The Prisoner’s Throne: A Novel of Elfhame

Of course, when Cardan invited Wren to dinner, he didn’t mean dining together at a table. He meant attending a feast held in her honor. Of course he did.

Oak forgot how things worked, how people behaved. After being away from Elfhame for so long, he is being crammed back into a role he no longer remembers how to fit into.

Once he’s dressed, scolded, and kissed by his mother, he manages to make it out the door. On his way to the kitchens, he runs into his nephew, who demands a game of hide-and-seek and chases after a palace cat when he’s put off. Then, as the prince packs a basket, he endures being good-naturedly fussed over by several of the servants, including the cook who sent up little iced cakes. Finally, having obtained a pie, several cheeses, and a stoppered bottle of cider, he slips away, his cheeks stinging only a little from the pinching.

Still, the sky over Insmire is the blue of Wren’s hair, and as he makes his way to her cottage, he cannot help feeling hopeful.

He is most of the way there when a girl darts from the trees.

“Oak,” Wren says, sounding out of breath. She’s clad in a simple brown dress with none of the grandeur of the clothes he’s seen her in since she took over the Court of Teeth. It looks like something she threw on in haste.

“I love you,” Oak says, because he needs to say it simply, so she can’t find a way to see a lie in it. He’s smiling because she came through the woods in a rush, looking for him. Because he feels ridiculously happy. “Come have a picnic with me.”

For a moment, Wren looks utterly horrified. The prince’s thoughts stagger to a stop. He feels a sharp pain in his chest and fights to keep the smile on his lips.

It’s not as though he expected her to return the sentiment. He expected her to laugh and perhaps be a little flattered. Enjoy the thought of having a little power over him. He thought she liked him, even if she found him hard to forgive. He thought she had to like him some to want him.

“Well,” he manages, hefting the basket with false lightness. “Luckily, there’s still the picnic.”

“You fall in love with the ease of someone slipping into a bath,” she tells him. “And I imagine you extricate yourself with somewhat more drama, but no less ease.”

Now that was more the sort of thing he was prepared to hear. “Then I urge you to ignore my outburst.”

“I want you to call off the marriage,” she says.

He sucks in a breath, stung. Truly, he didn’t expect her to rub salt in so fresh a wound, although he supposes she gave him no reason to think she wouldn’t. “That seems like an excessive response to a declaration of love.”

Wren doesn’t so much as smile. “Still, call it off.”

“Call it off yourself,” he snaps, feeling childish. “As I remember from the ship, we had a plan. If you wish to change it now, go right ahead.”

She shakes her head. Her hands are clenched into fists at her sides. “No, it must be you. Come on, it’s not as though a marriage is what you want, not really, right? No matter how you say you feel. It was a clever thing to do—a clever thing to say. You’ve always been clever. Be clever now.”

“And break things off with you? Cleverly?” He sounds brittle, resentful.

She actually looks hurt by his tone. Somehow that makes him angrier than anything else. “I should never have come here,” she tells him.

“You can go,” he reminds her.

“You don’t understand.” She wears a pained expression. “And I can’t explain.”

“Then it seems we are at an impasse.” He folds his arms.

She glances down at her hands, which are gripping each other tightly, fingers threaded together. When she looks back up into his eyes, she seems sorrowful.

“I shall see you at the feast,” he says, attempting to regain his dignity.

Then he turns and stomps off toward the woods, before he can say more things he will regret. Before she takes the chance to hurt him worse. He feels petty, petulant, and ridiculous.

Rubbing the heel of his hand over one eye, he doesn’t look back.

Striding toward Mandrake Market with a picnic basket in his hand, Oak feels a perfect fool.

Several people bow low when he passes, as though sharing the same path is a singular honor. He wonders if he would feel less awkward if he had grown up entirely on the isles and wasn’t used to being treated as nothing special in the mortal world.

He gloried in it when he was younger. Loved how all the children here wanted to play with him, how everyone had smiles for him.

