Oak thinks of the story Bogdana told, of a girl whose magic burned like matches, and considers that Bogdana’s own magic doesn’t work in that way. The storm hag was exhausted, perhaps, after she made the ship fly, but not sick. When Cardan brought a whole island from the bottom of the sea, he didn’t faint afterward. “And that’s what Bogdana brought you north to try to fix?”

  She hesitates.

  “Shall I ask one of the Council to come and inspect what potions and powders you keep in your cabinet?”

  She only laughs. “Would you really do such a thing to an old lady such as myself, to whom you already owe a debt? What bad manners that would be!”

  He gives her an irritated look, but she’s right. He does owe her a debt. And he is one of the Folk, brought up in Faerie enough to almost believe that bad manners outweigh murder in a list of crimes. Besides, half the Council probably buys from her. “Can you undo Wren’s curse?”

  “No,” she says, relenting. “As far as I know, it cannot be undone. When the power of Mellith’s death was used to curse Mab, Mellith’s heart became the locus for that curse. How can you fill something that devours everything you put into it? Perhaps you can answer that. I can’t. Now go back to the palace, prince, and leave Mother Marrow to her ruminations.”

  He’s probably late for the banquet already. “If you see Bogdana,” he says, “be sure to give her my regards.”

  “Oh,” says Mother Marrow. “You can give her those yourself soon enough.”

  By the time he arrives in the brugh, the hall beneath the hill is full of Folk. He is, as he predicted, late.

  “Your Highness,” Tiernan says, falling into step behind him.

  “I hope you rested,” Oak says, attempting to seem as though he hasn’t just been dumped, as though he hasn’t a care in the world.

  “No need.” Tiernan speaks in a clipped fashion, and he’s frowning, but since he’s so often frowning, the prince can’t tell if it indicates more disapproval than usual. “Where were you this afternoon?”

  “I took a quick trip to Mandrake Market,” Oak says.

  “You might have fetched me,” Tiernan suggests.

  “I might have,” Oak agrees amiably. “But I thought you might be the worse for wear after almost drowning—or perhaps otherwise occupied.”

  Tiernan’s frown deepens. “I was neither.”

  “I hoped you might be otherwise occupied.” Oak glances around the hall. Cardan lounges on his throne on the dais, a goblet hanging off his fingers as though it may spill at any moment. Cardan. Oak has to speak with him, but he can’t do it here, in front of everyone, in front of Folk who may be part of the conspiracy the prince needs to disavow.

  Jude stands close to Oriana, who is gesturing with her hands as she speaks. He doesn’t spot any of the other members of his family, although that doesn’t mean they’re not here. It’s quite a crowd.

  “Hyacinthe is a traitor thrice over,” Tiernan says. “So you can cease speaking of him.”

  Oak raises a single eyebrow, a trick he is almost sure he stole from Cardan. “I don’t recall mentioning Hyacinthe at all.”

  Not unexpectedly, that irritates Tiernan even more. “He betrayed you, helped imprison you. And struck you. He attempted to kill the High King. You ought to dismiss me from your service for how I feel about him, not inquire about it as though it were perfectly normal.”

  “But if I don’t inquire, how will I know enough to dismiss you from my service?” Oak grins, feeling a bit lighter. Tiernan said feel, not felt. Maybe Oak’s romance is doomed, but that doesn’t mean someone else’s can’t succeed.

  Tiernan gives him a look.

  Oak laughs. “If anyone wants to torture you, all they need to do is make you talk about your feelings.”

  Tiernan’s mouth twists. “On the ship, we…,” he begins, and then seems to think better about the direction of that statement. “He saved me. And he spoke to me as though we could… but I was too angry to listen.”

  “Ah,” Oak says. Before he can go further, Lady Elaine moves toward him in the crowd. “Ah, shit.”

  Her ancestry is half from river creatures and half from aerial ones. A pair of small, pale wings hangs from her back, translucent and veined in the manner of dragonfly wings. They shimmer like stained glass. On her brow, she wears a circlet of ivy and flowers, and her gown is of the same stuff. She is very beautiful, and Oak very much wishes she would go away.

