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“Three centuries.” Auden had gone very still. “You are speaking of the emperor’s own sorcerer. The one they whisper of and never see. The one who serves the throne itself.”

Rainthorn looked at him a long moment, and did not answer, which was answer enough.

I watched Auden understand it, watched the pieces come together behind his eyes, the order to cage him, the emperor grieving at the sky, the question about a woman new to the city, and now a three-hundred-year-old working turned against a girl who had done nothing to anyone. I saw him arrive at the edge of a thing too large to hold, and I saw him decide, in the same moment, that he would hold it anyway.

“There is more you are not telling me,” he said to Rainthorn. “About her. About what she is. About why the emperor’s own witch would spend three hundred years’ craft on burying one girl in a fox.”

“There is a great deal I am not telling you,” Rainthorn said. “Some of it because it is not mine to tell.” Her eyes went to me, just for a breath, and away. “And some of it because we do not have the days to spare on it. You want to know the measure of the enemy. I understand. But the enemy is not the thing to look at now. The clock is the thing to look at now.”

“Then tell me the clock,” Auden said. “Tell me what fights it. If she will not undo it and cannot be made to, then what slows it, what holds it back, what buys the days you say we have. There is always something. You would not be this calm if there were nothing.”

And Rainthorn, who did not flatter and did not lie, looked at him with something that was almost respect.

“There is one thing,” she said. “It is not a cure. Understand me. There is no cure, not from my hands. But there is a thing that has already been slowing her work without any of us understanding it, and if I am right about what it is, then it is the only ground we have to stand on, and we had better learn to stand on it fast.”

She turned to me, and her old face was grave.

“When did you last feel the fox rise and lose to it,” she said. “Truly rise, as it does at your worst. Think, child. When was the last bad wave, before this morning.”

I thought. And the answer, when it came, surprised me, because I had not marked it at the time.

“Not for days,” I said slowly. “Not since before the mountain. Not since—” I stopped.

“Since,” Rainthorn said, and waited.

I did not want to say it in front of him. But the cold was in my veins and the truth was the only currency I had left, so I said it.

“Since I have been with him.”

Rainthorn nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed a thing she had already half seen. Auden, at the foot of the table, went very still in a wholly different way.

“That,” Rainthorn said, “is the ground we stand on. I do not fully understand it, and I will not pretend to. But I have watched the brew hold you shorter and shorter as your grief fed the curse, and I have watched you walk in some mornings steadier than my medicine could account for, and I did not have the piece that explained it until just now, when you named it yourself.” She looked between the two of us. “Whatever is between you, it does the opposite of what her working does. Her craft feeds on your fear and your grief and buries you deeper. This, whatever this is, quiets them, and holds you up, and gives you back to yourself. It has been fighting her this whole time, and neither of you knew.”

“Then that is what we use,” Auden said.

“That is what we use,” Rainthorn agreed. “Not because I understand it. Because it is the only thing in this whole black business that has ever pushed her working backward instead of forward, and a drowning man does not question the hand that pulls him up.” She stood, the sharpness coming back into her, the strategist surfacing through the grief. “It will not be enough on its own. Slowing is not stopping, and buying days is not buying years. But it buys us the days, and in the days we look for the rest. There is always a rest, child. Three hundred years old or no, nothing is built without a seam in it somewhere. We have until the fox takes you to find hers.”

She looked at all of us, the coven and the captain, gathered in her low, smoke-dark room around the girl on the table.

“So we do not grieve,” she said. “We do not have the days for grief. We work. Starting now, with what we have, which is more than we had an hour ago, because an hour ago we did not know the one thing that fights her, and now we do.” Her pale eyes settled on me, and for all the grimness in her, there was something in them I had not expected, something that steadied me more than any of the calm had. “You are not buried yet, Liora. You are on my table with breath in you and people around you who will spend everything they have before they let you go into the dark. That is not nothing. Hold on to it. It is the truest medicine I have.”

I held on to it.

Lying on that table with the cold in my veins and the fox waiting somewhere under my skin for its final wave, with Selene’s hand in mine and Auden at my feet and the old woman already turning to her shelves, I held on to the one thing they had given me in place of a cure. Not hope, exactly. Something harder and better than hope. A task. A direction. A reason to keep my breathing slow and my fear banked and my eyes open. We had until the fox took me. We meant to use it.

And under all of it, quiet and steadying and terrifying in equal measure, the new knowledge sat: that the thing keeping me human, the thing that had been fighting the witch’s craft without my ever knowing it, was the man standing at the foot of the table with my life in his frightened, steady eyes.

I did not have the room, that morning, to be afraid of what that meant. That would come later. For now, it was simply the ground we stood on, and we stood on it, and we began.

Chapter 31

We went for Cael after dark, Auden and I, by the back ways toward the palace district where the streets turned from crooked and poor to broad and swept and lined with the houses of people who had never once been hungry, and I held my shape the whole way like a fist held closed, and it cost me more with every street.

Tsuki rode inside my coat, a warm weight against my ribs, his small claws hooked into the wool and his head just out at the collar where he could see. He had refused, in the flat, final manner he refused things, to be left behind. “A house you might not get out of is a house you want a small clever creature in,” he had said, and Selene had agreed, and so he came, tucked against me, silent for once, his warmth the one easy thing I carried. The other thing I carried was not warm at all.

The pull had not stopped since morning. It had only grown more certain. Walking now, I could feel it working in me as a kind of patient subtraction, the woman being drawn down and the fox being drawn up, and the effort of staying upright on two legs in my own skin had become a thing I had to spend attention on, like arithmetic I was afraid of getting wrong. I did not tell Auden how bad it had got. He knew, I think, from the set of my shoulders and the careful way I had begun to walk, but he said nothing, only kept close, and once, when a wave of it came over me so hard that I had to stop in a doorway and breathe through it with my eyes shut, his hand found the small of my back and stayed there, warm, until it passed. We did not have time for it to be more than that.

It was on that walk that I started to understand Auden was afraid, and not for himself, and not only for me.