CHAPTER 22
Emma sat on the bench of the anteroom in a daze, as green-wigged clerks and mincing courtiers eddied from the judgment chamber. One thousand years.
If it took that long, if she paid off the debt on the final day of the thousandth year, and found a way back to the mortal world, what would it look like?
It would not be her world. It would be empty of any who had known her.
Her mother would have been buried generations before.
And what would she recognize of herself, after centuries of living in the Night City?
Emma pictured her kinder feelings worn away, her face wearing the same mask of glittering malice as the audience at the trial. That would be its own kind of death.
The chatter of the anteroom faded back around her, and Emma realized that the red-haired fox maiden—Nancy, she reminded herself—was talking in a soft murmur.
“—so brave as you were. But how’re you ever going to pay off that debt?”
“I’m not going to think about it,” said Emma, more cheerfully than she felt. “So how long do you have left? Before you get out, I mean.”
“Out?” Nancy looked blank.
“Your years of service? How long until you’re free?”
“Oh, that? I don’t know,” Nancy said, with a listlessness that surprised Emma. She spoke as though it were something she barely thought of, recalled after long effort. “A fair while to go yet, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Emma couldn’t imagine not keeping track, down to the week. Down to the day.
“The City’ll let me know once I’m through. I don’t like to question.” She ducked her head. “I’m not the same as you. Or the rest of our sisters.”
“What do you mean?”
But the fox maiden leapt to her feet. “There’s the Librarian with your token. Come, let’s go meet him.”
The token was a slip of waxed parchment the length of her thumb.
When she saw it, Emma fell silent. She didn’t say a word, not all the way back through the earthen corridors of the Court, not as they climbed up to the tiny chamber with the door to the outer world.
There on the parchment, in gleaming black ink, was an eye ringed with monstrous teeth.
A shape she had seen once before. When she was mortal.
It should not have made her want to cry.
But she remembered that girl, so confident of failing her law tutorials, zipping a piece of paper into her bag and forgetting about it, and wished she had known.
Known what it had meant. That someone was watching out for her.
That someone cared for her. That she was worth caring for.
“You gave me this symbol,” she said. “The day we met in the Library.”
The Librarian covered her hand with his own crooked, lumpy one. “Mine did not have such power, child. It was but a poor copy. I knew the rune, that is all. I thought it might protect you, with my hope and will worked into it. Would that it had been enough.”
“But how could you know I would need protection?” Emma whispered. “I’d only just met the Turnbulls. Met—Jasper.”
She had spoken his name. A howl echoed in her chest.
“There was something in the air around you.” He stroked her cheek with one gnarled finger.
“I had seen something like it in my youth. When I first painted the University. Even as a mortal, I sensed there was a wonder about it. A power beyond what should have been. I saw the truth of it, and I saw the truth of you. You are precious, child. And the precious often becomes the hunted.”
Carefully, as though his bones were made of glass, Emma reached around to hug him. She buried her face in his brocaded front. She hadn’t realized it before, but safety had a smell. And it was an exact blend of old toast and dusty paper.
There was a harrumph behind them.
“Well then,” the Sister said. “Now that’s settled. Nancy, it’s high time you take her to the House of Foxes. Dawn’s on the horizon. We will see you soon, my brother and I.”
Emma’s spirits dropped as their steps faded down the street. With the Sister and the Librarian went the last connection to her mortal life. Her new world felt cold. Gray light seeped over the turrets of Fenchurch College. The dawn chill seeped through her borrowed cloak.
Nancy curled an arm through hers and squeezed. “Don’t look so sunk, love.” She steered Emma along the High Street, then past Percy College into the maze of cobbled alleys beyond. “They’ll all be waiting up, you know. Your sisters.”
Despite herself, Emma found her pulse picking up. “Who? Where?”
“The House of Foxes, of course. Your new home.”
Nancy led them into an alley so narrow, the moon only found its way there in slivers.
It was choked with industrial bins from the restaurants that backed onto it.
Even as she wrinkled her nose, Emma was aware of some remnant of fox at the back of her mind, sorting the stench into its component scents with delight.
grease and bird and sugardrink and old meat and foxsmell and
“Wait. I can smell them. Foxes.” Emma lifted her nose to sniff the air.
foxsmell greenstuff foxsmell meat foxsmell foxsmell foxsmell
“Here. Right here.”
