Page 71 of Broken Vow

I hated myself for it and I would do it again and both of those things were true at once and neither cancelled the other, and that is the whole of what it is to be the kind of person I had decided, that night, to keep on being. It costs. This was the bill.

“If you come again,” I said, and it was all I had left, and it was nothing, and she knew it was nothing, “I will find another way. One that does not need me to be sure of anything.”

“I am certain you will try.” And then she passed out, her head going slack against the wall.“”

I worked the heavy coat off her shoulders and put it on and belted it close, because I would not walk out bare for the whole palace to look at, and because taking it from her was the one small thing I could still do to her and I did it. Then I stepped through the broken seam into the passage and pulled the dark in after me like a door.

For a moment I just stood with my back against the cold stone and shook. It came over me all at once, now that there was no one to perform a steadiness for, what I had just done and just failed to do. My hands would not be still. I had raised a weight to kill a woman and I had not, and I did not know yet whether that made me better than her or only softer, only easier to come back for, and the question sat in my chest beside the spent and shaking aftermath of the rage and would not settle. I had beaten her and I had not finished her, and those were not the same thing, and the difference was going to come back for me. I had let her live, and she would gather herself up again, I had no doubt of it, and the only thing my mercy had truly purchased was the certainty that I would have to do this again someday, worse, and that next time I would know I had had the chance to spare myself it and had not taken it. The coat smelled of her. I pulled it closer anyway, because the cold was real and the smell was only my pride, and I made my feet move, into the black, before whatever was holding me upright finished letting go.

The passage was black as a shut box and it went nowhere I could understand.

I had thought, stepping into it, that a passage must go somewhere, that I had only to follow it and it would deliver me out into a place with people and lamplight and a door I knew. But the way behind the walls of that palace was not built for going somewhere. It was built for moving unseen, and it branched, and branched again, low and close and black as the inside of a chest, and within a few turns I had no notion at all of where the room was behind me or where any room lay ahead, only my two hands on cold stone and my bare feet feeling for the next inch of floor.

And I was failing fast now. I had known it since the blow, even before the blow, and the confrontation had spent the little I had left, and now there was nothing left at all, and my body knew it before I would let myself know it. My hands on the stone began to want to be paws. The walls leaned. I went down to my knees in the dark without deciding to, and could not at once remember how to make them lift me again, and somewhere close the gold was coming up at the edges of everything, patient, certain, the curse moving back into the country I had won from it an hour ago.

I tried to think of the cure and couldn’t hold the thought. Even hoping for it took more than I had left, because every time I’d pictured the rescue it had looked the same: Auden running, Tsuki at his shoulder, the jar in his arms, the door banging open. And on my knees in the dark I finally understood the thing I’d been too busy to let myself understand. It didn’t matter whether they’d gotten out. It didn’t matter whether the cure was ready and in his hands this very moment. They couldn’t give it to a girl they couldn’t find. No one knew I was here, tucked into a seam in the walls of the oldest part of the palace, in a passage built so that no one would ever know anyone was inside it. I could be an arm’s length from a room full of people and they’d never know. I’d walked out of one trap straight into a worse one, and I’d done it to myself, and I didn’t have enough left in me even to laugh at it.

I am Liora, I told the dark, because it was the only thing I had to hold onto. I am Liora.

Then the gold closed over me.

And the last thing I thought, before I lost myself, wasn’t the cure, or the witch, or even him. It was that someone would find me. That someone would think to look, somewhere in all that dark, and not leave me where I lay.

Then I was gone, and the fox lay down in the dark and didn’t move.

Chapter 36

Cael had seen them carry the thing out of the hall.

He had been in the antechamber when the doors opened and the guards came through fast and rough with a bundle slung between them, a cloak wrapped around something the size of a dog that fought the cloth in short violent fits, and he had stood still among the moving men and watched it pass, and it had not sat right with him. The fine cloth of it was an envoy’s, not a sack for a beast. They carried it carefully, almost gingerly, the wary handling of soldiers who had been told not to mark what they held and could not see why it mattered. And for half a breath, as they shouldered past him, the wrapping had slipped, and he had seen the narrow muzzle and the one eye that found him through the gap, and the eye had not been an animal’s eye at all. It had looked at him. It had known him.

