The Hostage Prince (12 page)

A
spen sat low in the boat, eyes frantically searching the waters. But since Snail had killed the one who had tried to drag her overboard, there had been no more attacks by the mer—no flash of green tail or bubbling froth to signal another assault.

Still,
better caution than a coffin
, his father had always said. So he kept his eyes on the waves and his head continually scanning left and right.

Left and right,
he thought, then corrected himself.
Fore and aft, rather.
He frowned.
Or is it port and starboard?

He had never paid much attention to nautical terms, not liking water, boats, or sailors. And he had
never
understood the need to rename directions just because one was on the water. The language of the sailing men that he recalled from his childhood in the Seelie Court was as strange as the trader's dialect, or the gabble of the Border Lords.
Why can they not all speak alike?
he wondered
. Understanding would be greatly improved thereby.

He snuck a glance at Snail, who was watching the water as anxiously as he. He wondered about asking her what she felt about language but he was not certain how to start the conversation.

She is nothing like Sun and Moon.
Yes, they are cruel
, he thought,
but they know their place in the world and the place of those around them.
He was intimidated by them, infatuated with them, possibly under their spell—but he could certainly talk to them
. Not that they often answered, except with scorn.
But Snail, Snail was so . . .
prickly.
And she certainly didn't know her place. Still, when he had thought her dead, facedown in the bottom of the boat, he had felt . . . bereft.

Suddenly, Aspen heard a grinding sound and the boat stopped with a jerk.

“We have arrived,” the Sticksman said. “Get out.” As an afterthought, he added, “Prince.” It was less a title than part of a command.

Aspen gave a mighty leap over the side of the boat, landing onto a small spit that was half sand and half marsh. Glancing quickly around, he noted that the spit jutted from a thickly forested shoreline into the slow-moving shallows.

No mer
, he thought, and felt his heart resume its regular beat.

Hearing Snail climb over the side with what sounded like a bit more decorum, he turned just as she landed in the sand. He was surprised at how light she was on her feet.

“But where
are
we?” she asked. “Are we still in Unseelie lands?”

Aspen shook his head. “No,” he said.

He was trying to picture the map in Old Jack Daw's apartments, where he had taken lessons in map reading since Jaunty had not thought it worthy of a hostage prince to know such things. “You are not going anywhere,” Jaunty had said, “for you must remain here for the rest of your life. And if you go on a hunt, or ride to hounds, the beaters will know where to take you.” That had made sense. The beaters were usually wolfmen and they certainly had the nose for the woodlands.

But Jack had disagreed, and said otherwise. “A man
should
know the lands that surround him. A prince
must
know, for he may rule it all some day.” And even when Aspen had shrugged and pointed out that he was hardly likely to rule the Unseelie lands, Jack had said, “You have a crystal ball? You are a soothsayer? A seer?” And of course Aspen had had no answer for those questions.

“Are we in Seelie lands then?”

He was so caught up in memory that Snail's voice startled him for a moment. “Not exactly.”

“Well, where are we then?” She sounded a bit exasperated. “Your Serenity,” she added when he looked up at her sharply.

See,
he thought,
prickly.
He'd never met a prickly underling before. Except for Jack, of course. Even if he had been only a hostage prince, he was of the highest rank. And the underclasses should know their places. Except, for some reason, this girl did not.

“Well,” he said, picking up a short, sharp stick and dusting the sand off of it, “that is not as easy a question as you might think.” Kneeling in the sand, he used the stick to sketch what appeared to be the outline of a fat, three-legged squirrel.

“That,” he said, tapping the squirrel's body, “is Unseelie land.” He scooted a bit to his right and drew a large circle, adding several circles atop and below it. “Those are Seelie lands.” He drew a thin line from the squirrel's tail to a spot somewhere in between what might have been rocks or bodies of water. “This is the river path we took.” He looked up at the Sticksman, who remained on the boat. “Yes?”

The Sticksman gave a shallow nod. “Yes.”

Snail frowned down at the crude map. “Then you know where we are!”

Aspen frowned at his map as well. “Not exactly.”

“How
not exactly
?” Snail said loudly. “Don't you
princes
study geography and mathematics and all that?”

Somehow, “princes” didn't sound like a compliment when she said it.

“Well, yes,” Aspen said. “But Faerie geography is a tough subject. See here.” He tapped the stick on the sand map's Unseelie lands and then the Seelie lands. “The lands held by the two courts are well known and well controlled. We can travel through them freely and easily.”

He thought about their narrow escape from the Border Lords and the mer and coughed nervously. “Well, maybe not easily if one is trying to escape. But at least we did not get lost. However, the
unmastered
lands in between have a wild magic all their own and tend to . . .”

“Tend to what?”

“Well, they tend to move around a bit.”

“A
bit
?”

