Not a flattering assessment of Oak, but he is currently slung over the back of a horse. He also, possibly, saved the knight’s life. And mine.

  “Is that what you truly believe?” I ask.

  “What? That there’s a girl? Of that, I’m certain. There always is. But I’m equally certain that bravery shouldn’t be beneath a prince,” Tiernan tells me.

  There are rumors that Cardan never wanted the throne, that he will hand it over to Oak willingly at some vague future time. But when I think of High King Cardan with his black curls and cruel mouth, the way he behaves—silly and dangersome all at once—I don’t believe he would relinquish power. He might, however, trick Oak into going on a quest he wouldn’t return from. Build him up with stories of honor and valiant deeds. “If the High King and Queen let him go without no more protection than you, someone wants him dead.”

  Tiernan’s eyebrows raise. “You’ve got a suspicious mind.”

  “Says the lover of a traitor.” I hadn’t been certain I was right, but then I saw Tiernan glance at Hyacinthe when he spoke of love, and recalled what Oak said to him before about trust.

  It’s satisfying when I see the blow land.

  Tiernan gapes at me, stunned, as though it never occurred to him that just because my voice is scratchy with disuse, just because I seem more beast than girl, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been paying attention.

  Hyacinthe gives a hollow laugh.

  “You think the High King is making a move against Oak through me?” asks the knight.

  I shrug. “I think that even if you want to take every risk for the prince, there’s only one of you. And I think it’s odd for the royal family to allow a prince to gamble on glory with his life.”

  The knight looks away and does not respond.

  We walk on for the better part of a mile before Oak makes a low moan and tries to sit up. “Jude,” he mutters. “Jude, we can’t just let him die.”

  “You’re all right,” Tiernan says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We lost them.”

  The prince opens his tawny fox eyes and looks around. When he sees me, he slumps back down, as though relieved that I am still here.

  Near dawn we come to a windswept beach.

  “Wait here with the prince,” Tiernan tells me as we close on a jetty of black stone. “Hyacinthe, your commands stand. My enemies are yours. Defend her if necessary.”

  The prisoner gives a thin-lipped smile. “It’s not I who has forgotten all I vowed.”

  I cannot see Tiernan’s face, so I cannot tell if Hyacinthe’s bitterness bothers him.

  The air is thick with salt. I lick it off my top lip and watch as Tiernan leads his wounded horse onto the sand. Rags’s hoof touches the edge of a wave. At the brush of sea-foam, she tosses her mane and gives a whinnying sound that causes the hair to stand up along my arms.

  Hyacinthe turns to me. The crash of the surf makes it impossible for him to be heard by Tiernan, but he lowers his voice anyway. “There are things I could tell you, were I not bridled. Free me, and I’ll help you.”

  I say nothing. I pity him, bridled as he is, but that doesn’t make him my ally.

  “Please,” he says. “I would not live like this. When I was caught, Oak removed the curse, but he didn’t have the power to keep it from creeping back. First my arm, then I know not what. It is worse than being a falcon entire, to lose oneself again slowly.”

  “Let me be clear. I hate Lady Nore,” I say, a snarl in my voice, because I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to sympathize with him more than I do already. “And if you’re loyal to her, I hate you, too.”

  “I followed Madoc,” Hyacinthe says. “And now I am his son’s prisoner. Because I was more constant, not less. More loyal than my lover, who became twisted around the finger of another and forswore me. Lady Nore promised to remove the curse on any falcon who would join her, but I never gave her any oath. You can trust me, lady. Unlike the others, I will not play you false.”

  Across the beach, Tiernan’s horse charges into the black water, heedless of the swells breaking over her.

  More loyal than my lover, who became twisted around the finger of another.

  “Is Rags drowning?” I ask.

  Hyacinthe shakes his head. “The sea folk will take her back to Elfhame, and she will be made well there.”

  I let out my breath. My gaze goes to Oak, his cheek pillowed on Damsel’s flank. His armor glinting in the moonlight. The flutter of his lashes. The calluses on his hands. “Removing the bridle will neither halt nor hasten your curse,” I remind Hyacinthe.

