The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

We plummet through the sky, the speed of our descent shoving the scream back into my mouth. All I can do is hang on to the solid mass of Oak’s body and wrap my arms around him as tightly as they will go. Thunder booms in my ears.

We plunge into a sheet of rain. It knocks us around, slicking our fingers and hair, making holding on difficult with everything so slippery. Coward that I am, I close my eyes and press my face into the prince’s back.

“Wren,” he shouts, a warning. I look up just before we hit the ground.

I am thrown off into mud, my breath knocked out of me. The ragwort steed crumbles away to the dried stalk of a plant under my bruised palms.

Everything hurts, but with a dull sort of pain that doesn’t get worse when I move. Nothing seems broken.

Standing shakily, I reach out a hand to help Oak up. He takes it, levering himself to his feet. His golden hair is dark with rain, his lashes spiky with it. His clothes are soaked through. His scraped knee is bleeding sluggishly.

He touches my cheek lightly with his fingers. “You—I thought—”

I stare up into his eyes, puzzled by his expression.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

I shake my head.

The prince turns away from me abruptly. “We need to get to the meeting spot,” he says. “It can’t be far.”

“We need to find shelter.” I have to shout to be heard. Above us, lightning cuts through the sky, striking into the woods just beyond us. Thunder cracks, and I see a dim thread of smoke curl upward from the site of the hit before the rain douses the fire. “We can find Tiernan when the storm lets up.”

“At least let’s walk in that direction,” Oak says, lifting his pack and throwing it over one shoulder. Ducking his head against the storm, he walks deeper into the woods, using the trees for cover. He doesn’t look back to see if I follow.

We go on like that for a while before I see a promising area to stop.

“There.” I point at an area with several large rocks, not far from where the soil dips down into a ravine. There are two trees, less than six feet apart, with branches reaching toward one another. “We can make a lean-to.”

He gives an exhausted sigh. “I suppose you are the expert. Tell me what I need to do.”

“We find two huge sticks,” I say, measuring with my hands. “Basically, as long as you are tall. They have to extend past the branches.”

I discover one a few yards away that seems as though it could be partially rotted, but I drag it back anyway. Oak has caused another to bend helpfully, through some magic. I begin to tear the skirt of my dress into strips, trying not to think of how much I liked it. “Tie with this,” I say, going to work on the other end.

Once they’re in place, I use smaller sticks as ribs, stacking them to make a roof and then piling that with moss and leaves.

It is far from waterproof, but it’s something. He’s shivering by the time we crawl inside. Outside, the wind howls and thunder booms. I drag in a large log and start stripping away the bark to get at the drier wood within.

Seeing the slowness of my progress, he reaches into his boot and takes out a knife, then hands it over. “Don’t make me regret giving you this.”

“She wanted to delay you,” I say softly, aware that he probably doesn’t want to hear my justification.

“Queen Annet?” he asks. “I know.”

“And you think she almost managed it because of me?” I ask. The insides of the log are drier, and I arrange the pieces I chip off on the stones in a pyramid shape, trying to keep the worst of the water off them.

He pushes wet hair out of his eyes, which are that strange fox color. Like gold that has been cut with copper. “I think you could have told me what you intended to do.”

I give him a look of utter disbelief.

“Hyacinthe told you something about me, didn’t he?” Oak asks.

I shiver, despite not being affected by the cold. “He said that you had a kind of magic where you could make people like you.”

Oak makes an exasperated sound. “Is that what you believe?”

“That you inherited an uncanny ability to put people at ease, to convince them to go along with your desires? Should I not?”

His eyebrows go up. For a moment, he’s quiet. All around us the rain falls. The thunder seems to have moved off. “My first mother, Liriope, died before I was born. After she was poisoned—at Prince Dain’s orders—Oriana cut open her belly to save me. People do say that Liriope was a gancanagh, and her love-talking was how she caught the eye of the High King and his son, but it’s not as though that power was much use to her. She paid for that charm with her life.”

At my silence, he answers the question I did not ask. “Blusher mushroom. You remain conscious the whole time as your body slows and then stops. I was born with it in my veins, if you can call being torn out of your dead mother a birth.”

“And Liriope and Prince Dain—”

“Were my dam and sire,” he agrees. I knew that he was some part of the Greenbriar line, but I hadn’t known the details. With that horrifying legacy, I suppose I can understand how Madoc would seem an admirable father, how he would adore the mother who rescued and raised him. “Whatever power I have of Liriope’s, I don’t use it.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “Maybe you can’t help it. Maybe you do it without knowing.”