There, in a thicker patch of shadow, the molten gleam of a foxy brass nose caught her eye.
It was a doorknocker. The door nestled between the bins was ornate enough, but Emma suspected that if she had not been looking very hard, or directed by a fox’s unerring nose, it might have slid from view unnoticed.
“Right you are.” Nancy grinned. The claw on her collar glinted silver in the streetlight. “Welcome to the House of Foxes, love.”
Nancy raised the knocker and beat the fox’s head against the shadowy door. It gave them a long, slow wink, and the door swung open.
Emma saw a russet-paneled corridor—
burrow home burrow
—corridor, Emma thought firmly. There was an underground feel to the House of Foxes, with its low ceilings and bowed walls, which ought to have been oppressive. Instead, it felt comforting. As though a warm hand were smoothing the prickles from her fur.
“You’re back.” The beautiful eyes and dark skin of an older maiden peered from a doorway, framed by a lace cap. “And with our new sister? Saskia will be glad. She tore the house apart looking for enough coin for a bribe, before we got the message.”
Nancy’s face was torn between amusement and regret. “Oh, Frances, no. Not the pantry, at least?”
“Especially the pantry,” Frances said, and Nancy groaned.
“Night above. We came back as soon as we could, but the Court had to sort a token of protection for Emma.”
The older maiden made a noise in the back of her throat.
“I know, I was flummoxed when I heard. An actual token of protection.” Nancy shook out Emma’s cloak and hung it up with her own.
“Getting it took an age and a half. You know how it is at Court. The Upper Houses keep the scribes running about on solstice invitations and poetry and the like, so they hardly have a breath for Lower House business, even when it’s official. ”
“I do know.” The maiden looked grave. “Our sisters are still awake. They were shaken, hearing about the Boars.”
“Thinking a troop would burst in any moment, to take us all away to join Emma?” Nancy sighed. “I’d have spared them that. Come, Emma. They’ll be glad to meet you.”
They passed through double doors into a large space.
A baronial fireplace dominated one wall, holding court over a trio of squashy russet sofas.
Across the room, lead-veined windows looked out into dark earth laced with roots.
Beneath them stood a claw-footed dining table.
Mildew webbed the tapestries, and the brocade wallpaper behind had been ripped in several places, as though by claws.
The strips that hung down fluttered in the draft of their entrance.
Emma’s eyes were drawn to the figures by the fireplace.
Flickering firelight shone from hair that gleamed like silk in the dark, and faces whose lines were eerily perfect.
The fox maidens, she supposed. Most of them were curled together on the sofas.
The two youngest, who didn’t look more than fourteen, wrestled on the hearth.
Saskia sat apart in one of the window seats, a barricade of books on her lap.
At their entry, she buried her face in her reading with studied unconcern.
But Emma felt a fierce gaze tracking her over the rim of the book.
Like Emma, the others in the House of Foxes wore the silver collar with the claw.
But their dress was a jumble of decades.
The two young ones—the twins, Nancy said—were dressed identically, in school uniforms no teen had worn in more than a century.
Gertie was the one buried under swathes of spangled black veil, like a Victorian mourner.
She spoke only in eerie hums and, apparently, was fond of snacking on beetles.
Lounging on the sofa opposite was one of the more glorious specimens of femininity Emma had ever seen.
Selina was a peroxide-blond confection of cone bra and curves, lipsticked to perfection beneath the wave set of a fifties starlet.
Half-eaten chocolates littered the cushions around her.
Beside Selina sat the beautiful older maiden, Frances, who refused to go out unless properly attired in a bonnet and pelisse, and whose voice still held the song of her birthplace in Jamaica.
They were curious and welcoming, and Emma felt herself shrink under their kindness.
She did not want it. She could not let them draw her into feeling she belonged.
The House of Foxes was not her home. Her real home was in the mortal world, and she had to focus on getting back to it.
So she ducked her head and answered in monosyllables.
She heard the fox maidens murmur in sympathetic tones about how tired she must be, after her ordeal.
“We all ought to be abed, late as it is. Has Sara gone already?” Nancy said, scanning the room. “Well, you go join her. It’s past dawn already.”