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I began to nibble at the meat, and the taste of the fresh tender chicken revived my spirit, so I barely noticed how he saw to my leg, cleaning the wound with water and a cloth, his hands as careful as they had been with the wire, and wrapping it in a strip of clean linen, all the while keeping up the low even murmur that had calmed me in the field.

Then he sat at his desk, and the dawn came up grey in the window, and I lay by the fire and watched him until I slept again.

* * *

I woke to an empty room.

The fire had burned low. The light in the window was full morning now, and the man was gone, the chair at his desk empty, the chamber quiet. He had left me water and another strip of meat and the warmth of the banked fire, and he had gone wherever the morning took a man like him, and I was alone in the chambers of a stranger in the heart of the palace I had crossed the empire to reach.

I should have felt safe. I was warm and fed and my leg was bound and the man had been kind. But the safety did not come. Something in the room had changed with him gone, some quality of the air, and the fox in me was uneasy in a way the woman could not account for, my ears turning, my nose working, a low warning moving through the body before the mind could find its source. The strong smell of incense had unsettled me, and with that realization, the wall opened.

I did not understand it at first. An invisible seam in the stone simply parted, a section of the wall swinging inward without a sound, a darkness behind it that the morning light did not reach. And out of the darkness, into the chamber, stepped a woman. The hair on my back rose.

She was not young and not old. Her hair was the colour of slate. She moved into the room the way water moves into a low place, without hurry, without sound, and a cold panic froze my heart and held my body in place. She moved as though the chamber were hers and always had been, and she looked at me where I lay by the hearth.

“So it is true,” she said. It sounded like something between recognition and regret. “The universe is a curious place. It seems to either withhold or deliver what is needed to restore the equilibrium of the magical energy, in ways we mortal beings will never truly understand.” She raised her hand, and a purple glow formed around it, as though it were its own source of light.

Her voice was quiet and it was meant for me, and the fox in me came up off the cloth with every hair standing, because my fox body knew, before the woman knew, that the thing that had come through the wall meant to end me.

“This must all be so very confusing for you. I am sorry that you have to endure it, but I promise to make it fast and gentle.” She came toward me slowly, and there was no cruelty in her face, which was worse than the threat of open violence. I could understand the desire of a trapper to skin a valuable pelt. I could not understand a woman appearing through a secret door to take me away. What was in her face was the calm of someone doing a thing she had done many times, a thing she did not enjoy and did not regret, a necessary thing. “Of all the places he could have brought you. Straight to me.”

I backed away from her. The bound leg slowed me. The desk was at my back and the wall beyond it and the woman between me and the door, and she came on, slow, her hand beginning to rise. The pendant began to feel hot against my breast, and it seemed to gather a faint warmth around me, knowing I was going to die here, in this room, having been saved only to be taken, and the unfairness of it lit something in me that was neither the fox nor the woman but both. The purple glow from her hand coalesced into a ray of energy that washed around me and made me queasy for a fraction of a second. Then she knelt in front of me and reached for me, so calm, so unconcerned with the danger of the wild animal before her, that her calm was the last thing in my mind before the fox struck.

I bit her.

The fox struck before the woman in me could decide to, my teeth closing on the reaching hand, on the meat of it below the thumb, and the skin broke and the blood came hot and bright into my mouth, mixed with the taste of the pendant’s silver still on my tongue. She made a sound, sharp, surprised, the first crack I had seen in her calm, and she pulled the hand back, and in the half second her body recoiled I was past her.

I do not remember deciding to run. I was simply running, past her legs and across the chamber and through the hidden door into the dark corridor beyond, the blood of the witch in my mouth. Behind me she screamed in anger, thrusting her bleeding hand toward me, but the purple energy did not come. She cursed and clutched the wound with her other hand.

A tunnel opened ahead, just tall enough for my body, its walls greasy and reeking of smoke and burned fat, a vent shaft dropping toward the kitchens in the bowels of the palace below. I forced myself into it. The dark closed around me, slick and narrow, and then the floor of it simply ended and I was falling, tumbling through hot greasy air toward a sudden blaze of light and noise.

