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“They told me I would find you brooding by the water.” The Envoy Vasstent crossed the gravel without waiting to be received, her northern grey near to silver in the moonlight, her voice carrying flat and clear across the still garden. “You hide well, Majesty, for a man with a court full of people looking for him. One begins to think you do not wish to be found.”

“One begins to think the envoy forgets whose garden she is standing in.” Drystan did not turn. His voice was tired, with an edge under the tiredness. “I came here to be alone.”

“You came here to avoid me. As you have avoided me for the better part of a year.” She came to a stop a few paces from him, and I pressed myself flat into the shadow of the wall, and I did not breathe. “A year, Majesty. A year I have sat in this gilded swamp of a court, sending letter after letter north to an empress who grows colder with each one, while you ride off into the countryside for weeks at a time and leave me to make your excuses. Your father gave his word. The houses of Aurelian and Veyrkhan, joined, the southern empire and the northern, a peace sealed in a marriage bed. It was not only promised, it was sworn between your father and her mother before either of you was crowned. And here I stand, a year on, with nothing to carry home but your stalling.”

“My father gave his word,” Drystan said. “Not I.”

“You are his heir. His word is your debt.”

“His word is his.” Now he did turn, and even in the moonlight the cold came into his face, the emperor’s face, the hard hand he kept beneath the soft one. “I have met your empress once, Envoy. One afternoon, across a treaty table, when we were both children too young to care for anything but the toys waiting for us back in our own chambers, shown to each other like horses at a fair. I owe her the courtesy of a neighbour and nothing more. I am the emperor of Aurelian. The choice of who sits beside me is mine, and mine alone, and there is no power in the north or the south that can compel it. Not her armies. Not her envoy’s patience. Certainly not a promise two dead parents made over my cradle. Aurelian law leaves the choosing of a bride to the one who wears the crown, that the line may stay strong, and I will choose when I choose, and whom.” His voice dropped, quiet and dangerous now. “And you, Envoy, have been a long time in my court, and you have grown free with your tongue. Take care how you speak to me. I would not like to write to your empress that her envoy insulted the emperor she has spent a year trying to win. I do not think the writing of that letter would go well for you.”

Something flickered in Vasstent’s smooth face, the same brief recalculation I had seen her make across the ceremonial hall, and then she laughed, low and unbothered, and it was worse than anger.

“Forgive me, Majesty. I forget myself.” She did not sound as though she forgot anything. “It is only that I have been at this so long, and I am so very tired of waiting on a sentiment. Because that is what this is, is it not? Underneath the talk of choice and crowns. You are a romantic.” She said the word the way you name a disease. “You believe in love. You believe that somewhere out there is a great passion worth setting an empire’s peace aside for, and until you find her, or while you mourn whatever country dalliance you have been riding off to all these months, the rest of us must wait on your tender heart.” She tilted her head. “I have known a great many men, Majesty. Your idea of love is every man’s idea of love. It wears a prettier name at court, that is all. You ride off to the provinces for weeks and come back with that look on your face, and I am meant to believe it is statecraft, and not some farmer’s daughter warming the imperial—”

“I rode,” Drystan said, “to do the one thing an emperor is for.”

He had risen. He stood very straight under the plum tree, and his voice had changed, and I, flat in the shadow with my heart in my throat, waited for what I was certain would come next. I waited for him to defend it. I waited for him to tell her she understood nothing, that what he had found in the provinces was not a dalliance but the love of his life, that he had lost the most precious thing the world had ever given him and would mourn her until he died. I waited for him to say my name.

“I rode out among my people,” he said, “because a man cannot rule a country he has only seen from a throne. I went to the villages and the markets and the river towns to learn what my country is, what it needs, what it suffers, because that is the duty my blood lays on me and there is no duty above it. Everything I am, everything I will ever be, belongs to the line I was born to carry and the empire it holds. My forefathers built this with three hundred years of their lives, and I will not be the one who weakens it for a feeling. No woman will turn me from that. Not the empress. Not anyone.” His jaw was set, his eyes on the envoy, and he did not know, he could not know, that he was speaking to the one soul in the world the words would kill. And then her sneer about appetite seemed to reach him fully, and something in him gave way, the cold control breaking under it, and his voice came lower and rougher and terrible.

“And do not stand in my garden and tell me what my heart is, Envoy, as though it were a simple thing, as though I were some boy chasing skirts in the provinces. You understand nothing of what this duty costs. I have already paid more for this crown than you will pay in your whole life of carrying other people’s messages. I found the one thing a man is given once, if he is fortunate, and I gave it up, because keeping it would have meant breaking the law of my own blood. I let the most precious thing I will ever hold go out of my hands, with my eyes open, because the line is more than any one man’s heart. So you will not lecture me on sentiment. I have buried more of it than you can imagine, and I will go on burying it, every day, for the rest of my life, because that is what it is to wear this. A man who would set his duty down for love is not fit for this crown. I am fit for it. I have proven that I am fit for it. Now leave me.”

The world came down on me where I crouched in the dark.

I have already paid. I gave it up, with my eyes open. I let the most precious thing I will ever hold go out of my hands.

I was the thing he let go.

