Page 37 of Broken Vow

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The emperor came to the witch three nights after the garden, and he came alone, the way she had taught him to come a long time ago.

Morrigwen kept her chambers hidden in the far reaches of the palace, reached by a stair most of the court would have sworn did not exist, and Drystan climbed it the way he always did, like a man going to a thing he hated and could not do without. She was waiting for him, the way she had waited for the men of his line before him. Three hundred years in the service of that line had taught her the sound of an Aurelian in trouble on her stair.

“You have not come to me in a while,” she said, without turning from the low green fire she kept. “And now here you are at the third hour, with no torch. Has something frightened His Majesty?”

“I saw a fox.” He said it flatly, and heard how foolish it sounded, and said it anyway, because it had kept him from sleep for three nights running. “In my private garden. A silver fox. It came out of the dark and ran the length of the garden in the moonlight and was over the wall before a guard could be called.” He stood stiff by the door, the emperor of half the world, unwilling to come any further into the room. “Its fur was the same, Morrigwen. You know the one I mean. You told me I might have made my own downfall, and you never told me what you meant by it, and then I watch this silver thing run through my garden as though it had come to collect on the debt.” His voice pulled tight. “So I am asking you. Is it a sign? Is it her? Did I do something that night I have to answer for?”

Morrigwen held very still, and in the green light her face gave away nothing, because she had spent three centuries learning to give away nothing, and because in this one matter she had decided, on a recent night when she reached for a fox and the fox tore her hand open and fled, that the emperor was the last creature alive she would tell the truth to.

She knew exactly what he had done to the fabric of her working that night, snatching the pelt off the wall and flinging it into the fire, ruining good work with a sentimental gesture, too soft to let her finish the necessary cruelty and too proud to own it afterward. She had watched the rat escape. She had felt the magic slide sideways into something she could not at first read. And she had spent the time since piecing together what he had made, a thing she had very nearly caught and lost, a thing she now meant to catch properly and put an end to before it could grow into what it threatened to become. She would hand him none of that. He had shown her at the altar exactly how much resolve he had where this woman was concerned. Tell him a silver fox carrying his lost love’s soul was loose in his own halls, and he would do something soft and ruinous and undo three centuries of her patient work in a single sentimental hour.

So she lied to him, the way she had lied to his fathers before him, the truth bent just far enough to pass.

“There are silver foxes in the hills north of the city,” she said. “Rare creatures. Not unheard of. One strays down into the gardens now and again in a hard season, hunting the ornamental fish. I have seen them myself.” She turned from the fire at last and gave him the flat weight of her ancient gaze. “You did a foolish thing that night, Majesty, with the pelt. I said as much at the time. A soft, foolish thing that spoiled a good working and changed nothing that mattered in the end. The woman is gone. What is done is done, and you are the one who chose it, and it is too late to climb my stair at the third hour wishing you had chosen otherwise.” She let it cut, because cruelty toward his guilt was the surest way to send him off and keep him off. “A fox is a fox. Your conscience is making omens out of vermin. Go to your bed, Drystan. Marry your empress. Do the one useful thing still left to you, and stop seeing ghosts in your garden.”

She watched the words go to work on him. She watched him want to believe her, because believing her cost him nothing and the other thing cost him everything, and she watched him choose, the way he always chose, the road that let him go on ruling. He looked at her a moment longer, and some part of him was not satisfied, the animal part that had felt the chill out under the plum tree and trusted that chill more than it trusted her. But he was tired, and he was guilty, and he was an emperor with an empire on his back, and he let her send him away.

“Goodnight, Morrigwen,” he said, and went back down the stair, no wiser than he had climbed it, carrying his guilt to bed with him like a stone he had hung about his own neck to mark his failure and decided never to set down.

She listened until the last of his footsteps faded.

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Then she took down a dark cloak, and went down into the gardens herself.

She knew where to look. One of her many quiet eyes had told her exactly where the silver fox had crossed the emperor’s private garden, and that was the part that interested her most, because the emperor’s private garden was no common ground. It was the most guarded green in the palace, walled and gated and barred to all but the highest few, and a fox had been there, in the heart of the heart of the place, close enough to the emperor to touch him. Whatever this creature was, the same one that had bloodied her hand when she reached for it, it went where almost nothing living could go.

