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A servant’s door stood ajar, and a narrow flight of steps carried me down into a sudden opening of air and light. The scent changed at once, stone and wet green and the quiet breath of morning after water. I was out of the palace and into a still, ordered world of clipped hedges and raked gravel, where every line seemed considered rather than grown, and even the silence felt arranged. Ornamental water lay between stones and moss, catching the early sun and turning it to a pale, deliberate gold, as though the light itself had been placed there by careful hands.

I crossed the garden low and fast and found the cover of a stand of flowering shrubs against a small shrine, and I forced myself into the dark beneath them, into the tangle of stems and shadow, and there at last I stopped.

I lay in the dark under the shrubs with my sides heaving and my bound leg on fire and the taste of the witch’s blood drying in my mouth.

The irony of it burned in me. I had reached the capital. I had reached the palace. I had even reached my Drystan, and lost him, and fled him. I had been saved by a kind man and hunted by a woman who came through walls. The palace rose above me, vast and white and full of people who would kill me if they found me, and the witch was somewhere in it, and the man I loved was somewhere in it, grieving me and yet, somehow, doing nothing. And I was a wounded fox in a flowerbed with no plan and nowhere in all the world to go.

I pressed myself into the dark beneath the shrubs and made myself small and still, and I listened to the palace search for me, and I tried to think what to do next.

Chapter 11

I do not know how long I lay under the shrubs. It had started to rain, and I could hear the search moving through the palace above me, voices calling, doors opening, the bark of the kitchen dogs carried out into the gardens and then drawn back in. I made myself small in the dark beneath the leaves and did not move, and slowly, as the morning wore on and they found nothing, the voices thinned and the hunt drew inward again, back into the great stone body of the palace, until the garden was quiet but for the wind that blew the rain clouds away and sent a shiver down my spine, and the trickle of the ornamental water.

I did not dare to move. My leg throbbed and the cut at the corner of my mouth still hurt. The witch’s blood had dried to a bitterness on my tongue. I had nowhere to go and no way to get there, and so I stayed where I was, pressed once more to the ground beneath a roof of leaves, no better off than before. I was in the palace now, and yet it felt as though I might as well have been at the far end of the world, for now that the whole place knew of me there was no way I would ever reach him. I was turning the impossible problem over and over when a voice came out of the dark above me.

“I’ve seen foxes before, and I’ve seen fugitives before.” A pause, dry, considering. “Seeing both at once is new.”

I came up off the ground with every hair standing.

There was nothing above me but the little shrine and some shrubs and the pale sky behind them, and then a piece of the shadow under the eaves detached itself and dropped, and glided, on a thin stretched membrane of skin, down through the air to land on a low branch an arm’s length from my face. A creature no bigger than my two paws. Silver-white fur, the exact silver of my own. Luminous eyes, far too bright and far too knowing for an animal, fixed on me with what looked like a mischievous smirk. It swung its small flat tail and folded the wings of skin along its sides, wholly unconcerned about the large predator that could have swallowed it whole.

It looked at me, and I understood it had aimed its words at me, not the way Taren had spoken to me in the field, but as though it actually expected an answer. The thought broke open something in my chest that I had been holding shut for days.

“Oh, don’t do that,” the creature said, watching me with disapproval as a thin desperate sound climbed out of my throat. “Don’t. You’ll bring the whole garden down on us, and I’ve only just found you.” It tilted its head, the eyes moving over me, the silver fur, the bound leg, the pendant at my throat. “Before I help you, I need one thing, and I need you to be honest, because it concerns me personally. Are you the sort of fox who eats squirrels? Or the sort who can keep her impulses under control?”

I stared at it. Before I could make any sound at all, it answered for me.

