Wren blinks up at Oak, and he gives her what he hopes is an apologetic grin. Her startled expression smooths out into puzzlement and some emotion he is less able to name. She reaches up, and he bends lower, going to one knee, so that she can brush her fingers over the nape of his neck. He shivers at her touch. Looking down into her dark green eyes, he tries to read her feelings in the minute shifts of her countenance.
He thinks he sees a longing there to match his own.
Wren’s lips part on a sigh. “I want—” he begins.
“No,” she tells him. “By the power of Grimsen’s bridle, get on your knees and be silent.”
Surprise makes him try to pull away, to stand, but he cannot. His teeth close on the words he now cannot say.
It’s an awful feeling, his body turning against him. He was on one knee already, but his other leg bends without his deciding to move. As his calves strike the frozen floor, he understands, in a way that he never has before, Wren’s horror of the bridle. Jude’s need for control. He has never known this kind of helplessness.
Her mouth curves into a smile, but it isn’t a nice one. “By Grimsen, I command you to do exactly as I say from here forward. You will stay on your knees until I say otherwise.”
Oak should have left when he had the chance.
She rises from the bed and draws on a dressing gown. Walks over to where he kneels.
He looks at her slippered foot. Glances up at the rest of her. A strand of light blue hair has fallen across one scarred cheek. Her lips have a little pink at the inner edges, like the inside of a shell.
It is hard to imagine her as she was when they began their quest, a feral girl who seemed like the living embodiment of the woods. Wild and brave and kind. There is no shyness in her gaze now. No kindness, either.
He finds her fascinating. He’s always found her fascinating, but he is not foolish enough to tell her that. Especially not in this moment, when he is afraid of her.
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to see me again, prince,” Wren says. “I understand that you called for me in your cell.”
He screamed for her. Screamed until his throat was hoarse. But even if he was allowed to speak, clarifying that would only compound his many, many mistakes.
She goes on. “How frustrating it must be not to have everyone eager to comply with your desires. How impatient you must have become.”
Oak tries to push himself to his hooves.
She must note the impotent flex of his muscles. “How impatient you are even yet. Speak, if you wish.”
“I came here to repent,” he says, taking what he hopes will be a steadying breath. “I should never have kept what I knew from you. Certainly not something like that. No matter how I thought I was protecting you, no matter how desperate I was to help my father, it wasn’t my place. I did you a grievous wrong, and I am sorry.”
A long moment passes. Oak stares at her slipper, not sure he can bear to look into her face. “I am not your enemy, Wren. And if you throw me back into your dungeons, I won’t have a chance to show you how remorseful I am, so please don’t.”
“A pretty speech.” Wren walks to the head of her bed, where a long pull dangles from a hole bored into the ice wall. She gives it a hard tug. Somewhere far below, he can hear the faint ringing of a bell. Then the sound of boots on the stairs.
“I am already bridled,” he says, feeling a little frantic. “You don’t need to lock me away. I can’t harm you unless you let me. I am entirely in your power. And when I did escape, I came directly to your side. Let me kneel at your feet in the throne room and gaze up adoringly at you.”
Her green eyes are hard as jade. “And have you spending all your waking hours trying to think of some clever way to slither around my commands?”
“I have to occupy myself somehow,” he says. “When I am between moments of gazing adoringly, of course.”
The outer corner of her lip twitches, and he wonders if he almost made her smile.
The door opens, and Fernwaif comes in, a single guard behind her. Oak recognizes him as Bran, who occasionally sat at Madoc’s dinner table when Oak was a child. He looks horrified at the sight of the prince on his knees, wearing the livery of a guard beneath a stolen cloak.
“How—” Bran begins, but Wren ignores him.
“Fernwaif,” she says. “Go and have the guards responsible for the prisons brought here.”
The huldu girl gives a small bob of her head and, with a wary glance at Oak, leaves the room. So much for her being on his side.
Wren’s gaze goes to Bran. “How is it that no one saw him strolling through the Citadel? How is it that he was allowed to walk into my chambers with no one the wiser?”
The falcon steps up to Oak. The fury in his gaze is half humiliation. “What traitor helped you escape?” Bran demands. “How long have you
been planning to assassinate Queen Suren?”
The prince snorts. “Is that what I was trying to do? Then why, given everything I stole from that fool Straun and the laundry, didn’t I bother to steal a weapon?”
Bran gives him a swift kick in the side.
Oak sucks in the sound of pain. “That’s your clever riposte?” Wren lifts a hand, and both of them look at her, falling silent. “What shall I do with you, Prince of Elfhame?” Wren asks.
“If you mean for me to be your pet,” he says, “there’s no reason to return me to my pen. My leash is very secure, as you have shown. You have only to pull it taut.”
“You think you know what it is to be under someone’s control because I have given you a single command you were forced to obey,” she says, heat in her voice. “I could give you a demonstration of what it feels like to own nothing of yourself. You are owed a punishment, after all. You’ve broken out of my prisons and come to my rooms without my permission. You’ve made a mockery of my guards.”
A cold feeling settles in Oak’s gut. The bridle is uncomfortable, its straps pulling tight against his cheeks, but not painful. At least not yet. He knows that it will continue to tighten and that if he wears it long enough, it will cut into his cheeks as it cut Wren’s. If he wears it longer than that, longer than she did, it will eventually grow to be a part of him. Invisible to the world and impossible to remove.