And yet you knew it was false. That was part of what drew you to Wren—she had your measure from the ftrst.

But though she had his measure, he wasn’t sure he had hers. Mother Marrow was summoned north by Bogdana. Mother Marrow gave Wren the gift of that cottage where she and her people spent the night.

Mother Marrow knew something of their plans.

Mandrake Market, on the tip of Insmoor, used to be open only on misty mornings, but it’s grown into a more permanent fixture. There, one can find everything from leather masquerade masks to charms for the bottoms of shoes, swirling tinctures of everapple, potion-makers, and even poisons.

Oak passes maple sugar in the shape of strange animals, a lace-maker weaving skulls and bones into her patterns. A shopkeeper sets out trays of acorn cups full to their tiny brims with blood-dark wine. Another offers to tell fortunes from the pattern of spit on a page of fresh parchment. A goblin grills fresh oysters over an outdoor fire. The midday sun stains everything gold.

Like the growth of the market, stalls and tents have given way to more permanent structures. Mother Marrow’s house is a sturdy stone cottage with none of the fancifulness of walls shingled in candy. Out front, an herb garden grows wild, vines tied so they weave over the top of a diamond-paned window.

Steeling himself, he raps on the wooden planks of her door.

There is a shuffiing from the other side, and then it opens, squeaking on dry hinges. Mother Marrow appears in the doorway, standing on clawed feet, like those of a bird of prey. Her hair is gray as stone, and she wears a long necklace of rocks carved with archaic symbols on them, ones that puzzle the eye if you look too long.

“Prince,” she says, blinking up at him. “You look far too fine for a visit to poor Mother Marrow.”

“Could any grandeur be great enough to properly honor you?” he asks with a grin.

She huffs, but he can tell she’s a little pleased. “Come in, then. And tell me of your adventure.”

Oak moves past her into her cottage. There is a low fire in the grate and several stumps before it, along with a wooden chair. Another threadbare chair sits off to one side with knitting equipment piled in a basket at its feet. The yarn seems freshly spun, yet not carded well enough to remove all the bits of thistle. On the wall, a large, painted curio cabinet contains an array of things that don’t reward observing too closely. Tiny skeletons covered in a thin layer of dust. Viscous fluids half-dried in ancient bottles. Beetle wings, shining like gems. A bowl of nuts, a few shaking and one hazelnut rolling back and forth. Beyond the cabinet, the prince can see a passageway into a back room, perhaps a bedroom.

She urges him to sit in the wooden chair by the fire, the back carved in the shape of an owl.

“Tea?” she offers.

Oak nods, to be polite, although he feels as though he’s been swimming in tea since his homecoming.

Mother Marrow tops off a pot from the kettle hanging over the fire and pours him a cup. It’s a blend of some kind, carrying the scent of kelp in it, and anise.

“This is very kind,” he says, because the Folk do not like to have their efforts dismissed with mere thanks and take hospitality very seriously.

She grins, and he notes a cracked tooth. She picks up her own cup, which she has freshened, using it to warm her hands. “I see the advice I gave you was useful. Your father has returned. And you have won yourself a prize.”

He nods, feeling as though he’s on unsteady ground. If she’s referring to Wren, it seems dismissive to call her a prize, as though she were an object, but he can’t think what else she could be talking about. Perhaps Mother Marrow has a reason to appear not to care too much for Wren. “Leaving me to seek your guidance again.”

She raises her eyebrows. “On what subject, prince?”

“I saw you in the Ice Citadel,” he says.

She stiffens. “What of it?”

He sighs. “I want to know why Bogdana brought you there. What she hoped you were going to do.”

Silence stretches out for a long moment between them. In it, he hears the boiling of the water and the clack of the nuts as they move in her cabinet.

“Did you know I have a daughter?” she asks finally.

Oak shakes his head, although now that she mentions it, he does remember something about her having a child. Perhaps someone referred to the daughter before, although the context eludes him.

