“You’ve not heard of them? A love-talker is able to quicken such desire in mortals that they die of it. The Folk might not find the passion lethal, but we still feel it. Oak’s first mother charmed the High King Eldred and his son Dain into her bed. Oak’s half brother is said to have made both Jude and her twin, Taryn, his lovers and stolen Cardan’s former betrothed from his side. What do you suppose the prince is able—”

  Hyacinthe bites off his last words because we have stopped in front of four doors, all of them of stone with spiraling metal hinges.

  But I can’t help finishing the sentence for him, the way I fear it would have gone. What do you suppose the prince is able to do to someone like you? A shudder goes through me, a recognition of a desire that I would have preferred to deny.

  Was that how he made everyone feel? No wonder there was always a girl. No wonder Hyacinthe believes Tiernan is wrapped around his finger.

  Dvort bows again, gesturing toward the rooms, then gives Hyacinthe a shove to keep moving into one of three branching passageways.

  “He stays with us,” Oak says.

  “You heard His Majesty.” Despite the sneer in his voice when he speaks of Oak, Hyacinthe obviously doesn’t want to be taken. He attempts to move around the page, toward the prince. But the silent page blocks his way.

  Oak’s hand goes to the hilt of a blade.

  “Enough,” Tiernan says, grabbing the prince’s arm. “They want you to break hospitality. Stop it. It shouldn’t hurt Hyacinthe to cool his heels in the queen’s prison for one night. I’ll accompany him and make sure he’s comfortable enough.”

  “Unseelie is as Unseelie does,” says Jack of the Lakes with some relish.

  I watch them go, panic rising as our party is cleft in two. When I am ushered into my room, I only feel worse.

  It is a grim chamber, its walls carved of stone and earth. There is a rough bed in one corner, heaped with blankets and opulent cushions, and hung with tapestries. Each curtain depicts hunted creatures bleeding out in forests of colorful foliage, their bodies full of arrows.

  There’s a jug of water and a washbasin on a stand, and a few hooks on the wall. I take a turn about the room, looking for spy holes, secret passageways, and hidden dangers.

  The place makes my skin itch. Though it is warm here, and nothing is ice, it reminds me entirely too much of the Court of Teeth. I want to be away.

  I sit on the bed, counting to one hundred, hoping that the panicky feeling will pass.

  Just as I get to number eighty-eight, Oak opens the door. “I’ve arranged for you to see the royal seamstress.”

  My gaze alights on the hollow of his throat just above his collar. I try to avoid his eyes.

  Love-talker.

  “I don’t want to go.” All I want is to curl up in a corner until we can leave.

  He looks incredulous. “You can hardly attend the revel like that.”

  Shame heats my cheeks, looking at him in all his finery.

  It’s not fair. I am cleaner than I’ve been in weeks. It’s true that there are holes in my dress, the hem is ragged, and there are places where the fabric has worn thin enough to tear. Still, it’s mine.

  “If you think I will embarrass you, leave me to this room,” I growl, hoping he agrees.

  “If you go as you are, it will appear as though Elfhame does not value you, and that’s perilous in the Court of Moths,” he says.

  I scowl, unwilling to be reasonable.

  The prince sighs, pushing hair out of his fox eyes. “If you remain in this room, Tiernan must stay to watch over you, and he has a hankering to drink the sweet wines and hear the songs of the Court of Moths. Now, up. You can put your old dress back on tomorrow.”

  Humiliated, I rise and follow him.

  Someone sings an eerie little song on the other side of the seamstress’s door, and I feel the pull of magic, thick clots of it. Whatever is inside has power.

  I shoot Oak a look of warning, but he knocks anyway.

  The song stops.

  “Who calls at Habetrot’s chamber?” comes a whispery voice.

  Oak raises his eyebrows at me, as though he intends me to answer.

  Fine, if that’s what he wants. “Suren, whose garb has been deemed inadequate by an obnoxious prince, despite the fact I’ve seen people go naked to revels.”

  Rather than be insulted, Oak laughs delightedly.