  “I will tell your family that you’ve arrived,” Tiernan says, and melts into the crowd.

  Lady Elaine cups Oak’s cheek in one delicate, long-fingered hand. Through sheer force of will, he neither steps back nor flinches. It bothers him, though, how hard it is to steel himself to her touch. He’s never been like that before. He’s never found it hard to sink into this role of besotted fool.

  Maybe it’s harder now that he actually is a besotted fool.

  “You’ve been hurt,” she says. “A duel?”

  He snorts at that but grins to cover it. “Several.”

  “Bruised plums are the sweetest,” she says.

  His smile comes more easily now. He is remembering himself. Oak of the Greenbriar line. A courtier, a little irresponsible, a lot impulsive. Bait for every conspirator. But it chafes worse than before to pretend to ineptitude. It bothers him that had he not pretended for so long, it was possible his sister would have entrusted him with the mission he had to steal.

  It bothers him that he’s pretended so long he’s not sure he knows how to be anything else.

  “You are a wit,” he tells Lady Elaine.

  And she, oblivious to any tension, smiles. “I have heard a rumor that you are being promised in marriage to some creature from the north. Your sister wishes to make an alliance with a hag’s daughter. To placate the shy folk.”

  Oak is surprised by that story, which manages to be almost wholly accurate and yet totally wrong, but he reminds himself that this is Court, where all gossip is prized, and though faeries cannot lie, tales can still grow in the telling.

  “That’s not quite—” he begins.

  She places a hand on her heart. Her wings seem to quiver. “What a relief. I would hate for you to have to give up the delights of Court, forever sentenced to a cold bed in a desolate land. You have already been away so long! Come to my rooms tonight, and I will remind you why you wouldn’t want to leave us. I can be gentle with your cuts and scrapes.”

  It comes to Oak that he doesn’t want gentle. He isn’t sure how he feels about that, although he doesn’t want Lady Elaine, either. “Not tonight.”

  “When the moon is at its zenith,” she says. “In the gardens.”

  “I can’t—” he begins.

  “You wished to meet my friends. I can arrange something. And afterward, we can be alone.”

  “Your friends,” Oak says slowly. Her fellow conspirators. He had hoped their plans had fallen apart, given how many rumors were flying around. “Some of them seem to be speaking very freely. I’ve had my loyalty questioned.”

  It is on that statement that Wren enters the brugh.

  She wears a new gown, one that looks like nothing that could have come from Lady Nore’s wardrobe. It is all of white, like a cocoon of spider silk, clinging to Wren’s body in such a way that the tint of her blue skin shows through. The fabric wraps around her upper arms and widens at the wrists and the skirts, where it falls in tatters nearly to the floor.

  Woven into the wild nimbus of her hair are skeins of the same pale spider silk. And on her head rests a crown, not the black obsidian one of the former Court of Teeth, but a crown of icicles, each an impossibly thin spiral.

  Hyacinthe stands at her side, unsmiling, in a uniform all of black.

  Oak has seen his sister reinvent herself in the eyes of the Court. If Cardan leads with his cruel, cold charm, Jude’s power comes from the promise that if anyone crosses her, she simply cuts their throat. It is a brutal reputation, but would she, as a human, have been afforded respect for anything gentler?

  And if he didn’t wonder how much that myth cost Jude, how much she disappeared into it, well, he wonders now. He hasn’t been the only one playing a role. Maybe none of his family has quite been seeing one another clearly.

  Wren’s gaze sweeps the room, and there’s relief in her face when she finds him. He grins before he remembers her rejection. But not before she gives him a minute grin in return, her gaze going to the woman at his side.

  “Is that her?” Lady Elaine asks, and Oak realizes how close to him she stands. How her fingers close possessively on his arm.

  The prince forces himself not to take a step back, not to pull free of her grip. It won’t help, and besides, what reason does he have to worry over sparing Wren’s feelings? She doesn’t want him. “I must excuse myself.”

