From a bag, Lady Nore takes a little knife in the shape of a half moon. She slices her palm. Then she takes a pinch of bone gravel from a bag at her waist and smears it onto her bloody, open hand. One by one, she walks to the snow sculptures and presses those bits of bone, shining with wetness, into their mouths.

  And one by one, they awaken.

  They are like me. Whatever they are, they are like me.

  And yet, these stick creatures seem like living puppets and little else. They stay in their neat rows, and when she orders them inside, they go obediently, as though they’d never had any other thought. But I do not understand why, if the magic of Mab’s bones is animating these creatures, they are not conscious in the way that I am.

  Although I may have been made from snow and sticks and blood, there is some difference that allows me to behave like a disobedient faerie daughter, when these creatures seem to make no choices at all.

  But then I recall the spider hunting the servant and don’t know what to suppose.

  The sound of footsteps is the only warning before two guards turn the corner.

  Oak puts his hands on my shoulders, pushing my back to the wall.

  “Pretend with me,” he whispers. And then he presses his mouth to mine.

  A soldier kissing one of the serving girls. A bored ex-falcon attempting to amuse himself. Oak hiding our faces, giving us a reason to be overlooked. I understand the game.

  This is no declaration of desire. And yet, I am rooted in place by the shocking heat of his mouth, the softness of his lips, the way one of his hands goes to the ice wall to brace himself and the other to my waist, and then to the hilt of my knife as they draw closer.

  He doesn’t want me. This doesn’t mean he wants me. I repeat that over and over as I let him part my lips with his tongue. I run my hands up his back under his shirt, letting my nails trail over his skin.

  I have been trained in all the arts of a courtier. Dancing and dueling, kissing and deceiving.

  Still, I am gratified when he shudders, when the hand he was bracing with lifts to thread through my hair, to cup my head. My mouth slides over his jaw to his throat, then against his shoulder, where I press the points of my teeth. His body stiffens, his fingers gripping me harder, pulling me closer to him. When I bite down, he gasps.

  “You there,” says one of the soldiers, a troll. “Get to your post. If the lady hears of this—”

  When Oak draws back, his lips are flushed red. His eyes look black beneath golden lashes. I see the marks from my teeth on his shoulder. He turns and drives a knife into the troll’s stomach. The troll falls soundlessly as Oak turns to slash the other’s throat.

  Hot blood spatters the ice. Where it lands, steam rises and a constellation of pockmarks appear.

  “Is there a room nearby?” the prince asks in a voice that shakes only a little. “For the bodies.”

  For a moment, I stare at him stupidly. I am reeling from the kiss, from the swiftness of the violence. I am not yet used to Oak’s ability to kill without hesitation and then look chagrined about it, as though he did something in slightly poor taste. Spilled a rare vintage of wine, perhaps. Mismatched his trousers to his shirt.

  Although I cannot be anything other than glad he killed them swiftly and soundlessly.

  I lead him across the hall, into a strange little chamber for keeping supplies to clean and polish and provide for the needs of the Gentry in this part of the castle.

  Inside, the frozen carcass of an elk hangs in one corner, slivers of meat cut off. On the opposite wall are wooden shelves, packed with linens, cups, glasses, and trays, as well as dried herbs that hang in bundles. Two barrels of wine sit on the ground, one opened, a ladle resting on the lip.

  Oak drags both guards in. I grab up one of their cloaks and a tablecloth from the shelves to go back and mop up the blood.

  As I do, I check to see if there are any translucent parts of ice through which anyone could have witnessed what happened. If they did, it would have appeared like a violent shadow play, and therefore not entirely unusual in the Citadel. Still, if someone was searching for us, it might be a problem.

  I notice nothing to give us away, so I stash the soiled fabric back in the room. Oak has pushed the bodies into a corner and covered them with a cloth.

  “Is there any blood on me?” he asks, patting down the front of his woolen shirt.

