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Cael saw him understand it. Saw him turn, looking for another way, and find the only one too far, a long loop around the outer galleries that would cost him minutes the fox in Cael’s arms did not have. They both knew it in the same moment, across the height between them, the two of them and a drop neither could cross.

“I have her,” Cael called down, low, pitched to carry no further than the rail. “Or I have something. I do not understand the half of what I am holding and I do not have time to. I know only that it is barely breathing, and that the moment you saw it you went the colour of a sheet, so it matters to you, and the only thing I could think to do was bring it to you.”

“We have the cure.” Auden lifted the clay jar in both hands, and his voice cracked on it. “She has to drink it, all of it, now, whatever she is. Cael, she has to drink it now.”

“Then you had better find wings.” Cael looked at the long drop between them, and the locked inner halls at his back, and did the soldier’s arithmetic and did not like the answer. “There is no way up to me from down there that does not run the long way round through the inner palace, and that is minutes she does not have. Throw it and it breaks. I cannot climb down to you carrying her.” He looked at the fox along his arm, at the gold filling her eyes, the last rim of her own colour going. “And we are losing her while we stand here arguing the stairs.”

For a moment there was nothing from below but Auden’s face turned up white in the lamplight, helpless with the jar in his hands, and the helplessness on it was a hard thing to watch on a man Cael had never once seen at a loss.

Then the squirrel moved.

“You cannot walk it up,” he said, already down off Auden’s shoulder and onto the wall, claws set into the stone, “but I can climb it. Give it here.”

“It is half your size,” Auden said.

“Then I will be slow.”

Cael watched him come up the courtyard wall in fits and bursts, the jar dragging and swinging under him, stopping at every ledge to set himself and haul the weight after, and it was the longest climb he had ever stood and watched, with the fox going colder in his arms the whole length of it. Twice the jar caught on the stone and he thought it would fall. Twice it held. And then the squirrel came over the rail and dropped the jar into Cael’s waiting hand and lay flat on the stone with his sides heaving.

“Open it,” he managed. “All of it, into her. Now.”

Cael got the stopper out with his teeth and his free hand, and laid the fox along his forearm, and tipped the jar to her muzzle. For a terrible moment nothing happened, the liquid running over her teeth and down without her taking any of it, and he thought they had come all this way to pour medicine over a dead animal after all. Then the small throat worked. Once, and again, and then she was swallowing in earnest, drinking it down in long pulls, and he poured until the jar was empty and her breathing had changed under his hand, deepened, steadied, the long pauses gone out of it.

What happened then he had been warned of and still was not ready for.

The fox in his arms began to come apart and remake itself, fur drawing back into skin, the small body lengthening and turning heavy all at once, and between one breath and the next it was not a fox he held along his arm but a young woman, naked, her silver hair spilling over his sleeve, her face slack and unknowing against him.

Cael looked away before the change had finished settling. He turned his face to the dark of the gallery and kept it there, and with his free hand he got his own coat off his shoulders, one-armed, awkward, and brought it down over her, covering her to the knee, before he let himself look again, and then he looked only at her face. She was a stranger to him.

“I have her,” he called down to Auden, and heard his own voice come out rough. “She is back. She is breathing.” He did not say the rest, that she had not woken, that a body could be pulled back from the edge and still slide off it, because Auden would hear all of that anyway, in the spaces between. “Get out. The way you came, out to the outer gate, and I will bring her to you there. I cannot carry her down through the inner halls without being seen, and if she is seen I cannot answer for what they do with her.”

“Cael.”

“Go, brother. I will bring her to you. I have not failed you yet tonight and I do not mean to start.”

He heard Auden go. Gathering the girl up properly against his chest, the coat held close around her, the witch’s coat bundled beneath, and the squirrel climbed slow and spent up his arm to ride on his shoulder, and he started along the gallery to find the stair down.

He had gone perhaps a dozen steps when the door at his back swung shut on its own weight and the latch dropped home with a heavy iron sound. He turned and tried it. It did not give. Some counterweight, some old mechanism in a palace full of them, and it had sealed the way he had come.

He took the measure of it. Going back was impossible. He could not climb down to the court carrying a woman who could not hold on. He did not know if the cure had taken for good or bought her an hour. She needed the herb-woman, or a warm bed and someone who knew more than he did, and she needed it now, and there was only one way off this gallery that was not the locked door or the drop.

Ahead, at the end of the walkway, stood a tall pair of doors he knew the other side of as well as he knew anything in this palace. Going through them was the last thing he wanted. It was also the only way left.

He went to them, and shifted her weight to free one hand, and pushed them open, and carried her through.

* * *

I woke slowly, and the first thing I knew was warmth.

It was not my own. I had been so cold, colder than the dark, cold all the way down to wherever I had been, and now there was warmth around me and an arm under me holding me up, and rough wool against my skin that smelled of leather and steel and a man I did not know. My head lay against his chest and my legs hung over his arm, and I could not have lifted my hand to save my life, so I did not try. I only lay there and breathed. Breathing did not hurt. After everything, that alone was so good that I nearly slipped back under from the relief of it.

I was myself again. A woman. The gold had let go of me. Somewhere back in the dark I had been a fox dying in a wall, and now I had my own body again, my own weight, my own hands, and I did not understand how, and I was too far down to ask.

I got my eyes open.

Lamplight, and a high gold ceiling sliding past above me, and the line of a jaw I half knew, dark hair, a hard set profile I had last seen for half a breath through a gap in a falling cloak. Cael. The commander. He carried me with his eyes fixed ahead and his mouth a flat line, and there was a slight weight on his shoulder that turned its head and looked down at me with two black eyes, and Tsuki’s voice, when it came, was gentler than I had ever heard it.

“There she is,” he said. “Welcome back, little sister.”