  “Tonight, then,” Lady Elaine says, even though he never agreed. “And perhaps every night thereafter.”

  As she departs, he is aware he has no one to blame but himself that she ignored his words. Oak is the one who makes himself appear empty-headed and easily manipulated. He is the one who falls into bed with anyone he thinks may help him discover who is betraying Elfhame. And, to be fair, with plenty of others to help forget how many of the Folk are dead because of him.

  Even those he cared for, he hid from.

  Maybe that’s why Wren can’t love him. Maybe that is why it seems so believable that he may have enchanted everyone in his life into caring for him. After all, how can anyone love him when no one really knows him?

  The crowd ought to be familiar, but the noise of the gathered Folk is loud and strange in his ears. He tries to shake it off and hurry. His mother will be annoyed he’s late again, and not even Jude and Cardan are going to sit down to a feast in his honor without him, which means it can’t officially begin until he gets to the table.

  And yet, he keeps getting distracted by his surroundings. By hearing his father’s name on certain lips. Hearing his own on others. Listening to knots of courtiers speculate about Wren, calling her the Winter Queen, the Hag Queen, the Night Queen.

  The prince notes Randalin, the little horned man drinking from an enormous, carved wooden mug, chatting with Baphen, whose curling beard sparkles with a new selection of ornaments.

  Oak passes tables with wines of different colors—gold and green and violet. Val Moren, the former Seneschal, and one of the few mortals in Elfhame, is standing beside one, laughing to himself and turning in circles as though playing the childish game of seeing how dizzy he can become.

  “Prince,” he calls out. “Will you fall with me?”

  “Not tonight, I hope,” Oak answers, but the question echoes eerily in his mind.

  He passes a table with roasted pigeons, looking entirely too pigeon-y for Oak’s comfort. Several leek and mushroom tarts rest beside them, as well as a pile of crab apples being set upon by sprites.

  His friend Vier spots him and raises a flagon. “A toast to you,” he cries, walking over to sling an arm over Oak’s shoulders. “I understand you’ve won yourself a northern princess.”

  “Won is definitely overstating the case,” Oak says, sliding out from his friend’s arm. “But I ought to go to her.”

  “Yes, don’t leave her waiting!”

  The prince wades back into the crowd. He sees a flash of metal and spins, looking for a blade, but it is just a knight wearing a single sleeve of her armor over a frothy gown. Near her are several ladies of the Court with enormous, cloudlike clusters of baby’s breath for wigs. He passes faeries in mossy capelets and dresses that end in branches. Elegant gentlemen in embroidered robes and doublets of birch bark. One green-skinned girl with gills has a train on her gown long enough to catch occasionally on roots as she passes. As he’s looking, Oak realizes it isn’t a train at all but the spill of her hair.

  By the time he makes it to the High Table, he sees Wren standing before his sister and Cardan. He really should have gotten here sooner.

  Wren catches his gaze as he approaches. Though her expression does not alter, he thinks he sees relief in her eyes.

  Jude watches them both, calculating. Still, after two months away and a long rest to clear his head, what he notices most is how young Jude looks. She is young, but he can see a difference between her and Taryn. Perhaps it is only that Taryn has been to the mortal world more recently and has caught up to her years. Or that having a young child is tiring, and she doesn’t look older so much as exhausted.

  A moment later, he wonders if it was only the fancy of the moment that made him think that. But another part of him wonders if Jude is quite as mortal as she once was.

  He bows to his sister and to Cardan.

  “Wren was just telling us of her powers,” says Jude, voice hard. “And we asked for the return of the bridle you borrowed.”

  He’s missed something and not something good. Did she refuse them?

  “I have sent one of my soldiers for it,” Wren tells him, as though in answer to the question he did not ask.

  Perhaps they are only annoyed at the reminder of how many traitors to Elfhame serve in the Court of Teeth. If so, they must be doubly annoyed when a falcon swoops into the room, becoming a man as he lands. Straun.