  It was a fine spatter, and though it struck his clothes, the pattern is nearly invisible in the dark fabric. I find a little in his hair and wipe it off. Rub his cheek and just above the corner of his mouth.

  He gives me a guilty smile, as though expecting me to take him to task for the kiss or the murders. I cannot guess which.

  “We’re almost to the stairs,” I tell him.

  On the landing, we spot two more guards on the opposite end of a long hall. They are too far to make out our faces, and I hope too far off to see anything inauthentic in our costumes. I keep my gaze straight ahead. Oak nods to one, and the guard nods in return.

  “Brazen,” I mutter under my breath, and the prince grins.

  My hands are shaking.

  We pass the library and the war room, then walk up another set of stairs. These spiral steeply for two floors until we come to Lady Nore’s bedroom, at the very top of the leftmost tower.

  Her door is tall and pointed at its apex. It is made of some black metal, frosted over with cold. The handle is a deer hoof.

  I reach out my fingers, turn it. The door opens.

  Lady Nore’s bedroom is entirely new, the room washed in red. It takes me a moment to realize where the color is coming from. Viscera. The flayed-open bodies of Lady Nore’s victims on display all around her, frozen inside the walls so that light could filter through them and give the room its odd, ruddy tint.

  Oak sees it, too, eyes wide as he takes in the awful space. “Well, a reliquary full of bones can’t be out of place among all this grotesque art.”

  I give him a grateful glance. Yes. That’s right. All we need to do is find Mab’s remains. Then we can escape with his father. And perhaps I will no longer feel trapped by the Citadel, no longer be frozen in my past, as though I were one of the bodies in the wall.

  A large bed sits in the middle of the floor, the headboard and footboard of carved onyx in sharp, spear-like shapes. Over the cushions rests a coverlet of ermine. A brazier burns in one corner of the room, warming the air.

  Opposite hangs a mirror with a black frame in the shape of intertwining snakes. Beneath that is a dressing table, with jewels and hairpins strewn across its surface. I find an inkpot and a golden comb in its drawers.

  I expect everything here to be perfectly arranged, as it was in the memory of my childhood, but when I turn to Lady Nore’s enormous wardrobe, built of ebony wood and inlaid with teeth from many beasts and beings, I see that several of her dresses lie on the floor. They are great, grand things in scarlet and shimmering silver, with droplets that appear like frozen tears. There are whole gowns of black swan feathers. But the closer I look, the more I notice the stains, the rips. They are as old as the broken towers of the castle.

  The mess makes me suppose that Lady Nore readied herself quickly and without the help of servants. There is a desperation in all this that seems at odds with her sitting at the cusp of vast power.

  Oak puts a hand on my arm. I startle.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  “When they first took me from the mortal world to the Court of Teeth, Lord Jarel and Lady Nore tried to be nice to me. They gave me good things to eat and dressed me in fancy dresses and told me that I was their princess and would be a beautiful and beloved queen,” I tell him, the words slipping from my lips before I can call them back. I occupy myself with searching deeper in the closet so I don’t have to see his face as I speak. “I cried constantly, ceaselessly. For a week, I wept and wept until they could bear it no more.”

  Oak is silent. Though he knew me as a child, he never knew me as that child, the one who still believed the world could be kind.

  But then, he had sisters who were stolen. Perhaps they had cried, too.

  “Lord Jarel and Lady Nore told their servants to enchant me to sleep, and the servants did. But it never lasted. I kept weeping.”

  He nods, just a little, as though more movement might break the spell of my speaking.

  “Lord Jarel came to me with a beautiful glass dish in which there was flavored ice,” I tell him. “When I took a bite, the flavor was indescribably delicious. It was as though I were eating dreams.

  “You will have this every day if you cease your crying, he said.

  “But I couldn’t stop.

  “Then he came to me with a necklace of diamonds, as cold and beautiful as ice. When I put it on, my eyes shone, my hair sparkled, and my skin shimmered as though glitter had been poured over it. I looked wondrously beautiful. But when he told me to stop crying, I couldn’t.