He had let them go. There had been nothing else to do in that corridor full of the emperor’s guard, with the emperor’s broken voice still hanging behind the doors. But he had stood there afterward longer than he should have, turning it over, and the more he turned it the less he liked what he was looking at, and so in the end he had done the only thing his oath and his brother left him room to do. He had gone to find it.

That was an hour ago, and he had spent most of the hour learning how thoroughly a thing could be lost inside a palace that did not want it found.

They had taken it into the western holding rooms, that much the guards on the lower court would tell their commander. But the holding room he was sent to was empty, a fallen candle-stand on the floor and a long smear of blood drying on the plaster by the back wall, and a draught in the room that should not have been there, coming from a black gap where a section of the wall had swung inward on a hinge no honest builder had ever set. Cael had stood in that doorway and understood two things at once. That something had happened in this room that the guards knew nothing about. And that whatever had walked out through that wall had gone into the part of the palace no map showed and no guard patrolled, the old dead passages the place had been built around and then sealed up and forgotten.

He took a lamp from the wall, thought better of it, and left it. A light in those passages would show as a thread at every seam, and he did not yet know who else might be moving on the other side of the walls tonight. He went in by feel.

The dark closed over him at once, close and dry, the air tasting of dust no one had breathed in a lifetime. He kept one hand flat on the stone and let his eyes take what little there was. The passage ran straight a while and then began to fork, and he chose by the faint draw of moving air and by instinct, and twice he stopped and held still and heard only his own blood in his ears, and went on. He had hunted men through worse country than this. He told himself that. But he had never hunted anything that mattered to his brother, and whatever waited at the end of this passage did, and Cael did not let himself put a name to what he would find, or to the state he would likely find it in.

He smelled the blood before he reached her.

Not much, and going cold, but in that dead air it was the loudest thing there was, and he followed it around the last turn. His boot met something soft against the base of the wall. He crouched. His fingers found fur, and under the fur the quick flutter of a breath that was barely there at all. The fox was lying in a pool of heavy cloth, a woman’s coat, good wool gone stiff with drying blood along one sleeve, far too fine and far too large for the small animal tangled in it. A coat did not walk itself into a sealed passage and wrap itself around a fox. He did not have time to understand it, but he marked it, and when he lifted her he gathered the coat up with her.

She was wedged into the angle where the passage turned, a loose heap of fur gone dim in the dark, and so light when he gathered her up that for a moment his chest seized on the certainty that he had come too late, that he was lifting a dead thing. Then the breath came again against his hand, shallow, too fast, with a long pause at the end of it that should not have been there. Alive. Barely, and not for long.

“I have you,” he said, low, to the animal that could not answer him. “I have you. Be still.”

She did not stir. Whatever fight had spent itself in that holding room had taken everything she owned with it, and what was left of her was running down fast, a body letting go of itself by degrees. He had held dying men before, and he knew this rhythm, the shallow breath, the going cold, the small shudders spaced further and further apart, and he knew she was a long way into it. He did not know what was wrong with her or what would mend it. He knew only that his brother would, and that he had to get her to Auden before the thing in his arms stopped breathing for good.

Turning with her held close against his chest, he went back the way he had come, faster now, trusting his feet to find the turns his eyes had missed, climbing when the passage climbed. He was making for the one place in that sealed warren that opened out high and wide enough to find Auden in the dark, and to put her into the only hands he trusted to know what she needed.

The passage gave him up at last through a gap behind a pillar, out onto a high gallery that ran along the inside of one of the great courtyards, open to the night air on one side above a long drop to the stones below. Cold air, and lamplight coming up from the court, and after the dead black of the walls it was almost too much to take in at once. He went to the rail with her against his chest and looked down, and his luck, what little of it there was tonight, held.

Auden was below. He stood near the centre of the court with his head turning, searching, a clay jar held against him with both arms, and on his shoulder a small dark shape that could only be the squirrel. Cael did not call out. A shout in that court would bring the guard from three directions. A lantern hung from a bracket further along the rail. He shifted the fox to one arm, reached it, and passed his free hand across the flame twice, blocking the light and letting it spring back, a flat hard signal any soldier would read.

Auden’s head came up. He saw Cael, and the small shape in his arms, and he started forward and then stopped, casting along the base of the wall for a stair, a ladder, anything. There was nothing. The court was a stone box, and the only way up to the gallery ran back through the inner halls, the deep part of the palace that had never opened to him and never would.