“No,” it said, watching my eyes. “No, you’re not the eating sort, are you. In fact, you’re not really a fox at all.” It crept closer along the branch, fearless, peering. “I’ve lived in this palace a long time, and I know what’s magic and what isn’t the same way you know warm from cold. You, little silver sister, are lit up like a festival lantern. Whatever you are, you are not what you appear to be.” It paused, and seemed almost delighted. “And you’re hurt, and hunted, and you’ve a pendant in your fur worth more than this entire shrine, which makes you a very great deal of trouble. This is going to be so exciting. Selene will love you. I am Tsuki, by the way, and you are coming with me. Try to keep up, and try, sincerely, not to eat me.”

He dropped from the branch and glided low across the gravel, and I followed, because he was the first thing in the world that had seen me and named me, and because I had no other place or person to turn to, and because a small flying squirrel at least could not skin me alive or kill me with magic.

It led me along the wall, through a gap behind the shrine, down a servants’ path screened by hedges, keeping always to the cover I would have chosen for myself, as though it knew precisely how a hunted thing needed to move. He glided ahead and waited, glided ahead and waited, and twice he stopped me with a sharp high whistle when footsteps crossed somewhere near, and we pressed into the shadows until the steps had gone.

We came to a quieter wing, older and plainer than the great halls, the apartments of those who served the court without ruling it. Tsuki slipped through a window left open a hand’s width, and a moment later a door at the base of the wall eased open, and I went through into a small courtyard, and from there through another door into a room.

The room was warm and close and full of living things. Herbs hung drying from the beams. Green things grew in pots on the sill. Books, more than I had seen since the temple library, stood stacked on every surface. A narrow bed, a table, a hearth, and the smell of tea and beeswax and ink. After the cold stone of the palace it was like stepping into a held breath.

A woman sat at the table with her back to me, writing. Dark hair coiled at her neck. She did not turn.

“Tsuki, if you have brought another half-dead bird into my rooms, I will wring your neck and the bird’s both, I swear it on my mother.”

“Not a bird,” Tsuki said, gliding up to land on the table by her hand.

She turned, and her eyes found me where I stood trembling in the doorway, a wet silver fox with a bound leg and a wound at her mouth and a pendant at her throat, and whatever sharp thing she had been about to say died on her lips.

She was perhaps a few years older than I was, or had been, with a sharp knowing face and dark eyes that had plainly seen a great deal and trusted little of it. She looked at me a long moment, and I braced for what came next, the recoil, the calculation, the appraisal of what a silver pelt was worth. But it did not come.

“Oh, hello, gorgeous,” she said, and there was no pity in it, only a brisk fond warmth, a young woman taking the measure of a problem she had already decided to solve. “Look at the state of you.” She rose and crossed the room, slow, her hands open, and crouched a little distance away, exactly as Taren had crouched in the field. “Someone has done you a great unkindness, haven’t they. Well. We’re going to turn you around, you and I.” She did not reach for me. She let me look at her. “No one comes into these rooms but me. You can stop shaking whenever you like.”

She glanced at the bound leg, the careful linen Taren had wrapped. “Someone’s already started the work, I see. And you’ve come a long way since, by the look of you.” Her eyes moved over me again. She reached for a cushion from the bench and set it by the hearth. “Come on. To the fire. You’re half-frozen and as wet as the rain clouds that drenched you, and neither of those suits you.”

I did not dare to move. I wanted to trust her, wanted nothing more than to stretch out on the soft-looking cushion and rest by the warm hearth while a friendly girl my own age helped me make sense of what had happened to me, but I was too shaken still, by the witch and by the escape through the palace.

“She doesn’t trust easily,” Tsuki observed from the table. “I can’t think why. Cursed, hunted, half-frozen. No reason at all to be wary of strangers.”

Selene shot the squirrel a look, and then she did the thing that unmade me. She went back to her chair, turned half away, and busied herself hanging a small pot of water over the fire, leaving me the room and the choice, the way you leave a wild thing the space to decide for itself that you are safe.

So my fox brain unclenched and let me move. I crossed the warm room on my bound leg and lay down on the cushion she had set out, and the warmth reached into me, and she watched me from the corner of her eye and did not move too fast, and something that had been clenched in me since the river loosened, just a little.