lie he can’t tell.

  His sister sighs. “And she came here. That has to be worth something.”

  And she held me prisoner. But he isn’t sure that Jude will be at all moved by that as proof of Wren’s caring about him.

  “So do you really intend to go through with this marriage? Is this real?”

  “Yes,” Oak says, because none of his concerns are about his own willingness.

  Jude doesn’t look happy. “Dad explained that she has a unique power.”

  Oak nods. “She can unmake things. Magic, mostly, but not exclusively.”

  “People?” Jude asks, although if Cardan can congratulate Wren on the death of Lady Nore, he clearly knows the answer, which means she knows, too.

  Still, his sister wants to hear it from him. Maybe she just wants to make him admit it. He nods.

  Jude raises a brow. “And that means what exactly?”

  “Scattering our guts across the snow. Or whatever landscape she has to hand.”

  “Lovely,” she says. “And are you going to tell me she’s our ally? That we’re safe from that power?”

  He licks dry lips. No, he cannot say that. Nor does he want to confess that he’s worried Wren will take herself apart without meaning to.

  Jude sighs again. “I am going to choose to trust you, brother mine. For now. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Oak wakes in his familiar bedroom, among a familiar mess. Papers cover his dresser and desk. Books are piled in untidy stacks, shoved back into their shelves at odd angles. On his bedside table, a volume is open facedown, its spine cracked.

  The prince has very poor book etiquette. It has been remarked on before by his tutors.

  Tacked up on the wall is a collage of drawings and photographs and other artifacts from both worlds that Oak occupies. A bright orange ticket from a fair hangs beside a riddle on a piece of vellum found in the gullet of a fish. A napkin with the number of a boy he met at a movie theater written in ballpoint pen. A sticky note with three books he means to pick up from a library. A golden necklace in the shape of an acorn, given by his first mother to his second and then to him, attached with gum to the wall. A silver fox figurine with twine around its middle, twin to the one Wren has. A manga-style portrait of Oak done by Heather in markers. A pencil sketch for a formal portrait of the family that hangs in one of the halls.

  It all is just as it was when he left. Looking around makes him feel as though time telescoped, as though he stepped out for only a few hours. As though he couldn’t have come back so changed.

  Oak hears a sound from the sitting room outside his bedroom—part of the chambers that ought to be his alone. He comes fully awake, sliding out of bed, his hand going automatically to the dagger beneath his mattress.

  That’s right where he left it as well.

  He creeps along the wall, careful with his hooves against the stone floor. He peers through the gap between door and frame.

  Madoc is picking over the remainder of the food on the table.

  With a sigh of disgust—at himself, his father, and his apparent paranoia—he stabs the dagger into the wall and grabs a robe. By the time he comes out, Madoc is sitting on a couch and drinking cold, leftover coffee from the night before. An eye patch covers a quarter of his face, and a twisted black cane rests against a side table. The reminders of his father’s suffering in the Citadel temper Oak’s rage toward him but don’t rid him of it.

  “You’re alive,” Madoc says with a grin.

  “I might say much the same of you,” Oak points out, sitting across from his father. He’s in a dressing gown embroidered with a pattern of deer, half of them shot with arrows and bleeding red thread on the golden cloth. Everything in Elfhame feels surreal and sinister at the moment, and the dying deer on his robe aren’t helping. “And before you make any point about anything I’ve done that you believe was risky, I suggest you recall you did something riskier and far more foolish.”

  “I am chastened,” Madoc says, and then his mouth lifts in a grin. “But I did get what I wanted.”

  “She pardoned you?” Oak isn’t entirely surprised. His father is here in the palace, after all.

  The redcap shakes his head. “Your sister rescinded the exile. For now.” He snorts, and Oak understands that’s all Jude could do without looking as though he was getting some kind of special favor out of her. But it was enough.

  “And you’re done with scheming?” Oak asks him.

  Madoc waves a hand in the air. “What would I need to scheme for when my children control everything I ever wanted for them?”

