I squat on the other side of the prince, worried 1 am going to do something wrong. Oak's gaze slants to me as, with fumbling fingers, I try to work off the scale mail where it has stuck to his wound...
Underneath, his stained linen shirt is pushed up over the flat plane of his stomach, the dip of his hip bones. His sweat carries the scent of crushed grass, but mostly he smells like blood.
He watches me, lashes low over his eyes.
Without his golden armor, he almost looks like the boy 1 remember.
Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel.
There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.
Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world, where she lives feral in the woods.
Oak, now seventeen, is charming, beautiful and manipulative.
He's on a mission that will lead him into the citadel, and he wants Suren's help. But if she agrees, it will mean guarding her heart against the boy she once knew and a prince she cannot trust, as well as confronting all the horrors she thought she'd left behind.