Page 56

So we rode out together.

He carried a bow across his back, a sword at his hip, and a long wooden stave shod with a steel point bound to his saddle where his hand could reach it, the kind of weapon country people keep for wild boar. Looking at his gear as he checked the girth, I thought only that it was sensible to go armed into hills with such an ill omen upon them. I did not yet realize how grateful I would be for every piece of steel he brought.

Tsuki rode with us, of course, because Selene had made me swear to take him, and because nothing short of an imperial decree could have kept him from a journey that promised new country to be insufferable about. He perched across the withers of my hired horse like a small silver figurehead, spending the first hour informing me of everything he could see that I could not, which was, by his account, nearly everything.

We passed through the western gate into a morning bright and cold. For the first few hours, the road remained ordinary, climbing gently through farmland, past the last scattered villages, and finally into the open reaches. As we rode, we talked.

I had not expected how natural it would feel to speak with him on an open road, with the city sinking behind us. In the capital, every interaction between us had been observed, by Selene, by the court, and by my own fear, every word weighed for what it might reveal. Out here, there was no audience to perform for and no role I had to maintain. The passing leagues loosened my speech just as the tavern fire had eased my shoulders. We spoke of the lower city and the people he watched over. We spoke of the river country I half belonged to yet had never seen, and he listened to my descriptions of a place known only through my mother’s tales as if it were a real land he might one day visit. I did not share the true, dark shape of my life, but I offered him more genuine truths than I had given anyone outside the coven in a long time. He gave true things in return, and as the road wound into higher, wilder country, I found myself almost happy.

The landscape shifted before the light did. The farms vanished, the good road gave way to a stony track through thinning trees, and the hills shouldered close and grey on either side. Our conversation quieted, for the terrain did not invite speech. A weight pressed upon us from no obvious source. The birds fell silent. The horses grew uneasy, flattening their ears back. As the light lengthened into gold and thinned toward dusk, I understood why the villagers refused to come up here after dark. I felt it too, the distinct sensation of being watched by a place that had learned how to wait.

“Stay close,” Auden said quietly. Unslinging his bow, he laid an arrow across the rest without drawing it, keeping his eyes on the treeline. I kept my horse a length behind his, watching the darkness deepen between the trunks.

* * *

The first creature emerged from the dusk without a sound. The silence was the most uncanny detail, for a hunting wolf breathes, pants, and betrays its presence. This thing came at a dead run, noiseless as a shadow. It was unnaturally large, its eyes catching the last light and reflecting it back as flat, slate grey, lacking any living shine. Where its paws struck the stony ground, they made the heavy sound real feet should make, rendering the rest of its silence far worse.

Auden’s bow was up and drawn before I fully processed what I was seeing. The arrow caught the creature in the chest. It dropped, thrashing as blood spilled from the wound, dark and slow, like something poured rather than pumped. Then more appeared, three, four, sliding out from the treeline on both sides at once with the same horrific soundlessness. The horses panicked.

Mine reared, throwing me off its back onto the stony track. I hit the ground hard, the breath knocked clean from my lungs. Even as I rolled, my hand went instinctively to the satchel at my hip, feeling for the give of broken glass. My life was in those vials, and an animal reflex made me protect them above my own bones. The glass remained whole against my hip. That was my last clear thought before the horse bolted into the dark, the silent creatures closed in, and fear gave way to survival.

“Liora, the spear!”

Auden’s voice cut through the chaos from atop his plunging horse as the steel-shod stave came swinging down through the air. I snatched it, catching the wood as I had caught a hundred tools tossed across a hundred chores in a past he knew nothing about. The stave felt solid and familiar in my hands. My body knew how to use it before my mind could reason.

I had stood like this before, not against these slate-eyed horrors, but on a black winter night with a screaming herd behind me, a girl at a barn door as ordinary wolves came out of the snow. You plant the butt, keep the point raised, and stand your ground, because running means death. My hands remembered. As the first creature leapt for my throat, I dropped the point and took its full weight on the steel. The impact drove up the stave into my shoulders, nearly tearing my arms from their sockets. I screamed, shoved, and felt it slide off the tip, raising the spear again before the next could strike.

I held my ground. I stood against the two or three that lunged at my side of the dark, while across the churned earth, Auden fought with a lethal precision I had never seen in him. His bow was gone and his sword was drawn. He moved through the pack without a wasted motion, faster than I could track, positioning himself between the worst of them and me. I was watching the warrior he had been made to be, a side completely hidden within the gentle man who fed street children and could find no home.

Then a second pack poured down from the high rocks, far larger than the first. There were too many.

One lunged from his blind side while his blade was buried in another, laying his arm open from shoulder to elbow. Three more rushed toward his turned, bleeding back. He could not recover in time, and I could not reach them with the spear. The sight of him going down beneath them was unbearable, and the entity inside me that I had spent weeks fearing answered the call.

The fox rose.

It was nothing like my previous slips, those gradual creeps toward the beast that I so dreaded. This was a door blown off its hinges. Between heartbeats, the world shifted register. The dusk became bright, grainy, and vast. A thousand scents crashed over me at once, the copper bite of blood, the rank breath of the beasts, crushed bracken, and his distinct, living scent beneath it all. Sound separated into sharp threads, letting me hear each individual paw hit the earth.

My hands on the stave shifted as I watched. My nails darkened, curving down into the wood to grip it as roots grip stone. The human part of me that had lived in terror of this change stood frozen at the back of my mind, while something far older took control.

It was not my enemy.

That was the realization I could not have known until that moment. The fox did not turn on me. It turned on them. I became impossibly fast, meeting the creatures on their own terms. The stave moved with lethal certainty in my altered hands as I crossed the ground, cutting into the three beasts closing on Auden’s back. I brought them down, steel, claws, and a body that instinctively knew how to slip past snapping teeth unharmed. For those few seconds, I was not fighting the fox, nor drowning in it. I was the fox, and the fox was fighting for him. Amid the blood and terror, a buried part of me felt a sudden, undeniable fierce satisfaction.

Then the fight ended. The surviving beasts broke and fled into the rocks. I stood in a ring of slain creatures, holding the bloody stave in clawed hands, gold light singing in my vision as my breath tore through my chest. The power was already receding, replaced by a deep, uncontrollable shaking.

It hit all at once, the reaction of a body that has run through death and survived. I stood shaking, unable to stop, but the tremor granted me time to force the fox back down before he could look at me.

That was the true danger of the night, coming after the beasts had fallen. The fox had risen on terror, and the terror lingered in my veins. I had to retreat from the animal shape by sheer willpower, with a wounded man ten feet behind me who must never learn what I was.

I forced my breathing into a slow, quiet rhythm, as the temple had trained me. I watched the world fade from its bright register back into the flat dusk. My claws softened, pulling back into ordinary fingers around the stave, and the gold receded from my sight. It took longer than it ever had, for more of the beast had surfaced than ever before. But the darkness was deep, his back had been turned during the worst of it, and when I finally trusted my hands and eyes again, he had not seen. The streak at my temple remained coarse as wire, but my eyes were grey, and the night hid the rest.

“Liora.” His voice was rough, strained with pain. “Liora, are you hurt?”

“No.” I kept my back to him until I was certain of my face. “I am not hurt. Are you?”

“I have had better evenings.”

A sound came out of me, half a laugh, half a tremor. His dry humour, even while bleeding in the dark, allowed me to turn around.