The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

Oak throws the grappling hook. Built for ice, the sharp edge sticks in hard. “If I fall, you must promise not to laugh. I may still be a little bit poisoned.”

I think of Tiernan and how exasperated he would be if he heard those words. I wonder exactly how much a little bit means. “Maybe I should be the one to go first.”

“Nonsense,” he says. “If you weren’t behind me, then who would break my fall?” Then he grabs the rope, presses his feet to the side of the Citadel, and proceeds to walk himself up the wall.

I roll my eyes, grab hold, and follow far more slowly.

We stop at the edge of the tower, and he winds the rope and removes the hook, while I peer down into the chamber through the opening. I hear distant strains of music. That must come from the great hall, where the thrones sit, and where instruments strung with the dried guts of mortals, or ones inlaid with bits of their bones, had been played to the delight of the Court of Teeth. This sounds more like a lone musician, though, rather than the usual troupe.

As I look down, a servant rushes through, holding a tray filled with empty goblets that clatter together. Thankfully, they do not glance up.

I press my hand to my heart, grateful we weren’t descending at that moment.

“This time you go first,” Oak says, sinking the hook into new ice. “I’ll cover you.”

I think he means that if someone spots me, no matter if they are a servant or guard, he’s going to kill them.

“They taught you a lot of things, your family,” I say. The sleight of hand, the wall climbing, the swordsmanship.

“Not to die,” he says. “That’s what they attempted to teach me, anyway. How not to die.”

Considering how often he throws himself directly into the path of danger, I do not think they taught him well enough. “What’s the number of times that someone tried to assassinate you?”

He gives a one-shouldered shrug, his attention on the tableau below. “Hard to know, but I’d guess there were a few dozen attempts since my sister came to power.”

That would be more than twice a year for every year since I met him. And that scar on his neck suggests that someone got very, very close.

I think of him as he was in the woods at thirteen, wanting to run away. Angry and afraid. I think of him lying on the sled this morning.

I poison everything I touch.

Every time I feel as though I know him, it seems there is another Oak underneath.

I shimmy down the rope, dropping when I am close enough to the ground not to hurt myself. My feet make a soft, echoing noise when they hit the floor, and I am struck by the nausea-inducing familiarity of the place. I spent not even two years here, and yet the very smell of the air makes me sick.

A massive bone chandelier hangs in the center of the room, candle wax dripping hot enough to melt indentations in the floor.

While the exterior of the Citadel is formed of giant slabs of clear, bright ice, some of the interior walls are enhanced by having things frozen inside the ice, resulting in something like wallpaper. Stones suspended, as though forever in midfall. Bones, picked clean, occasionally used to form sculptures. Roses, their petals forever preserved in their full flowering. This room’s walls have two faerie women frozen inside them, preserved so that they never decayed into moss and stone, like the rest of the Folk. Two faerie women, dressed in finery, crowns on their heads.

The Hall of Queens.

I had never known that Lady Nore might have joined their number, if not for me. A fresh horror, on top of all the others.

I can’t help feeling like a child again, with time seeming to dilate around me. Every hour, each day had felt endless, telescopic. The spaces were distorted in my memory, the halls shorter, the ceilings less high.

My wrists still show knots of skin where Lord Jarel pierced them to drive through the thin silver chains that leashed me. If I touch my cheeks, I can still feel, right underneath the bone, the marks of scars.

I do not realize how long I have been staring until Oak lands beside me, the clatter of his hooves louder than my soft-shod feet. He takes in the room, and me.

“Do you know the way from here?” he asks.

I give a quick nod and begin to move again.

One of the dangers of the Citadel is that the ice throughout varies in translucence, so there are places where movement is visible between rooms, or even through floors and ceilings. We could be semi-exposed at all times. Therefore, we must not crouch or attempt to hide. We must move in such a way that our faint outlines do not betray us.

I lead us into a hall, and then another. We pass a thin window of ice that looks out on the interior courtyard, and I glance through it. Oak pulls me back into shadow, and after a moment, I realize why.

Lady Nore stands outside, in front of sculptures of stick and snow. A line of ten, some in the shapes of men, some beasts, some creatures that are neither. Each one’s mouth is filled with sharp, jagged icicle teeth. Each one has stones in place of eyes; a few have them pressed into sockets of flesh. I spot other horrible things: a foot, fingers, bits of hair.

From a bag, Lady Nore takes a little knife in the shape of a half moon. She slices her palm. Then she takes a pinch of bone gravel from a bag at her waist and smears it onto her bloody, open hand. One by one, she walks to the snow sculptures and presses those bits of bone, shining with wetness, into their mouths.

And one by one, they awaken.

They are like me. Whatever they are, they are like me.