Page 55
He could not read the craft. Turning the bottle in the dark yielded nothing, no label, no scent through the stopper, only its terrifyingly ordinary appearance. He could not say what it did or how to undo it, but he understood the shape of it: she had disguised a poison as a cure, made two, and sent one out tonight, the very night she told him the matter was hers.
There was only one person the matter had ever been about.
He stood in the witch’s cold chambers with the twin of the thing meant to destroy the woman he had ruined, entirely helpless. He did not know where she was. He could not ask. He could not send a single guard to a door without raising questions as to why the emperor hunted a lowborn girl, questions that would break the alliance, shame the empress, and lay his ruinous heart open to the court. The walls he had built to keep himself from reaching her held him now, while a poison flew across his city in the claws of a bird he could not recall.
He set the bottle down in the clean ring its twin had left, turned to the exact angle it had held. If Morrigwen learned he had been there, she would know he had turned against her. A man with no other weapon does not throw away his sole advantage, which was that she still believed him too broken to move.
He returned through the dark the way he had come. He was still afraid, but the fear now carried an edge. He could not reach Liora, but he could learn what Morrigwen was doing. He could move against her in the dark, quietly, with the patience she had taught his family by example. He could keep moving against her until he found a way to place himself between the poison and the girl before the bird finished its flight. He did not know how. He knew only that he had stopped grieving and started hunting in the same hour, in the same cold room, and that he was no longer doing nothing.
* * *
We returned from the tavern warm, loose, and laughing. As we turned into the lane, the crow came out of our open window.
It flew low over our heads, three-legged and certain, just as it had flown that morning. The laughter died in all three of us. Tsuki leapt from Selene’s shoulder onto the wall, his fur bristling, but the bird was already gone over the roofs toward the palace. We stood in the dark street, staring at our open window and the lamp still burning inside. No one wanted to be first through the door.
I went first. It was my form in those bottles.
The shelf had been swept clean, the bottles knocked off in one hard pass. The floor beneath was a wreck of glass and spilled tincture, the green, rich scent of Rainthorn’s work soaking into the boards. Two of the strong brews lay shattered against the wall, and the rest, the patient rows of bloom-stock we had gathered in the high forest and laboured over while the herb was potent, were gone. Wet glass caught the lamplight as the smell filled the room.
I went down on my knees.
My legs simply gave out, leaving me kneeling in the spilled liquid with broken glass under my hands, unable to draw a breath. That very morning, I had stood before Rainthorn’s cracked mirror after my dose and looked at myself. There had been ten ordinary fingers on my hands, no claws, and the white streak at my temple lay quiet and silver-dark under my hair. My eyes had held no gold at all, only their natural grey. I had been a whole woman in the glass. That was what the strong brew bought, not comfort, but a morning where I could look at my face and find it human.
Now it lay on the floor. Those mornings were gone. I had watched us gather and stopper every drop of this year’s bloom, representing days of labour and my only chance for the year. A bird had entered through my open window while I laughed in a tavern and poured it all into the floorboards. There would be no more, for the herb was finished blooming in the low country. All I had left was the weak brew that bought a few hours, buying less every week as my grief grew. Behind the weak brew was nothing, and behind nothing was the fox, with me awake inside it for the rest of my existence.
I think I was making a sound. Selene was on the floor beside me, ignoring the glass, wrapping both arms around me and repeating my name. Tsuki sat motionless on the sill, and Rainthorn stood over the ruin of her work, her face turned to stone. For a while, none of them tried to make me get up, which was the kindest mercy, for there was nothing on the other side of standing except a smaller, broken life, and I was not ready to face it.
A long time passed before I lifted my head.
When I finally moved, it was only to gather the few bottles that had survived, knocked into the back corners, three or four of the weak brew, all I had left in the world. I crawled across the floor, picking them out of the glass one by one. The last bottle had rolled across the room to rest against the far wall. When my fingers closed around it, something made me pause, a faint note of unease I could not name, a subtle feeling that this bottle did not sit quite right in my hand.
Yet I was kneeling in the ruin of everything that kept me human, my eyes wet with tears. A bottle was a bottle. I had lost so much that night that one small irregularity was not worth examining. I gathered it up with the rest, held them against my chest like the last warm coals in a cold house, and did not look at it again.
Chapter 26
I woke the next morning into the smaller life.
That is the only way I have ever found to say it. I had gone to sleep in the wreck of everything that kept me whole, and I woke knowing the wreck was still there, that it had not been a dream. The strong brew was now a lingering scent in the floorboards, and the mornings I could look at my own face and find all of it human were behind me, numbered and few. I lay on Selene’s narrow spare bed and did not want to get up, because getting up meant standing into the new, diminished size of my world.
Then Rainthorn came in without knocking, setting a cup of the weak brew on the sill. She sat down on the end of the bed with her old hands folded and offered no gentle words.
“On your feet, child,” she said. “I have a task for you.”
That was her kindness, and it was precisely what I needed, not empty comfort, but a purpose. She did not tell me everything would be all right, for she did not lie, and we both knew the spilled brew could not be gathered back. Instead, she spoke of a place in the hills with a spring old enough to answer questions, and a feather wrapped in waxed cloth that the water could read. She told me that if I went up there and cast the feather into the spring, I would return knowing the name and the dwelling of the creature who had done this to us. She added that a final bloom might still be standing on that high, cold ground, the last strong-stock left in the world. I was the only one who could bring it down.
She gave me something to fight against when I had spent the night believing there was nothing left to do but shrink. So I got up.
* * *
Auden did not argue when I told him I was going. His quiet acceptance proved he understood something about me that most men take years to learn, if they ever learn it at all.
He arrived at Selene’s door within an hour of my message, already dressed for the road in his russet coat. He listened to the whole explanation, the feather, the spring, and the dark reputation those western hills carried, with grave attention. At the end, he did not claim it was too dangerous, nor did he offer to go alone and return with the answer like a parcel.
“Two horses, then,” he said. “Mine and a hired one. We can be past the western gate before the watch changes and into the hills by dark, if your old woman’s road is the one I think it is.”
“You are not going to tell me to stay home?”
“You would not stay,” he replied, “and I find I would rather have you where I can see you than spend the day looking over my shoulder. A scrying-spring is no use to either of us if you are not the one to throw the feather, and I would not know the first thing about the rite even if you tried to teach me on the road. We go together, or I follow you up that mountain at a distance like a fool. I would rather not be a fool, if you will allow it.”