  In other words, no, he’s not done.

  Oak sighs.

  “So let’s discuss your wedding. You know several factions here are enthusiastic about it.”

  Oak’s eyebrows go up. People who want him out of the way?

  “If you had a powerful queen, it would be more possible to support you against the current occupants of the thrones.”

  Oak should have known better. “Since I haven’t made myself look as though I would make a competent ruler.”

  “Some Folk prefer incompetence. Their desire is for their rulers to have enough power to hold the throne and enough naivete to listen to those who put them there. And your queen exudes both.”

  “Oh?” Madoc holding forth about politics is comforting in its familiarity, but it bothers him that Madoc so quickly identified the factions at Court that were up for treachery. It worries Oak how Madoc might respond if Oak ever indicated he was interested in becoming High King. He’s concerned that the redcap might prize naivete in Oak as much as any conspirator.

  “They will sidle up to your little queen tonight,” his father goes on. “They will introduce themselves and curry her favor. They will attempt to ingratiate themselves with her people and compliment her person. And they will gauge just how much she hates the High King and Queen. I hope her vows were ironclad.”

  Oak can’t help recalling the way she told Randalin she might be able to break her vows like she broke a curse. Pull it apart like a cobweb. He doesn’t like thinking how intrigued his father would be by that information. “I better get dressed.”

  “I’ll ring the servants,” Madoc says, reaching for his cane and pushing himself to his feet.

  “I can manage,” Oak tells his father firmly.

  “They ought to clear these platters and bring you some breakfast.” His father is already moving toward the pull beside the door. As with so many things, it is not as though Oak couldn’t stop him, but it would take so much effort that it doesn’t seem worth doing.

  Oak’s family is used to thinking of him as someone who needs to be taken care of. And for all that Madoc knew that Oak was dangerous enough to spring him from the Ice Needle Citadel, he suspects Madoc would be surprised about the prince’s machinations at Court.

  Before a servant can be called in to give him help he neither wants nor needs, Oak goes back to his bedroom and hunts through his armoire for something to wear. As soon as he finishes with his father, he will steal a basket of food from the kitchens and go to Wren’s claw-footed cottage, so there’s no need for anything fussy. He chooses a plain woolen green jacket and dark pants that stop at the knee. He’s going to tempt Wren to run wild in Elfhame. Leave their guards behind and politics behind, too. He’s determined to make her laugh. A lot.

  A fierce knock on the door brings him out of his bedroom. Despite having gorged the night before, and despite telling his father not to bother summoning more food, his stomach growls. Probably he has some meals to catch up on. Possibly he can take this food and not bother robbing the kitchens.

  “Ah,” Madoc says. “That would be your mother.”

  Oak gives the redcap a look of betrayal. There would have been no avoiding Oriana for long, but he could have managed a little longer. And his father could have warned him. “What about breakfast?”

  “She’ll have brought you something.” He supposes they had some kind of prearranged signal when Madoc was done with Oak—the bell pull, a servant to run and alert her.

  With a sigh, the prince opens the door, then moves to one side as his mother sweeps into the room. She has a tray in her hands. On it rests a teapot and some sandwiches.

  “You’re not going to marry that girl,” Oriana says, fixing him with a glare. She sets down the tray sharply, ignoring the loud sound of it hitting the table.

  “Careful,” Oak warns.

  Madoc rises, leaning heavily on his black cane. “Well, I will leave you two to catching up.” His expression is mild, fond. He is not fleeing conflict. He loves conflict. But perhaps he doesn’t want to be in the position of openly telling Oriana that her priorities do not match his own.

  “Mom,” Oak says.

  She makes a face. She is dressed in a gown of white and rose, a frothy ruff at her throat and the ends of her sleeves. With her pink eyes and pale skin and petallike wings on her back, she sometimes looked like a flower to him—a snapdragon. “You sound like a mortal. Is it so hard to say in full?”