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She was as silver as the ore broken straight from the mountains in the southern reaches. Her fur caught the dawn light in a way that softened her edges and made her glow against the dark water. Her face was sharp and elegant, and her ears stood high and alert at the top of her head, with sparkling dark eyes, larger, mysterious, and full of sadness, pain, and distress, looking back at me with an intelligence that did not belong to any wild animal I had ever seen. And my pendant hung from her mouth.
The disc swayed below the small pointed chin, and the chain trailed on either side like a long necklace that had come loose. The disc picked up the light the water was reflecting back to it, and that light put marvellous highlights in the fur around the creature’s face. She was beautiful. I knew the face from the old fables in the temple scrolls. Stories of an animal sent by the gods to do their bidding, equipped with ancient magic, admired by those who lived a just life and feared by unchecked power, and hence hunted to near extinction. The creature in the water was a silver fox. I was that creature. I had turned into a fox.
The grief that had been building since I woke broke open at the water’s edge. My fox body could not produce tears, but it could tremble, and I trembled as I lowered my head until the pendant brushed the surface and small ripples broke apart the silver creature looking back at me.
How? How had this happened to me? I had gone to sleep a woman in love and woken as this. People did not turn into animals in the night. Someone had done this to me. An enemy of Drystan’s, a witch, some old forbidden thing I had wandered into without knowing. I could feel the pendant warm against my tongue, and a darker question cut through the rest. Was it the pendant? Had our love unlocked something sleeping inside it? I had no answers, and no voice to ask anyone who might. There was no one to hear me. There was no one to tell.
I had to get to Drystan. He was my only hope, but I had to be careful. The trip to the capital was not long, but the paths were well trodden, and the sight of a nearly extinct, magical fox would draw the eyes of anyone who might profit from catching it. I would keep to the shadows of the trees and the hedgerows, and hide whenever I saw people. Anything else would be too dangerous. I looked around and a fresh wave of terror went through me. I was exposed here, out in the open, easy to spot from any direction. I needed somewhere safe to hide and gather myself and plan, but where? A single cherry petal drifted down and settled on my nose, and I knew. The grove. I would go back to the grove, where I would let the body teach me what it could do before I asked it to carry me west. The grove was the place that had held me as a girl, and it would hold me as a fox.
I turned from the water and walked toward the cherry blossoms.
* * *
The grove rose from the horizon as I moved across the last fields. The pink of the blossoms was the same pink as the morning sky above me, and when the trees opened, the path I had taken yesterday afternoon on the back of my mare lay before me. It felt unrecognizable from this height, but the entrance to the grove was the same entrance I had walked through a hundred times since I was thirteen, and my body knew the way even though it had never walked it before.
The light moved through the trees in pink shafts. The path softened underfoot, and the sound of the waterfall came from somewhere ahead, faint, but calling. I could feel my raging thoughts fall silent. I had a long way to go, but I would rest here first, and think, and plan the road west. The grove closed around me.
Chapter 8
I wasted too much time searching the grove the way I had once searched the temple scrolls for the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Moving through the cherry trees with my nose to the ground and my new senses wide open, I believed the place where Drystan and I had shared our afternoon would hold some trace of what had been done to me. It was naive to think the grove would provide an answer or a hint to trigger my recovery, but it offered nothing. If truth lived anywhere, it should have been here.
There were no signs, only the familiar rhythm of the grove. The pink shafts of light through the blossoms, the drift of petals across the water where I had stood with him, and the hush of the cathedral that had been mine since I was thirteen remained unchanged. The grove did not know what I had become any more than I did, receiving me as it received the wind, with indifference and beauty, offering no comment or aid.
