Page 17 of The Stolen Heir

He appeared relieved that I didn’t ask him questions about his mother, like why he was upset with her or why she’d been kind despite it. I wondered again if he’d been looking for Madoc when he found me the night before.

I began to shuffle the cards and talked as I did so he wouldn’t notice my hands. “What else was there in the kitchens?”

He frowned a little, and it made me nervous until I realized he was just concentrating. “Pheasant,” he said. “Acorn cakes. Oh, and I think I have Ring Pops somewhere here, from trick-or-treating. I went as myself.”

There was something horrifying about that, but some part of me wished I could have done it, too.

I dealt to him from the bottom of the deck and to myself from the top, where I’d been careful to put plenty of matches. He won once anyway. But I won twice.

He let me hide under his bed that day, and the next, after I learned that there hadn’t ever been a chance at peace, that the Court of Teeth had lost the war, and that Lord Jarel, my father, was dead.

That was the first time in over a year that I slept through the night and deep into the afternoon without waking.

I will always be grateful for that, even after guards dragged me out of his room three days later in chains. Even after the High Queen sent me away from Elfhame, and Oak said not a single word to stop her.

CHAPTER

4

Behind the abandoned house, two faerie horses chew on dandelions as they wait for their riders. Slight as deer, with a soft halo of light surrounding their bodies, they glide between the trees like ghosts.

Oak goes to the first. Her coat a soft gray, her mane braided into something that looks like netting, and which is hung with gold beads. Tooled leather saddlebags rest against her flanks. She nuzzles into his hand.

“Have you ridden before?” he asks me, and I return him the look he deserves.

In the Court of Teeth, I was instructed on almost none of the things that a child of royalty ought to know. I was barely taught to use my own magic, leaving me as I am, with weak spells, poor etiquette, and no familiarity with faerie horses.

“No? And yet you would look so well with your hair whipping behind you,” Oak says. “Wild as the Folk of old.”

I feel the tightening coils of embarrassment in my gut. Although he may intend it as mockery, I am pleased as much as shamed by his words.

Tiernan has his hand on Hyacinthe’s back, guiding him across the grass. An odd way of touching a prisoner. “You can’t help trying to charm every snake you come upon, no matter how cold-blooded or vicious. Let that one be.”

I want to bare my teeth, but I feel it will only justify Tiernan’s words.

“I think you’re giving me the advice you ought to have given yourself years ago,” Oak returns without real annoyance, and I can see from Tiernan’s expression that arrow struck true. The knight’s eyes narrow.

Oak rubs a hand over his face and, in that moment, looks exhausted. I blink, and his features shift to mildly amused. I am left to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. “Making pleasant conversation with one’s traveling companions leads to less miserable travel, I find.”

“Oh, do you?” says Tiernan in a parody of the prince’s drawl. “Well, then, by all means—carry on.”

“Oh, Ishall,” Oak returns. Now they’re both obviously annoyed with each other, although I have no idea why.

“What’s your horse’s name?” I ask in the long silence that follows. My voice rasps only a little.

Oak strokes fingers over the velvet nap of her flank, visibly pushing off his mood. “My sister Taryn called her Damsel Fly when we were young, and it stuck. I’ll hand you up.”

“Isn’t that sweet?” Hyacinthe says, the first words I’ve heard him speak. “Riding your sister’s horse into battle. Have you anything of your own, prince? Or just girls’ castoffs and scraps?”

“Get up,” Tiernan tells Hyacinthe gruffly. “Mount.”

“As you command,” the cursed soldier says. “You do delight in giving orders, don’t you?”

“To you, I do,” Tiernan returns, heaving himself up behind the prisoner. A moment later he seems to realize what he’s said, and his cheeks pink. I don’t think Hyacinthe can see him, but I can.

“He calls his horse Rags,” Oak goes on as though neither of the others spoke, although ignoring them must take some effort.

Tiernan sees me glance in his direction and gives me a look that reminds me that, were it up to him, he’d have me bound and gagged and dragged along behind them.