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* * *

The thing she truly had to teach me, the only thing, was how not to feel. Or, as Rainthorn put it more precisely, how not to let my feelings get the best of me. The old woman was too old, she said, to go on hiding for hours through the forest that bordered the north side of the palace grounds, hunting rare herbs that were hard to come by at the best of times and loved to grow nestled on precarious ledges and cliffs and rock needles. The brew would not always be easy to make. So I had better learn to need it less, and to hold my shape with something other than her medicine.

“The court will try to break you,” Selene said. “Not with knives. With words, with slights, with a smile that means the opposite of itself. And you, gorgeous, of all the women in that palace, you are the one who cannot afford to flinch.” She did not have to finish it. We had both seen the dress collapse empty, more than once, when I had been overcome by the thought of not being able to reach Drystan. “So you will learn to feel everything and show none of it. Or you will burn.”

This, at last, was a thing I did not already know.

But I had a foundation for it, from the same temple world that had given me my name. I had sat in meditation since I was a child. I knew how to watch a feeling rise and not be carried off by it, at least when it did not involve Drystan, how to find the still place beneath the storm and rest there. The monks had called it prayer. It turned out it was for survival.

What I had not understood was that Selene would not use invented wounds.

The first night she trained my composure, she played a sneering duchess and said my gown was a season out of fashion, and I held a still face without effort, and she stopped and frowned and shook her head.

“No,” she said, in her own voice. “That is no use. They will not waste their time on your gown. They will find the soft place and put the knife there, the way I am about to, and I am sorry for it, because I love you, and because there is no other way to teach you this.” She thought for a moment, and when she spoke again the voice was not hers, it was a cool amused stranger’s, and the words went straight under my ribs. “They tell me you came all this way alone. No family. No husband. Were you not wanted, child, or did you simply have no one left who would keep you?”

My mother. The cottage. The empty altar. The loss came up so quickly that the feeling swept over me and frightened me, and I felt the warmth flicker at my chest, and I shut my eyes and breathed the storm down the way the monks had taught me, and held, and held, until it steadied and passed.

When I opened my eyes Selene’s own face had gone pale, but she did not stop, because stopping would have been the unkindness. She had to go on, if I wanted to stand a chance of climbing far enough through the lower ranks of the court to ever come near Drystan.

Night after night she found the soft places, one after another, and pressed the knife in. She made me a girl abandoned at a river, swept away and forgotten, and I nearly turned back into my fox form. She made me a woman who had stood at a gate begging to be let in to a man who left no word, and I felt my hands begin to go and breathed them back. And then, one night, in the cruelest voice she owned, she said the thing I had never once let myself say.

“Did it never occur to you that he never meant to marry you at all? That a man like that says the words a country girl wants to hear, and beds her, and rides away, and forgets her by the next bend in the road? That you crossed an empire for a promise he had already broken before you ever set out?”

The river broke over me all at once. The warmth at my chest guttered and I felt the change start, the room beginning to widen, and it was not the sting of an invented slight, it was the anxiety of the thing I most feared was true, the doubt I had buried at the mezzanine and buried again at the gate, dragged into the light and spoken aloud, and for one terrible moment I wanted to let it take me rather than feel it.

I breathed into it. I went down into the still place under the storm and I stayed there while the feeling raged over the top of it, and I held my shape by main force and the discipline of a thousand temple mornings, and slowly, slowly, the warmth steadied, and I did not turn.

It is not true, I told myself, down in the still place. It is only Selene in a cruel voice. It is only words. He grieves me. I saw his face. It is not true.

I do not know if I believed it. But I held the shape, and that was what the night was for.

When I came back to myself Selene was not playing a duchess anymore. She was just a woman who had spent an hour hurting someone she loved, and her eyes were wet, and she reached across and took my hands.

“That one,” she said quietly. “That was the one, wasn’t it? That’s the thing you can’t look at.”

“It isn’t true,” I said.

“No,” she said, and she said it the way she had said maybe at the fire after the gate, the bandage laid gently over a wound she feared was worse than I knew. “No, of course not. But that is the one they will reach for if they ever smell blood, gorgeous, because it is the one that nearly took you. So we will sit with it, you and I, until it cannot. Until you can hear those exact words from the cruelest mouth in that court and smile at them as if they were a remark about the weather.”

We sat with it. Many nights. It never became easy. But it became possible, and possible was the best I could hope for.

* * *

The fortnight cost a great deal.

It cost coin I watched Selene spend without telling me where it came from, for the papers that made Lady Liora of House Marenne real on parchment, for the seamstress who came twice in secret and went away sworn to silence. I swore a hundred times to pay it all back, and she laughed it off and told me not to worry. She had an old debt to settle with the universe, she said, and this was the most worthy cause she had ever come across, so I took her kindness gratefully. But it cost me in smaller ways too, ways I did not dare speak of to her yet. Each night I became a noblewoman who had never milked a goat or buried a mother or knelt at a village altar, and each dawn I became a fox, and the girl I had actually been grew fainter between the two, pressed thin, until some nights I could not have said which of the three was the truest.

It was the brew that troubled Rainthorn.

She brought it wrapped in cloth as always, and as always she watched me drink and watched me change, but her face grew grimmer each time, and one night near the end she made me drink and then sat back and counted something under her breath that I could not hear, and when the words came at last they were low, and more to herself than to me.

“It is holding you less long than it did, dear child.”

I had felt it and said nothing, the borrowed hours running shorter, the tide turning sooner each time. “I thought it was only that I was tired.”

“No.” She turned the empty flask in her old hands. “The dose is the same, and the herbs certainly are the same, gods know these old bones pay enough to be sure of it. It is the binding. It is taking a stronger hold than it had, and reaching through it is harder than it was a fortnight ago.” She looked at me, and there was no comfort in her face. “Something is feeding it. I do not yet know what. But the curse on you is growing, child, and my herbs are running to keep pace with a thing that is pulling ahead of them. I can hold you for tonight, and I can likely hold you for a good while yet. But I will not pretend the road runs flat, because it does not, and you should walk into that court knowing the ground under you is not as steady as we would like.”

She said it and looked at me with concern and let it sit, and neither of us spoke the obvious thing, that a woman whose human shape was slipping faster than before, walking into a court built to wound her, was like carrying a candle into a high wind.