The Stolen Heir: A Novel of Elfhame (The Stolen Heir, 1)
The Stolen Heir: Chapter 14

Rays of sunlight strike the snow, melting an ice layer that freezes and re-forms every day. As I take a step, I feel the sheet break, a craquelure spreading from my feet.

This time, I do not fall. In that reflective, glittering brightness, though, it is hard to hide.

During our trudge toward the Citadel, Oak untied himself and crawled from the sled, declaring he was well enough, and then proved that his definition of “well enough” wasn’t the same as “well,” since he has spent the time since staggering along as though drunk.

Titch found us again, swooping low and settling on Tiernan’s shoulder. The knight sent the hob off to scout ahead.

“Let’s stop here,” Tiernan says, and Oak collapses gratefully into the snow. “Wren has suggested we change clothes.”

“I do appreciate your commitment to us looking our best,” says the prince.

By now, I am used to Oak and do not think for a moment he doesn’t understand the plan. I haul out the uniforms I stole from Gorga. For myself, with my bluish skin, I take the dress of one of the castle servants. Huldufólk, like Lady Nore, have gray skin and tails. My skin isn’t quite right, and I have no tail, but its absence is hidden by the long skirts.

I wrap the bridle in a strip of cloth around my waist, then tie it on underneath the dress like a girdle. My knife goes into my pocket.

I change quickly. So does Oak, who shivers as he pulls rough woolen pants over his smooth linen ones. They hang low enough that his hooves look passably like boots when half-covered with snow. Tiernan shivers almost continuously as he pulls on the new uniform.

“You’re still likely to be identified if anyone sees you close-up,” I warn Oak.

He is the prince, after all, with hooves not unlike the former Prince Dain’s.

“Which is why I should go in, not you,” says Tiernan for what feels like the millionth time.

“Nonsense; if they catch me, they won’t immediately put my head on a spike,” Oak returns.

He’s probably right. Still. “Yes, but they’re more likely to catch you,” I say.

“You ought to be on my side,” he says, looking hurt. “I was poisoned.”

“That’s another good reason for me to go in your place,” Tiernan puts in.

“Pragmatist,” says Oak, as though it’s a dirty word.

We get as close as we dare and then hollow out snow into a cavern to wait in until nightfall. Oak and Tiernan pull their hands and feet tight to their bodies, but the prince’s lips still take on a bluish color.

I unclasp the cloak that I’ve been wearing and pass it to him.

He shakes his head. “Keep it. You’ll freeze.”

I push it at him. “I’m never cold.”

He gives me an odd look, perhaps thinking of me lying with him by the fire, but must be too chilled to debate.

As they go over our plan one more time, I start to believe that this is possible. We get in, steal back Mab’s remains, and leave with the general. If something goes wrong, I suppose we have the deer heart in the reliquary, but since Oak’s bluff seems like a long shot, I hope we don’t have to rely on it. Instead, I concentrate on remembering that I still have the power of command over Lady Nore.

And yet, as we approach the Citadel, I cannot help but recall being lost in this snow, weeping while tears froze on my cheeks. Just being here makes me feel like that monster child again, unloved and unlovable.

As night falls, Tiernan crawls out of our makeshift dwelling. “If you’re going in, then at least let me be the one to go down and make sure all is how we expect it.”

“You need not—” Oak begins, but Tiernan cuts him off with a glare.

“Wren ought to stay behind with the heart,” Tiernan says. “If you’re not planning on confronting Lady Nore, then it doesn’t matter if Wren can command her, and Wren’s no use to you in a fight.”

“I could be useful in avoiding one,” I remind him.

Oak does not seem moved by Tiernan’s argument. “If she’s willing to come, then she’s coming.”

Tiernan throws up his hands and storms off through the snow, obviously angry with both of us.

“I do think I may need you inside the Citadel,” Oak tells me. “Although I wish that wasn’t the case.”

I am glad he wants me there, though I am no knight or spy. “Perhaps all three of us could go in,” I venture.

“He needs to stay here, lest we get caught,” Oak says. “He’ll keep the heart with him and bargain for our return with it.”

A moment later, Tiernan ducks his head back inside, the owl-faced hob on his shoulder. “You two can climb the side to the birdie entrance. Titch has been watching the patrol shifts, and they’re sloppy. Makes it hard to know when they are going to happen, but there’s a window of opportunity when they do.”

Oak nods and pushes himself to his feet. “Very well, then,” he says. “No time like the present.”

“One more thing,” Tiernan says. “There are trolls on the battlements, along with those stick creatures and some falcon soldiers.”