She went to the low wall at the garden’s edge in the last of the night and searched the gravel and the grass along the foot of it with the patience of a creature that owned three hundred years and felt no hurry in any of them, and she found what she wanted snagged on a rough lip of stone at the top of the wall, where a small body had gone over fast and left a little of itself behind.

A few hairs. Silver-white, fine, holding the last of the moonlight. She lifted them from the stone with two fingers, as careful as if they were spun glass, and held them up, and smiled, and there was nothing kind in it.

“There you are,” she said softly, to the hairs, to the night, to the woman somewhere out in the dark who did not know she had left a piece of herself behind. “There you are, little thing. You bit me. I have not forgotten that you bit me.”

She carried the hairs back up the stair, to the low green fire, and took down a shallow black bowl she had not had reason to use in a long while, and filled it with water from a jar older than the empire, and coiled the silver hairs down into the water, and began, very low, in a tongue with no living speakers but her, to sing.

The water did not boil. It went still, a black mirror with the silver hairs suspended in its depth, and as she sang an image began to gather on the surface. A fire. A room. The shapes of figures around a hearth.

And then the image would not hold.

It guttered, and swam, and changed, and what troubled her was not that it was faint, faint she had expected from so small a piece, but that it would not settle into a single thing. One moment the black water showed her a fox, low and silver and four-legged by the fire. The next it showed her a woman, slender, silver-haired, a coarse bright streak at her temple, sitting where the fox had been. Fox. Woman. Fox again. The shapes bled through each other and would not come apart, the way two reflections lie over each other on troubled water, and the working, which had never in three hundred years failed to tell her plainly what it was tracking, could not seem to decide what it had caught.

Morrigwen’s smile thinned. She sang the binding again, lower, pressing the working down onto its quarry, and still the bowl gave her the same restless doubled thing, the fox and the woman wearing each other, neither one winning. She sat back on her heels and considered it with the flat patience that had carried her through three centuries, and she told herself it was only the smallness of the sample, only the distance, only the strangeness of a working that had gone sideways once already in the fire.

She told herself that. But she had made this thing, or unmade it, with her own hands, and she knew the feel of magic that answered to her, and this did not, quite. Somewhere out in the dark there was a creature that was a fox and a woman at once and would not resolve into either, a thing she had set loose by half and could not now see clearly. And here was the strange part, the part she turned over with something that was almost pleasure. For the first time in longer than she could easily remember, she did not already know how a thing would end. After three hundred years in which everything came around again, the same faces, the same hungers, the same little tragedies wearing new names, here at last was something she had not seen before. She found, to her own faint surprise, that she savoured it. And only underneath the savouring, so far down she did not trouble to look at it, lay the other thing, the small cold fact that what she savoured was a working that no longer entirely obeyed her.

She drew the cloak tighter and bent back to the bowl. It would resolve. Everything resolved, given time and patience, and she had always had more of both than anyone who stood against her. Night upon night the black water would follow the thread home, fox or woman or whatever lay between, and when it showed her the place at last she would go to it, and she would finish what the fire had left half done.

“Soon,” she told the bowl, and did not look at the thing beneath the savouring, and waited.

And out in the dark of the palace fringe, in a warm room the black water could not yet show her clearly, a woman who did not know she was being hunted slept a few borrowed hours of human sleep, and dreamed, for the first time since the garden, not of the river and not of the man without a face, but of a poor temple at first light, and did not understand why the dream felt less like a plan than like a homecoming.

Chapter 17

I went down to the lower city in the dark before dawn, on legs that wanted to be four instead of two.

The grief came with me, the way it always came now, as a passenger that wanted to hold the reins. Selene had measured the brew into me with her own hands and made me promise to turn back at the first sign, and I had promised, and we both knew I was lying, because there was no turning back built into me anymore. So I went down the hill with the grief riding me, and every dozen steps I stopped and breathed the way the temple had taught me a lifetime ago, and pressed the fox back down under my own skin, and went on.