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“I told you—I am a courtier, versed in all the courtly arts.” He’s grinning as he says it, though, acknowledging the absurdity of the statement.

I find myself shaking my head and grinning, too. He’s being ridiculous, but I am not surehowridiculous.

“I do have a bad habit,” he says. “Of falling in love. With great regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.”

I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back.

“As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say.

He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would have been his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.”

Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask.

“Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.”

“Me?” I ask incredulously.

“You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.”

I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement.

He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women.”

He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.”

“Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb up into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.”

“Youdolike cruel women,” I say.

“Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote her terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately,sheadored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to sword fight for show.”

I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words.

“That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.”

“Oh,” I say. “That isthree levelsof unfortunate.”

“Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.”

The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughs in the face of despair. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.”

“Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.

The threshold of Undry Market is announced by two trees leaning toward each other, their branches entangled. As we duck beneath, what had previously been scraps of song and spots of color lose their disguise and the entire panoply comes into view. Shops and stalls fill the clearing. The air is rich with perfumes, honey wines, and grilled fruits. We pass a tented area with lutes and harps, the vendor trying to call to us over the sound of one of his instruments recounting a terrible tale of how it was made.

As we walk, I see that the market stretches down to a rocky area near the shoreline, where a pier has been built out into the waves. A single ship bobs at the end of it. I wonder if that is what Tiernan is trying to buy from the goblins.

Then I am distracted by the hammering of smiths and a smattering of song. There is a forge not far from where we are standing, one with a display of swords in the front. And beside that, a maypole and a few dancers going around it, winding the ribbons. A stall selling cloaks in all the colors of the sky, from the first blush of dawn to deep as midnight and spangled with stars. A bakeshop hawking braided breads, their shining crusts decorated with herbs and flowers.

“Don’t have gold?” calls an antlered shopkeeper. “Pay with a lock of hair, a year of your life, a dream you wish to never have again.”

“Come!” calls another. “We have the finest jackets in a hundred leagues. Green as poison. Red as blood. Black as the heart of the King of Elfhame.”

Oak stops to purchase cheese wrapped in wax paper, a half dozen apples, and two loaves of bread. He also gets us warmer clothes, along with hats and gloves. Rope, new packs, and a grappling hook, the tines of which fold down like the tentacles of a squid skimming through water.

We pass a fletcher, selling barrels of arrows with different feathers affixed to the ends. Crows and sparrows, even those from a wren. Pass a display of gowns in beetle-bright green, saffron, and pomegranate red. A stall with bouquets of drying herbs hanging upside down, beside seedpods. Then a bookseller, shelves of old tomes and empty, freshly bound books open to creamy pages waiting to be written in. One stall over, an alchemist displays a shelf of poisons, including poisoned ink. A row of oddly shaped skulls sits alongside them.