  “Then he became angry, and he told me that if I didn’t stop, he would turn my tears to glass that would cut my cheeks. And that’s what he did.

  “But I cried until it was hard to tell the difference between tears and blood. And after that, I began to teach myself how to break their curses. They didn’t like that.

  “And so they told me I would be able to see the humans again—that’s what they called them, the humans—in a year, for a visit, but only if I was good.

  “I tried. I choked back tears. And on the wall beside my bed, I scratched the number of days in the ice.

  “One night I returned to my room to find that the scratches weren’t the way I remembered. I was sure it had been five months, but the scratches made it seem as though it had been only a little more than three.

  “And that was when I realized I was never going home, but by then the tears wouldn’t come, no matter how much I willed them. And I never cried again.”

  His eyes shine with horror. “I should never have asked you to come back here.”

  “Just don’t leave me behind,” I say, feeling immensely vulnerable. “That’s what I want, for the game I won all those years ago.”

  “I promise you,” he says. “If it is within my power, we leave together.”

  I nod. “We will find the reliquary and ruin her,” I tell him. “And then I will never come back.”

  But as we open drawers and comb through Lady Nore’s belongings, we find no bones, no magic.

  “I don’t think it’s here,” Oak says, looking up from a box he’s poking through.

  “She might keep it in the throne room,” I venture. Even though we must go down steps again and slip past guards, I will be glad to be out of this terrible room.

  “My father might know where it’s kept,” he says. “I know you don’t think—”

  “We can try the prisons,” I say reluctantly.

  As I turn to give the chamber one last look, I notice something strange about her bed. The base of it is ice, and I am sure there’s something frozen in it. Not red but ivory and brown.

  “Oak?” I say.

  He turns, looking in the direction that I am. “Did you find something?”

  “I’m not sure.” I walk across the floor. Pushing back the covers, I see three victims frozen there. Not taken apart, like those in the walls. I cannot even tell how they died.

  As I stare, one, impossibly, opens his eyes.

  I shrink away, and as I do, his mouth parts and out comes a sound that is half moan and half song. Beside him, the other two awaken and begin to make the same noise, until it rises in a ghostly chorus.

  Sounding an alarm.

  Oak grabs my shoulder and pushes me out the door. “A trap,” he says. “Go!”

  I run down the stairs as fast as I am able, half-slipping, my hand bracing on the wall. The clatter of Oak’s hooves is right behind me.

  We make it to the second landing before ten guards appear—ex-falcons, huldufólk, nisser, and trolls. They fan out in a formation around us, weapons drawn. Oak’s back presses against mine, and I hear the rattle of his thin blade pulling free from its sheath.

  Oak kills two trolls and a nisse before another of the trolls gets a knife to my throat.

  “Halt,” he calls, pressing the blade down hard enough to sting. “Or the girl dies.”

  For a moment, the prince’s eyes are so blank that I don’t know if he can hear the words. But then he falters, letting his blade sag. He looks as though it was a fight to come back to himself.

  None of them get too close, even then. Blood still drips from that needle-thin blade of his. They’d have to step over the bodies of their comrades.

  “Throw down your sword,” one of the other soldiers calls to him.

  “Vow she won’t be harmed,” Oak says, breathing hard. “Also me. I would like not to be harmed as well.”

  “If you don’t drop that blade, I’ll cut her throat and then yours,” the troll threatens. “How’s that for a promise?” He’s so close to me that I can smell the leather of his armor, the oil on his knife, and the stink of dried blood. I can feel the heat of his breath. The arm across my neck is as solid as stone.

  I try to think past my panic. My own knife is still in my hand, but the troll has gripped the wrist holding it.

  I could bite his arm, though. My sharp teeth could rend even a troll’s flesh. The shock of pain would either cause him to cut my throat or loosen his grip. But even if I was lucky, even if I could use that moment to slip out of his hands and run to Oak, what then? We’d never make it out of the Citadel. We would most likely never make it out of this hall.