  “Do not fall under Prince Oak’s spell,” he warns as the knight climbs up the rocks to us. “He’s not what he seems.”

  Several questions are on the tip of my tongue, but there is no time to ask them. As Tiernan draws close, I look out at the sea. Rags has disappeared. I can’t see so much as her head above the waves.

  “We’re down to one steed,” Tiernan informs us.

  We don’t have a place to rest, either. I study the shadowy space beneath the boardwalk. We could curl up there on the cool, soft sand without being bothered. Just the thought of it makes me freshly aware of how exhausted I am.

  The knight points up toward the road. “There’s a motel that way. I saw the sign from the shoreline.”

  He takes the reins of Oak’s horse and leads her up the hill. I follow, ahead of the winged soldier. I note how stiff they are with each other, how carefully they keep separate, as magnets must keep a safe distance or be slammed together by their very nature.

  We walk, fading stars overhead, brine in the air. I wonder if the hum of traffic or the smell of iron bothers them. I am used to it. So long as we remain here, I am on solid ground. Once we get to the Court of Moths, we will be far enough into Faerie for things to grow slippery and uncertain.

  At the thought, I kick a desiccated fast-food drink cup, sending it spinning along the gutter.

  A few blocks and we come to a motel with scrubby weeds pushing through the cracks of the parking lot. A few run-down cars are parked near the one-level stucco building. A sign overhead promised vacancies, cable, and little else.

  The prince attempts to sit up again.

  “Just stay where you are,” says Tiernan. “We’ll be back with the keys.”

  “I’m fine,” Oak says, sliding off the horse and immediately collapsing onto the asphalt.

  “Fine?” the knight echoes, eyebrows raised.

  “I couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” says the prince, and manages to stagger to his feet. He leans heavily on a nearby car.

  “Hyacinthe,” Tiernan says, pointing. “Do not let him fall again. Wren, you’re with me.”

  “I could only dream of letting so important a personage drop,” Hyacinthe sneers. “Or I would never dream. Or something.”

  “Flying is what you ought to dream of, falcon,” Oak says, with enough heat that I wonder if he overheard part of our conversation.

  Hyacinthe flinches.

  “Wren,” Tiernan says again, beckoning toward the motel.

  “I’m bad at glamours,” I warn him.

  “Then we won’t bother with one.”

  The reception area stinks of stale cigarettes despite the NO SMOKING sign over the door. Behind the desk is an exhausted-looking woman playing a game on her phone.

  She glances up at us, and her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens to scream.

  “You see totally normal people here for totally normal reasons,” Tiernan tells her, and as I watch, her features smooth out into a glassy-eyed calm. “We want two rooms, right next to each other.”

  I think of how my unparents were glamoured and hate this, even though he’s not asking her to do anything awful. Yet.

  “Sure,” says the woman. “Not too many tourists this time of year; you’ll have most places to yourselves.”

  The knight nods vaguely as the woman shoves a blank motel key into the machine.

  She says something about how she still needs a card for incidentals, but a few words later, she’s forgotten all about that. Tiernan pays with bills that don’t have the suspiciously crisp look of glamoured leaves. I cut him a strange glance and pocket a matchbook.

  Outside, our remaining horse stands on a patch of scrubby grass, glowing softly, eating a dandelion. No one seems inclined to tie Damsel up.

  Oak sits on the bumper of a car, looking a bit better. Hyacinthe leans against a dirty stucco wall.

  “That money,” I ask. “Was it real?”

  “Oh, yes,” the prince confirms. “My sister would be wroth with us otherwise.”

  “Wroth.” I echo the archaic word, although I know what it means. Pissed off.

  “Super wroth,” he says with a grin.

  To faeries, mortals are usually either irrelevant or entertainment. But I suppose his sister can be relegated to neither. Many of the Folk must hate her for that.

  Tiernan leads us to our rooms—131 and 132. He opens the first and ushers us all inside. There are two twin beds, with scratchy-looking coverlets. A television sits on the wall over a saggy desk that’s been bolted to the floor, causing the carpet to be stained with small circles of rust around the screws. The heater is on, and the air smells vaguely of burning dust.