“Well, a bit more than that. The Shifting Lands.”

Snail sat on the ground next to the map. “Wonderful.” She made it sound anything but.

“It is no problem, though. I just have to remember the equations,” he told her, though his forehead creased as he tried to recall them. Those had been last year's lessons, after all, and mathematics had never been his strong suit.

Suddenly his forehead smoothed out again. “I've got it!” he said, and he spoke rapidly lest he forget it again. “The elevation of the spot times the number of the season squared gives us the L property that mostly governs the movement factor of forested lands.” He smiled at Snail, proud to have remembered such a complex equation. “If we had landed in the plains the calculation is much more complicated.” He scrawled some numbers in the sand and then bit his thumb. “I believe we are—”

“You are in the Hunting Grounds,” the Sticksman said. He was right behind Aspen, looking down at the map.

“I would have figured that out,” Aspen grumbled. “Eventually.”

“I don't think we have time for
eventually
,” Snail said. “We need to be going
now
.”

“Are you not forgetting something?” the Sticksman said.

Aspen looked down and then slapped his forehead. “Of course!” He drew a thin line equidistant from both lands. “The Borders.” He frowned. “Though those shift around a bit as well.”

“No,” said the Sticksman. “My favor.”

Aspen gulped. “Ah—that. . . . If it is within my power.”

“You will travel far,” the Sticksman said. It wasn't a question, and Aspen thought he could feel the power of prophecy in the creature's next words. “And you will meet creatures old, odd, and powerful. You will ask each of them these three questions.” The Sticksman waited as if expecting confirmation.

“Um, yes,” Aspen said somewhat awkwardly. “And these questions are?”

“What is the Sticksman?” The creature paused not in hesitation but as if setting the words into Aspen's mind. “How did the Sticksman come to be?” Another pause. “How does he come not to be once more?”

“Very well,” Aspen said, though inwardly he thought the questions unanswerable.

“If you receive the answer to any of those questions and do not return within a year and a day of learning the answers to share them with me, I shall consider our bargain unfulfilled.” The Sticksman leaned very low and fixed Aspen with his pale, pupilless eyes. “Then I would have to seek you out to exact payment.”

Aspen did not know how the Sticksman could seek him out or what he meant by “exact payment,” but he definitely did not want to find out. Of course, if he never received any answers, then he would not have to return to this shore ever again.

“I am a prince of Faerie and I have given my bond,” he said, trying to make the words true by saying them firmly. “A prince and his bond are sacred.”

A traitorous thought suddenly came to him:
Is not running from the Unseelie Court breaking the hostage bond?

But suddenly, for the first time, he realized that
he
had never given his bond. It had been given for him. He had been a child when he was turned over to King Obs and the Unseelie Court. He had had no say in the matter.

For a man's word to matter it must be freely given,
he thought,
by the man himself.
And he had been no man, but a boy.

“I give you my bond, Sticksman. I shall return with your answers when I get them.”

He meant every word.

The Sticksman studied Aspen for a moment more and then nodded once, apparently satisfied. He turned in a single fluid motion, walked back to the boat, and stepped easily over the high side. Then he stuck his pole in the sand and pushed off. The boat moved off the sand, slipping into the water, and going upstream as easily as it had down.

Aspen knew it would soon be out of sight. But Snail had been right; this was no time for idle watching.

“Come, girl,” he said. “It is time to enter the Hunting Grounds.”

Then he strode manfully toward the forest, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

He pretended that he didn't hear her when she muttered, “Sure, but are we the hunters or the prey?”

S
nail thought bitterly, not two hours later, that they were neither the huntsmen nor the prey. They were, quite simply, the Lost.

Or as she said to the prince, “We're going in circles.”

“How can you know that?” he asked sharply. “
I
do not know that!”

“Because we've passed the same tree three times.”

“We have passed a lot of trees. How could you possibly know one from the others?” He spoke witheringly and seemingly without real curiosity.

“Because that's the only tree with the initials BPS.”

He looked oddly at her. “I did not see any initials on a tree.”

She pointed to a white birch, and there—almost hidden by the leaves—were the very initials.

“You can
read
?” Evidently, that was the thing he was most riveted by.

“Of course I can read. I'm apprenticed to a midwife.” She stood, hands on hips, and glared at him.

“
Midwives
can read?” He sounded even more astonished.

She looked at him with the same withering glance he'd given her. “Would you put your darling in the hands of someone who couldn't read the script on a pothecary bottle, leading her to mistake a sleeping potion for, say,
arum
?”

“I . . . I . . .”

It was the first time she'd actually shut him up and it made her grin. She didn't bother to hide her delight.

He squared his shoulders and tried to look princely. Instead, she thought it made him look like a small boy caught pinching butter from the churn.