“I tried to trick the High King into marrying her.”

Oh, right. That was the context. Mother Marrow gave Cardan a cape that, when worn, makes him immune to most blows. It’s said to be woven of spider silk and nightmares, and although Oak has no idea how that could be done, he doesn’t doubt the truth of it. “So you have some interest in your line ruling.”

“I have some interest in my kind ruling,” she corrects him. “I would have liked to see my daughter with a crown on her head. She’s very beautiful and quite clever with her fingers. But I will be glad to see any hag daughter on the throne.”

“I don’t intend to be High King,” he informs her.

At that, she smiles, takes a sip of her tea, and says nothing.

“Wren?” he prompts. “The Citadel? Bogdana’s request?”

Her smile widens. “We hags were the first of the Folk, before those of the air alighted and claimed dominion, before those of the Undersea first surfaced from the deep. We, like the trolls and the giants, come from the earth’s bones. And we have the old magic. But we do not rule. Perhaps our power makes other Folk nervous. Little wonder that the storm hag was tempted by Mab’s offer, though in the end the cost was high.”

“And now she bears a grudge against my family,” he says.

Mother Marrow snorts, as though at the delicacy of his phrasing. “So she does.”

“Do you?” he asks.

“Have I not been a loyal subject?” she asks him. “Have I not served the High King and his mortal queen well? Have I not served you, prince, to the best of my poor abilities?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Have you?”

She stands—acting offended to cover that she does not—and perhaps dares not—answer. “I think it’s time you go. I am sure you are wanted at the palace.”

He sets down his untouched cup of tea and rises from the chair. She’s intimidating, but he’s taller than her and royal. He hopes he seems more formidable than he feels. “If Bogdana has a plan to move against Jude and Cardan, and you’re a part of it, the punishment will not be worth whatever reward you’ve been promised.”

“Is that so? Rumors abound about your loyalties, prince, and the company you keep.”

“I am loyal to the throne,” he says. “And to my sister, the queen.”

“What about the king?” asks Mother Marrow, her eyes like flint.

Oak’s gaze doesn’t waver. “So long as he doesn’t cross Jude, I am his to command.”

She scowls. “What about the girl? What loyalties do you owe her? Would you give her your heart?”

An ominous question, given what he knows of Mellith’s history.

He hesitates, wanting to give a real answer. He is drawn to Wren. He is consumed by thoughts of her. The rough silk of her voice. Her shy smile. Her unflinching gaze. The memory of fine, wispy strands of her hair under his hands, the nearness of her skin, her indrawn breath. Memory of the way she sparred with him across that long table in the Citadel—the familiarity of it, so like many of his own family meals. But the sting of his confession and her rejection is fresh. “I would give her whatever she wanted of me.”

Mother Marrow raises her brows, looking amused. Then her smile dims. “Poor Suren.”

Oak puts a hand to his heart. “I think I’m offended.”

She gives a little laugh. “Not that, foolish boy. It’s that she should have been one of the greatest of hags, an inheritor of her mother’s vast power. A maker of storms in her own right, a creator of magical objects so glorious that the walnut I gave her would be a mere trinket. But instead, her power has been turned inside out. She can only absorb magic, break curses. But the one curse she cannot break is the one on herself. Her magic is warped. Every time she uses it, it hurts her.”

Oak thinks of the story Bogdana told, of a girl whose magic burned like matches, and considers that Bogdana’s own magic doesn’t work in that way. The storm hag was exhausted, perhaps, after she made the ship fly, but not sick. When Cardan brought a whole island from the bottom of the sea, he didn’t faint afterward. “And that’s what Bogdana brought you north to try to fix?”

She hesitates.

“Shall I ask one of the Council to come and inspect what potions and powders you keep in your cabinet?”

She only laughs. “Would you really do such a thing to an old lady such as myself, to whom you already owe a debt? What bad manners that would be!”

