“It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?” Emma said.
The creature let out a great breath, and its nails stilled. It nodded.
“What’s within a mortal, then? Ah.” And she saw it. It was so simple, it was tragic. “Mortality. You give what you contain. Everything that you are. And you’re gone. A far higher price than a hundred years of service. A trick.”
The creature nodded. She paced before the pedestals. “So my choices are here.”
She’d never had a wish to be a rat; still less, to serve withsteady grinding.But Ravensunveiled secretswitheyes on shadows.Sentries, perhaps. Was she not cunning and quiet? She had lain in wait watching animals often enough in her mortal life. She might make a good sentry.
And Eelsminded magic’s pathways.She liked thinking of herself as a guardian. Swirling around the same bends in the river as the otters she had loved. She might see the walls of Gabriel College there. Or watch her friend sitting on the bank, refracted through the water’s surface. Julia. Emma stretched her hand for the droplet.
She could not take it. A call in her mind stilled her fingers. Emma turned to the amber claw. It glowed with the warmth of asecret spilled, with the light of a winter’s fire. She pictured jaws strong with teeth. A pelt, rough and cozy. A song from her throat, piercing the sky. And it felt like something known. A part of her that had always been there, waiting for the fire spark of fox fur to unfurl.
And a phrase from the riddle came back:skimming mortal fires.Whatever service the foxes performed, they were close to mortals. If she did not escape, if she had to serve a hundred years—Emma pushed down the screaming in her mind at the thought of it—she could not bear it without sight of her friends. Nat, a strong memory: bright with music and laughter and the sting of chili on her tongue. Julia, a quieter note, winding through her clouded memories like a ribbon of pale silk. If she could only be near them, she would survive.
“I’ve chosen,” she said. “The House of Foxes.”
She reached for the claw. Once more a fox. But this would not be like her cold, panicked run through the streets, fear sweat clouding her eyes. This time, it was a choice. She knew what would come.
How her smooth skin, plucked and shaved to the hairlessness so pleasing to humans, would change. Coarse hairs would sprout through her pores, a thicket against invaders. No hint of camouflage. She would be red, only red. A blazing warning to predators:Touch me, and you will burn.
Her softness would go. The curves of her breasts, the small belly like a cushioned pear, the spread of her thighs. Lost. Winnowed into the lean tension of a fox frame, a coiled spring made flesh. Her long, sturdy legs would shrink, shedding the strength she had built from years of hiking with her mother or climbing the steps of Gabriel Tower. So much of herself lost with that woman’s shape.
But she would be fierce. Her jaws would rend; her claws would tear. She would dance, copper armored under the moon, a huntress in the night. Was that not something she had always longed for, deep down? The Emma that would be, if only she could shed her skin of fear and niceness. Running free through the streets. Elemental. Beastly. Alive.
Emma’s hand closed around the claw. Heat streaked up her arm and settled like a heavy cloak, falling over shoulders, waist, head. Her ears were full of noise. Joyful barks bounced around her skull until Emma could not think, until she felt her lips pull back and her throat echo the cry. She fell, and the stone chamber became vast around her. Her nose twitched, now a bright, damp blackberry at the end of a long snout. Every particle of scent sang to her of its source. And through it all, a russet voice frisked through her mind.
we are fox
so quick so clever
blood on claw and jaw
Emma balked. She had been trapped with just such a voice, in a fox form that had been a prison. It had eaten her whole. She could not lose herself again. Emma gasped in a breath, and her senses flooded back. She was bent over, girl hands braced on girl thighs. No longer fox-shaped.
She had not been trapped. This fox form was a choice, not a prison. Emma forced her breathing to slow. The amber claw pulsed firefly bright in her palm, then crumbled into glowing particles that sank beneath her skin. She felt the change, beneath the workings ofher mind. The barest whisper of the fox voice. A brush of autumn leaves, skittering in the wind of her thoughts.
“Fox maiden.” The creature looked her up and down with approval. “The test has spoken true.”
It waved. The stone wall fizzed, and a door pushed its way through.
“The Night’s luck go with you, little once-a-mortal.” There was warmth in the rasping voice. It had been kind to her, she thought.
Emma turned with thanks on her lips, and stumbled back in horror. Reality was stretching, creature and pedestals and walls sliding together like strands of dough. The room was collapsing on itself. In another moment, the walls would fold entirely and take her with them. Already, the force of it was pulling her inward. Emma clawed through the rippling world for the door. She pulled it open and threw herself through.
CHAPTER 20
Emma stumbled forward, dizzy and sick. Fox song coursed through her blood, chiming against her bones like a knife drawn across marble. Emma reached her hands behind, thinking to steady herself against the door. There was nothing at her back but a wall of earth. She wiped her fingers on her borrowed cloak, and her vision at last steadied itself.
She was in a sparse room. A jug and basin stood next to a dressing screen. Cracks spiderwebbed the mirror, and the rows of cloaks and boots along the wall were old and worn. There were two chipped chairs before a fire. And there, on one of them, sat a figure with wild gray hair and a tapping foot.
“So there you are.” The Librarian’s sister hauled herself up. She clasped Emma’s shoulder with a warm, calloused hand. “You’ve scuffed up my boots, girl.”
For a moment, Emma wondered if her tumble through the door had scrambled her mind. She could not imagine how the Sister had come to be in front of her. Or why the old woman looked entirelyunsurprised, when the shock was coursing through Emma’s body like an ice-cold shower. “How are you here? What is this?”
“It’s where I was told to wait for you. You’ve an ordeal in front of you, girl, I won’t lie.”
“An ordeal? What’s—”
