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Chapter 12

I slept uneasily that night, dreaming vivid dreams of the raging river tamed by the strange man who felt so familiar, who almost felt like home. I could not fathom why my mind would show me such a vision when every fibre of my body ached to be reunited with my dear Drystan. There was no question of my love for him. There was no doubt in me about that, and yet that strange brew had bent my mind into this peculiar showing, this picture of myself embracing another man and feeling at peace. By morning I was a woman again and my mind was sensible again, and the planning began.

Rainthorn had come back at first light with a fresh measure of the brew in a stoppered clay flask, setting it on Selene’s table the way a physician sets down medicine, with instructions for its use and a warning against wasting it. One dose, she said. One night, near enough, if I did not tax it. The herbs that made it were dear and slow to gather, and some of them she could get only from a man across the river who asked too many questions. Each flask was a small fortune in trouble, and I was not to spend a drop of it on anything that did not matter.

I sat at the table wrapped in one of Selene’s robes, my own hands around a cup of tea, and listened to the two of them lay out the shape of my new life as though it were a campaign.

“Getting her into the palace is going to be a major feat, let alone before the emperor, as a country girl with no name and no house,” Selene said. She had a sheet of paper in front of her and a stick of charcoal, making the kind of list I imagined she made for everything, sharp and ordered. “So we give her a name. It can’t be her own. Something with a house behind it, or she’ll never get near the inner palace. A house far enough from the capital that no one here has met its daughters. The eastern provinces, maybe, or the river country. Somewhere a girl could be born and raised and never seen at court until now.” She glanced at me. “A young widow, I think. A widow can arrive alone without a family escort and no one blinks. A maiden cannot.”

“And the curse,” Rainthorn said. “You do not speak of the curse. Not to anyone. Not ever. A woman who turns into a fox is a woman who burns, in this empire or any other. As far as the court is to know, you are flesh and blood and nothing stranger, a lady of a minor house come to make her way.”

“It will take some time. We have to obtain the insignia of a house,” Selene said. “There are people I will need to talk to, papers I will need made, and that costs coin and care.” She must have seen the look on my face, because she smiled at me encouragingly, her voice gentling. “I know it is not what you want to hear. I know you want to go to him now. But the only way you reach him and live is slowly, with a good plan. Give us a few days, no more than a fortnight, I promise, so we can find out first what you are caught in. We learn the ground before we walk it. And then we walk it together.”

I said yes. I meant it when I said it. I sat in that warm room with the two of them and Tsuki, and the rational part of me understood that they were right, that the careful road was the only road, and that haste was the thing that killed people like us. But after they had both left to attend to their responsibilities, a restlessness began to creep up on me. I tried to distract myself by cleaning the stove and all the pots and pans, then half-heartedly picking up some of Selene’s books, which under other circumstances would have kept me happily lost for days. Nothing could soothe the feeling that I was wasting time, or that every minute spent waiting was a minute that made it harder to reach him.

* * *

And then the evening came and I could not wait anymore.

I do not know how to explain it except that my longing was bigger than my believing.

I lay by the fire that night, a fox again, the day’s brew long faded, and Drystan was just a few walls away from me with nothing I could do to reach him. He was there, in the same vast stone body of the palace where I lay curled on a cushion, grieving me. I had seen his face. He had not forgotten me. Every reasonable thing Selene had said about plans, papers, and patience could not hold for one moment against the simple, unbearable fact that he was close enough to reach and did not know I had come.

I thought, if he only knew. If someone only told him. He would never make me wait for papers and a false name. He would rush to me in an instant. He would scold anyone who had doubted my story and delayed me, and then he would have me restored. We would hold hands again at last, all of it put right in a single night, if he only knew I was here.

The flask of brew sat on the high shelf where Rainthorn had left it. It was not so hard to reach. Two jumps with my agile body and a sweep of my paw sent the flask to the floor, where it shattered. I felt wretched for breaking something of Rainthorn’s, but I would repay her a thousand times over once I was reunited with Drystan. I lapped the bitter brew from the floor, careful of the shards. The change came easier this time, or perhaps I only knew now what to expect, the river, the pillar, the man whose face I could not see, the brief, unbearable warmth of being held in the bright water, and then the light, the kitchen, and my own hands.

I dressed in the dark in the plainest of Selene’s clothes. I left her a note I could barely write, my hand clumsy on the charcoal, only a few words: gone to him, forgive me, and slipped out of the quiet rooms into the palace I had crossed an empire to reach. It felt like a betrayal of the kind woman who had taken in a strange country girl plagued by a curse and asked nothing in return. Yet here I was, abandoning all the caution she had begged of me, doing the thing a part of my mind knew was unreasonable, because my heart could not bear the separation a moment longer.