  Oak’s former prison guard gives him a smug look as he holds out the bridle to Wren.

  The prince can still conjure the feeling of the straps against his skin. Can still remember the helplessness he felt when she commanded him to crawl. How Straun watched him, how he laughed.

  Wren takes it from the soldier, letting it lie across her palm. “It’s a cursed thing.”

  “Like all Grimsen’s creations,” Jude says.

  “I don’t want it,” Wren says. “But I won’t give it to you, either.”

  Cardan raises his brows. “A bold statement to make to your rulers in the heart of their Court. So what do you propose?”

  In her hands, the leather shreds and shrivels. The magic departs from it like a thunderclap. The buckles fall to the dirt floor.

  Jude takes a step toward her. Everyone in the brugh is looking at them now. The sound the destruction made drew their attention as surely as a shout.

  “You unmade it,” says Jude, staring at the remains.

  “Since I have cheated you out of one gift, I will give you another. There’s a geas on the High Queen, one that would be easy enough for me to remove.” Wren’s smile is sharp-toothed. Oak isn’t sure what the nature of the geas is, but he is sure from the spark of panic in Jude’s face that she doesn’t want it gone.

  The offer hangs in the air for a long moment.

  “So many secrets, wife,” Cardan says mildly.

  The look Jude gives him in return could have peeled paint.

  “Not only the geas, but half a curse,” Wren tells his sister. “It winds around you but cannot quite tighten its grip. Gnaws at you.”

  The shock on Jude’s face is obvious. “But he never finished speaking—”

  Cardan holds up a hand to stop her. All teasing is gone from his voice. “What curse?”

  Oak supposes the High King may well take a curse seriously, since he was once cursed into a giant, poisonous serpent.

  “It happened a long time ago. When we went to the palace school,” Oak’s sister says.

  “Who cursed you?” asks Cardan.

  “Valerian,” Jude spits out. “Right before he died.”

  “Right before you killed him, you mean,” Cardan says, his dark eyes glittering with something that looks a lot like fury. Although whether it is toward Jude or this long-dead person, Oak isn’t certain.

  “No,” Jude says, not seeming in the least afraid. “I’d already killed him. He just didn’t know it yet.”

  “I can remove that and leave the geas alone,” Wren says. “You see, I can be quite helpful.”

  “One supposes so,” says the High King, his thoughts clearly on the curse and this Valerian. “A useful alliance.”

  Oak supposes that means Wren is still pretending she’s willing to marry him.

  Wren reaches her hand into the air, extending her fingers toward Jude and making a motion as though gripping something tightly. Then her hand fists.

  His sister gasps. She touches her breastbone, and her head tips forward so that her face is hidden.

  The High Queen’s knight, Fand, unsheathes her blade, the glint of the steel reflecting candlelight. All around, guards’ hands go to their hilts.

  “Jude?” Oak whispers, taking a step toward her. “Wren, what did you—”

  “If you’ve hurt her—” Cardan begins, his gaze on his wife.

  “I removed the curse,” Wren says, her voice even.

  “I’m fine,” Jude grates out, hand still pressing against her chest. She moves to a chair—not the one at the head of the table, not her own—and sits. “Wren has given me quite a gift. I will have to think long and hard about what to give her in return.”

  There’s a threat in those words. And looking around, Oak realizes the reason for it.

  It isn’t just that Wren took apart the bridle without permission and the curse without warning, nor that she exposed something that Jude may have wanted to stay hidden, but she made the High King and Queen look weak before their Court. It’s true they weren’t up on the dais for all to see, but enough courtiers were listening and watching for rumors to spread.

  The High King and Queen were helpless in the face of Wren’s magic.

  That Wren did them a service and put them in her debt.

  She did to Jude what Bogdana had done to her in the Citadel—and did it more successfully.

  But to what purpose?

  “You bring an element of chaos to a party, don’t you?” Cardan says, his tone light, but his gaze fierce. He lifts a goblet from the table. “We obviously have many things to discuss regarding the future. But for now, we share a meal. Let us toast, to love.”