  Hyacinthe stands beside the door, wing closed tight to his back. His gaze follows me, possibly to avoid resting on the knight.

  Oak crawls onto the nearest bed but doesn’t shut his eyes. He smiles up at the ceiling instead. “We learned something of her capabilities.”

  “And you want me to tell you that was worth you being poisoned?” the knight demands.

  “I’m always being poisoned. Alas, that it wasn’t blusher mushroom,” the prince says nonsensically.

  Tiernan nods his chin at me. “That girl thinks you’re a fool for even being here.”

  I scowl, because that’s not what I meant.

  “Ah, Lady Wren,” Oak says, a lazy smile on his mouth. Marigold hair brushing his forehead, half-hiding his horns. “You wound me.”

  I doubt I hurt his feelings. His cheeks are still slashed from my nails, though. Three lines of dried blood, pink around the edges. Nothing he says is a lie, but all his words are riddles.

  Tiernan kneels and starts to unbuckle the sides of Oak’s armor. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  I squat on the other side of the prince, worried I am going to do something wrong. Oak’s gaze slants to me as, with fumbling fingers, I try to work off the scale mail where it has stuck to his wound. He makes a soft huff of pain, and I can see the way his lips are white at the edges, from being pressed together as he bites back whatever other sounds he wants to make.

  Underneath, his stained linen shirt is pushed up over the flat plane of his stomach, the dip of his hip bones. His sweat carries the scent of crushed grass, but mostly he smells like blood. He watches me, lashes low over his eyes.

  Without his golden armor, he almost looks like the boy I remember.

  Tiernan gets up, gathering towels.

  “How did Lady Nore know you were coming for me?” I ask, trying to distance myself from the strange intimacy of the moment, from the heat and nearness of his body.

  If she’d sent both Bogdana and stick creatures, she must suddenly want me very much, after ignoring me for eight years.

  Oak tries to sit up higher on the pillows and winces, a hectic flush on his cheeks. “She’s likely to have realized that asking you to come with me would be the clever thing to do,” he says. “Or she could have had spies that saw the direction in which we were headed when we left Elfhame.”

  Tiernan nods toward Hyacinthe from the bathroom, where he’s soaking cloth under steaming water from the tap. “Spies like him, I imagine.”

  I frown at the bridled former falcon.

  “There’s not a lot of work for birds out there,” Hyacinthe says, putting up his hand in defense. “And I didn’t spy on you.”

  Tiernan brings over the towels, picking one up as though he intends to wash the prince’s wound. Before he can, Oak takes and presses it to his own shoulder, closing his eyes against the pain. The water trickles down his back to stain the sheets pink.

  “We’re within a few days’ ride of the Court of Moths, but we’re down to one horse,” Tiernan says.

  “I’ll bargain for another,” Oak tells us distractedly. I am not sure he realizes that in the mortal world, horses are not something you can just pick up at a local farmers’ market.

  When the prince begins to bind up his wound, Tiernan nods in my direction. “Come,” he says, ushering me out of the room. “Let’s leave him to dream of all the things he will do tomorrow.”

  “Like issue a royal decree that you won’t mock me when I’ve been poisoned,” says Oak.

  “Keep dreaming,” Tiernan tells him.

  I glance back at Hyacinthe, since it doesn’t seem to me that the knight is wrapped around the prince’s finger. If anything, they seem like friends who’ve known each other a long time. But the former falcon is picking his fingernails with a dagger and ignoring all of us.

  Tiernan uses his second key to open the way to a nearly identical space. Two beds, one television. Rust stains where the bolts have sat in contact with the rug. A polyester coverlet that looks as though spilled water might bead up on top of it.

  There, the knight loops rope around my ankle, tying me to the bed with enough slack that I can lie down, even roll over. I hiss at him as he does it, pulling against the bonds.

  “He might trust you,” says Tiernan. “But I trust no one from the Court of Teeth.”

  Then he speaks a few words over the knot, a bit of enchantment that I am almost certain I can break, what with all the practice I’ve had at unraveling the glaistig’s spells.

