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It was a lie to keep me breathing, dressed as an order, the only protection he could give that would not betray us both. And the men moved at once, fast and rough, and one of them caught up the nearest cloth to bundle the snapping animal I had become, and it came down over me, and in the last instant before it swallowed the light I saw what it was. The fine grey travelling-cloak I had taken from the envoy not an hour before. The cloak I had wound around myself like a banner of my own reclaimed dignity, come down over me now as the sack they would carry me out in. I went into the dark wrapped in Vasstent’s grey.

He had spared me again. With the same breath that gave me up again. He could not stop choosing the throne, and he could not stop, inside that choosing, finding the one crack in it through which to keep me alive.

I never answered him. That is what I carried out of that hall, jolting blind against a stranger’s grip, the cloak over my head shifting just enough, as they shouldered through the doors, to show me one face in the corridor outside. Cael, the commander, standing still among the moving guards, watching the bundle they carried past with a frown I had no time to understand. Then the cloth closed again and he was gone. He had torn himself open in front of me and asked, without asking, to be understood, and the world had taken me before I could give him one word back. Yes, or no, or I understand, or I will never forgive you, any of it, all of it. He would not know. He would stand in that emptied hall not knowing what I would have said, and I would go into whatever was coming not having said it, and now there were two questions hanging between us instead of one. His why, and my silence, with the whole of what was coming wedged into the space where an answer should have been.

Chapter 35

They carried me a long way in the dark, jolting blind against a stranger's grip, the grey cloak wound so close I could not have said which way was up, and then a door, and voices, and I was swung down and in and let go all at once, and a lock turned, and the footsteps went away.

I worked myself loose of the cloak and stood on four feet in the middle of the floor and made myself breathe and took the measure of what was left of me. My eyes were still mine. The one barred window let the moonlight in pale and clean and not the flat dead gold I had learned to dread, and so I knew the woman was still in me somewhere, down under the fur, behind the animal's eyes. But she was thin now. I had spent so much of myself holding my shape through the smothering dark of the cloth and the long jolting carry, and there was less of me to spend than there had been, and I could feel exactly how much less.

I made myself think past the fear and lay out what I knew, because a plan was a thing the running animal had never been able to hold, and holding one was how I kept hold of myself. The flower for the cure had finally been found. I held to that. Before it all came apart, before the hall, I had known the flower was in Rainthorn's hands, and that the brewing of it was slow, and that slow was the enemy now. Somewhere across the city an old woman was boiling the one thing that could call me back for good, if there was time, if anyone could carry it to me, if I could stay myself long enough to drink it. Three ifs, and I had no power over a single one of them, and so I set them down. I could not brew the cure and I could not fetch it. I could only keep the woman lit a little longer, and wait, and hope the people who loved me were faster than the gold coming up behind my eyes.

And then I smelled her.

It came through the wall before anything else did, the dry cold scent of her, herbs and old smoke and the green rot of the draught, and my fox-sharp nose had it a long moment before any human ear would have caught the sound that followed, the faint give of stone against stone. I knew that smell. I had smelled it bent over me on the worst night of my life. My first night inside this palace, in Taren’s chamber, where I had curled small and believed myself hidden until the wall opened without a sound and she came through it to carry me off, and I had set my teeth in her hand and torn loose and run with the bitter iron of her blood in my mouth. My fur stood up the length of my spine. There was a door in that wall that was not a door, and she was behind it, and she was coming through.

She came through it. The slow sure step, the same face that had bent down over me on the worst night I had ever lived. She looked at the fox standing in the middle of the floor, and I watched the certainty settle over her, watched her decide that this would be the easiest thing she had done all night.

“There, now,” she said, and the voice was almost gentle, the gentleness you spend on a hurt creature you have already decided to put out of its trouble. She set a small bag on the table and began, without the least hurry, to work its mouth open, and the green sweet rot of the draught came off it into the room, more of the stuff that had been brewed to pour me out of my own body and never let me back into it. “No more running, child. You were never meant to last this long. We will put you down to sleep, and this time you will not wake from it, and the world will be a cleaner place by morning.”

And the whole time she did not once look at me as though I were a person. She looked at me the way you look at a task you set down half done and have come back to finish, a stain to be got out of the cloth. She had broken me once exactly like this and walked away sure it would hold, and here she stood at the same kind of lying wall with the same ease in her hands, expecting the same frightened girl to lie down under them.

I was not that girl anymore.

It came up out of me the way it had come up in the gallery, all at once, hot and clean and rising out of a floor of myself I had only lately learned was there, and there was no fear anywhere in it for the curse to take hold of. She had come at me through a wall once before and I had bitten her for it, and she had learned nothing from it, she had only walked back in through another wall to try the same thing again, and the gall of that, the cold sureness of it, lit something in me the poison could not touch. The heat ran out to the very ends of me. The mark woke and burned over my heart. And I reached down into myself and pulled my own body back, because I would not be poured into the dark to make this woman’s night tidy, and between one breath and the next I stood up off the floor a woman again.

