The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

“Queen Annet, I caution you. She is no longer yours to toy with,” Oak says.

But her smile does not dim. She waits, and I am without any choice but to play her cruel little game.

Despite my mind having gone blank.

I take a shuddery breath. Queen Annet posited that there was a solution to the riddle, but it’s an either-or situation. Either drowning or beheading. Either lying or truth. Two very bad outcomes.

But if the truth results in drowning and a lie results in beheading, then I have to find a way to use one of those against her.

I am tired and hurting. My thoughts are in knots. Is this one of those chicken-or-egg questions, a trap to seal my doom? If I were to choose drowning and it’s the truth, then she’d have to do it. Which means beheading is the fate of a liar. So . . .

“I must say, ‘You will behead me,’” I tell her. Because if she does it, then I am a truth-teller and she ought to have drowned me. There’s no way to execute me properly.

I let out a sigh of relief—since there is an answer, whatever she might have wanted to do, she must now let me go.

Queen Annet gives a tight smile. “Oak, take your traitor with the blessings of the Court of Moths.” As he takes a step toward me, she continues. “You may think that Elfhame will look ill on my attempts to keep you here, but I promise you that your sister would like it far less well to find I’d let you leave with Lady Suren, only to discover she sliced open your throat.”

Oak winces.

Annet notes his reaction. “Exactly.” Then she turns away with a swirl of her long black skirts, one hand on her gravid belly.

“Come,” the prince commands me. A muscle in his jaw twitches, as though he’s clenching his teeth too hard.

It would be safer if I hated him. Since I cannot, perhaps it is good that he now hates me.



They release Jack of the Lakes outside of the hill. His face is bruised. He slinks toward us, swallowing any witty comments. He goes to his knees before Oak, reminding me uncomfortably of Hyacinthe when he swore to me.

Jack says nothing, only bowing so low that his forehead touches Oak’s hoof. The prince is still clad in his armor. The golden mail glitters, making him seem both royal and remote.

“I am yours to punish,” says the kelpie.

Oak reaches out a hand and cups it lightly over Jack’s head, as though offering a benediction.

“My debt to you is paid, and yours to me,” Oak says. “We will owe each other nothing going forward, save friendship.”

I wonder at his kindness. How can he mean it when he is so angry with me?

Jack of the Lakes rises. “For the sake of your friendship, prince, I would carry you to the ends of the earth.”

Tiernan snorts. “Since Hyacinthe spirited off Damsel Fly, maybe you should take him up on his offer.”

“It is tempting,” Oak says, a half smile on his face. “And yet, I think we will make our own way from here.”

I study the tops of my boots, avoiding eye contact with absolutely everyone.

“If you change your mind, you have only to call on me,” says the kelpie. “Wheresoever you are, I will come.”

Then Jack transforms into a horse, all mossy black and sharptoothed. As he rides off into the waning afternoon, despite everything, I am sorry to see him go.





CHAPTER

10

C

louds of mosquitoes and gnats blow through the hot, wet air of the marsh where the Thistlewitch lives. My boots sink into the gluey mud. The trees are draped heavily in creeper and poisonous trumpet vine, swaths of it blocking the path. In the brown water, things move.

“Sit,” Oak says when we come to a stump. This is the first time he’s spoken to me since we left Queen Annet’s Court. From his pack, he takes out a brush and a pot of shimmering gold paint. “Stick out a foot.”

Tiernan walks ahead, scoping the area.

The prince marks the bottom of my one boot, then the other, with the symbol we were given. His fingers hold my calves firmly in place. A treacherous heat creeps into my cheeks.

“I know you’re angry with me . . . ,” I begin.

“Am I?” he asks, looking up at me as though there is a bitter taste in his mouth. “Maybe I’m glad that you gave me an opportunity to be my worst self.”

I am still sitting on the stump, pondering that, when Tiernan returns and yanks a twist of hair from my head.

I hiss, coming to my feet, teeth bared, hand going for a knife that I no longer have.

“You know how the bridle works as well as anyone,” Tiernan says, low, so that Oak, busy drawing symbols on the bottoms of his hooves, does not seem to hear. He holds three pale blue strands of my hair in his hand. “Do not betray us again.”

A chill goes through me at those words. The great smith Grimsen forged that bridle, and like all his creations, it has a corrupt secret. There is another way than wearing it to be controlled—wrapped hair, and a few words—that was how Lady Nore and Lord Jarel had hoped to trick the High Queen into binding herself along with the serpent king.

The strands of my hair between Tiernan’s fingers are a reminder that even if they don’t put it on me, I am not safe from it. I should be grateful that I am not wearing it already.

“Were it up to me,” he says, “I’d have left you behind and taken my chances against Lady Nore.”