That is why it was made. To make Wren eternally obedient to Lord Jarel and Lady Nore.
Wren hated that bridle.
“I grant you that I don’t know what it feels like to be compelled to follow someone else’s orders again and again,” Oak says. “But I don’t think you want to do that, not to anyone. Not even to me.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think, Greenbriar heir,” she says. “I remember your stories, like the one about how you used a glamour against your mortal sister and made her strike herself. How would you like to feel as she felt?”
He confessed that when Wren won a secret from him in a game they played with three silver foxes, tossed in the dirt outside the war camp of the Court of Teeth. Another thing he maybe ought not to have done.
“I’ll slap myself silly willingly, if you like,” he offers. “No need for a command.”
“What if, instead, I force you onto your hands and knees to make a bench for me to sit upon?” Wren inquires lightly, but her eyes are alight with fury and something else, something darker. She pads around his body, a prowling animal. “Or eat filth from the floor?”
Oak does not doubt that she saw Lord Jarel demand those things from people. He hopes that she was never asked to do those things herself.
“Beg to kiss the hem of my dress?”
He says nothing. Nothing he says could possibly help him. “Crawl to me.” Her eyes shine, fever bright.
Again, Oak’s body moves without his permission. He finds himself writhing across the floor, his stomach against the carpet. He flushes with shame.
When he reaches her, he stares upward, rage in his eyes. He’s humiliated, and she’s barely begun. She was right when she said he didn’t understand what it would feel like. He hadn’t counted on the embarrassment, the fury at himself for not being able to resist the magic. He hadn’t counted on the fear of what she would do next.
Oak cuts his gaze toward Bran, who has remained stiff and still, as though afraid to draw Wren’s attention. The prince wonders how far she would go if he were not present.
How far she will go anyway. Then the door opens.
Straun enters, along with a guard wearing battle-scraped armor and bearing a scar across the broadest part of his nose. He seems familiar, but
Oak can’t quite place him—he must have served with Madoc but not come to the house much. Straun looks as though he’s fighting to move, and the scarred guard is looking as though he wants to murder Straun.
Straun steps forward, going to one knee. “Queen of winter, know that I only ever wished to serve—”
She holds up a hand, forestalling the groveling he seems to be working up to. “I have been tricked by the prince often enough to know how clever he can be. Now you will not be deceived again.”
“I shall make a new oath to you,” he declares. “That I will never—”
“Make no oaths you are not certain you can keep,” she tells Straun, which is better advice than he deserves. Still, he looks chastened by it.
Oak pushes to his hooves, since she hadn’t told him to stay there. Wren barely spares him a glance.
“Bind my prisoner’s wrists,” she tells the scarred guard. “As you command, Queen.” His voice is gruff.
He walks to Oak, pulling his arms behind him sharply. Tying his bonds uncomfortably tight. The prince’s wrists are going to be sore by the time he makes it back to his cell.
“We were discussing how best to discipline Prince Oak,” she says.
Straun and the other guard look a lot happier at that thought. Oak is certain that, after they were punished by the High Court for their treason, it would be at least a little satisfying to see a prince of Elfhame brought low. And that was before he gave them a reason to have a personal grudge.
Wren turns to him. “Perhaps I ought to have you sent to the Great Hall tomorrow and command that you endure ten strikes of an ice whip. Most barely get through five.”
Bran looks worried. He might want Oak humiliated but perhaps didn’t expect to see Madoc’s son’s blood spilled. Or maybe he is concerned that if they have to give back the prince, Elfhame will want him in one piece. Straun seems thrilled by the prospect of some suffering, however.
Dread and humiliation coil in Oak’s stomach. He has been such a fool. “Why not whip me now?” he asks, a challenge in his voice.
“Spending a night dreading what will come in the morning is its own punishment.” She pauses. “Especially as you now know your own hand can be turned against you.”
Oak looks directly into her eyes. “Why are you keeping me at all, Wren? Am I a hostage to be ransomed? A lover to be punished? A possession to be locked away?”
“That,” she says, bitterness in her voice, “is what I am trying to figure out myself.” She turns to the guards. “Take him back to his cell.”
Bran reaches for him, and the prince struggles, pulling out of the guard’s grasp.
“Oak,” Wren says, pressing her fingers to his cheek. He goes still beneath her touch. “Go with Straun. Do not resist him. Do not trick him. Until you are confined again, you will follow these commands. And then you will stay in my prisons until you are sent for.” She gives the prince a stern look and withdraws her hand. Turns to the soldiers. “Once Oak is in his cell, the three of you can go to Hyacinthe and explain how you allowed the prince to slip past you.”
Hyacinthe. A reminder that the person in charge of the guards hates Oak more than the rest of them combined. As though he needed more miserable news.
“Will you send for me?” the prince asks, as though there’s any room for bargaining. As though he has a choice. As though his body will not obey its own accord. “You said only perhaps you’d have me whipped.”
Straun shoves him toward the door.
“Good night, Prince of Elfhame,” Wren says as he is led from the room. He manages a single glance back. Her gaze locks with his, and he can feel the frisson of something between them. Something that might well be terrible, but that he wants more of all the same.