“But I thought the trolls were trapped…,” I begin, but trail off because there are so many possibilities. They could be trolls that do not come from the Stone Forest and are therefore not subject to its curse. But when I think about the heaps of clothing, and the mounted heads, I wonder if what we witnessed were the remains of sacrifices meant to appease the ancient troll kings to open the way from the forest.

My blood was spilled for the glory of the Kings of Stone who rule from beneath the world, but my body belongs to the Queen of Snow.

At that unsettling thought, I follow Tiernan and Oak out of our snow tunnel and into the frigid air.

We stay as low to the ground as we are able. In the dark, it’s easier to approach the Citadel without drawing much attention to ourselves. At least until we see a great and horrible spiderlike construction of ice and stone, flesh and twig, lumbering through the night.

We hear a piercing scream, and I see that the spider has a huldu woman in its pincers. They are too far away for us to help her. A moment later, her screams cease and the stick-spider begins to feed.

“If that thing can eat,” Oak says, “then it’s truly alive. Not like one of Grimsen’s ornamental creations with fluttering wings that move like clockwork. Not like that head on a spike, repeating the same message over and over. It hungers and thirsts and wants.”

Like me.

Oh, I do not want to be here. I hate this place. I hate everything about it and everything it might teach me about myself.

Enormous braziers burn on either side of the Citadel gate. We wait in the snow until there is movement on the battlements.

Tiernan flips a knife in his hand. “I’ll create a distraction at the garrison while you and the prince go up that wall.”

This is my last chance to avoid returning to the place of my nightmares. All I have to do is tell Oak I changed my mind. Tiernan would be thrilled.

I think of Bogdana’s words to me in the woods. The prince is your enemy.

I think about the feeling of Oak’s breath against my neck, the way his fox eyes looked with the pupils gone wide and black. I think about how desperate he must be, to come all this way for his father, to gulp down poison, to risk his life on an uncertain scheme.

I think about the bridle wrapped around my waist, the one I tried to steal. The one he gave me to keep.

I have to trust him. Without me, we cannot command Lady Nore.

“We should go straight to the prisons,” Oak says. “Get Madoc. Go from there.”

“Better not,” I tell him. “We don’t know how hurt he’s going to be, and we can move faster without him. If we get the reliquary, then we can free him and move him to the sled directly.”

Oak hesitates. I can see the conflict between getting what he came here for and getting everything. “All right,” he says finally.

“If you’re not back by dawn,” Tiernan says, “then you know where I will be with the reliquary.” With that, he heads off through the snow.

“How exactly is he going to create a distraction?” I ask, attempting to walk with my head down, as though I am a servant who belongs to the Citadel and am returning from a dull errand—perhaps gathering crowberries. Attempting to behave as though Oak is a soldier walking me inside.

“Better not to ask,” the prince says with a slight smile.

Up close, the outside of the Citadel is not a single piece of cloudy ice, but one composed of blocks, which have been melted smooth. Oak sticks his hand into his pack, and I recognize the grappling hook and rope from Undry Market.

He’s eyeballing the spires, looking for the correct one.

“There,” I whisper, pointing up.

The entrance, three stories above us, isn’t visible when standing beneath it, as we are. It looks like an arch, the mirror of those that surround it.

“You ready?” he asks.

I’m not. When I think of Lady Nore, it’s as though my mind becomes full of scribbles, blotchy and looping, scratching through all my other thoughts. I nod in answer, because I don’t trust myself to speak when I have no ability to tell anything but the truth.

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.

And yet, these stick creatures seem like living puppets and little else. They stay in their neat rows, and when she orders them inside, they go obediently, as though they’d never had any other thought. But I do not understand why, if the magic of Mab’s bones is animating these creatures, they are not conscious in the way that I am.

Although I may have been made from snow and sticks and blood, there is some difference that allows me to behave like a disobedient faerie daughter, when these creatures seem to make no choices at all.

But then I recall the spider hunting the servant and don’t know what to suppose.

The sound of footsteps is the only warning before two guards turn the corner.

Oak puts his hands on my shoulders, pushing my back to the wall.

“Pretend with me,” he whispers. And then he presses his mouth to mine.

A soldier kissing one of the serving girls. A bored ex-falcon attempting to amuse himself. Oak hiding our faces, giving us a reason to be overlooked. I understand the game.

This is no declaration of desire. And yet, I am rooted in place by the shocking heat of his mouth, the softness of his lips, the way one of his hands goes to the ice wall to brace himself and the other to my waist, and then to the hilt of my knife as they draw closer.

