CHAPTER 20
Emma stumbled forward, dizzy and sick. Fox song coursed through her blood, chiming against her bones like a knife drawn across marble.
Emma reached her hands behind, thinking to steady herself against the door.
There was nothing at her back but a wall of earth.
She wiped her fingers on her borrowed cloak, and her vision at last steadied itself.
She was in a sparse room. A jug and basin stood next to a dressing screen. Cracks spiderwebbed the mirror, and the rows of cloaks and boots along the wall were old and worn. There were two chipped chairs before a fire. And there, on one of them, sat a figure with wild gray hair and a tapping foot.
“So there you are.” The Librarian’s sister hauled herself up. She clasped Emma’s shoulder with a warm, calloused hand. “You’ve scuffed up my boots, girl.”
For a moment, Emma wondered if her tumble through the door had scrambled her mind.
She could not imagine how the Sister had come to be in front of her.
Or why the old woman looked entirely unsurprised, when the shock was coursing through Emma’s body like an ice-cold shower. “How are you here? What is this?”
“It’s where I was told to wait for you. You’ve an ordeal in front of you, girl, I won’t lie.”
“An ordeal? What’s—”
“Answers soon. We’re to rest here first, so you’ll be ready.” She waved Emma to the chairs.
Emma sank into one with relief. “You’re not afraid I’ll run away again?”
The Sister barked a laugh. “Did it do you any good to run, hmm? What did you learn out there?”
“I can’t be seen by mortals. They don’t hear me; they can’t remember me. After dark it seems easier, but—I’m still not like them. Not anymore.”
She told the Sister of the boar-headed monster that had hunted her. Of the emptiness she had felt, wandering the streets unseen.
“And with what you saw, do you want to run away again?”
“There’s nowhere for me to go, is there? My old life is gone.” As the words hung, trembling, in the air, Emma realized she could not take them back. Grief hit her with a force that made tears impossible. Crying would have been a relief. Instead, her eyes burned, dry as cracks in the savannah.
To her surprise, the Sister pulled her into a hug.
“I know what it is to be lost to the world, girl,” she whispered fiercely. “I’ll not tell you to forget your mortal life all at once. I’ve not managed it. But you must start again. You cannot spend your life yearning for what is gone.”
Emma gave way to sobs at last: ugly, body-wracking ones. The Sister stroked her hair and made gruff soothing noises. “So you met one of the Boars, did you? Seems extreme to send one after you for a simple summons. But nothing is simple these days, I suppose.”
“What are they?”
“When the City’s laws are broken, the Boars are sent after the offenders. May you never spend time in their cells, girl.”
It had not been civic duty that made the thing’s cruel eyes light up. It had wanted to hurt her. The fact it had an official role made the bile rise in her throat. What kind of place was this City, having predators as lawkeepers?
A squat figure in an apron bumped the door open. Her cheeks had the moist green-brown spotting of a frog. “So that one’s for the Oath? You be sure she’s ready. They’ll be sending for her soon.”
The frog-servant spun on her heel. She let the door bang behind her.
“Calling you now?” the Sister growled. “Oh, that’s the Court for you. They can spend two hundred years of their immortal lives composing an ode to the moss beneath a toadstool, but this they want done immediately. We need more time…”
“Calling me for what?”
“The Oath. A swearing-in ritual of sorts, now that you’ve chosen a house.” The Sister’s mouth twisted, as though she would have said more but had stopped herself.
“My house.” Emma uncurled her palm. The fox claw was gone, though a trace of its warmth lingered on her skin. “The House of Foxes. I chose it.”
“A house I know well.” There was affection in the Sister’s voice.
“My brother and I have plenty of dealings with the fox maidens. I should think you’ll like them.
” She pulled writing materials from her belt-purse and dashed off a note.
“I shall send my brother to bring them, since you’ll need sponsors for your Oath. ”
She winced as she rose to hand the note to a servant outside the door.
“This Oath.” Emma pictured a knife slicing her palm. A brand pressed to her flesh. Fear curled in her belly. “Do I have to?”
“Your house cannot take you in, not until you are sworn to the City. Once you take the Oath, you are a citizen and protected by the City. Those who do not, live the dregs of a life at the outskirts. Preyed upon by whatever monsters are off their leash that night. It’s no life, girl.”
