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That was the thing I noticed after, lying spent and warm across his chest with his heart going slow under my cheek. There was no gold pricking at the edges of my sight, no coarseness rising at my temple, no pull toward the animal at all. The thing that had been drowning me for weeks, that rose on grief and rose on fear and rose on every cold and frightened feeling I had, had simply nothing here to feed on. I was held, and I was safe, and I had just been happier in my own body than at any time since that night took everything from me. The curse lay quiet in me as it never had before. There was simply nothing in me for it to feed on. I had not understood until that moment how much of holding my human shape had been a fight. Here, with him, it was not a fight. It was simply the truth of me, for once, with nothing pulling against it.

I fell asleep like that, in his arms, in the warm, and I did not dream of rivers or dark men or anything at all.

* * *

I woke before he did, in the pale gold of the early light coming through the one high window, and for a while I did not move, because I did not want to.

I was warm all down one side where I lay against him, and his arm was heavy and slack across my back, and the shrine was very quiet around us, and I lay and let myself simply be there, in the warmth, with no clock in my chest for once and no dread waiting at the edge of the morning. I had forgotten a person could wake like this. I had thought it was one of the things the curse had taken for good.

And then I lifted my head a little and looked at him, and I understood something that made my throat go tight.

He was deeply asleep. Not the light wary half-sleep of a soldier, not the dozing of a man who keeps one ear on the door. He was gone all the way down, slack-faced and open and utterly at rest, breathing slow and even, a man asleep in his own home with nothing in the world to guard against. And I thought of what he had told Selene’s kitchen, that he could not sleep under a real roof, that he rested only here at the shrine, on his bench out in the yard, and badly even then, that he had carried all his life an ache for a home he could not name. He had built this place with his own hands and it had not let him sleep, because a house is not a home, because the walls he had set had stood empty.

They did not stand empty now. I was in them. And he was sleeping the way a man sleeps when he is finally, truly home, and I understood that I had done that, not by building anything, but by being the first person he had ever let all the way inside, not as someone he served or tended or kept a careful lamp burning for, but as someone who simply belonged here, who was his. I had filled the house. I had not meant to, I had only loved him, and the loving had done the thing the building never could. He was asleep in a home at last, and I had made it one by being in it.

I slid out from under his arm without waking him, and I drew the russet coat around my shoulders, and I went out into the body of the little shrine to let him sleep.

It was bare and clean and cold in the early light, the swept stone floor, the plain altar to the goddess of mercy at the far end with its single offering-bowl, the unfinished places where his work waited. I had spent years of my girlhood in places like this, the temple discipline still in my bones, and I knelt on the cold stone in front of the mercy-goddess the way I had been taught, and I let myself be still, and I breathed, and I let the morning be what it was.

And what came to me, kneeling there, was not dread. It was hope. I had not felt it in so long that I almost did not know it. But for the first time since the world ended I let myself look at the whole of it, the witch in the palace and the hunt in the streets and the failing brew, and I did not only see the ways it would kill me. I was not alone in it. I had Selene, who had built me a life out of nothing. I had Rainthorn, who knew old and deep things and had three days from now a fresh strong brew steeping. I had Tsuki, who could go anywhere and hear anything. And now I had this man asleep behind me in a home I had helped make, who had seen the worst truth of me and called it a wonder. We knew where the witch lived. We knew what we were fighting. And kneeling on the cold stone in the mercy-goddess’s bare little house, I let myself believe, for the length of that quiet morning, that we might actually win. That I might get to keep all of it. That there might be a life on the far side of this after all.

I went back to him.

* * *

He was waking when I came back to the warm dark of the inner room, surfacing slow and reluctant, and he reached for me before his eyes were even open, found me, drew me back down against him with a low contented sound, and I went, and fitted myself against his side, and let him hold me in the last of the sleep-warmth while the day waited outside the barred door.

