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And a light began at the centre of my chest, from the place over my heart where the warmth of the pendant had always gathered, and a light answered it from him, and the two lights reached across the bright water and met and joined, and the joining grew, and grew, until it was too bright to bear, a white blinding warmth that swallowed the river and the man and the world, and through it, very far away, I heard a woman’s voice cry out.

The light was in the room.

I was in the room. I was on the floor of Selene’s kitchen and the light was pouring off me, out of my chest, filling the small space, and Selene had thrown an arm across her eyes and Rainthorn had turned her face away and Tsuki had vanished behind the kettle, and the light swelled and broke, and the world rushed in.

The scale of everything changed. The ceiling fled upward. The floor dropped away beneath me. The room that had been a cavern around a small creature shrank to its proper size, a low warm kitchen I could have crossed in four strides, and I was looking down at it from the height of a woman.

My senses turned over. The vast roaring smell-world of the fox collapsed inward and went quiet, and the bitter brew and the woodsmoke and the herbs faded to a single ordinary smell of a room at night. The firelight stopped being a hundred shifting heat-signatures and became simply firelight, gold and gentle. The world narrowed and dimmed and steadied into the small human world I had been born to, and after the howling acuity of the fox it was almost silent, almost dark, almost still.

And I had hands again.

I held them up in the firelight, my hands, my own hands, the lines of my own palms, and I turned them over and they were mine, and a sound came out of me, and the sound was not a yelp and not a whimper. It was my breath. It was a human breath catching in a human throat.

I opened my mouth.

“I—” The word cracked and broke, and I tried again, and my voice, my own voice, the voice that had said yes to a man in a clearing what felt like a lifetime ago, came out of me into the warm room. “I can speak. I can— my voice. My voice is back.”

“Easy,” Selene said, and her own voice was thick, and her eyes were wet, and she was reaching for me, a blanket in her hands, drawing it around my bare shoulders. “Easy, gorgeous. Easy. I have you.”

I was weeping. The tears the fox could never cry came all at once, days of them, a lifetime of them, pouring down a face that was mine again, and I let them come, and Selene held the blanket around me and held me through it, and Rainthorn stood back by the fire with her grave old face unreadable, watching.

“Tell me,” I said, when I could. The words came clumsy, unpracticed, my mouth relearning them. “Please. Tell me you can hear me. Tell me I’m—” I looked at my hands again. “Tell me I’m real.”

“I hear you,” Selene said. “I hear you. You’re real. You’re here.”

And so I told them. It came out of me in pieces, out of order, the words tripping and tumbling, the grove and the man I loved and the morning I woke as a fox, the river, the snare, the kind knight, the woman who came through the wall. I had carried it all alone for so long, the whole unspeakable weight of it, with no voice to set it down, and now the voice was mine again and it all came pouring out, and Selene knelt before me and held my hands in hers and did not let go. And when it was told, I was still myself, still a woman, the brew holding me, and I could have wept again from that alone.

“He’s waiting for me,” I said. “Drystan. He’s at the palace, I saw him, he doesn’t know I’m here, he doesn’t know what happened to me. I have to reach him. If he sees me, if he knows me, he’ll—” I was already moving, gathering the blanket, getting my unsteady human legs under me. “I have to go to him. Tonight. While I’m— while I’m like this.”

“Sit down,” Selene said.

It was not unkind. It was the voice of a woman who had spent her life at this court and knew exactly what it would do to a girl like me, and there was enough in it that I sat.

“You can’t walk into the palace and announce yourself to the emperor,” she said gently. “Look at you. You’ve no name anyone knows, no house, no papers, no story that a single soul in that building would believe. A woman appears from nowhere, claiming the emperor was to wed her, with no proof but a pendant and a tale about turning into a fox?” She shook her head. “They’d have you in chains before you reached the second gate, gorgeous, if they didn’t decide you were mad and toss you out the first one. And the brew holds you only till morning. You’d turn back into a fox somewhere in the middle of it, in front of the guards, and then we’d never get you out at all.”

The hope I had carried since the rice paddy did not die at that. It only changed its shape. “Then what,” I said. “Tell me what I do. I will do anything.”

Selene looked at me for a long moment, and I watched something settle in her, a decision, the same one I had seen her make about the cushion and the fire, made larger now. “You can’t reach him as no one,” she said. “So we make you someone. A name. A house far enough away that no one can check it. A reason to be at court. It will take time, and money, and care, and the brew, and you doing exactly as I say.” She glanced at Rainthorn. “Can you keep her supplied?”

“For coin,” Rainthorn said. “And not forever. The herbs are rare and getting rarer, and the binding on her is the strongest I have touched in my life. I can give her borrowed time, night by night. I cannot give her her life back. That is past me.” She looked at me, and the gravity in her face was almost gentle. “Something more than my herbs will have to lift what was laid on you, child. What that is, I do not know. But the brew will buy you the hours to go looking.”

“Then we start there,” Selene said. “Hours. We build them into a life.” She took my hands again. “We will get you to him. Not tonight, and not as a fox at his feet. But we will get you there, as a woman with a name and a place, that I promise you.”

I held her hands and I believed her, because I had to, and because after everything, someone had looked at the ruin of me and said we, and meant it.

We talked late into the borrowed night, the three of us and the squirrel, the fire burning low, a plan taking shape in pieces the way my story had come out in pieces. And somewhere in the small hours, with the plan half-made and my eyes growing heavy, I felt the warmth at my chest begin to fade.

It was not the river this time. It was gentler than that, a tide going out, the brew spending the last of itself, the human world beginning to loosen its hold on me. I felt the height go out of me first, the room growing as I shrank back toward the floor. I felt the silence of the human world give way again to the rising flood of scent and sound. I had time, this time, to be afraid of it, and then to stop being afraid, because Selene’s hand was already on my back as it happened, resting, not holding, the way it had been at the start.

“It’s all right,” she murmured, watching me go. “It’s all right, gorgeous. You’ll come back. We’ll bring you back tomorrow, and the night after, and every night until it holds for good.”

The fox closed over me like a tide coming in, and the woman went under, gently this time, lowered rather than torn, and the last of the light at my chest guttered out.

I lay on the cushion by the fire, a fox again, the borrowed time spent. But the cold thing I had carried since the morning I woke in the cottage, the being alone, the being no one’s, the being a creature no living soul knew was a woman, that thing was gone. Selene knew. Rainthorn knew. The bright-eyed creature on the mantel knew. I had been found, and I was not alone, and a woman who owed me nothing had said we as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

Selene drew the blanket over me where I lay, fox-small now, and banked the fire.

“Sleep, gorgeous,” she said. “We start tomorrow.”