  The door opens to reveal a woman with frog-green skin, a wide lower lip, and wild eyebrows. Dressed in a black garment large enough to swallow up her body, she’s bent so far over that her fingers nearly touch the ground.

  She looks at me and blinks wet black eyes. “Come, come,” she calls.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” says Oak with a departing bow.

  I bite my lip against snarling and follow the faerie into a tunnel that’s so low-ceilinged that I have to stoop.

  When we emerge, it is into a chamber filled with bolts of cloth resting on shelves that go up high enough to be shrouded in darkness. What light there is comes from candles set in sconces around the room, covered in globes of cloudy glass.

  “You know what they say about me?” Habetrot whispers. “That instead of sewing garments, I pluck them out of dreams. Raiments such as I create have never been seen before, or since. So, what do you dream of?”

  I frown down at my tattered dress in confusion.

  “Forest girl, is that what you were? One of the solitary fey brought to Court?”

  I nod, because that’s true enough, in a way.

  “Perhaps you want something of bark and furs?” she asks, walking around me, squinting a little as though seeing some vision of what she will put me in.

  “If that’s appropriate,” I say, unsure.

  She grabs hold of my arm, encircling it with her fingers to measure. “Surely you would not insult me with such a lack of extravagance?”

  I am at a loss. Even if she could see into my dreams, she would find no garment of the sort she would have me imagine. “I don’t know what I want.” The words come out a whisper, too true by half.

  “Destruction and ruin,” she says with a clack of her tongue. “I can practically smell it on you.”

  I shake my head, but I can’t help thinking of the satisfaction I felt wrecking the glaistig’s spells. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a knot inside me, and were it to come apart, whatever emerged would be all teeth.

  Habetrot regards me with her bead-black eyes, unsmiling. Then starts searching among her bolts of cloth.

  Once, the thing I am wearing was a sundress, with fluttery sleeves. A diaphanous white gown that flowed around me when I spun. I found it in a shop late one night. I’d stripped off the clothes given to me in the Court of Teeth, left them behind, and put that on instead.

  I liked the dress so much that I wove myself a crown of hellebores and danced through the night streets. I stared at myself in puddles, convinced that so long as I didn’t smile, I might even be pretty. I know it doesn’t look like that anymore, but I can no longer picture myself in anything else.

  I wish Oak could have seen the dress as it was, even though it hasn’t looked that way in a long time.

  A few minutes later, Habetrot comes over with a fabric in a soft, deep gray that seems to shift in her hands between brown and blue when she turns it in the light. My fingers stray to the cloth, petting the nap of the velvet. It is as soft as the cloak that the prince draped over my shoulders.

  “Yes, yes,” she says. “This will do. Arms out like a bird. There.”

  As I stand there, letting her drape me in fabric, my gaze goes to her collections of buttons and fiber and cloth. To the spindle resting in one corner and the shimmer of the thread in it, bright as starlight.

  “You,” Habetrot says, poking me in the side. “Shoulders back. Don’t crouch like an animal.”

  I do what she tells me but bare my teeth at her. She bares her teeth in return. They are blunt, blackened along the gums.

  “I have dressed queens and knights, giants and hags. I will dress you, too, and give that for which you were too afraid to ask.”

  I don’t see how that is possible, but I do not argue. I think instead of the way we came. I counted the passages, and I am almost certain I know the way back to the fog-shrouded hole in the ground. I go over them again and again to fix them in my memory in case I have to run. In case we all have to run.

  When she has my measurements and perhaps my measure, she goes to her table and begins to rip and stitch, leaving me to awkwardly wander the room, peering at ribbons, some of which seem to be made of woven hair, others of toad skin. I pocket a pair of sharp-looking scissors with a handle in the shape of a swan. They are lighter than my knives and much easier to conceal.

  I cannot deny that though I have avoided the Folk, I am fascinated by them. Despite them being deceivers, and dangerous.

  My gaze alights on a button the exact shining golden bronze of Oak’s hair. Then another the purple of Hyacinthe’s eyes.

