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“In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there’s no way to prevent it from running its course.”

I pledge my troth to thee and promise to turn thy guts inside out if you deceive.

“Why would you want me after all I have done?” Hyacinthe asks, anguished.

“Why does anyone want anyone else?” Tiernan answers. “We do not love because people deserve it—nor would I want to be loved because I was the most deserving of some list of candidates. I want to be loved for my worst self as well as my best. I want to be forgiven my flaws.”

“I find it harder to forgive your virtues,” Hyacinthe tells him, a smile in his voice.

And perhaps somewhere inside her, she is coming to learn that she can be all the things that once scared her.

To that, Oak has no answer. He doesn’t want to be like her. He wanted people to love him a normal amount.

But it was true that he wanted everyone to love him.

Fine, not everyone would see being thrown into a dungeon as a romantic gesture, but he’s choosing to at least consider the possibility that she put him there because she wants something more from him.

“The excess of songs hasn’t helped, nor has their longevity. It’s been what? Eight years? Nine? Truly, the celebratory air about the whole business has been excessive. You’d think I never did a more popular thing than sit in the dark on a throne and bite people who annoyed me. I could have always done that. I could do that now.”