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For most of the year, the herb was a plain, grey thing that grew where it liked and made a plain, colourless brew, enough to hold the worst of me at bay for part of an evening and no longer. But for three days, when it came into bloom on the broken ground above the tree line, the same plant turned potent past all its ordinary measure. A brew drawn from the flowering stems would hold far longer and far truer than anything Rainthorn could make the rest of the year. Those three days came once. She meant to have all of it.

It grew where nothing helpful ever grows easily, in clefts of rock that a woman as old as Rainthorn could see but could not reach. For two days I was her hands and her young back, climbing where she pointed, wedging myself into cold seams of stone to pinch out the pale, starred flowers one at a time and lay them in the lined basket she guarded as though it held coin. She named each plant as I brought it down, pointing out the ones that were not right and the ones that would kill a body that mistook them for it. I learned them because she made me learn them. Walnut-faced and short of breath on a boulder, she said a woman who depends for her life on a brew only one old crone in the world knows how to make is a woman living on borrowed time twice over, and she did not mean to leave me that way when her time came.

So I learned to brew it. In her low, smoke-dark room past the city wall, over two nights, she taught me the order of it, what goes in cold, what goes in at the boil, how long to let it stand, and how you know by the smell when it has turned from medicine to poison. My hands shook at first, then steadied. We made enough to last, jar after stoppered jar of the strong bloom-brew cooling on her shelf, more and better than I had ever held at once. For the first time since the garden, the clock at my back went a little quiet. Here was a hoard of evenings, real ones, full ones, in which to be a woman, until the bloom-stock ran out and the grey, ordinary kind was all there was again.

It cost me the temple, though. Two nights with Rainthorn were two nights I did not go down to the shrine. I felt the absence more than I let myself examine, a low ache under the work, and I think Rainthorn felt me feeling it.

She did not ask. That was her way. On the second night, with the last jar cooling and the fire low, I found I wanted to tell her. More than that, I wanted to ask her something I did not know how to ask.

“I have done a thing I am ashamed of,” I said. “Not a wrong thing. I cannot even say it was a thing I did. It happened, and I let it keep happening, and I never told Selene. Now there is a shape in the middle of my life that she cannot see, and I did not put it there to hurt her or to hide from her. It grew while I was not watching, and now I do not know how to tell her it is there without it sounding like I kept it from her on purpose.”

Rainthorn stirred the fire and did not look at me. “This thing. It is the man.”

I had not said it was a man. “Yes.”

“You have been going to him.”

“To a temple. He happens to be there. It is not”—I stopped, because I had no plain word for what it was. “I do not know what it is. But it is mine, and it is real, and I should have told her. Every day I did not tell her made the next day harder, until now telling her at all feels like confessing to something, when at the start it would have been nothing.”

She was quiet a while, working the coals. When she spoke, she did not soften it, which was why I trusted her.

“You think you cannot trust her with it.” She held up a knotted hand before I could argue. “Not because she would betray you. You know she would not. You are afraid of the telling itself. You have got it into your head, since the garden, that opening your mouth about a thing you care for is how you lose it. A man you loved taught you that lesson, and you learned it well, and now you are using it on the wrong people.” She set the iron down. “Child, hear an old woman. The trust a man broke and the trust you owe a friend are not the same coin. He spent the one. That does not empty the other. You are letting a thing that happened to you decide how you treat a woman who took you in off the road and asked nothing back. Selene is not the man. Tell her the plain truth, that it grew quiet and you should have spoken sooner, and let her be your friend about it. She will. The only one keeping it a secret now is you.”

I sat with that, and it landed where the true things land, low and sore.

“You are right,” I said. “Tomorrow. I will tell her tomorrow.”

* * *

I took the first of the strong brew the next morning, before we started up to the city, and I was surprised at what the good stock could do.

The grey brew had only ever pushed the fox back a pace and held it grumbling at arm’s length. This did more. It drew the fox all the way out of me. I held my hands up in the grey dawn light of Rainthorn’s room, and they were my hands again, every one of the ten fingers ending where a finger should end, the hard, curved claws gone back into nails, into skin, into the hands I was born with. I went to the cracked mirror on her wall. The coarse, frost-white streak that had run wrong at my temple for a while, that no comb would lie flat, had softened and settled back into the silver of the rest of my hair. I was a silver-haired woman again and nothing more, nothing turning into anything else. No gold in my eyes. No animal crouched behind my own face waiting for its moment.

I stood and looked a long while, because I had not seen this woman in so long I had half stopped believing she was still under everything. Whole. Entirely myself, entirely human, for as long as the strong brew held. It was the deepest reprieve I had known since the cottage, and it ached even as it eased me, because I knew the shape of it now. I knew it for a borrowed evening and not a cure, knowing that by the next dawn the fox would be back at the edge of me and the streak would coarsen again. But for today, I was a woman. Only that. I let myself have it.

* * *

We came up to the city that afternoon, Rainthorn and I and the basket of cooling jars. I had the words half-built in my mouth the whole way, the plain telling I had promised, but I never got to use them.

There was a man at Selene’s door.

I knew the set of his shoulders before anything else, the still way he stood waiting, and my stomach dropped clean through the floor of me. Auden. At Selene’s door, in daylight, in the part of the city where Lady Liora lived, with my grey shawl folded over his arm.

The shawl still carried the temple. Even from the foot of the steps I caught it, the incense and the woodsmoke gone into the wool over the nights it had wrapped me there. It lay now against the plain dark of his unmarked clothes, the lower city’s poor sanctuary brought up the hill and resting against the chest of the man who kept it, the two halves of the world I had been holding apart standing together on a respectable doorstep in the afternoon light. He had come to bring back the shawl. I understood it at once, and it unsteadied me a little, because a man with an angle would have kept it as a reason to hope for my return, and he had not. He had brought back the thing I left because it was mine and I should have it.

Selene reached the door before I could think of what to do.

She opened it on him and took in the whole of it in half a breath, the unmarked clothes, the bearing, the plain silver veil-pendant at his throat she would know on sight. A Veilborn at her door with her chaperone-charge’s shawl over his arm, and something kindled behind her dark eyes, quick and bright and entirely past my power to stop.

“You’ll be looking for Lady Liora,” she said, warm as a hearth, before he had gotten out more than half a sentence. “She’s just behind me. You’ve saved her a worry, as she’s been fretting over that shawl. Come in, come in. You can’t stand in a doorway, and I’ve only just put the water on.”

Auden did not want to come in. I saw it plainly. He had come to hand over a shawl and go, and now a sharp-eyed noblewoman was drawing him over a threshold into a house full of women he did not know. He could feel, as an animal feels weather, that he had stepped into something with more in it than tea. He hung back half a step. Then he looked past Selene to me and held my eyes, and I understood the question in them as clearly as if he had spoken it. Is this all right? Do you want me here? Say the word and I will make my excuses and go. He was asking my leave. In a house that was not his, pulled in against his own wish, he would not so much as sit down without knowing I wanted him to.

I could have freed him. One small shake of my head and he would have bowed and gone. I knew it, and Rainthorn knew it as well, because her hand came to rest light at the small of my back. The calm in her touch told me without words to let it happen, that this was the mission, that this was the thing we needed and could not buy. So I held still. I did not give him the look that would have set him free. I left him standing in the trap with his eyes on me, asking to be let out, and I let the mission win. I have carried the cost of it since, that the first thing I ever did to Auden in the daylight was fail to save him from my own friend.

“Stay,” I made myself say. “Please. There’s tea.”

Relief and wariness fought in his face, and he came in.