He doesn’t want me. This doesn’t mean he wants me. I repeat that over and over as I let him part my lips with his tongue. I run my hands up his back under his shirt, letting my nails trail over his skin.

I have been trained in all the arts of a courtier. Dancing and dueling, kissing and deceiving.

Still, I am gratified when he shudders, when the hand he was bracing with lifts to thread through my hair, to cup my head. My mouth slides over his jaw to his throat, then against his shoulder, where I press the points of my teeth. His body stiffens, his fingers gripping me harder, pulling me closer to him. When I bite down, he gasps.

“You there,” says one of the soldiers, a troll. “Get to your post. If the lady hears of this—”

When Oak draws back, his lips are flushed red. His eyes look black beneath golden lashes. I see the marks from my teeth on his shoulder. He turns and drives a knife into the troll’s stomach. The troll falls soundlessly as Oak turns to slash the other’s throat.

Hot blood spatters the ice. Where it lands, steam rises and a constellation of pockmarks appear.

“Is there a room nearby?” the prince asks in a voice that shakes only a little. “For the bodies.”

For a moment, I stare at him stupidly. I am reeling from the kiss, from the swiftness of the violence. I am not yet used to Oak’s ability to kill without hesitation and then look chagrined about it, as though he did something in slightly poor taste. Spilled a rare vintage of wine, perhaps. Mismatched his trousers to his shirt.

Although I cannot be anything other than glad he killed them swiftly and soundlessly.

I lead him across the hall, into a strange little chamber for keeping supplies to clean and polish and provide for the needs of the Gentry in this part of the castle.

Inside, the frozen carcass of an elk hangs in one corner, slivers of meat cut off. On the opposite wall are wooden shelves, packed with linens, cups, glasses, and trays, as well as dried herbs that hang in bundles. Two barrels of wine sit on the ground, one opened, a ladle resting on the lip.

Oak drags both guards in. I grab up one of their cloaks and a tablecloth from the shelves to go back and mop up the blood.

As I do, I check to see if there are any translucent parts of ice through which anyone could have witnessed what happened. If they did, it would have appeared like a violent shadow play, and therefore not entirely unusual in the Citadel. Still, if someone was searching for us, it might be a problem.

I notice nothing to give us away, so I stash the soiled fabric back in the room. Oak has pushed the bodies into a corner and covered them with a cloth.

“Is there any blood on me?” he asks, patting down the front of his woolen shirt.

It was a fine spatter, and though it struck his clothes, the pattern is nearly invisible in the dark fabric. I replace a little in his hair and wipe it off. Rub his cheek and just above the corner of his mouth.

He gives me a guilty smile, as though expecting me to take him to task for the kiss or the murders. I cannot guess which.

“We’re almost to the stairs,” I tell him.

On the landing, we spot two more guards on the opposite end of a long hall. They are too far to make out our faces, and I hope too far off to see anything inauthentic in our costumes. I keep my gaze straight ahead. Oak nods to one, and the guard nods in return.

“Brazen,” I mutter under my breath, and the prince grins.

My hands are shaking.

We pass the library and the war room, then walk up another set of stairs. These spiral steeply for two floors until we come to Lady Nore’s bedroom, at the very top of the leftmost tower.

Her door is tall and pointed at its apex. It is made of some black metal, frosted over with cold. The handle is a deer hoof.

I reach out my fingers, turn it. The door opens.

Lady Nore’s bedroom is entirely new, the room washed in red. It takes me a moment to realize where the color is coming from. Viscera. The flayed-open bodies of Lady Nore’s victims on display all around her, frozen inside the walls so that light could filter through them and give the room its odd, ruddy tint.

Oak sees it, too, eyes wide as he takes in the awful space. “Well, a reliquary full of bones can’t be out of place among all this grotesque art.”

I give him a grateful glance. Yes. That’s right. All we need to do is replace Mab’s remains. Then we can escape with his father. And perhaps I will no longer feel trapped by the Citadel, no longer be frozen in my past, as though I were one of the bodies in the wall.

A large bed sits in the middle of the floor, the headboard and footboard of carved onyx in sharp, spear-like shapes. Over the cushions rests a coverlet of ermine. A brazier burns in one corner of the room, warming the air.

Opposite hangs a mirror with a black frame in the shape of intertwining snakes. Beneath that is a dressing table, with jewels and hairpins strewn across its surface. I replace an inkpot and a golden comb in its drawers.

