It’s time to return to Elfhame.
At fourteen, I learned to make tea out of crushed spruce needles along with bee balm flowers, boiled over a fire.
Worse, there were a few times I’d left him behind when I went to sit underneath windows at Bex’s school or the local community college, repeating probably useless poems and snatches of history to myself, or doing sums by tracing the numbers in the earth. One night when I returned, I found he’d been attacked by a squirrel looking for material to nest in and most of his insides had been pulled out.
Out in the woods, I’d often think of the games Rebecca and I used to play. Like once, when we were pretending to be fairy‑tale princesses. We carted out props—a rusty axe that had probably never been taken from the garage before, two paper crowns I’d made from glitter and cut‑up newspaper, and an apple, only slightly bruised, but shiny with wax.
“You get to eat the apple,” Rebecca pointed out. “And wear a crown. Besides, you said that you wanted to be the princess. That’s what princesses do.”“Suren?” a shout came through the woods. No one should have been calling me. No one should have even known my name.Only to see Oak, the heir to Elfhame, standing in a clearing. All my memories of him were of a merry young boy. But he’d become tall and rawboned, in the manner of children who have grown suddenly, and too fast.
“They’d probably be happier if he did,” he told me. “I’m the reason my father is in exile. The reason my mother married him in the first place. My one sister and her girlfriend had to take care of me when I was little, even though they were barely more than kids themselves. My other sister almost got killed lots of times to keep me safe. Things will be easier without me around. They’ll see that.”
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