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* * *
The crow had watched the women until they turned the corner before dropping from the eave to the sill.
Morrigwen sat in the deep quiet of her chambers, her eyes closed, her sight laid over the bird’s. Through its eyes, she looked into the lamplit room the three had left, and she was not pleased by what she saw.
She had expected the squalor of survival, a girl hunted toward the animal, scraping by on whatever a back-alley charm-seller could assemble, frightened and diminishing, a matter of weeks before the magic finished its work. That was the nature of the curse, and that was its patience. It did not need her help to win.
What she saw ranged along the wall in the failing light, however, was true craft.
She had the crow walk the sill, turning its head to count the bottles and read what it could through the glass, the colour, the cling, the sediment. The longer she looked, the colder she became. This was no charm-work. This was the labour of an herbalist with real schooling and patience, someone who understood the binding from the inside, who had found the few living things that could fight it, and who had been fighting it steadily, dose upon dose, for as long as the girl had been in the city. Holding the form. Buying the woman back from the fox one evening at a time.
So that was why it had not finished. Three centuries Morrigwen had practised the long arts. She knew to the grain how a curse should run, and this one was running slow because of the hand on the brake. Some old woman with dirt under her nails and a gift she had no business keeping had set herself directly across Morrigwen’s work.
It was almost admirable. Morrigwen had let very few things impress her in three hundred years, but competence was one of them. It changed nothing.
Drawing the crow’s sight back into herself, she considered the simplest answer. The herbalist could be removed. People with dirt under their nails were removed every day, and no one counted them. But a removed herbalist left a body, and a body left questions. The girl and her patroness would only go to ground deeper, and Morrigwen had not stayed unseen across the reigns of seven emperors by leaving bodies where a quieter method would serve.
No. Let the herbalist keep her craft. Let her keep brewing her patient reprieves. Morrigwen would simply see to it that the next reprieve the girl reached for was not one at all.
She worked for a long while at the table where her real craft was kept, beside a fire that burned the wrong colour. When she finished, she held a small measure of something in a stoppered bottle. She stood it among her instruments beside its empty twin and looked at it. It was remarkably close to the herbalist’s own work, held in glass similar enough to pass a frightened glance in poor light. It would not hold the woman against the fox. It would do the opposite, and there would be no arguing it back, for the ingredient she had brewed it from did not grow on this side of the world, nor in this season. The only stores of it within a thousand leagues sat on her own shelf, and she did not intend to share.
She called the crow off the sill. It came and took the bottle in its claws, careful as a creature that had done this before, and she sent it back out into the soft spring dark toward the open window across the city.
“Reach for your medicine, little vixen,” she said to the empty room in the green light. “Reach for it when the good bottles are gone and you are afraid, and drink down the rest of yourself.”
* * *
Drystan came up to his chambers late and alone. He knew something was wrong before his hand left the door. The room was warm though he had ordered no fire, and the glow that met him was not the clear gold of a hearth, but the sick, low green he had seen only a handful of times in his life.
She sat in his chair. Three centuries in the service of his house had given Morrigwen the unbothered ease of a thing older than the furniture. She sat in the emperor’s seat by a fire she had lit in colours no honest wood made, watching him enter. She did not rise, telling him everything about how the meeting would go.
“You failed,” she said without greeting. “The captain walks free, three of the five stood in your hall and watched you fold, and the whole order is awake now, asking why their brother was nearly leashed. You broke a custom older than your great-grandfather and had not the spine to finish it, which is the worst of both roads. You made noise, gained nothing, and showed your hand to the one quarter of this court that answers to no one but itself.”
He did not sit, refusing to give her the image of the emperor taking a scolding on the edge of his bed like a child. “I will not cage a man who has done nothing.”
“You had my cause, which was sufficient, and which you lacked the stomach to act on,” she said without heat. That was the worst of her, that there was never any heat. “You have gone soft in a place where an emperor cannot afford it. We both know the shape of that softness, and we both know her name, though you have not had the courage to say it aloud since the night you reached into my fire and unmade my work to keep a village girl breathing one season longer.”
The green fire popped. The old altar-cold went through him, bringing back the memory of the silver fox, the pelt in the flames, and her voice telling him he might have made his own downfall. He held his face still by an effort that cost him more than he would ever let her see.
“What have you done?”
“What you would not.” She rose, standing neither tall nor imposing, yet remaining the most terrifying presence in the empire. “You need not trouble yourself with the particulars. You have made it plain you cannot be relied upon where this is concerned, so I am relieving you of it. The matter is mine now. It was always going to return to me.” She gathered her shawl, crossed to the door, and paused at his shoulder without looking at him. “Grieve if you must. You have made an art of it. But grieve out of my way.”
She left. The green fire vanished the instant the door closed, dying all at once as no true fire dies. He stood in the dark of his rooms, his heart hammering.
Then, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he moved.
She had told him the particulars were not his to know. She had also, in her certainty, made a mistake she would not have made with a man she still deemed dangerous: she had revealed that she had only just acted, then walked away from her chambers to stand over him. That meant her rooms were empty now, for as long as it took her to return.
He knew the way. Every emperor of his line knew the path to the witch’s door, though most had the sense never to use it. Moving without a lamp through the servants’ stair and the old passage behind the east gallery, the emperor of the south passed through his own palace like a thief. At her door, he paused only long enough to feel the fear, then stepped inside.
She had not bothered to lock it. No one in their right mind would dare cross that threshold, and the rest of the court did not know she existed. The chambers were older than the palace built around them. Air sat heavier here, the green light clinging to stone though the fire was out. The room had been doing the same work in the same place long before his family wore the crown. Standing there, he understood that this was the true centre of his house, not the throne, nor the high temple, but the cold room where the power that sustained them resided. He had served it his whole life without seeing its face, and now he was looking at it.
On the long table, the traces of craft were fresh. The residue hung in the air, marked by strange-coloured scorches on the stone and instruments still warm. Among them stood a small stoppered bottle, beside a clean ring in the dust where its twin had recently rested.
He picked it up.
It looked like medicine. That was what turned him cold all through, colder than the green fire ever had. It looked like an apothecary’s work, like something a careful healer would hand across a counter, a soft amber tincture in honest glass, the kind of bottle that signalled mercy, sitting on a witch’s table in a room that had not held mercy in three hundred years. Freshly made, one of a pair, with its twin already gone into the night.