I expect everything here to be perfectly arranged, as it was in the memory of my childhood, but when I turn to Lady Nore’s enormous wardrobe, built of ebony wood and inlaid with teeth from many beasts and beings, I see that several of her dresses lie on the floor. They are great, grand things in scarlet and shimmering silver, with droplets that appear like frozen tears. There are whole gowns of black swan feathers. But the closer I look, the more I notice the stains, the rips. They are as old as the broken towers of the castle.

The mess makes me suppose that Lady Nore readied herself quickly and without the help of servants. There is a desperation in all this that seems at odds with her sitting at the cusp of vast power.

Oak puts a hand on my arm. I startle.

“You all right?” he asks.

“When they first took me from the mortal world to the Court of Teeth, Lord Jarel and Lady Nore tried to be nice to me. They gave me good things to eat and dressed me in fancy dresses and told me that I was their princess and would be a beautiful and beloved queen,” I tell him, the words slipping from my lips before I can call them back. I occupy myself with searching deeper in the closet so I don’t have to see his face as I speak. “I cried constantly, ceaselessly. For a week, I wept and wept until they could bear it no more.”

Oak is silent. Though he knew me as a child, he never knew me as that child, the one who still believed the world could be kind.

But then, he had sisters who were stolen. Perhaps they had cried, too.

“Lord Jarel and Lady Nore told their servants to enchant me to sleep, and the servants did. But it never lasted. I kept weeping.”

He nods, just a little, as though more movement might break the spell of my speaking.

“Lord Jarel came to me with a beautiful glass dish in which there was flavored ice,” I tell him. “When I took a bite, the flavor was indescribably delicious. It was as though I were eating dreams.

“You will have this every day if you cease your crying, he said.

“But I couldn’t stop.

“Then he came to me with a necklace of diamonds, as cold and beautiful as ice. When I put it on, my eyes shone, my hair sparkled, and my skin shimmered as though glitter had been poured over it. I looked wondrously beautiful. But when he told me to stop crying, I couldn’t.

“Then he became angry, and he told me that if I didn’t stop, he would turn my tears to glass that would cut my cheeks. And that’s what he did.

“But I cried until it was hard to tell the difference between tears and blood. And after that, I began to teach myself how to break their curses. They didn’t like that.

“And so they told me I would be able to see the humans again—that’s what they called them, the humans—in a year, for a visit, but only if I was good.

“I tried. I choked back tears. And on the wall beside my bed, I scratched the number of days in the ice.

“One night I returned to my room to replace that the scratches weren’t the way I remembered. I was sure it had been five months, but the scratches made it seem as though it had been only a little more than three.

“And that was when I realized I was never going home, but by then the tears wouldn’t come, no matter how much I willed them. And I never cried again.”

His eyes shine with horror. “I should never have asked you to come back here.”

“Just don’t leave me behind,” I say, feeling immensely vulnerable. “That’s what I want, for the game I won all those years ago.”

“I promise you,” he says. “If it is within my power, we leave together.”

I nod. “We will replace the reliquary and ruin her,” I tell him. “And then I will never come back.”

But as we open drawers and comb through Lady Nore’s belongings, we replace no bones, no magic.

“I don’t think it’s here,” Oak says, looking up from a box he’s poking through.

“She might keep it in the throne room,” I venture. Even though we must go down steps again and slip past guards, I will be glad to be out of this terrible room.

“My father might know where it’s kept,” he says. “I know you don’t think—”

“We can try the prisons,” I say reluctantly.

As I turn to give the chamber one last look, I notice something strange about her bed. The base of it is ice, and I am sure there’s something frozen in it. Not red but ivory and brown.

“Oak?” I say.

He turns, looking in the direction that I am. “Did you replace something?”

“I’m not sure.” I walk across the floor. Pushing back the covers, I see three victims frozen there. Not taken apart, like those in the walls. I cannot even tell how they died.

As I stare, one, impossibly, opens his eyes.

I shrink away, and as I do, his mouth parts and out comes a sound that is half moan and half song. Beside him, the other two awaken and begin to make the same noise, until it rises in a ghostly chorus.

Sounding an alarm.

Oak grabs my shoulder and pushes me out the door. “A trap,” he says. “Go!”

I run down the stairs as fast as I am able, half-slipping, my hand bracing on the wall. The clatter of Oak’s hooves is right behind me.

We make it to the second landing before ten guards appear—ex-falcons, huldufólk, nisser, and trolls. They fan out in a formation around us, weapons drawn. Oak’s back presses against mine, and I hear the rattle of his thin blade pulling free from its sheath.