  I think of him in the dungeons. Hyacinthe, half-cursed, wearing that awful bridle, so desperate that he would seek help even from me.

  “Come and try this on,” says Habetrot, surprising me out of my thoughts.

  “But it’s only been a few moments,” I say, puzzled.

  “Magic,” she reminds me with a flourish, then ushers me behind a screen. “And give me that dress you’re wearing. I want to burn it.”

  I pull the worn fabric over my head, letting it fall to the floor between us and fixing her with a look that dares her to wrest it from me. I feel as vulnerable as a selkie taking off her skin.

  Habetrot pushes the soft blue-purple-gray garment into my hands. I put it on carefully, feeling the slide of the lining smooth against my skin, feeling the comforting weight of fabric.

  It is a gown, but one such as I have never seen before. It is composed mostly of the cloth she showed me, but there are strips of other material running through it, some diaphanous and others satiny, some patterned in butterfly wings, some felted wool. Dangling threads hang from torn edges, and a few pieces of thin fabric have been wadded up to give them a new texture. The swirling patchwork she has created is at once tattered and beautiful.

  As I look at it, I am not sure what to think. It is mockery that makes her dress me thus, in rags and scraps, no matter how deftly put together?

  But perhaps that’s what she thought would best suit me. Perhaps it is Oak who is the fool, who caught a wolf and thought that by putting it in a gown and speaking to it as though it were a girl, it would become one.

  At least the hem of the skirt doesn’t drag impractically on the floor. I can still run in it as I howl at the moon.

  “Come out, come out,” she says.

  I step from behind the screen, taking a sharp breath as I do so, dreading seeing myself in the mirror and feeling the burn of further humiliation.

  The little seamstress pushes me toward a polished bronze thing that looks like a shield. My reflection stares back at me.

  I am taller than I remembered. My hair is a wild tangle despite my attempts at finger-combing and washing it back at the motel. I never got out all the knots. My clavicle shows at the top of the collar, and I know I am too thin. But the dress clings to my chest and waist, skirt flaring over my hips. The tattered edges give it a haunting elegance, as though I am wrapped in the shadows of dusk. I look the picture of a mysterious courtier, rather than someone who sleeps in dirt.

  Habetrot drops boots beside me, and I realize how long I’ve been standing there, staring at myself. A different kind of shame heats my cheeks.

  I twist my hands in the skirt. The dress even has pockets.

  “I knew I kept these,” she says, indicating the footwear. “If he’s half as taken with you as you are with yourself, I imagine he’ll be well pleased.”

  “Who?” I demand sharply, but she only shrugs and presses a bone comb into my hand.

  “Fix your hair,” she says, then shrugs again. “Or make it wilder. You look lovely either way.”

  “What will you want for all this?” I ask, thinking of all the faerie bargains I’ve overheard, and of how much I like the dress I am wearing, how I could use the boots. I understand the temptation felt by every fool in a forest.

  Her bead-black eyes study me, then she shakes her head. “I serve Queen Annet, and she bade me gift whatever the prince of the High Court asked, were it within the scope of my talents.”

  Of course someone must have told Oak where Habetrot’s chambers were and assured him that she could do what he asked. So it is not Habetrot I owe, but Oak. And he owes Queen Annet in turn. My heart sinks. Debt is not easily dismissed in Faerie.

  And the Court of Moths are showing off what good hosts they are.

  “The gown is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen,” I say to her, as I can pay her no other way without insult. It has been a long time since I have been given a gift, barbed though it may be. “It does feel as though it might come from a dream.”

  That makes Habetrot’s cheeks pink. “Good. Maybe you will come back and tell me how the Prince of Sunlight liked the Queen of Night.”

  Embarrassed, I step out into the hall, wondering how she could believe that a dress—no matter how beautiful—could make me into an object of desire. Wondering if everyone at the revel would think that I was dangling after Oak and laugh behind their hands.

  I stomp back through the hall to my room and swing open the door, only to find Oak lounging in one of the chairs, his long limbs spread out in shameless comfort. A flower crown of myrtle rests just above his horns. With it, he wears a new shirt of white linen and scarlet trousers embroidered with vines. Even his hooves appear polished.

