Page 48 of The Stolen Heir
His jaw tightens. “Wren?”
I don’t know how to answer for what I did.
Oak takes the playing piece, an abstracted expression coming over his face. “I thought never to see this again.”
“We’re here to take Suren,” Revindra goes on. “And we will take it ill if you attempt to prevent us.”
The gaze that Oak slants toward me is as cold as the one he bestowed on the ogres.
“Oh,” he says. “I wouldn’t dream of stopping you.”
CHAPTER
8
At fourteen, I learned to make tea out of crushed spruce needles along with bee balm flowers, boiled over a fire.
“Would you like a cup, Mr. Fox?” I asked my stuffed animal solicitously, as though we were very fancy.
He didn’t want any. Since stealing Mr. Fox back from my unparents’ boxes, I’d cuddled up with him every night, and his fur had become dingy from sleeping on moss and dirt.
Worse, there were a few times I’d left him behind when I went to sit underneath windows at Bex’s school or the local community college, repeating probably useless poems and snatches of history to myself, or doing sums by tracing the numbers in the earth. One night when I returned, I found he’d been attacked by a squirrel looking for material to nest in and most of his insides had been pulled out.
Since then, I’d stayed at my camp, reading him a novel about an impoverished governess I’d taken from the library when I’d picked upForaging in the American Southeast. There was a lot about convalescing and chilblains, so I figured it might make him feel better.
Mr. Fox looked uncomfortably like the skins Bogdana hung up to dry after her kills.
“We’ll get you some new guts, Mr. Fox,” I promised him. “Feathers, maybe.”
As I flopped down, my gaze tracked a bird in the tree above us. I’d gotten fast and vicious in the wild. I could catch it easily enough, but it would be hard to be sure the feathers were clean and parasite-free. Maybe I should consider ripping apart one of my unfamily’s pillows instead.
Out in the woods, I’d often think of the games Rebecca and I used to play. Like once, when we were pretending to be fairy-tale princesses. We carted out props—a rusty axe that had probably never been taken from the garage before, two paper crowns I’d made from glitter and cut-up newspaper, and an apple, only slightly bruised, but shiny with wax.
“First, I am going to be a woodsman and you are going to plead for your life,” Rebecca told me. “I’ll be sympathetic, because you’re so pretty and sad, so I’ll kill a deer instead.”
So we played that out, and Rebecca hacked at weeds with the axe.
“Now I’ll be the evil queen,” I’d volunteered. “And you can pretend to give me—”
“I’mthe evil queen,” Rebecca insisted. “And the prince. And the woodsman.”
“That’s not fair,” I whined. Rebecca could be so bossy sometimes. “You get to do everything, and all I get to do is cry and sleep.”
“You get to eat the apple,” Rebecca pointed out. “And wear a crown. Besides, yousaidthat you wanted to be the princess. That’s what princesses do.”
Bite the bad apple. Sleep.
Cry.
A rustling sound made my head come up.
“Suren?” a shout came through the woods. No one should have been calling me. No one should have even known my name.
“Stay here, Mr. Fox,” I said, tucking him into my dwelling. Then I crept toward the voice.
Only to see Oak, the heir to Elfhame, standing in a clearing. All my memories of him were of a merry young boy. But he’d become tall and rawboned, in the manner of children who have grown suddenly, and too fast. When he moved, it was with coltish uncertainty, as though not used to his body. He would be thirteen. And he had no reason to be in my woods.
I crouched in a patch of ferns. “What do you want?”