“So
do you
know
where
we are?” She gave him a smile, trying for innocence and hitting instead on sass. “Or
where
we are going?”

“I told you these lands tend to move around a bit.” Now
he
was getting testy.

She sat down, crossed her legs, and looked up at him.

“What are you doing?”

“If the land moves, then perhaps
we
shouldn't.” She held her hands palms up, in mock resignation.

They were in a small clearing facing three paths. The middle one headed deeper into the woods, the left one veered off sharply, the right lazed in a twisty kind of way. Not only was Snail certain they'd been here before, she was also pretty sure they'd taken a different path out each time.

Aspen caught her looking at the paths and said, “
You
choose one.”

“Bad idea,” she said without hesitation.

He plopped down next to her. “Then what do you propose?”

“I told you: if the land moves, then perhaps we . . .”

This time, he glared at her and said angrily, “I heard you, but that makes no sense, ‘Perhaps we shouldn't.' Should not
what?
”

She pointed. “Watch what's happening.”

Reluctantly, he looked where she was pointing and his jaw dropped.

The land before them was subtly shifting. As if it was a map writ in water, it moved and changed with a slow, unseen tide.

“How did you know . . . ?” he said, practically in a whisper.

“I didn't. But I guessed.” She grinned. “It was a
good
guess, don't you think?”

He stared at the slowly moving landscape. “Knowing doesn't solve our problem.”

She smiled, still staring at the shifting land. “Midwives say,
Do not go to the baby, let the baby come to you
.”

“Speak plainly!” he said. “
You
are as bad as the Sticksman.”

“Let the land show us where to go,” she said. And even as she spoke, the land slowed its shifting, and the left-hand path stopped directly before them.

She turned and grinned. “See?”

“Do we dare trust it?”

She shrugged. “Do we have a choice?” Then she stood and reached out a hand.

Reluctantly, he took her hand and she pulled him up beside her. Then she put her other hand in the small of his back and pushed him forward.

“After you, Serenity. I know my place.” She didn't even try to hide the fact that she was making fun of him.

He pulled his sword from the sheath and stepped on to the path.

Despite her name, Snail kept pace behind him. Indeed, she didn't dare let him out of her sight.

The first time the path veered sharply left, and steeply downhill, the prince's shoulders went up, and he look angrily over at the gentler slope to the right.

Snail grabbed at his arm before he could step off the path, and whispered, “Think of it as a dance, Serenity. Let the path lead.”

“
I
do the leading in a dance,” he told her snippily.

She laughed out loud. “I'm sure that in the toffs' grand balls, the men always lead. But in the apprentice dances, anyone who wants to can.”

“And chaos ensues,” he said sharply.

“Chaos was what we had when we were first in the woods,” she reminded him. “When we were going in circles.”

He thought a minute, and without actually agreeing out loud, relaxed his shoulders, and let the path take them where it would.

*  *  *

F
OR A LONG TIME
it felt as if they were simply wandering with no apparent destination. By early evening, with no end in sight, the prince was beginning to get nervous. Snail could tell by the way he shifted his grip on his sword, sometimes sheathing it entirely and then, as quickly, unsheathing it and holding it before him.

“We have to find a stopping place,” he said. “Gather wood, make a fire, sleep somewhere safe.”

“And eat,” Snail said, all at once aware of how empty her stomach was. It felt as if she hadn't eaten in days. And then she realized—she actually
hadn't
eaten for quite some time, not since they'd been in the castle and before she was up in the birthing tower. Which had to have been at least a day and a half ago, if not longer.

“
And eat
,” he agreed.

Just as they both came to that agreement, there was a sudden strange sound, as if something was slowly grinding to a halt. They both jerked forward, then stopped walking.

Snail sighed. She suddenly understood that she was not only hungry, she was exhausted as well. The march through the Hunting Grounds and Shifting Lands must have taken longer than she realized.

“I smell something,” the prince said, sniffing like a boggart on the hunt.

“What do you . . .” and then she smelt it, too.

Someone close by was cooking cabbage soup.

She spun around but saw no lights, nothing to indicate where the smell was coming from: no campfire, no house, no inn, no castle, no . . .

“Look,” the prince said, pointing.

Snail looked through the gloaming, squinting hard to follow his finger.

And there, through the trees, was a dark, round . . . something.

“A
cave
?” she said. “Bad idea.”

“I think it's a
good
idea,” he said. “It will be warm, keep us safe, and—”

“This place is called the Hunting Grounds, my lord,” she said, as if speaking to a child. “Nothing good will live in a cave.”

“Someone cooking dinner lives there,” he told her.

“What if that someone who lives there is anticipating dinner to walk into his pot?” she asked.

“You do not know that.”

“You don't know otherwise.”

His stomach growled.

Her stomach growled.

And with that, their fate was decided.