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“There,” she said. “There she is. My name is Selene. The rude one is Tsuki, whom you’ve met. And you are safe here, gorgeous, for whatever that’s worth, which in this palace is not nothing.”

She fed me broth warmed over the fire, and changed the dressing on my leg with hands that knew their work, and all the while she talked, low and easy, not waiting for answers, and the sound of a human voice that wished me no harm was the sweetest thing I had heard since my world had ended two days before.

It was only when she sat back, the leg rebound and the broth gone, that her eyes went to the pendant at my throat and stayed there. She looked at it a long moment. Then she looked at my eyes, and something passed over her face, the same recognition I had seen in Tsuki, but slower, more troubled.

“That,” she said quietly, “is no animal’s trinket.” She did not touch it. “And you don’t have an animal’s eyes.” She was still for a moment, and I watched the practical woman weigh a cost she could not easily afford and decide to spend it anyway. “Tsuki,” she said, not looking away from me. “Go and fetch Rainthorn.”

* * *

Rainthorn came after dark. She came not through the courtyard but through a low door I had not noticed, the way of someone who knew the unwatched paths of the palace fringe, with a heavy leather bag worn soft by years and a cloak that smelled of green growing things and woodsmoke and, beneath that, something that lifted the fur along my spine, not danger exactly, but power, old and quiet.

She was a woman. I had not known what Rainthorn would be until she stepped into the firelight, old and broad and slow, with a face like a walnut and pale eyes that missed nothing. She stopped just inside the door and looked at me across the room, and unlike Selene, unlike Tsuki, she did not soften and she did not startle. She only looked, a long time, and her face grew grave.

“Well,” she said at last. “Selene, girl. What have you let into your house.”

She crossed to me slowly and crouched, her old knees cracking, and she read me the way the temple physician had once read a fever, and I let her, because Selene stood behind her with her arms folded and her jaw set, and I had decided to trust the people in this room.

Rainthorn’s eyes went to the pendant and held there, longer than Selene’s had, and where Selene had seen something fine and out of place, Rainthorn saw something else. Her breath changed. She did not touch it. “Where did you come by this,” she murmured, to no one. “Old. Older than old. And it is not sleeping.” She sat back on her heels. “This is a made thing, Selene. A working. I have not felt its like in forty years of this trade, and I do not know what it is for, and I will tell you plainly that frightens me more than I care to say.”

“And the fox?” Selene asked.

Rainthorn turned her pale eyes on me, and when she spoke again it was slow, the way you speak when you are reaching back for things half-lost.

“There were stories, when I was a girl, that my own teacher only half-remembered, for they had come down to her from hers, fainter at every step.” She studied me. “The silver foxes. Sent by the gods, the old tellings said. The last of them hunted out of the world before my grandmother’s grandmother drew breath, so that no one living has seen one, and what was known of them died with them.” Her voice dropped. “They were said to carry gifts. That they could bend what a watching eye believed it saw. That they could read the grief or the joy soaked into a room long after the people were gone. That they could find paths that were not there, and walk through a door into a place the door did not lead. That they could wear, for a little while, whatever a frightened heart most feared or most longed for. And that they could bind a truth into the world with a thread of silver, though that gift, the tellings said, cost them dearest of all.” She shook her head slowly. “Whether any of it was ever true, I cannot say. It is only stories now.”

Her eyes seemed to burn into my soul.

“But you are looking at me with a woman’s eyes out of a fox’s face, child, and the thing at your throat is older than the empire, so tonight I am inclined to believe the stories.”

She pushed herself up off her knees with a groan and turned to the hearth, taking up a pitcher and pouring water into an empty pot. “There is no gift in you that I can feel,” she said. “Whatever you were meant to carry, it is locked away, the same as your shape is locked. Something heavy was laid on you, child. Heavier than I can lift.” She carried the pot to the table and set her bag down beside it and began to unpack it, jars and twists of cloth and bundles of dried stems. “I cannot break what was done to you. I will not pretend otherwise, not to you and not to you, Selene.” Selene rolled her eyes and came over to help her unpack. “Whoever bound you had power I do not have and would not want.” She set a small black pot on the table. “But I can do a small thing. A reprieve. Borrowed time, no more, and it will cost herbs I cannot easily come by, so do not look to live in it.” She glanced at Selene. “Your fire, your kettle, and another pot. And you, child.” Her pale eyes came back to me. “Whatever I stir loose in you tonight, hold on to yourself as hard as you are able.”

* * *

She brewed it in Selene’s kitchen, over Selene’s fire, while the night pressed black against the windows.

It took a long time. She crushed and measured and muttered, dropping stems and powders and three pale drops from a stoppered vial into the small pot, and the steam that rose off it changed colour twice, and the smell of it filled the room, green and bitter and strange, with something underneath that made my head swim. Selene sat on the floor beside me with one hand resting lightly on my back, not holding, just resting, a warmth and a weight that said I was not alone. Tsuki watched from the mantel with his bright eyes, for once saying nothing.

When it was done Rainthorn poured a little of it, no more than a few mouthfuls, into a shallow clay bowl and set the bowl on the floor before me, and the steam came off it pale in the firelight.

“Drink, child,” she said. “All of it. And then hold on to whatever you are, as hard as you can hold.”

I lowered my head to the bowl, and the pendant swung forward and touched the rim, and I lapped at the bitter green water, and the world fell out from under me.

I was in the river again.

Not the memory of the river. The river. The cold closed over me and the current took me and threw me, and I was tumbling in the dark water exactly as I had tumbled the night the tree broke, helpless, spun, hurled against the dark, and this time I felt all of it, every blow, the water filling my mouth, the roar of it, the certainty that it would never stop, that I would be thrown in the black torrent forever with no bottom and no air and no end.

And then, ahead of me in the churn, a pillar.

A dark shape rose out of the raging water, breaking the current, and the river drove me toward it, and I braced to be smashed against the stone, because everything in the water was a thing that broke you. I braced for the impact.

The impact did not come.

The pillar opened, and took me, and folded me into a warm embrace, and the moment it held me the river stopped raging. The torrent that had thrown me eased, and slowed, and became a gentle current threaded with light, and the black water turned clear and bright, a still bright stream flooded with sun, and the thing that held me was no longer stone. It was a man.

I could not see his face. The light was behind him and the water moved between us, but I felt the shape of him, and it surprised me to feel that the shape was not Drystan. Broader through the shoulders in a different way, taller in another way, a body I had never been held by, and yet the embrace was the most familiar thing I had ever known, as though I had been held like this before, somewhere older than my own life, and had been waiting all my days to be held like this again.

He had stilled the water. The thing that drowned me, he had reached into and made calm, and in the calm of it I could breathe, and in the calm of it, in his arms, I felt myself unfold. The fox came away from me like a held breath let go. I rose in his arms and I was a woman again, floating before him in the bright water, whole, myself, and I had not had to become anything I was not. He had only stilled the river enough that I could be what I already was.