But I went as a woman this time, upright, on my own two feet, in a borrowed dress, anxious and hopeful. No one paid me any attention as I passed servants and court officials in the corridors. I walked through the waking palace as the dawn greyed the high windows, following the flow of it outward and down toward the great gates. No one stopped me, because a plain woman walking with purpose is among the most invisible things in the world in a palace full of important people.

The outer gate was a thing of iron and stone, manned by guards in imperial silver, with a slow line already forming before it in the dawn, petitioners, tradesmen, and supplicants waiting for the business of the palace to open. I did not wait in the line. I went straight to the guard at the head of it, a broad, bored man with the face of someone who had stood at this gate all his life, and told him I had come to see the emperor.

He did not even look at me properly. “Petitions are heard in the lower court on the third day of the moon. You just missed it. Come back in a month,” he said, in the voice of a man who had said it ten thousand times. “Give your name to the clerk. Move along.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not a petitioner. I’m—” And here I faltered, because the truth was a wild thing to say to a bored man at a gate, and I had no other truth to offer. “The emperor knows me. He was expecting me. I was to come to him. I was meant to be here three nights ago. My name is Liora. If you send word to him, if you only tell him I’ve come, he’ll—”

Now he looked at me, and that look was the thing that broke me and made me understand, at last, why Selene and Rainthorn had begged me to wait and make a plan. The look on the guard’s face was not anger, nor was it suspicion. It was pity, the weary, practiced pity of a man who had heard what must have felt to him like the same madness a hundred times, from a hundred women, each one certain she alone was the emperor’s secret love, his lost bride, his promised one, each one to be turned away gently before she made a scene.

“Of course he’s expecting you, love,” he said, not unkindly. “He’ll be more than pleased to see you on the third day of the moon. So off you go now. The emperor’s not expecting anyone at his gate at dawn, least of all—” he took in the plain dress, the tired eyes wild with determination, the woman with no escort, no papers, and no house “—least of all the like of you. Go home, and come back with the others in a month.”

“No. No, he is waiting for me. Send him word,” I said, hearing my voice rise, unable to stop it and hating myself for it. “Please. Good sir, I beg you. Tell him Liora has come. He left word. He must have left word. He was waiting for me. Ask, ask anyone, there must be an order, a standing order, to admit me when I came—”

“There’s no order,” the guard said, his patience thinning, as another guard began to drift over. “There’s nothing, because there’s never anything, with women like you. Now I’ve been kind, and I’ll not be kind twice. Move along before I have you moved.”

That could not be right. Something had gone wrong. It simply could not be that there was no word, no order, no standing instruction to admit the bride who was to come. No provision made, anywhere, for my arrival? How was that possible after what he had promised me at the grove? The man who was waiting for me had left nothing, had told no one, and had made no space in all the vast machinery of his power for the woman he was grieving.

I told myself, even then, standing right there, the explanation that would let me keep him. An emperor does not leave such things with gatemen. The arrangement had to be secret, the bonding held close, so of course there would be no order at a public gate. Of course no common guard would be told. I had to wait for the master guardsman, the one I had seen the night Taren smuggled me into the palace in my fox form. He would know. It made sense. It made perfect sense. I only had to wait a little while for the master guardsman to arrive.

The sun climbed higher. I hid behind a small stall at the corner of an outer wall and waited, and as I waited, I saw Selene.

She came hurrying toward the gate with a worried look upon her face, stopping the vendors and the proprietors to ask each of them if they had seen me. I could hear pieces of it drift over to my hiding place, all of them saying no, because I had come earlier than the people who now queued at the gate. Then she went away, and a little later she came back, working the same stalls again, asking again, the way you search for someone you have lost, returning repeatedly to the place they are most likely to be, refusing to believe a single pass had settled it. I watched her circle back to that gate three times. It felt like the cruelest betrayal to crouch in the shadow and let her search, but I could not reveal myself, not when I was so close to being reunited with Drystan.

And then the master guardsman arrived, and I broke from my hiding place, rushing toward him. The first guard saw me coming and said something low to the master guardsman. In that moment, I saw it plainly in the old man’s face, this attempt, too, was in vain. Worse, the old guard signaled two other men to join them, ready to apprehend the frantic girl trying to force her way into the palace. I turned away from the gate before they reached me, walking back into the palace with my face down and my eyes burning, around a corner and into the shadow of a colonnade, out of sight of prying eyes.

And the grief at the injustice of it took me, all at once, in violent surprise.

It came up the way the river had come up in Rainthorn’s brewing, all at once, from the bottom, carrying the whole crushing weight of it. He left no word. I had crossed an empire on the strength of a love I now stood inside his own gates unable to prove, turned away as a madwoman, one more deluded girl to be sent home. The anger and the hurt rose and crested, and I felt the warmth at my chest gutter and fail.