I understood it all at once, the whole of it, in the space of a breath, the way you understand a thing your body has known for a long time and your heart has refused. There had been no word at the gate because there was never going to be a word. There had been no search, no riders, no sorcerers, because he had not lost me. He had set me down. He had weighed me against his bloodline and his empire and his three hundred years, and he had chosen them, deliberately, with his eyes open, and he would choose them again, a thousand times, and he called it being fit to wear the crown. The grief I had seen on him was real. But it was not the grief of a man robbed. It was the grief of a man who had paid a price he had decided was worth paying, who could live with it, and would go on paying it forever, and had done it all to himself. He had loved me. And he had given me up the way you give up a thing, and grieved it the way you grieve a thing, and gone on.

And under that, colder, another piece slid into place, or seemed to. The strange woman who had come for me that first night in the knight’s chambers, the one who walked through the wall, the one whose hand I had torn open with my teeth, she was the how of it. And if she was the how, then surely, my mind told me in the dark, he was the why. He had made his choice, and somewhere it had been carried out, and I had been shut inside this small silver body so that the emperor’s life could go on unburdened by the country girl he had decided he could not keep.

I was certain of it, that night, the way you are only ever certain of the worst things. I built the whole of it in the space between heartbeats, every piece fitted to every other, his choice and her magic and my ruin, one seamless cruelty with his face at the center of it. It would be a long time before I understood how much of what I built in that wood was true, and how much was only the shape grief takes when it needs somewhere to lay the blame. That night I had no doubt at all. That night it was simple. He had given me up, and this was what the giving up had cost me, and he had known, and he had let it happen, and the knowing was the death of everything I had carried him in my heart to be.

I had crossed an empire on a single belief: that he was waiting, that he loved me, that he would have torn the world apart to find me. And the belief was a thing I had built with my own hands out of nothing, because the truth, the truth he had just spoken into the dark not knowing I would hear it, was that I had been precious to him, and he had set the precious thing down, because something he loved more had asked it of him, and the price had been bearable.

The grief that came then was nothing like the grief at the gate. The grief at the gate had been a wave. This was the sea itself, the whole black weight of it, rising from a place with no bottom, and there was no still room left in me deep enough to go down into, no breath the monks had ever taught me that could hold against it. The hope that had been the floor under everything was simply gone, and I fell through where it had been, and the fall had no end.

Something rose in me at the same instant, wild, a pure animal need to break from the dark and fly across the gravel and sink my teeth into him, to make him feel one drop of what he had spent so easily. I gathered to spring. But the grief was faster than the rage. It took me the way the river had taken me, all at once, over my head, and the spring went out of my legs, and I did not lunge.

I broke. And then I bolted.

I do not remember deciding to run. The fox took over, every primal thing in the small body screaming the one command, away, and I obeyed it, a streak of silver breaking from the shadow of the wall and flying across the moonlit garden, blind and howling a grief the fox throat could only voice and never weep, the pond and the plum tree and the two pale figures wheeling past me. Behind me the envoy’s voice changed, sharp, surprised.

“What in the—” And Drystan made a sound, a single caught breath. Because what tore across his moonlit garden was not a woman, and was nothing he could have braced for. It was a silver fox. The one creature in all the world bound to the worst night of his life: the pelt, the green fire, the witch’s voice telling him what he might have done. A living silver fox, here, in his own private garden, in the moonlight, running. I saw his head turn and his eyes find the flash of me, and I saw the thing move through his face that I was too far gone to read and he was too shaken to understand. A flinch. A chill that had nothing to do with the night air. The recoil of a man who has glimpsed his own guilt given fur and motion and set loose in the one place he came to be free of it. He did not know me. He could not have known me. But some animal part of him knew the shape of a silver fox and what it meant to him, and it froze his blood. He took a step toward where I had been. His hand half rose. And then I was gone.

I went over the low wall and through the gap and into the dark of the wider gardens, and behind me the moonlit garden with the pond and the plum tree and the man who had thrown me into a fire fell away, and I ran, and ran, with the sea closing over my head and nowhere in all the world to go.

* * *

I have no memory of most of that running.

I know I left the gardens. I know I crossed places far too dangerous for a fox to cross, places where to be seen or caught would have cost me my life, and I did not care, because the thing that had kept me careful all these weeks, the will to live, to reach him, to be restored, had gone out of me on the gravel under the plum tree, and there was nothing left steering the small body but the blind need to be somewhere else. I ran until the palace was behind me and the cultivated dark gave way to the wild dark, the rough ground at the edge of the grounds where the forest came down to meet the wall, and somewhere in there my legs gave out, and I went down in the leaf litter under the trees, and I did not get up.

I lay in the dark and I came apart.

I cannot call it grief, because grief is a thing a person has, and this was a thing that had me. It went through the fox body in waves that had nothing to do with the body, an intensity that flattened everything, the thin high cries forced out of me one after another into the empty wood, and I could no more have stopped them than stopped the tide. Everything I had carried since the cottage came due at once. My mother. My voice. My own face. The afternoon in the grove and the promise and the ring of his arms and all of it, all of it, a lie. Not a lie he told. A lie I had told myself: that I had mattered enough to fight for. I had not. I had been precious to him, and he had set the precious thing down because something else weighed more, and judged the loss bearable, and that was the whole truth of my life, and there was nothing underneath it.