He gives her an irritated look, but she’s right. He does owe her a debt. And he is one of the Folk, brought up in Faerie enough to almost believe that bad manners outweigh murder in a list of crimes. Besides, half the Council probably buys from her. “Can you undo Wren’s curse?”

“No,” she says, relenting. “As far as I know, it cannot be undone. When the power of Mellith’s death was used to curse Mab, Mellith’s heart became the locus for that curse. How can you fill something that devours everything you put into it? Perhaps you can answer that. I can’t. Now go back to the palace, prince, and leave Mother Marrow to her ruminations.”

He’s probably late for the banquet already. “If you see Bogdana,” he says, “be sure to give her my regards.”

“Oh,” says Mother Marrow. “You can give her those yourself soon enough.”

By the time he arrives in the brugh, the hall beneath the hill is full of Folk. He is, as he predicted, late.

“Your Highness,” Tiernan says, falling into step behind him.

“I hope you rested,” Oak says, attempting to seem as though he hasn’t just been dumped, as though he hasn’t a care in the world.

“No need.” Tiernan speaks in a clipped fashion, and he’s frowning, but since he’s so often frowning, the prince can’t tell if it indicates more disapproval than usual. “Where were you this afternoon?”

“I took a quick trip to Mandrake Market,” Oak says.

“You might have fetched me,” Tiernan suggests.

“I might have,” Oak agrees amiably. “But I thought you might be the worse for wear after almost drowning—or perhaps otherwise occupied.”

Tiernan’s frown deepens. “I was neither.”

“I hoped you might be otherwise occupied.” Oak glances around the hall. Cardan lounges on his throne on the dais, a goblet hanging off his fingers as though it may spill at any moment. Cardan. Oak has to speak with him, but he can’t do it here, in front of everyone, in front of Folk who may be part of the conspiracy the prince needs to disavow.

Jude stands close to Oriana, who is gesturing with her hands as she speaks. He doesn’t spot any of the other members of his family, although that doesn’t mean they’re not here. It’s quite a crowd.

“Hyacinthe is a traitor thrice over,” Tiernan says. “So you can cease speaking of him.”

Oak raises a single eyebrow, a trick he is almost sure he stole from Cardan. “I don’t recall mentioning Hyacinthe at all.”

Not unexpectedly, that irritates Tiernan even more. “He betrayed you, helped imprison you. And struck you. He attempted to kill the High King. You ought to dismiss me from your service for how I feel about him, not inquire about it as though it were perfectly normal.”

“But if I don’t inquire, how will I know enough to dismiss you from my service?” Oak grins, feeling a bit lighter. Tiernan said feel, not felt. Maybe Oak’s romance is doomed, but that doesn’t mean someone else’s can’t succeed.

Tiernan gives him a look.

Oak laughs. “If anyone wants to torture you, all they need to do is make you talk about your feelings.”

Tiernan’s mouth twists. “On the ship, we . . . ,” he begins, and then seems to think better about the direction of that statement. “He saved me. And he spoke to me as though we could . . . but I was too angry to listen.”

“Ah,” Oak says. Before he can go further, Lady Elaine moves toward him in the crowd. “Ah, shit.”

Her ancestry is half from river creatures and half from aerial ones. A pair of small, pale wings hangs from her back, translucent and veined in the manner of dragonfly wings. They shimmer like stained glass. On her brow, she wears a circlet of ivy and flowers, and her gown is of the same stuff. She is very beautiful, and Oak very much wishes she would go away.

“I will tell your family that you’ve arrived,” Tiernan says, and melts into the crowd.

Lady Elaine cups Oak’s cheek in one delicate, long-fingered hand. Through sheer force of will, he neither steps back nor flinches. It bothers him, though, how hard it is to steel himself to her touch. He’s never been like that before. He’s never found it hard to sink into this role of besotted fool.

Maybe it’s harder now that he actually is a besotted fool.

“You’ve been hurt,” she says. “A duel?”

He snorts at that but grins to cover it. “Several.”

