Page 57
Tsuki broke the remaining tension, dropping onto a rock above us from his hiding place. His fur was bristling as he addressed us in an indignant tone.
“Before either of you thanks me, yes, I left,” he announced. “A flying squirrel is no use against a wolf, only as a wolf’s supper, so one of us had to keep his head. I did so usefully. There is water forty paces down the slope, and the ground past it is flat enough to camp. You will not be getting back up the track tonight, for the path is impassable in the dark with that arm.” He cleaned a paw, having delivered his report in a single breath. “You are welcome.”
He was right, as usual. The fight had driven us down off the track, and the slope behind us was too steep to climb in the dark. My horse was gone, but Auden’s mount stood blowing in a stand of trees near the water, unhurt.
“We camp,” Auden said firmly. “We tend to this.” He gestured to his arm. “We climb by daylight when we can see the holds. The spring will wait one more night.”
* * *
We built a camp beneath a large fallen rock beside the stream. I gathered firewood, and he built the fire one-handed with practised efficiency. Once the light was established, we turned to his injury.
I helped him out of his coat and shirt. Seeing him bare-chested in the firelight, even with the long wound bleeding down his arm, made my breath catch. He was built without waste, the firelight casting gold over his broad shoulders, the flat of his chest, and the faint, pale lines of old scars across his skin. A heat rose in me that had nothing to do with pity, born of the simple presence of a warm man an arm’s length away in the dark. I had not looked at anyone like that in a long time, and I forced my attention back to his injury.
I cleaned the wound with water, a strip torn from my underskirt, and the flask of spirits he carried. He sat motionless, his breath hissing once as the spirits hit the tear before settling into a steady rhythm. I bound the arm securely, my hands remaining against his bare skin.
In all the weeks since my betrayal, I had withdrawn from every living touch, flinching from contact. Now I knelt close beside him in the firelight, my palms flat against his warm shoulder to steady him. As I worked, the movement shifted into something deeper. My hands slowed. I was no longer merely tending a wound. I was touching him, a living man, warm and breathing beneath my fingers. He knew it, remaining still, and I did not pull away.
“You fought back there,” he said softly, watching my hands. “I have trained soldiers who would have dropped that spear and run, yet you set your feet and held.” He chose his words carefully, navigating around the strength he had sensed in the dark without pressing for a name. “I would not have walked out of that wood alive without you. I want you to know I see that.”
“You opened your arm keeping them off me first,” I replied, keeping my eyes on the cloth. “Do not claim you fought alone.”
“I am not keeping count,” he said gently. “Not with you.”
I looked up. He was close, closer than I had allowed anyone to be since the marble, the water, and the ruin. The fire lit one side of his face in gold while the other rested in shadow, his expression as open as it had been across the drum in the temple. The adrenaline of surviving the fight lingered between us, creating a raw, shared vulnerability. Warmth spread through me, and the internal voice that always commanded me to run grew silent.
I did not kiss him. A stubborn part of me knew we needed firmer ground than a violent night in a dark wood, and I trusted that instinct. But I did not pull my hand back. I left it resting over the bandage, directly over his heart, which beat steady and strong against my palm. After a moment, he raised his good hand, placing it over mine and pressing it gently to his chest, his thumb brushing once across my knuckles.
In the weeks following the betrayal, I had believed my capacity for connection was permanently gone, that I would slide into the fox’s shape without ever feeling a man’s touch as anything other than a threat. Yet here, in a dark wood with blood drying on my skin, that capacity returned. Beneath the warmth lay a connection that ran deeper and older than the few weeks we had known each other, as if a part of me had recognized him long before we ever met. I set that thought aside to examine later, but the feeling remained, real, steady, and alive.
The fox remained banked low inside me, silent and still. The grief and terror that usually fed the curse found no purchase in this moment. There was only the firelight, his heartbeat beneath my hand, and the quiet night. For the first time in memory, I was not afraid of being close, and I wished to be nowhere else.
Chapter 27
We went up by the grey first light, before the sun had cleared the ridge, while the dead beasts still lay stiffening on the track below us.
Auden went first, testing the holds with his good arm, the wounded one bound tight against his chest. I came behind, the satchel of surviving brew strapped across my back where I could feel every bottle, and the waxed feather Rainthorn had given me buttoned into an inner pocket over my heart. Tsuki went ahead of us both, flowing up the rock face as though the climb were a thing invented for his personal amusement, doubling back now and then to tell us how slow we were.
The higher we climbed, the more the country changed. The ill weight that had pressed on us in the dusk was gone, burned off by the daylight and by something else, something in the thinning air that felt scoured and pure, older than the wrong thing below. The stunted trees fell away. Bare grey stone took their place, and then, past a shoulder of the mountain that no path led to, we came out into a high hollow, and the spring was there.
It was not what I had pictured. I had imagined something grand, a waterfall, a pool ringed in old carved stone. This was small. A basin of dark rock no wider than a cottage floor, filled with water so still and so black it looked solid, fed by no stream I could see and draining to nowhere. The surface did not move. Not a ripple, not a breath of wind reached it, though the air moved everywhere else. Around its rim, half-sunk in the moss and the lichen, stood a ring of stones so old their carving had worn to almost nothing, only the ghosts of shapes remaining, older than the empire, older than the temples I was raised in, older, I thought, than the gods I had been taught to name.
“I will keep watch,” Auden said quietly. He had stopped at the edge of the hollow, as though he understood without being told that the water was not his to approach. “Do what you came to do. I will be here.”
I went to the water alone.
I knelt at the black rim, took the feather from over my heart, and unwrapped it. Rainthorn had told me the words, and I said them, low, into the stillness, the old river-tongue of my mother’s country that I had not known I still carried until it came up out of me whole. Then I set the feather on the black surface and let it go.
It did not float. It sank, turning, without a ripple, down into a dark that had no bottom, and the moment it passed out of sight the still water woke.
Not with wind. With pictures.
They came up through the black as heat comes up off a summer road, bending the air. I saw the palace, but from the inside, from passages I had never walked. I saw a door in a wall that no map showed. I saw, behind it, a room older than the house built around it, where a fire burned the wrong colour and the air sat heavy, and I understood, as you understand things in the spring’s telling, that I was being shown the true centre of the empire. Not the throne. This. A cold room that had been doing its work in the same place since before the first stone of the palace was laid.
And I saw her.
The woman from the knight’s chambers. The one who had come through the wall on my first night in the palace, whose hand I had opened with my teeth. She stood in the cold room with her slate-grey hair and her ageless face, and the spring showed her to me across a great reach of years, the same woman in the same room, reign after reign, emperor after emperor kneeling before her and rising and dying while she did not change. I saw her called by one name and then another and then another, the names sloughing off her like old skin, and under all of them the same cold patience, the same terrible usefulness, three hundred years of it and more, the hidden engine of the house that had unmade my own.
Morrigwen. The spring gave me the name she wore now as it gives everything, plainly, without weight, a fact laid on the black water. Morrigwen, who served the emperors of the south. Morrigwen, who had made the fire I was thrown into. Morrigwen, who lived behind a door in the deep palace that no map showed, and who was hunting me still.