  He looks every bit the handsome faerie prince, beloved by everyone and everything. Rabbits probably eat from his hands. Blue jays try to feed him worms meant for their own children.

  He smiles, as though not surprised to see me in a beautiful gown. In fact, his gaze passes over it quickly, to rest with an odd intensity on my face. “Striking,” he says, although I do not see how he could have possibly given it enough attention to know.

  I feel both shy and resentful.

  The Prince of Sunlight.

  I do not bother telling him what he looks like. I am sure he already knows.

  He brushes one hand through his golden curls. “We have an audience with Annet. Hopefully we can persuade her to send us to the Thistlewitch swiftly. Until then, we have been invited to roam her halls and eat from her banquet tables.”

  I sit on a stool, pull on my new boots, and then tie up the laces. “Why do you think she took Hyacinthe?”

  Oak rubs a hand over his face. “I believe she wanted to show she could. I hope there’s no more to it than that.”

  I take the comb from a pocket of my new dress and then hesitate. If I begin to untangle my nimbus of snarls, he will see how badly my hair is matted and be reminded of where he found me.

  He stands.

  Good. He will leave, and then I will be able to wrangle my hair alone.

  But instead he steps behind me and takes the comb from my hands. “Let me do that,” he says, taking strands of my hair in his fingers. “It’s the color of primroses.”

  My shoulders tense. I am unused to people touching me. “You don’t need to—” I start.

  “It’s no trouble,” he says. “I had three older sisters brushing and braiding mine, no matter how I howled. I had to learn to do theirs, in self-defense. And my mother…”

  His fingers are clever. He holds each lock at the base, slowly teasing out the knots at the very ends and then working backward to the scalp. Under his hands, it becomes smooth ribbons. If I had done this, I would have yanked half of it out in frustration.

  “Your mother…,” I echo, prompting him to continue in a voice that shakes only a little.

  He begins to braid, sweeping my hair up so that thick plaits become something like his circlet, wrapping around my head.

  “When we were in the mortal world, away from her servants, she needed help arranging it.” His voice is soft.

  This, along with the slightly painful pull against my scalp, the brush of his fingertips against my neck as he separates a section, the slight frown of concentration on his face, is overwhelming. I am not accustomed to someone being this close.

  When I look up, his smile is all invitation.

  We are no longer children, playing games and hiding beneath his bed, but I feel as though this is a different kind of game, one where I do not understand the rules.

  With a shiver, I take up the mirror from the dresser. In this hair and with this dress, I look pretty. The kind of pretty that allows monsters to deceive people into forests, into dances where they will find their doom.

  A knock on the door announces a knight with hair the color of rotten vegetation and eyes like onyx, who introduces herself as Lupine. She tells us that she is to lead us to the revel happening in the great hall of the palace. When she speaks, I see that the inside of her mouth is as black as her eyes. “The Queen of Moths awaits you.”

  She appears to be one of the sluagh, the half-dead Folk. Banshees, who are said to be the souls of those who died in grief. Fetches, which mirror the faces of the dying and announce their doom. If the Gentry are proof that faeries can live forever, and be forever young, then the sluagh are proof they might even live on after that. I find them both disconcerting and fascinating in equal measure.

  Tiernan and Jack have made themselves presentable. The kelpie slicked back his dark hair and affixed a flower just below the collar of his shirt. Tiernan wears a doublet he must have hunted up from one of his bags, brown velvet and slightly wrinkled, more that of a soldier than a courtier. He frowned when he saw Oak emerge from my room with me.

  “Lead on,” Oak tells Lupine, and with a shallow bow, she sets off, leaving us to trail behind.

  The tunnels of the Court of Moths carry the scents of fresh-turned earth and seawater. As the southernmost Court on the coast, it is perhaps not surprising that we pass through sea caves, their walls studded with the sharp remains of barnacles. There is a wet, crashing sound, and for a moment I imagine the ocean rushing in and drowning us all. But it recedes, and I realize the waves must be far enough off not to be a danger.