The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

“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.