The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

She nods at a former falcon, and he begins to help Madoc across the snow. I see the general lean toward him and say something. Their pace slows. We wait with the wind whistling around us and the hour growing later. Tiernan halts when he reaches Madoc and hands the case with the deer’s heart inside to the soldier.

The soldier starts to walk back to us. Madoc and Tiernan remain, as though expecting that Oak and I will really be coming to join them in a moment.

Bogdana watches, amusement lifting a corner of her mouth despite the shackles she wears.

“What a delight it would have been,” Lady Nore says in a tone of barely concealed malice. “To have had all that power and to have known it was Madoc’s son who gave it to me.”

The troll king looks at her, and I realize my mistake. I have instructed her to say nothing that will give away the power I have over her, but I failed to take into account that she could make airy, passive-aggressive statements implying a great deal.

“What does that mean?” Hurclaw asks.

“You ought to ask my daughter,” she says with the sort of sweetness that is meant to cover the taste of rot.

His gaze goes to me. “I thought she had no tongue.”

Lady Nore only smiles, and he nods to one of his Folk.

The troll soldier lifts a bow. He shoots before I can do more than raise my hand in warding.

The arrow slices through the pad of my thumb and strikes me in the side, slicing through flesh. The impact unbalances me. I hit the snow, falling to my hands and knees. I gasp for air, feeling the agony of trying to get a breath. I think one of my lungs was struck.

Scarlet stains my side. The snow is blooming red with it.

Oak starts to run toward me when the troll archers train their bows on the prince and Hurclaw calls for him to halt. The prince stops. I can see he has his sword, the restraints tying his hands are gone.

The former falcons are fanning out, and I see Hyacinthe weaving between them, moving in my direction.

This is all wrong.

“Prince,” Hurclaw’s voice booms. “Bring that heart to me, or I will fill you both full of arrows.”

I want to call out, to order Lady Nore to command her troops to defend me, but I cannot seem to make the words come. This hurts.

It hurts like when—

The bone shard in my mouth—

My chest—

The ice spiderswebbing under my fingers as I moved—

Oak glances at me with those trickster’s eyes, panic in them. Then he inclines his head to the troll king. Walking to the former falcon, the prince takes the box with the heart from him.

And whispers something.

Hurclaw swings down from his mount.

Oak approaches him. They are close now, too close for arrows aimed at the prince not to strike their king.

Hurclaw lifts the latch with a flick of one clawed nail. A moment later the troll stumbles back, grabbing for his throat, where a needlethin pin sticks out from his skin. The heart, dark and shriveled, falls into the snow. A deer heart, nothing more.

It was the case that mattered, the case that Oak commissioned from the blacksmith in Undry Market.

Once, the Bomb told me a story about poisonous spiders kept inside a chest. When the thief opened it, he was bitten all over.

The case was the trap.

I remember the care with which Oak set the lock, back in the cave. He must have been fitting a poisoned dart, ready to kill Lady Nore if all our other plans failed.

“Now!” shouts the soldier who’d been given the prince’s whispered orders.

The falcons have made a careful circle behind the trolls. At the signal, they draw their weapons and rush in.

There is fighting all around me. Arrows and blades. Screams.

I push myself to my knees. “Mother,” I say, forcing it out.

That was the word meant to end the masquerade of control.

“All who follow me, you shall follow Suren’s commands from this moment forward and forevermore,” Lady Nore calls out, following my instructions exactly as she was supposed to, at least until she pitches her voice low. “If she can make any.”

“Stop the trolls,” I shout, pushing myself to my feet. When I cough, blood spatters my fingers.

“You are the one to order me captured, child?” Bogdana calls to me. “You?”

I snap off the end of the arrow, gritting my teeth against the pain. Freeing my other hand.

Hurclaw is trembling all over. Whatever the poison, it is acting fast.

“You played us false,” the troll king says. “You never had Mellith’s heart at all, did you?”

“He cannot lie,” says Lady Nore, standing amid the carnage, watching it as though it is distant from her. “He told us he brought it north with him. He has it.”

What happens when she discovers how you’ve deceived her? When she realizes her role in your plan?

“Call off your people,” Oak tells Hurclaw. “Call them off, and I will give you the antidote.”

“No!” The troll king lunges for Oak. They topple together onto the snow. Oak is skilled, but nowhere as strong as Hurclaw.

She will have to decide how much she hates me.

Oak, who abandoned looking for the heart after he went to the Thistlewitch. Who tried to send me away, who hadn’t wanted to need me.

He’ ll steal your heart. Wasn’t that what Bogdana said in the woods?

My mind drifts dizzily back to the feeling of something inside me unraveling.