“Bruised plums are the sweetest,” she says.

His smile comes more easily now. He is remembering himself. Oak of the Greenbriar line. A courtier, a little irresponsible, a lot impulsive. Bait for every conspirator. But it chafes worse than before to pretend to ineptitude. It bothers him that had he not pretended for so long, it was possible his sister would have entrusted him with the mission he had to steal.

It bothers him that he’s pretended so long he’s not sure he knows how to be anything else.

“You are a wit,” he tells Lady Elaine.

And she, oblivious to any tension, smiles. “I have heard a rumor that you are being promised in marriage to some creature from the north. Your sister wishes to make an alliance with a hag’s daughter. To placate the shy folk.”

Oak is surprised by that story, which manages to be almost wholly accurate and yet totally wrong, but he reminds himself that this is Court, where all gossip is prized, and though faeries cannot lie, tales can still grow in the telling.

“That’s not quite—” he begins.

She places a hand on her heart. Her wings seem to quiver. “What a relief. I would hate for you to have to give up the delights of Court, forever sentenced to a cold bed in a desolate land. You have already been away so long! Come to my rooms tonight, and I will remind you why you wouldn’t want to leave us. I can be gentle with your cuts and scrapes.”

It comes to Oak that he doesn’t want gentle. He isn’t sure how he feels about that, although he doesn’t want Lady Elaine, either. “Not tonight.”

“When the moon is at its zenith,” she says. “In the gardens.”

“I can’t—” he begins.

“You wished to meet my friends. I can arrange something. And afterward, we can be alone.”

“Your friends,” Oak says slowly. Her fellow conspirators. He had hoped their plans had fallen apart, given how many rumors were flying around. “Some of them seem to be speaking very freely. I’ve had my loyalty questioned.”

It is on that statement that Wren enters the brugh.

She wears a new gown, one that looks like nothing that could have come from Lady Nore’s wardrobe. It is all of white, like a cocoon of spider silk, clinging to Wren’s body in such a way that the tint of her blue skin shows through. The fabric wraps around her upper arms and widens at the wrists and the skirts, where it falls in tatters nearly to the floor.

Woven into the wild nimbus of her hair are skeins of the same pale spider silk. And on her head rests a crown, not the black obsidian one of the former Court of Teeth, but a crown of icicles, each an impossibly thin spiral.

Hyacinthe stands at her side, unsmiling, in a uniform all of black.

Oak has seen his sister reinvent herself in the eyes of the Court. If Cardan leads with his cruel, cold charm, Jude’s power comes from the promise that if anyone crosses her, she simply cuts their throat. It is a brutal reputation, but would she, as a human, have been afforded respect for anything gentler?

And if he didn’t wonder how much that myth cost Jude, how much she disappeared into it, well, he wonders now. He hasn’t been the only one playing a role. Maybe none of his family has quite been seeing one another clearly.

Wren’s gaze sweeps the room, and there’s relief in her face when she finds him. He grins before he remembers her rejection. But not before she gives him a minute grin in return, her gaze going to the woman at his side.

“Is that her?” Lady Elaine asks, and Oak realizes how close to him she stands. How her fingers close possessively on his arm.

The prince forces himself not to take a step back, not to pull free of her grip. It won’t help, and besides, what reason does he have to worry over sparing Wren’s feelings? She doesn’t want him. “I must excuse myself.”

“Tonight, then,” Lady Elaine says, even though he never agreed. “And perhaps every night thereafter.”

As she departs, he is aware he has no one to blame but himself that she ignored his words. Oak is the one who makes himself appear empty-headed and easily manipulated. He is the one who falls into bed with anyone he thinks may help him discover who is betraying Elfhame. And, to be fair, with plenty of others to help forget how many of the Folk are dead because of him.

Even those he cared for, he hid from.

Maybe that’s why Wren can’t love him. Maybe that is why it seems so believable that he may have enchanted everyone in his life into caring for him. After all, how can anyone love him when no one really knows him?