Page 15 of The Prisoner's Throne
She goes on. “How frustrating it must be not to haveeveryoneeager 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. “Isthatwhat 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 asinglecommand 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.