  The prince’s sword dangles from his fingers, but he doesn’t let it drop. “I was invited here and instructed to bring Mellith’s living heart to your lady. I think she would be extremely disappointed to find you’d robbed her of her prize. Dead, I can hardly give it to her.”

  A shudder goes through me at the thought of Lady Nore getting what she wants, even though I know this is a game, a con, a hustle. Oak doesn’t really have Mellith’s heart. The danger lies in her seeing through his deception.

  And it doesn’t matter if it gets me into the room. All I need is to be able to talk.

  Oak goes on. “You’ve almost caught us. You have to make only one small concession, and I will go with you, docile as a lamb.”

  “Throw down your blade, prince,” says one of the ex-falcons. “And no harm will come to either of you by our hands while we escort you to the throne room. You can beg for Lady Nore’s mercy and explain why, were you invited to the Citadel, we found you running from her bedchamber.”

  Oak lets the sword fall. It clatters to the floor.

  One guard wrenches the knife out of my hand, while another takes a skein of rope and winds it between my lips, knotting it at the back of my head. As they push me along, I try to chew it apart, but though my teeth are sharp, I am bound well enough that we reach the throne room with the rope still in my mouth.

  They have not bound the prince, but he walks surrounded by drawn blades. I cannot tell if that is meant as a sign of respect for his person or if they don’t want to take their chances by getting too close.

  All I know is that I must find a way to speak. Just a few words and I will have her.

  The troll pushes me before Lady Nore so that I fall on my hands and knees.

  She rises from her seat at a long, food-laden table. We have interrupted her banquet.

  Lady Nore’s white hair has been tied up on her head in a complicated arrangement of plaits, although a few have come down. Her gown is an opulent confection of black feathers and silver fabric that deepens to black at the floor. Ex-falcons crowd around her, formerly loyal soldiers to the Grand General of Elfhame, now hers to command.

  When I look at her, I am filled with the same hate and fear that paralyzed me throughout my childhood.

  And yet, there is fresh madness in her yellow eyes. She is not the same as she was when I saw her last. And disturbingly, I see myself in her. Resentful, and trapped, and full of thwarted desire. The worst parts of me, and all my worst potential.

  New also are the two gray hands that she wears as a necklace. Horrifyingly, I see the fingers move as though alive, caressing the hollow of her throat. More horrifyingly, I suspect them to have once belonged to Lord Jarel.

  Behind her, on a pillar of ice, is the cracked reliquary that must contain the bones and other remains of Mab. Strangely, tendrils, like roots, grow from the case, one with a bud on it, as though flowering.

  On Lady Nore’s left side sits a troll with a crown of beaten gold and a mantle of blue velvet stitched with silver scales. His clothing is leather, richly worked, with a pattern that reminds me of those we saw in the Stone Forest.

  Hurclaw, who has somehow evaded the curse of the Stone Forest. Who has brought his people to help guard the Citadel. But why throw in his lot with Lady Nore? If what Oak got from Gorga was correct, Hurclaw is here to court her. If so, perhaps her power makes for a compelling dowry. He and his trolls make up the majority of those seated, along with two huldufólk ladies, and Bogdana. She is in her usual ragged black robes, her hair as wild as ever. When she sees me, a strange gleam enters her eyes.

  On the table before all of them are silver plates and goblets of ice filled with black wine from the night-blooming fruit of the duergar. Black radishes, soaked in vinegar and cut into thin slivers to show off their pale insides. Trays of snow drizzled with honey so that the honey freezes and can be lifted and eaten like a cracker. Jellied meat, with an uncomfortable resemblance to the walls of the Citadel with things frozen inside.

  A single musician plucks at the strings of a harp.

  Despite the feast, and the guards, and stick soldiers standing at attention along one wall, the room seems empty by comparison with what it was once like, when Lord Jarel was alive. There ought to have been tables filling the hall, with guests to make toasts. Cupbearers. Entertainers. A court shaped entirely to Lady Nore’s whims. Have they all fled?