I hit the world all at once. A vast kitchen, fires roaring under iron pots, steam and smoke and the clatter of a hundred tasks, and into the middle of it dropped a silver fox out of a hole in the ceiling. I came down through a rack of hanging copper and into a stack of pots that went over with a crash like a temple gong. For a heartbeat the whole kitchen froze, cooks and scullions staring at the impossible thing that had fallen among them, a wild silver creature sprawled in the wreckage of their pots. Then the screaming started. A cleaver came down where I had been. A boy swung a broom. Hands grabbed for the rare pelt that had dropped into their midst like a gift from the gods. I scrambled up, my bound leg buckling under me, and broke for the one door standing ajar across the room, through a forest of legs and knives and shouting, and out.

The palace was a maze and I did not know it.

I ran through corridors I had never seen, past doors and arches and stairs, my bound leg screaming, my breath tearing, the fox instinct choosing turns the woman could not have chosen, away, only away, away from the witch. Servants flattened against the walls as I passed, a flash of silver low to the ground, and someone shouted, and somewhere a dog began to bark, and I ran. I came out into a long railed gallery above a great hall, breathing hard.

The gallery ran the length of the hall below, and I checked my flight at the rail, because the space opened so suddenly beneath me, vast and bright, a hall of white stone and gold inlay with the morning sun coming through high windows, and people below, many people, the life of the court moving through the hall in the colours of their station.

And there, below me, across the hall, was Drystan.

It was as though I had been struck by lightning. Every part of me that had been moving toward him since the morning I woke in the cottage strained at once. There he stood among his advisors near the great doors at the far end, robed, attended, a knot of officials around him with papers and low voices, the emperor at the work of the empire on an ordinary morning. He had come to me at last. No. I had come to him. I had reached him. He was there.

Everything in me strained toward him. I nearly went over the rail. The need to reach him was the strongest thing I had felt, stronger than the river current that had swept me away, a pull that did not care that I was a fox, or that the hall was full of people, or that I had no voice to call his name. He was twenty paces away and a floor below me and he was Drystan and I had found him.

Even at the distance I could see that he was grieving. It was in the set of his shoulders and the heaviness of his head and the slow, tired way he received the papers his officials handed him. The composure was there, the emperor’s mask, but underneath it, plain to me who had learned his face across the weeks of our love, was a man carrying something that had broken him. He suffered, and I saw it, and I knew I was right to have come. He had not forgotten me. He had not moved on. He was suffering as I was suffering. The sight of his grief flooded me with a relief so total it nearly loosened my grip on the rail, and I felt guilty for feeling relief in the face of his suffering.

But why was the hall so calm? Why did he move through an ordinary morning of his court? The officials murmured. The sun came through the high windows onto the white stone. And nowhere in it, nowhere in the whole bright ordinary hall, was there any sign of a search. No sorcerers bent over maps. No knights being sent to the provinces. No riders, no muster, no disruption, no sign anywhere that the woman who was to have come to the gates had been missed, looked for, mourned by anyone but the one still man at the far end with the grief in his shoulders. The most powerful man in the empire stood in the heart of his power, grieving, and his power sat idle around him, and no one was looking for me, and the world was going on.

The thought did not finish forming. My situation was too precarious to dwell on the strangeness of the scene below, with the need to reach him and the impossibility of reaching him and the shout that went up behind me as someone in the corridor saw the fox at the rail.

I would not be able to reach him. Even now. Even here. He was across the hall and a floor below and surrounded by his court, and I was a hunted animal with a witch behind me and the palace waking to the alarm of a silver fox loose in its halls. If I went down into that hall I would be caught before I crossed half of it. He would never know it was me. He would see a fox run mad through his court, and he would watch the guards take it, and he would go back to his papers.

The shout came again, closer, and I tore myself from the rail.

I left him there, below me, grieving and still, the man I had crossed the empire to reach, and I ran, because reaching him was impossible and staying was death, and I carried away from that gallery the comfort of having seen his grief. And beneath it, buried and unnamed, the first small splinter of a question I was not ready to ask.

I ran along the endless corridor and found the outside by accident.