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I do not know how long I lay there. The moon moved across the trees, and the wood breathed around me, and the pain soaked into every fibre of the small body until it felt like a thousandweight of grief pressed into a bundle of silver fur and muscle and bone. And at some point, through the waves of it, I became aware that I was not alone, that there were soft slow footsteps coming through the leaves, and the smell of woodsmoke and green things and something old and quiet, and then a shape lowered itself to the ground beside me with the crack of old knees, and a hand, broad and warm and slow, came to rest on my heaving side.

I did not know how she had found me. I did not have it in me to wonder.

“There now,” Rainthorn said, very low. “There now, child. I have you.”

She did not ask me what had happened. She looked at me a long moment in the moonlight, the broken silver thing crying its heart out in the leaves, and whatever she read in me, she read all of it, and she did not make me reach for words I did not have. She only took from the worn leather bag at her hip a small stoppered flask, the last of something she had not meant to spend tonight, and worked the stopper loose with her thumb.

“I was not going to give you this until the morrow,” she said. “The herbs are dear, and there is little enough of it. But you cannot carry a grief like that in a body that cannot weep it. It would destroy you. And you should not carry it alone.” She poured a little into the cup of her own palm and held it down to me. “Drink, child. Come back, and be a woman, and weep the way a woman can weep. I will weep with you, if it eases you. And then you will come home with me, and you will tell me what was done to you, or you will tell me nothing at all, as you like. But you will not lie alone in a wood with it. Not tonight. Not while I have breath and a flask and two arms to carry you.”

I drank from her hand.

The water took me down into the river the way it always did. But there was no bright pillar waiting this time, or if there was, I went past it in the dark and never found it. There was no man, no warm shape rising to break the current, no arms to gather me, no stilling. The water did not slow for me. It could not. The torrent that took me was the grief itself, and there was too much of it, and no power in that dream or any other could have calmed a flood that deep, and I would not have let it if it tried. I wanted no peace. There was no peace to be had. The brew dragged me up through the cold raging water and set me back in my own flesh, and that was all it could do, all it had ever been able to do. It could give me back my body. It could not touch the thing in me that had broken. The change came hard and joyless, and the light broke, and the world fell into its right size, and I came out of the river into the wood with my ruin still entire inside me, only now I had a throat to scream it with.

I was a woman again, on my knees in the leaf litter, naked and shaking in the moonlight, and the tears the fox could not shed came at last, all of them, and I bent over my own knees and wept until I had no breath left, and the old woman gathered me against her and held me, and rocked me a little, the way a mother who truly loved her child might, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say, and because she was wise enough to know it.

I had crossed an empire on a single belief, and the belief was gone, and I was nothing now but a woman weeping in a wood in an old woman’s arms.

But I was not alone. Even then. Even at the very bottom of it. Someone had come into the dark and found me, and given me back my own voice so that I could grieve, and asked nothing, and stayed.

It was not much to build a life on. But it was not nothing. And in the days to come, it would have to be enough to begin again.

Chapter 16

Rainthorn carried me home through the last of the dark, and I do not remember the journey, only that I was a woman in her arms one moment and a fox the next, the brew giving out somewhere along the way, and that she did not put me down when I changed. She gathered my small silver body up against her chest and went on walking, slow and steady through the waking streets of the palace fringe, an old herb-woman carrying what any watcher would take for a sick animal, and she brought me to Selene’s door as the sky went purple with the first of the sunrise.

Selene was awake. I think she had been awake the whole night, ever since she found my place by the hearth empty. She opened the door before Rainthorn could knock, and her sharp face was drawn tight with fear, fear for me, as though I were her own blood. I had not been given that much unconditional care even in the village where I was raised, among my own people. When she saw the state of the creature in Rainthorn’s arms, she did not ask what had happened. She only stood back and let us in, and put more wood on the fire, and waited.

It was Tsuki who spoke first, from the mantel, and the dry edge that lived in everything he said was simply gone, snuffed out the way a pinched candle goes dark. “Someone has hurt you,” he said, very quietly. “Someone has hurt you badly, little silver sister.”

I could not tell them, not as a fox. So Rainthorn brewed again, a second dose in a night she had not meant to spend any, and she said not a word about the cost, and when I came up into my own body by the fire I was too hollow even to weep. I had wept myself empty in the wood. What remained was flatter than weeping, a grey nothing where the centre of me used to be.

And I told them.

I told them all of it, in a voice with no colour in it, the garden and the plum tree and the envoy and the words he had spoken into the dark not knowing I would hear them. I told them what I had understood, crouched in the shadow, that there had been no message at the gate because there was never going to be one, that he had not lost me, that he had set me down and chosen his bloodline with his eyes open and called it being fit to wear the crown. I told them I had been the most precious thing he would ever hold, and that he had let me go, and grieved me, and gone on, and would do it again if the choice came twice.

