The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1)(50)

“Locke had a party at his house,” I say. “I stayed—but it wasn’t, I mean, nothing much happened. We kissed. That was it.”

Her chestnut braids fly as she shakes her head. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

I let out my breath, perhaps a little dramatically. “Why would I lie? I’m not the one hiding the identity of the person courting me.”

Taryn frowns. “I just think that sleeping in someone’s room, in someone’s bed, is more than kissing.”

My cheeks heat, thinking of the way it had felt to wake up with his body stretched out beside mine. To get the attention off me, I start speculating about her. “Ooooh, maybe it’s Prince Balekin. Are you going to marry Prince Balekin? Or perhaps it’s Noggle and you can count the stars together.”

She smacks me in the arm, a little too hard. “Stop guessing,” she says. “You know I’m not allowed to say.”

“Ow.” I pick a white campion flower and stick it behind my ear.

“So you like him?” she asks. “Really like him?”

“Locke?” I ask. “Of course I do.”

She gives me a look, and I wonder how much I worried her, not coming home the night before.

“Balekin I like less well,” I say, and she rolls her eyes.

When we get back to the stronghold, I find that Madoc has left word he will be out until late. With little else to do for once, I look for Taryn, but although I saw her go upstairs just minutes before, she’s not in her room. Instead, her dress is on the bed and her closet open, a few gowns hanging roughly, as though she pulled them out before finding them wanting.

Has she gone to meet her suitor? I take a turn around the room, trying to see it as a spy might, alert for signs of secrets. I notice nothing unusual but a few rose petals withering on her dressing table.

I go to my room and lie on my bed, going over my memories of the night before. Reaching into my pocket, I remove my knife to finally clean it. When I bring it out, I am holding the golden acorn, too. I turn the bauble over in my hand.

It’s a solid lump of metal—a beautiful object. At first I take it only for that, before I notice the tiny lines running across it, tiny lines that seem to indicate moving parts. As though it were a puzzle.

I can’t screw off the top, although I try. I can’t seem to do anything else with it, either. I am about to give up and toss it onto my dressing table when I glimpse a tiny hole, so small as to be nearly invisible, right at the bottom. Hopping off my bed, I rattle through my desk, looking for a pin. The one I find has a pearl on one end. I try to fit the point into the acorn. It takes a moment, but I manage, pushing past resistance until I feel a click and it opens.

Mechanized steps swing out from a shining center, where a tiny golden bird rests. Its beak moves, and it speaks in a creaky little voice. “My dearest friend, these are the last words of Liriope. I have three golden birds to scatter. Three attempts to get one into your hand. I am too far gone for any antidote, and so if you hear this, I leave you with the burden of my secrets and the last wish of my heart. Protect him. Take him far from the dangers of this Court. Keep him safe, and never, ever tell him the truth of what happened to me.”

Tatterfell comes into the room, bringing with her a tray with tea things. She tries to peek at what I am doing, but I cup my hand over the acorn.

When she goes out, I set down the bauble and pour myself a cup of tea, holding it to warm my hands. Liriope is Locke’s mother. This seems like a message asking someone—her dearest friend—to spirit him—Locke—away. She calls the message her “last words,” so she must have known she was about to die. Perhaps the acorns were to be sent to Locke’s father, in the hopes Locke might spend the rest of his life exploring wild places with him rather than be caught up in intrigues.

But since Locke is still here, it seems as if none of the three acorns were found. Maybe none of them even left her bower.

I should give it to him, let him decide for himself what to do with it. But all I keep thinking about is the note on Balekin’s desk, the note that seemed to implicate Balekin in Liriope’s murder. Should I tell Locke everything?

I know the provenance of the blusher mushroom that you ask after, but what you do with it must not be tied to me.

I turn the words over in my mind the way I turned the acorn in my hand, and I feel the same seams.

There’s something odd about that sentence.

I copy it out again on a piece of paper to be sure I remember it correctly. When I first read it, the note seemed to imply that Queen Orlagh had located a deadly poison for Balekin. But blusher mushrooms—while rare—grow wild, even on this island. I picked blusher mushrooms in the Milkwood, beside the black-thorned bees, who build their hives high in the trees (an antidote can be made with their honey, I learned recently from all my reading). Blusher mushrooms aren’t dangerous if you don’t drink the red liquid.

What if Queen Orlagh’s note didn’t mean that she’d found blusher mushrooms and she was going to give them to Balekin? What if by “know the provenance,” Orlagh literally just meant that she knew where particular blusher mushrooms had come from? After all, she says “what you do with it” and not “what you do with them.” She’s cautioning him about what he’s going to do with the knowledge, not the actual mushrooms.

Which means he’s not going to poison Dain.