  “Sleep tight,” he tells me, and goes out, closing the door hard after him. He’s left his pack behind, and I bet he’s planning on returning and sleeping here, where he can keep an eye on me. And where he can avoid whatever he’s feeling about Hyacinthe.

  Spitefully, I get up and throw the bolt lock, letting the rope pull taut.

  Dawn has lengthened into day, and all around the motel, the mortal world is coming awake. A car engine fires to life. Two people argue near a vending machine. A slammed door sounds from the room next to mine. I peer out the window, imagining slipping away into the morning and disappearing. Imagining the look on Tiernan’s face when he returns to find me gone.

  But I would be foolish to try to face the storm hag or Lady Nore on my own. I would have been felled by the same poison that struck the prince, except without armor, the bolt would have sunk deeper into my flesh. And no one would have been there to give me an antidote or carry me on a horse.

  Still, I don’t want to be dragged along like an animal, worrying about being put on a leash.

  If I cannot have respect, if I cannot be treated as their equal, then at least I want Oak to see that I have as much right as he does to this quest, more reasons to hate Lady Nore, and the power to stop her.

  But it’s hard to think of how I will manage to convince them of that when my ankle is tied to the leg of the bed, and my thoughts are woolly with exhaustion. Taking one of the blankets from my bag, I scrabble into the dusty space between mattress and floor, curling up there. The awareness of the slats over me and the familiar, forest smell of my blanket is comforting.

  Pillowing my head on my arms, I try to settle in. It ought to be hard to fall asleep in this unfamiliar place, filled with strange sounds. My thighs hurt from the ride, and my feet are sore from walking. But as warm, buttery sunlight flows into the room like yolk from a cracked egg, my eyes drift closed. I do not even dream.

  When I wake, the sky is dark. I crawl out from underneath the bed, hunger gnawing my belly.

  Tiernan must have been in and then gone without my noticing, because the bolt lock is undone, his pack missing. I make quick work of his stupid enchanted knot, then go into the bathroom and fill the plastic cup I find there with water. I guzzle it, refill it, and drink again.

  As I look up, I catch sight of my own reflection and take an automatic step back. Unglamoured, my skin is the pale blue-gray of hydrangea blooms, smeared with dirt along one cheek and across my nose. My hair is so woven with leaves and twigs and mud that it would be almost impossible to know that underneath it is an even darker blue. I have the same pointy chin I had when I thought I was mortal. A thin face, with large eyes, and an expression of startlement, as though I expect someone else when I look in the mirror.

  At least my eyes could pass for human. They’re green, deep and dark.

  I smile a little to see the awfulness of my sharp teeth. A mouth full of knives. They make even the Folk flinch.

  My gaze goes to the tub, thinking about what I must seem like to Oak, now that we’re both grown. Turn the faucet and let the hot water run over my hand. As dirt washes off, I see that the skin underneath is a warmer, lighter blue.

  But I am no Court lady with lips of carmine and butterflies in my hair. I am scrawny, like a stick bug.

  I put the stopper in the tub and let it fill. Then slowly I lower myself in. The heat is almost more than I can bear. Still, I scrub at my skin with my jagged nails. In minutes the water is so filthy that I have to let it drain out. Then I do it again. Sinking my fingers into my hair, I try to pick apart the tangles. It’s painful, and slathering it with the contents of the tiny bottle of conditioner does little to help. I am still not totally clean when I get out of the water, despite the fine layer of grit remaining behind in the tub.

  Now that I’ve washed, my dress looks dirtier than ever, worn as thin as tissue in places, and discolored by both sun and mud. There’s nothing else, so I pick it up and run it under the tap of the sink, scrubbing at it gently with soap and hoping it doesn’t tear. Then I drape it over the shower-curtain rod and aim the hair dryer onto it. It’s still damp when I take it down.

  I start stepping into it when I see a shadow move outside the window.

  I drop to the floor, but not before I recognize the long fingers. As I crawl naked underneath the bed, I hear the sound of nails scratching against glass. I brace for Bogdana to shatter the window or kick in the door.