The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

“Secrets about me,” I clarify.

“You’ve betrayed me. You’ve stolen from me. You met with the storm hag, and then hours later you snatch a powerful magical object and run. Do I deserve no answers?”

“I wanted the bridle,” I say. “So that you could never make me wear it.”

He kicks up a tornado of leaves. “What cause have I ever given you to accuse me of that?”

I look sullenly away.

He says nothing, merely waiting for my reply. The silence stretches on, and I am surprised that I am the one who breaks first and fills it.

“Tiernan told me he’d use the bridle on me if I betrayed you again.” I fix him with a glare.

Oak blinks in surprise and is quiet for a long moment. “He doesn’t understand why you freed Hyacinthe and the others,” he says finally. “He can’t believe you did it because you wanted to help them. Folk do not do such things where we come from.”

I kick a rock, hard.

“If you want to go, go,” the prince tells me with an elaborate swish of his hand toward the trees around us.

I look into the woods but am not so foolish as to take his offer at face value. “Then why not just let me leave last night?”

Oak gives me a slightly guilty look. “Because I don’t like being the fool who’d been tricked. I like games, but I hate to lose.”

I blink at him in surprise. “What?”

He shrugs impatiently. “It’s not my best quality,” he says. “And besides, it seemed worthwhile to ask you if you were working with Bogdana.”

“I’m not,” I say, and when he gives me a long look, I say it in full. “I am neither working for nor with Lady Nore. I am not allied with Bogdana. I want to go north and keep Lady Nore from making more monsters. I even want to see your father freed.”

“Then why leave?” This is the difficulty with Oak. He invites you to trust him, makes you feel silly for doubting, and then you find yourself in a bus station, discovering how thoroughly you’ve been played.

“Rather than be sent to Elfhame, I decided I would go north without you and face my mother alone.” I wonder if I can get away with saying only that.

When he glances in my direction, his fox eyes are bright. “That’s even more foolish than our current plan.”

My stomach twists.

“I don’t understand it,” he says, scrubbing his hand over his face. “I feel as though I ought to be angry with you, but I admired what you did back at the Court of Moths. Even when it did, as you say, inconvenience me.”

I grimace a little at my own words, but then the import of what he’s saying sinks in. “You . . . admired that?”

“More than I’d like to admit.” When he looks at me, I see that same intensity in his face that I remember from when he stood beside Queen Annet. “You cared about the mortal and the merrow and even Hyacinthe. You defied all of us and, as far as I can tell, got nothing in return.”

I am not sure how to answer. “Did it weigh on you, keeping Hyacinthe prisoner?”

“He tried to kill the High King.”

“What?” I recall Tiernan saying there’d been an incident.

Oak appears amused by the shock of my voice. “Once, my father said that conflicts seem as though they are between beliefs or desires. But more often conflicts are between rulers. Those that follow rulers can be perfectly nice, which is how you wind up with two perfectly nice people with daggers to each other’s throats. Hyacinthe and I might have been friends, but for the part where we were set on opposite sides of a battlefield.”

I think on that for a long moment, wondering if that’s how he sees me as well. How it would be for him to discover that I am stitched together with magic, a manikin animated by a hag? Perhaps he would feel less guilty then.

I could take him at his word and attempt to leave. But he made no promises not to chase after me. Nor did he say he wouldn’t make me wear the bridle.

I could slip away in Undry Market and find a place to hide. But I have no reason to believe that the Folk there would help me over their prince. Most likely they would give me up for a few coins.

Or I could try to get the truth out of him. “You like games,” I tell him. “How about we play one?”

“What’s the wager?”

“If I win,” I say. “You answer my question. Without evasion.”

Nothing about the way he looks at me suggests that he does not consider these to be large stakes. Still, he nods. “And what is the game?”

“You have the piece. Just as when we were children, let’s see which of us throws better.”

He nods again, taking it from his pocket. The peridot eyes glimmer. “And if I win?”

“What do you want?” I ask.

He studies me and I study him in return. No smile now can disguise the steel underneath. “You promise to dance with me so that our practice back in the Court of Moths won’t be for nothing.”

“Those are absurd stakes,” I tell him, my cheeks hot.

“And yet they are mine,” he says.

I nod quickly, unsettled. “Very well. You throw first.”

We stop walking. He squats down and clears off the twigs and fallen leaves from a patch of grass. It feels like being children, like playing. It occurs to me that so many awful things in my life happened before that moment, and so many awful things in his life happened after.