A small foot nudged open the door. A diminutive creature blinked at them, one whose eyes were too large for her face and strangely far apart. The twitching velvety ears of a wild hare rose from her cap. “If you please, miss? I’m to see to you.”
Within moments she hauled in a steaming jug that dwarfed her. She steered Emma to the basin, peeled off her cloak, and tugged at Emma’s waistband with tiny paw-hands traced with puffs of fur. Emma squeaked.
“Don’t raise a fuss, miss, and let me take your clothes off proper. I have to get you scrubbed. You’ve half the muck of the streets on you, by the look of it.”
Emma submitted, and soon stood shivering behind the dressing screen. The servant dipped cloth after cloth into the basin and scrubbed Emma’s skin until it glowed. Emma looked down at her body.
It was her own, down to the last scar and freckle. But it was also new. The outlines of it were sharper, somehow. Her skin had a sheen to it. And her limbs felt loose in a way she didn’t recognize, as though she were made from a different material.
“So what is she?” the servant said.
“Fox maiden,” the Sister answered.
The servant wrapped a sheet around Emma, taking a good look at her as she did.
“The House of Foxes? But she’s got no collar.
I thought she might be one of the Upper Houses—she’s so tall, you could take her for a noble.
Will-o’-the-wisp blood or the like. Not that there’s anythink wrong with the Lower Houses, mind.
My own cousin’s girl went into the House of Ravens, seeing as her father got into a spot of debt, and it’s only stiff-rumped folk that’re funny about it, these days. ”
She held up a hank of Emma’s hair with an expert squint.
“Nice wave you have. I can do it proper for you, if you like. The Dawn Rose style, maybe? It’s the most popular with the nobles.
But—it’s maybe not fitting for you. We barely see the Lower Houses at Court, so I don’t know.
Don’t want them officials thinking you’re reaching above your station. ”
Before Emma could wonder how low, exactly, her station was that a mere hairstyle could overreach it, the maidservant bent her over the basin and began rinsing the dust from her hair.
Through the sodden strands, Emma heard her peppering the Sister with questions.
“Is it true you work in the Library? Do you really get to see mortals? Up close, in the daytime? Did you ever… touch one?”
“I do. That one you’re washing was a mortal, not too long ago.”
“No, truly? Born mortal and everything? Not a curse or the like? I heard the City made the lordling of one Upper House a mortal for a week and a day, and he came back pale and thin as a spider’s thread. You lived as one for…”
“Nineteen years,” said Emma, into the basin, fighting to keep her face expressionless even as her heart sped. Someone had been turned mortal. As a punishment, no less. So there was a way to reverse what had happened to her. To go home.
“Well, you must be glad as anythink to be here now. Mortal for nineteen years, imagine…” She ran a scented paste over Emma’s hair, and the strands fell to Emma’s neck in waves, shiny and dry.
Emma did not answer. She was staring at the looking glass.
If nothing else convinced her she was no longer mortal, her reflection would have.
Her face had changed, honed into cold perfection.
It was an inhuman beauty. Dark hair tumbled from her brow like the sea under moonlight.
Her lips were red as dark fruit; her lashes and brows, crow’s-wing black.
Her eyes were pools of liquid night. Tiny glints lit their depths, like cold stars winking in the deep.
“No fussing with the hair, now.” The maid interrupted her thoughts. “I hope it goes well for you, miss, with the Oath. It’ll all be over quick, either way.”
With that reassuring utterance, she tripped from the room. The door clicked shut behind her. And Emma sat down to marinate in her own uncomfortable thoughts. She barely registered the door opening again and the Librarian shuffling in. Not even as two foxes padded past him.
Then the foxes disappeared in a swirl of copper fur.
And that absolutely did hold Emma’s attention.
She fought the impulse to rub her eyes like a yokel, staring at the two upright figures where the foxes had been.
At first glance, Emma would have called them girls.
Then she wasn’t sure. Girl was such a human word.
The sheen to their skin was too perfect; the harmony of their fine bones and bitten-red lips too uncanny.
They wore broad silver chokers, each engraved with a curved claw.
She recognized in them the same strange beauty that had stolen her breath in her own reflection.
One of the pair stepped forward. She was an unnervingly pretty girl—girl? Emma wondered again—with bouncy auburn hair around a narrow face. Her little nose was dusted with freckles.
“I’m Nancy. I hear you’ve a story and a half.”
Emma couldn’t help smiling back.