I tested my new body while searching, discovering I could move through the undergrowth in complete silence. The smallest shift of a bird overhead pulled my eyes upward before I consciously decided to look. The world spoke to me in scent as much as sight, layered and full of immediate information I was only beginning to interpret. When a field mouse broke from the brush, my body gathered itself and gave chase before the thought fully formed. I ran it down across half a clearing in a burst of speed, pinning the trembling creature beneath my paws. The kill was a single motion away, yet the woman inside turned from it. The mouse escaped into the brush while I stood hungry, ashamed of an instinct I did not know how to satisfy.
I could not linger. The grove would not sustain me because I refused to let it, and every moment I delayed meant Drystan waited alone at the gates of the capital. He would believe I had changed my mind, abandoned him, or chosen to stay behind, entirely unaware that the woman he loved had woken in a form that could not speak her own name.
Clamping the pendant tightly between my teeth, I left the grove and turned west, frustrated at the time I had lost trying to solve the tragedy alone.
* * *
The land between the grove and the capital was country I had crossed only once, on the back of my mare in full daylight, when the world seemed arranged to keep a village girl safe. Now, I had to move low to the ground in the margins, using the shadows of hedgerows and stone walls. I moved cautiously to avoid detection, keeping the sun on my left as it began its slow descent toward the horizon.
The afternoon stretched long, and progress was slow. I ducked into cover whenever heavy carts rumbled past or farmers returned from their fields. As the light began to thin into amber, a low roar echoed through the landscape.
I smelled the water before I saw it, drawn forward by the deep voice of the river. Emerging from the tree line, the ground ended abruptly at the edge of a deep gorge cut directly into the earth. Far below, narrowed by sheer walls of stone, the river ran fast, dark, and cold.
Downstream stood a bridge, a span of timber and rope thrown across the narrowest gap. At its near end, a small structure marked the toll gate where two guards stood in the fading light, watching a slow trickle of foot traffic. Farmers hauling carts and men leading mules paused to pay before crossing.
Crouching in the brush at the forest edge, I understood the bridge was closed to me.
A silver fox could not walk across a guarded crossing. The rare pelt of a creature out of old fables, hunted nearly to extinction, was worth more than a toll gate earned in a decade. Stepping onto that timber bridge meant I would never reach the other side. Yet the river blocked my path for a long way, and attempting to go around it would cost weeks I did not have.
I followed the ravine upstream, away from the guards and the road, where the trees grew thick along the edge and the light was fading rapidly. I travelled until the bridge vanished behind me and the roar of rushing water became the only sound. I searched for a narrowing where I might climb down one wall and scale the other, but found instead an ancient tree fallen across the chasm. Its roots had been undercut by the river long ago, bringing the massive trunk down to bridge the gap, its far end wedged firmly into the opposite rock face. It was a natural crossing, the only one left that lacked men standing guard.
I stepped onto the log to test its strength, and the feeling beneath my paws made me freeze.
The wood was dead, soft with long rot. The bark sloughed away, and the core had gone spongy beneath years of rain. When I set my weight down, a faint flex travelled through the trunk. Through gaps where the bark had fallen, the ravine dropped steeply into the dark water below.
Instinct warned me that the tree was unsafe, that a fall into the torrent would be fatal. Every part of me urged a retreat to find another way. Yet as the day closed, I knew time was against me. I did not know how long I had before the magic settled permanently into reality, locking me in this form forever. The bridge was guarded, the cliffs were too steep to climb, and behind me lay only the village that would reject me and a grove that could not sustain me. On the far bank lay the road to the capital, the sorceresses, and the man who waited to hold my hands again.
Weighing the rotted trunk against the future on the other side, I breathed in the cold mist of the river and stepped forward.
* * *
I moved out onto the span in the failing dusk, spreading my weight evenly with the pendant clamped tight in my jaws. The wood flexed under every step, giving slightly as small, dry cracks echoed from within the trunk. I refused to look down at the drop below, keeping my eyes fixed entirely on the dark tree line of the far bank.
The centre of the span was the worst. The trunk had hollowed over time, sagging under my weight. My heart hammered against my ribs while I moved with my belly low and my breath shallow, listening to the wood creak beneath me.