And I told them the things I had worked out in the wood. Whatever had turned me into an animal was magic of terrible power, and it had been worked inside the emperor’s own palace, which meant it belonged to someone who served his house. And I had seen such a person, once, with my own eyes. The strange woman in the knight’s chambers, the one who came and went through a hidden door in the wall that no one was meant to know was there, the one whose hand I bit to the bone getting away from her. I had not understood, that night, what she was or why she had come for me. Now I did. Someone who could move through the palace by passages kept secret from the whole court could only be of the emperor’s own house, and a woman like that does not come hunting a fox by chance. She was the one, or she was of the same hand that had done it. And I had just heard the emperor say, in his own mouth, that he had given me up for his bloodline. So I knew this much. He had chosen his line over me, and the magic that unmade me had come from his world. What I did not yet know, what gnawed at me under everything else, was how much he himself had understood of it, and how much of it he had asked for, and beneath those, the question with no floor under it at all: Why? Why, when he loved me, when he says even now that he loved me, had he let it be done?

Selene did not speak until I was finished. She did not tell me I was wrong, and she did not tell me it would be all right, nor did she reach for any of the bright useless things people reach for. She came and sat beside me on the floor by the fire and took my cold hands into her warm ones and held them, and she said, very low, “I know. Gods help me, I know the exact shape of it. A powerful man, and a promise, and the slow learning that you were never going to be the one he chose, that you were a thing he could set down when the cost came due.” Her jaw tightened. “Sometimes they do it so gently you thank them for it. And then you spend years learning to stand again on the very place where they broke you.” She pressed my hands. “You are not the first woman this court has hollowed out, gorgeous. You will not be the last. But you are mine now, and I have learned a thing or two about standing up again, and I am going to teach you every part of it.”

I had thought myself empty. Yet something moved in me at that, faint, very far down, the first thing I had felt since the garden that was not grief. I had no name for it yet. But it had a spine in it, where the grief had none.

* * *

The next morning my own body showed me how little time I had left.

I woke a woman, the last of the night’s brew still holding, and I went to wash my face in the basin and stopped with my hands in the water, because the face that looked back at me from the still surface was not entirely mine anymore. A streak at my temple had gone coarse and bright, the fox’s pelt come through into my silver hair, rough where the rest of me was fine, catching the light wrong, and it did not soften as I stared at it the way a trick of the light would soften. My nails, when I lifted my hand to touch it, had a curve and a hardness they had never had, the beginning of something made for tearing. And in my eyes, when I leaned close, the fox’s shifting gold sat heavier than it used to, the animal looking out through the woman.

I called Rainthorn over, and she looked a long moment, and pressed her thumb to the coarse bright streak, and then she drew her hand back and pressed it to her own mouth, and I had never once, in all of it, seen her afraid until then.

“The two of you are bleeding into one,” she said. “The fox and the woman. The wall between them is starting to give.” She let go of my hair. “I have seen bindings fail before, child. This is what it looks like when they begin to. The shapes stop staying separate. A little at first. Then more. Until there is only the one left, and it is not the one you would choose.”

We learned the rest of it over the days that followed, and it was Rainthorn who said the whole of it aloud. The brew had been weakening for weeks, the borrowed hours running shorter, the binding drawing tighter, something feeding it that none of us could name. Now we could name it. The grief that had been a bearable weight before, held down by the hope that kept it from ever rising the whole way, was bearable no longer and held by nothing, because the hope was gone, and the grief had become the whole of me, every hour, waking and sleeping, and the curse drank it like a tide that never turned and began, slowly, to consume me.

So a dose that had once carried me through a night now barely carried me through part of an evening, and some doses gave out before they should and dropped me back into the fox while the cup still sat warm in my hand. I would rise into my own body and feel the grief climb in the same breath, the two of them bound together now, the being-a-woman and the holding-back-of-grief grown into a single act, and a grief that size is not a thing a person can hold, and so neither was the woman.

“It is the feeling,” I said to Rainthorn, on the third night, when a full dose had given me less than an hour. I was working it out as I spoke, the way you find the shape of a thing in the dark with your hands. “It was always the feeling. At the gate it took me when the grief rose. In the court I kept my shape only by keeping the feeling down. And now the feeling never stops, so the shape never holds.” I looked at my own hands, the hard new curve of the nails. “The curse is not the fox. The curse is what my grief is doing to me. The fox is only what the grief leaves behind, when there is too much of it to carry.”

Rainthorn was quiet a long moment, her pale eyes on me, and what was in her face was almost pride and was mostly sorrow. “I have been turning that over since the night at the gate,” she said. “And I could not have put it plainer than you just did, child. The working feeds on your grief, and it has found itself a well that will never run dry.” She set down the empty cup. “Which is why my herbs cannot save you. They could never break it, and now they can barely hold it, and the day is coming, not far off, when they will not hold it at all.” She did not soften it, because she was a woman who held the truth above any comfort. “On that day, if nothing has changed, you will be a fox, and you will stay a fox, and the woman will be somewhere underneath, awake, for as long as a fox lives. That is the thing we are racing.”