She gave back a step she had not planned to give. Her hand came up. I did not let her finish whatever it was going to be. There was a tall lacquered candle-stand against the wall by the door, taller than I was and weighted heavy at its foot, and I had it up in both hands before I had thought to reach for it, and I swung it.

It caught her across the brow. The crack of it filled the little room and ran back up my arms into my shoulders, and she went down sideways against the open wall and slid to the floor with the shawl tangling around her, and a gash opened above her eye and the blood ran down into it, and she did not get up. And in the half-second before she fell I saw the thing I had not once seen on that face in all the time I had known it. She had not expected this. Not from me. She had come through the wall certain of a frightened fox, and the surprise was still raw on her when the iron took her down.

I stood over her with the stand still in my fists and my breath coming ragged, and I understood with a terrible plainness what the next thing was. She was not finished. I could see her breathing, see the eyes trying to find me through the blood. She had cursed me. She had come through two walls to end me. She would come through a third. One more swing, harder, lower, and the woman who had unmade my whole life would stop, and I would be safe, and it would be over.

I lifted the stand.

God help me, I lifted it. I felt my arms take the weight of it up and back, the iron foot of the thing dragging heavier the higher it went, until it hung above my shoulder and the whole of it wanted to fall on its own and I was holding it up now as much as holding it ready. My shoulders burned. The muscles across my back drew tight and began to shake with the holding, a fine hard tremor that ran down into my hands where they were locked white around the shaft, and my breath came sawing through my throat too fast and too shallow, loud in that little room, the only loud thing in it. And under all of it was how clear my head had gone. The fear was gone. The shaking was only my body. Some cold still part of me stood above the whole scene and knew exactly what to do, the weight that would be enough, the soft place above her ear, the angle to find it, that I would have to mean it from the top of the arc all the way down and not let my arms think better of it on the way. It laid the task out plainly, as you would lay out the chopping of wood or the wringing of a hen’s neck, and waited for me to begin.

“You will not do it,” she said.

Her voice came thick and slow through the blood, but the certainty was already crawling back into it, and that was the unbearable thing, that even broken on the floor with my arms raised over her she had taken my measure before I had taken my own.

“Give me one reason I should not,” I said, and I did not lower it.

“I will give you the only one that will work on a woman like you.” She got herself up against the wall, a hand-span, no more, the blood sheeting down one side of her face, and she smiled at me through it, and the smile was the most frightening thing in that room. “The golden one. Your hearth-knight. Auden.” She said his name the way you set down a winning card. “My life is bound into his. It was done long ago, by hands you have never heard of, for reasons you would not understand. While I breathe, he breathes. Bring that down on me, child, and you will be standing over his body within the hour, wherever in the world he is, and you will have done it with your own two hands.”

The room went very quiet. The stand did not move. My arms had gone past burning into a deep shaking ache, and still I held it up, because I could not yet make myself do either thing, could not bring it down and could not set it aside, and into that held silence I made myself think, with the iron trembling over her skull, because she had handed me the one question I could not swing through.

“You are lying,” I said.

“Probably.” She did not even trouble to deny it. That was the horror of her. “I am on the floor with my blood in my eye and my life in your hands. Of course I would lie. There is every chance I made the whole of it up just now, to buy the only thing I have left to buy.” She tilted her bloodied face up at me, and her eyes were perfectly clear. “But you do not know that. You have felt what I can do. You spent weeks on four legs because of my magic. So you know I am able to have done a thing like this, if I chose. And being able is all I need from you. You will not gamble his life against your guess, however good your guess. That is not weakness in you. It is simply what you are, and I have my whole hand around it.”

And I stood there with the weight shaking in my grip and I came, in the space of three breaths, to the two things that were true, one after the other, and both of them ended the same way.

The first was that I could not do it. Even if she had said nothing at all, even with no bargain between us, I did not have it in me to bring an iron weight down through the skull of a woman already on the floor. I have killed nothing larger than a hen in my life. I had learned that very night that I would not let anyone make me into something I was not, and it turned out this was on that list too, even her, even to be safe. My arms had known it before I did. They would not finish it, and no amount of good reason was going to make them.

And the second was worse. Even if I had been the kind of woman who could do it, I still could not have. She had seen to that. I was as sure as I have ever been of anything that there was no binding, that she had pulled it out of the air the moment she needed it, that Auden was no more tied to her life than to the moon. I knew it. And knowing it was not the same as betting his life on it, and I am not, it turns out, a woman who can stake a life like his on what she knows against what she fears. She had found the one place in me that would never harden no matter what was done to it, and she had put herself inside it, and she had not even had to make me believe her. She had only had to make me unwilling to be wrong.

I lowered the stand.