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Bound by the limits of his small frame, Tsuki made the hardest choice of his life: he left us both. A fox that still harbored a human soul might be found again. A knight unconscious on the floor might yet wake. But if he dropped the jar to pursue me, or stayed to guard Auden, the cure would never be crafted, and all of us would be lost.

He flew out through a high window into the night air, soaring over the dark roofs of the city toward Rainthorn’s door, carrying the jar sealed against his chest. Behind him, the palace echoed with the sharp alarm of breached wards, my knight lay unconscious in the dark, and I ran on four legs through the heart of the enemy’s lair, drawn toward the single warm light lingering in the cold stone: the quiet chamber where the emperor sat alone with his grief.

Chapter 33

I came back to myself a little at a time, surfacing as if from a heavy fever, and what I surfaced into was sheer terror.

There had been no me at all for a while. I cannot say how long. Time had lost its thread, dissolving into a single unbroken now that stretched on without end. In that space, there was only a small, frantic animal running, and the animal was all that existed. The world had shattered into nameless shapes. There was hard, cold stone beneath my paws, and I ran. There was a great booming somewhere far above, voices that were only an unshaped threat, and I fled. Light swung wildly across the corridors, and I shied away. Everything was impossibly vast. The walls climbed past any sky I knew, the legs of furniture loomed like the trunks of ancient trees, and the mouths of doorways opened endlessly. I poured myself through them low to the ground, because low to the ground was the only safety left. Around me, above me, hung the stench of the hunters: oil, steel, and the sour salt reek of men who meant harm, so thick I could taste it on the roof of my mouth.

And the worst of it, the thing I can hardly bear to set down, was that somewhere inside that fleeing creature remained a splinter of me. A girl. Awake. Trapped behind the animal’s eyes like a child shut in a dark cupboard, beating against the inside of a body that would not obey her, screaming in a voice that made no sound. Stop, stop, this is not you, you are a person, your name is—

The animal did not hear. It could not process words. It knew only the cold floor, the swinging lanterns, the reek of danger, and the single law beneath it all: run. I was in there, awake, terrified, unable to reach my own limbs. If it had gone on much longer, I would have lost even that splinter. I would have been worn down, folded under, and extinguished like a candle, leaving the fox to run into the night carrying nothing.

Then thought began to return in pieces, like feeling returning to a numb limb, each prickle a small cruelty. My name came first, and holding it felt almost too heavy to bear. Liora. I am Liora. Then came the memory of the subterranean chamber, the crow, the pale sweet vapour. Then the cold, complete realization of where I was, what I was, and that I had lost the men I came with.

With that much of myself restored, I reached down into the beast I inhabited, and I forced it to stop.

It fought me. Every animal nerve screamed that to stop was to die. I made it stop anyway. It was the first thing in all of this that I did purely because I chose to, not because it was forced upon me. It was a small thing, unseen by anyone, as I stood in the shadow of a heavy pillar on four shaking legs and held a terrified creature still by sheer force of will. I did not know then that I had just rehearsed the very thing that would save me.

The world retained its true colours, unblurred by the flat gold I dreaded. The woman was still inside me, buried beneath the fur and animal instincts. But I was suspended between the two states, neither wholly one nor the other, and I did not know how long my mind would hold before the fume or the poison pulled me under once more.

Around me, the palace was waking. Men shouted to one another, hard, flat voices passing orders down the halls. Lanterns flickered against the walls, and servants in their night-dress hurried past the ends of corridors, their arms full, their faces pale with fright. Through the noise, one word echoed continuously. Intruders. Intruders. Search the east wing. Search the galleries. They were hunting me, unaware that the target they sought now ran on four legs.

I kept to the deep shadows and kept moving, because standing still meant discovery, and I had no plan beyond escape. I passed beneath a long colonnade, through a high arch, and into a gallery. There, I stopped.

The walls had faces.

It was a long, ancient hall, lined on both sides with portraits set in heavy gilded frames. The dead of the dynasty stared out into the gloom: emperors, consorts, and children, stiff and formal, darkened by time. I had no reason to linger, but something anchored me among the painted dead. I moved down the line on four silent paws, looking up at face after face, unsure of what I sought.

Then I saw her.

She hung between two larger frames, a woman no longer young, clad in the heavy velvet of a bygone age. Her hair was bound, her hands folded over her lap. The painter had depicted her gown cut low, in the fashion of her day. There, on the pale skin above her heart, was a mark.

I knew that shape. It was as familiar to me as my own hands.

I had carried it my entire life. It flared on my skin during my darkest and highest moments, a delicate, pale tracery over my chest that my mother had bidden me keep hidden and never explained. Here it was, painted on the breast of a long-dead queen on the walls of the empire, rendered three hundred years before my birth.

My heart hammered against my ribs as I moved further down the line. I found it again on another portrait, and again, fainter, on a third: the same mark in the same place, repeating across the vanished faces of a lineage these stone walls remembered, even if the world had forgotten.

Standing there on the cold stone, a fox gazing up at her own mark on the bodies of the dead, I finally understood the truth I had spent weeks refusing to see.

It was not about my worth. It had never been about me.

He had not simply stopped loving me. I had told myself that story through a hundred sleepless nights, believing I had been weighed and found too small, too low, too common to keep. The truth was far heavier, but it was something I could stand beneath. He had seen this mark. He had recognized the sign I carried beneath my skin, a symbol these very walls were built to remember and fear. He had understood that the woman he loved posed a direct threat to the power he had been raised to preserve above all else, and he had made his choice. Not against me, but for the throne. He had severed me as a man severs a limb to save the body. I was the price of his crown, and he had paid it.

Something shifted within me, something that had never happened before.

All my life, I had met hardship with grief or fear, and the curse had fed on both. I had wept, feared, and endured. I had never once allowed myself to be angry. Now, anger flared up from a place I had never tapped, hot, vast, and pure. The curse could find no hold upon it, because anger is not a wound. Anger is a reckoning.

I would not break.

The mark over my heart caught fire. A fierce, warm illumination bloomed against my chest, shining outward through the silver fur like a burning coal. As it burned, the fox lost its grip. The rage held my human form where grief and fear had failed. I rose back into myself, stepping out of the beast by my own choice, sustained by my own fury. I was a woman once more, standing bare upon the cold floor before the painted dead who bore my mark.

Bare, trembling, and entirely without fear.

“No,” I whispered to the dead queen, to the empty hall, to the man I meant to confront. “You do not get to decide what becomes of me. You had your turn. It is mine now.”

A heavy velvet drape hung beside the queen’s frame. I seized the fabric, pulling until the iron rod gave way with a dull groan. Wrapping the heavy cloth around my body, I knotted it securely at my shoulder. I would not scurry through this house like a hunted animal. I was finished being the prey.