After a while I made myself sit up, because the morning had its requirements even if I did not want them, and I reached for my satchel where it lay by the cot and drew it onto my lap to take my dose. The weak brew was almost gone. Three bottles left, and the strong stock three days from ready, and I would have to be careful now, parceling it out, holding the worst at bay a few hours at a time until Rainthorn’s new batch came good. I worked the satchel open and reached in among the cool glass.

“You know,” Auden said, behind me, his voice still rough with sleep, “you do not have to spend that on me.”

I turned. He had come up onto his good elbow, watching me, his hair loose and his face soft with waking, and there was something in his eyes that stopped my hands.

“I have seen you,” he said simply. “All of you. The woman and the fox both, and I told you in the snow what I thought of it, and I have not changed my mind by so much as a hair since. You do not have to hold your shape for me. Not here. Not ever. You can be whatever you wake as, any morning, any shape the day brings, and I will be glad of it, because it will be you.” A small tired smile. “Save your medicine for the streets, where you need it. In here you can just be yourself.”

I think it was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to me. After a lifetime of holding the fox down in shame, of being a secret even to myself, here was a man telling me I never had to hide again, that I was wanted in every shape I came in, that this one place in all the world was somewhere I could simply be. My eyes stung. I looked at him in the pale gold light with my heart so full it ached, and I loved him, and I felt safe, all the way down, safer than I had felt since before the world broke.

And because I felt safe, and because the streets were still out there and the habit was already in my hands, I lifted the bottle the rest of the way out and pulled the stopper and drank it down, smiling at him over the rim, meaning to be careful with the others but to take this one now.

It was bitter in my mouth. Not by much. Just enough, a thin thread of bitterness under the familiar green taste, and a coldness going down that the brew had never had, and my smile faltered, and I lowered the bottle and looked at it, and it was the wrong colour in the morning light. Green, where my brews were the dull gold of the bloom. Green, and the glass a shade I did not know. And the hunter’s flat voice came back to me from the gate, tainted physic in plain bottles, dressed up as a cure, and the cold of it spread out through my chest, because they had been combing the whole city for exactly the thing I had just put to my own lips. I knew, even as Auden’s face began to change at whatever he saw in mine, that this was the one that had rolled apart from the others across my floor on the worst night of my life, the one that had never sat right in my hand, the one I had carried home through the gate past the very men hunting for it and never once looked at.

I looked up at him, at his good kind frightened face in the safest place I had ever been, and I understood, with the cold already climbing my throat, that the witch had found me after all. That she had found me days ago. That she had been inside my satchel the whole time, riding against my hip through every mile of the mountains, waiting with the patience of a thing three hundred years old for the morning I felt safe enough to stop being afraid.

What I did not know was what she had given me. I sat there with the empty green glass in my hand and the cold spreading through me and no way to tell what was coming. Whether it would stop my heart within the hour or take a year about it. Whether she had meant to kill me quickly or to do some slower, stranger thing to me. There was nothing to brace against and nothing to fight, no wound to bind and no enemy in the room, only the warm quiet and the man I loved and the cold going down, and I could do nothing but sit in it and wait for my own body to tell me what she had decided I would become.

Chapter 30

The bitterness was still on my tongue when Auden’s face changed.

He had been soft with waking a breath before, propped on his good elbow, watching me drink my medicine with that quiet gladness. Then he saw whatever my own face was doing, and the soldier came up in him all at once, the stillness going hard and alert.

“Liora. What is it.”

I looked at the empty green bottle in my hand. My voice would not quite work. “It is the wrong colour,” I said. “My brew is gold. This is green.” The cold was spreading from my stomach outward, slow and total, nothing like sickness, more like a tide coming in through me. “This is not my medicine.”

He moved. He had my satchel off the floor and open before I had finished speaking, going through the remaining bottles with a soldier’s fast hands, holding each to the thin gold light. Three of them. All gold, all mine, all as they should be. Only the one I had already drained had been green, and it was empty now, and inside me.

“One bottle,” he said. “Only the one. Where did it come from?”