Page 39 of Broken Vow

She wore mourning grey, and she had a child by the hand.

I knew her grief before I knew anything else about her, because I was wearing the same one, and you learn to read it on others when you carry it yourself. A widow, and not long widowed, by the rawness on her. The child was a girl, four or five, too young to hold the whole of it and old enough to know that something had gone wrong that the grown people could not fix, and she clung to her mother’s skirt with the wide quiet of a child who has learned that the people who used to hold her up have stopped being able to.

They knelt near the front, and the woman bent her head, and her shoulders began to shake, and the girl looked up at her mother coming apart and did not know what to do, and no one in that poor place moved, because grief shames the helpless and most of us are helpless in front of it.

He set down what he was holding and went to them.

He did not pull the woman up or tell her it would pass or reach for any of the bright things people say to make grief easier on themselves. He knelt down beside her on the bare boards and stayed there while she wept, his head bowed near hers, and what he said to her was too low for me to catch and was plainly not meant to mend anything, only to put a second person inside the thing with her so she was not alone in it. He took some of the weight of it. I saw it land on him. He did not hold himself off from her sorrow at arm’s length. He went into it with her.

And then he turned to the child.

The girl had backed against the wall, frightened of her mother’s tears. He went down onto his heels in front of her, lower than she stood, so that she looked down at him and not up, and he was still, and gentle, and in no hurry at all. I do not know what he said. I watched his hands, some small foolishness with a pebble palmed and gone and found again behind her ear, the kind of nonsense you make for a child, and I watched the fear go out of her by degrees, and then, after he had earned it and not one moment before, the girl smiled.

Only for a breath. A small, watery, astonished smile, the smile of a child who has been afraid and is, for that one breath, not afraid.

Something came apart in me, watching it, that I had held whole through everything else.

I will not reach for words for it. I will only say that I had been a child once who lost the one who held up her whole sky, and no one had knelt down lower than me and stayed still until I could smile. I had grieved the way the poor grieve, around the edges of work that does not stop for sorrow, and I had grown up hard, and I had told myself for years that this was simply how the world was made. And here, in a falling-down shrine at the bottom of a cruel and gilded city, was a man giving a frightened grieving child the one thing I had never been given, freely, for nothing, because she needed it and he had it in him to give.

The door I had bolted against every living soul came open a crack, just enough to let the cold in, and I knelt in the shadow and let it, because I had no strength left to hold it shut.

Then the fear came up behind the feeling, fast and certain. I knew this. I had learned this in a clearing by the sacred pool and paid for the lesson with my whole life. I had once believed a man’s tenderness was the truest thing in the world, and it had cost me everything I was. I had come here to use this man, and instead I knelt in his temple eating his bread with my heart splitting open, and that was not the plan, that was the very opposite of the plan, that was the snare doing what snares do, which is to be lovely. I drew the door shut again. It would not close the whole way, but I made it close enough.

I did not go to him. I did not speak to him again. I had no charm left in me and no stomach to spend it if I had, and the part of me that had come down the hill to begin some long careful courtship of the truth sat in the shadow and could not lift its head. Whatever I had come to begin, I had not begun. I had only knelt in a poor temple and been, for one morning, a person no one wanted anything from, and it had nearly broken me, which was not at all what I had thought breaking would feel like.

When I trusted my legs again, I rose, and slipped out the way I had come, before he could mark my going.

I stopped at the basin in the threshold and washed once more, because that is what you do, hands and mouth and brow, the cold water closing the morning behind me. I did not look down. I turned my face to the gate and the grey morning beyond it, already climbing the hill in my mind, and so I did not see the few coarse silver hairs that lifted from me as I straightened and drifted down, turning, settling, into the black still water of the basin, where they lay fine and bright on the dark and did not sink. I felt steadier than I had in days, steady enough to climb the hill back into the gilded weight of my borrowed life, and I told myself the steadiness was the temple, the old rites, my own discipline come home to me, and not the man at all.

I had very nearly made myself believe it by the time I reached the top of the hill.

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In a room with no window, in a part of the palace that answered to no map, a shallow black bowl sat cooling on a dead hearth, and no one knelt before it.

The witch was elsewhere. She had left the working to steep, the way a snare is left set while you go about your day, trusting that whatever it catches will keep until you come to look. The chamber was empty. The green fire had burned down to ash.

And in the dark water of the bowl, with no eye on it, something stirred.

The silver hairs suspended in the depth of it turned slowly, all together, like iron filings swinging toward a lodestone, and the black surface, which for days had shown nothing but smeared and shifting shapes, cleared for the space of a few breaths into something almost like a picture. A low place. A poor place. Lantern light, and a sagging roof, and a basin of still water at a threshold, and a kneeling shape that was a fox and a woman both and would settle into neither. The image bloomed up out of the dark sharper than it had ever come, fed by something fresh, and it hung there on the surface of the water, clear and unwatched, in an empty room.

There was no one to see it.

It held a moment, and another, and then, the fire being dead and the hand that woke such things being elsewhere, it sank back down into the dark it had risen from, and the water went still and black and ordinary, and the hairs settled, and the bowl kept its secret for no one at all, and waited, as patient things wait, for the next time the woman touched water and the witch was home to look.

Chapter 18

The nightmare came that same night, driving me out of the house and into the dark before I was fully awake.

I will not set down what lived in it. It was the old one, the river, the fire, and the worst of what I carried. I came up out of sleep with my own cry caught in my throat and the grief already past my guard, the fox so close under my skin that my hands had half-changed against the blanket before I mastered myself. Across the room, Selene slept on. Tsuki was a small, warm weight on the mantel, his breath even. I did not wake them. There are hours you cannot invite another soul into, and this was one. Besides, I already knew that the thing I needed was not in that house.

I needed the temple.

I knew it as I knew the placement of my own hands, without the mediation of thought. I needed the bell-rope, the worn stone, and the scent of old incense, the spare, quiet world that held me together when everything else threatened to fray. Rainthorn was an hour’s walk past the city wall, and I did not have an hour. There was only the one sanctuary, and I was up, hooded, and out the door before I had finished deciding to go, a woman half-fox slipping through the sleeping streets toward the base of the hill.

It was a reckless journey, and I knew it. The lower city in the dead of night is no place for a woman alone, and I had no Tsuki flowing along the rooftops ahead of me to mark a safe path, only my memory of the route and my luck if it held. Twice I froze in a doorway while men passed whose footfalls I did not like. Once a dog came at me snarling out of an alley, then stopped short, backing away with a whimper, because whatever scent hung on me was not human. I stood shaking long after it fled. I descended through the dark on the razor edge of my own shape, holding the fox down with the last of my discipline, knowing that if I lost my form here, the woman underneath would be trapped in a small silver body in the worst possible place. I did not let myself look past that thought.

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