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No. Not here. Not now. I could not turn back into a fox because I could not master what I felt. But the river did not care. The river came back, the calm breaking into the torrent, the man not there to still it, and the human world fled upward and away from me. My hands turned to paws and the borrowed dress collapsed around a body gone small. I scrambled out of the cloth of it, a silver fox in the heart of the palace that hunted her, alone.

I went the way I had learned to go, low and hidden, through the margins, but I was slower now, clumsy with the feeling still tearing through me. Twice I nearly did not get clear in time: once from a pair of guardsmen who turned at a flash of silver, and once from a kitchen dog that caught my scent and dragged its handler half across a yard before I slipped through a drain and lost them. The dress I had left behind would be found. Let them make of it what they would. I had no room left to care.

I do not know how long it took me to find my way back toward the quiet wing. The palace was a maze, and I had walked it only once from the high vantage of a human girl, not from the low stance of a fox in flight. I was lost more than I was not. The sun rose full and the palace woke around me, every waking corner presenting another danger. Somewhere in the middle of it, spent, hunted, and alone, I understood with my whole body the thing Selene had tried to tell me with words: the careful road was the only road. I had spent everything to prove to myself what the kind woman had already known.

I had crawled into the gap beneath a storehouse to rest, or to hide, or simply because I could go no further, when I heard the wings.

A small sound, a stretched-skin glide, and then Tsuki dropped out of the brightening sky onto the stone before the gap, putting his bright eyes to the dark of it until he found me.

“There you are,” he said. “I was beginning to suspect you wanted me to make a profession of rescuing you.” Then, as he took in the state of me, some of the banter left his voice. “We have been all over this palace looking for you.”

He turned his head and gave a sharp, high whistle, the same three notes he had used to stop me in the garden, and somewhere not far off I heard footsteps break into a run.

And then Selene was there, dropping to her knees at the mouth of the gap, her usually sharp face open, frightened, and wet. She reached into the dark, gathering me out of it and into her arms, against her chest, the way Taren had gathered me in the field. She held me there, and I felt her shaking.

“You stupid girl,” she said into my fur, with no anger in it at all, only a voice cracking around the words. “You stupid, stupid girl. You went to him. Of course you went to him. I knew the moment I saw the flask broken. I knew exactly where you’d gone.” She held me tighter. “I am not angry. Do you hear me? I am not angry. I know why you went. Gods help me, I of all people know why you went.”

And she did. I understood it then, held against her, the thing the story of her own life had written in her long before I ever met her. She had loved powerful men. She had been certain, once, that she mattered to one of them the way I was certain I mattered to Drystan. She had stood, in her own way, at her own gate, and been turned away. There was no judgment in her because there could be none. She had only ever been one bad night away from being me.

“He left no word,” I tried to say, though of course it came out only as the thin, high cry of the fox, but she seemed to understand the grief in it if not the words.

“I know,” she murmured, rising now with me held against her, Tsuki gliding ahead to scout the way. “I know, gorgeous. Whatever you found at that gate, I know. You’ll tell me when you can. For now, you are coming home, and you are going to rest, and you are not going to do anything that foolish again without me beside you. We do this together from now on. You hear me? Together, or not at all.”

She carried me back through the waking palace, with Tsuki going before us. No one stopped a court lady carrying a creature wrapped in her shawl, because Selene walked as though she had every right to, and that, I was learning, was its own kind of magic.

* * *

I came back to myself by the fire that night, a woman again on the last of the dose Rainthorn had not wanted to spend so soon, because Selene had insisted that I needed to be able to talk, and Rainthorn had looked at the two of us and brewed it without another word.

I told them about the gate, the bored guard, the pity in his face, the missing word, the lack of orders or provisions, the nothingness where I had been so certain there would be an open gate waiting for me. Selene and Rainthorn listened, and neither of them said the thing I could see them both thinking, the thing I was not yet able to admit to myself.

“Maybe it was kept secret,” I said. “The bonding. Maybe he could not leave word at a common gate. Maybe—”

“Maybe,” Selene said. She did not say it unkindly, but she did not say it as though she believed it either. She said it the way you grant a wounded person the bandage they ask for, even when the wound beneath it is worse than they know. “Maybe so.”

Rainthorn was watching me from the bench with her pale eyes. “What did you feel,” she asked, “when you turned back into a fox?”

I was lost for words. It had been so overwhelming that I could not name with any clearness the thing that had happened in me. “I— I can’t say. It felt like I was swept away by my own feelings.”

The old woman nodded slowly. “It is most peculiar that the brew could be broken so easily,” she said. “Whatever it is that pulls you back into the fox, it seems to have something to do with how you feel. You will have to be careful, child. If you are ever in company, in public, you must guard against strong feeling, or it will turn you when you least can afford it.” She was quiet a moment, fitting something together behind her walnut face, the way she had fitted the pendant and the curse together the first night. “I will want to think on that,” was all she said. “There may be more to this curse than I have yet seen.”

But she did not push it, and I was too spent to wonder at it, so the matter was set aside for the night.

What was not set aside was the rest of it. When the talk came back around at last to what we would do, I did not argue. The longing was still wide awake in me, and I knew it would always be there, but the gate had burned something out of me too, the belief that I could reach him by wanting alone, and what was left in its place was the hard, cold knowledge that Selene had been right.

“We do it the slow way,” I said. “Like you proposed. The careful way. The name, the house, and the papers. All of it, however long it takes.” I looked at her. “I’m sorry. You told me, and I went anyway, and I nearly—” I could not finish it. “I won’t go alone again. We do it together. Your way.”

Selene reached across and took my hand, her sharp face soft in the firelight. “Together,” she said. “I’ll build you a self that palace cannot turn away from, gorgeous. A lady they’ll bow to. And then we’ll walk you in through the front, in daylight, with your head up, and there won’t be a guard in that empire who dares send you home.” A flicker of her old wryness returned to her mouth. “It will take a while. Try, for once in your life, to be patient.”

“I’ll try, I promise,” I said.

“You won’t,” she said. “But I’ll be here to chase you down when you don’t.”

And Tsuki, from the mantel, said, “I found her once. I can find her again. It is becoming something of a specialty,” and despite everything, I laughed, a small, cracked human laugh, the first since the grove, and it felt like the first true thing my own voice had done since it came back to me.

The brew faded near midnight, gentle this time, the tide going out, and I let it take me without fear, because Selene’s hand was on my back, the fire was warm, and I was not alone. Tomorrow we would begin the work of building the woman who would walk in through the front of that palace to reach the man who had promised himself to her.

Chapter 13