CHAPTER 22 #2
“I’ll stay a while.” Saskia unfolded herself from the window seat. “The new girl’s not eaten yet. She might be hungry.”
“I’m really not—” Emma was cut off by a gurgle from her stomach. “Oh.”
She was ravenous.
“Good idea, love,” Nancy said. “We can see Emma right.”
The other fox maidens filtered out in a cozy, yawning group. Saskia gestured Emma toward the dining table. It groaned under the weight of empty dishes. From the feathers left on the largest platter, it seemed a roast peacock had been the centerpiece.
Nancy pulled a face. “Sorry, love, there’s not much left for you. We’re not a house of delicate appetites.”
A clunk shook the table. Saskia had dropped a platter onto it, whisked from beneath the chairs. She pushed it across the table without meeting Emma’s eye, and flopped into a claw-tipped dining chair. “Saved what I could,” she said.
Nancy slid into a seat opposite. Emma sat next to her and inspected the tray. A luscious little rectangular tin was calling to her. It was all she could do not to tear into the metal with her teeth. She couldn’t place the smell, but the animal voice pulsing beneath her thoughts was enraptured.
eat
tear with teeth
tongue bright and sure
Peering at the gold tin, she recoiled. FINEST PTé.
Many things she had forgotten. But not that she, Emma, was a vegetarian. Oh, she thought, with a sickening twist in her belly, but when I was a fox, I… she forced her gaze from the tin and clenched her hands.
“Is something wrong?” Saskia offered a serving spoon of peacock with icy courtesy. When Emma shook her head, Saskia wolfed down the lot and licked the spoon.
Emma fought not to shudder. She pulled a dish of spiced rice toward her. It tasted like ashes.
Nancy tore into her own haunch of peacock as she recounted the twists of Emma’s trial. When they reached the point of Emma’s debt, Saskia sucked in a breath.
“A whole mortal life? Night above, that’s steep. And you told the Court it was better for them to let you live, because you’d be able to pay back the debt as a fox maiden?” Her face cracked in a silent laugh. “That’s too good.”
“I will be earning,” Emma said, a little defensively. “The contract said so, when I swore to the house.”
Saskia crunched on a peacock bone with vim. “It didn’t say how much, though, did it? I don’t think anyone from the Lower Houses has ever earned as much as half a mortal life. Not hunting, at least.”
“Hunting on behalf of the Night City.” That was the phrase the contract had used, describing her duties as a fox maiden. But hunting what? Skimming mortal fires, the riddle had said. That was the service of the House of Foxes.
Hunting. Mortal fires. Emma bit down hard, nipping the edge of her tongue.
The shivers started between her shoulder blades. “The mortals. We aren’t—we don’t hunt them?”
It would be too cruel. She’d only wanted to be close to her mortal friends. What kind of sickening trick would force her into a life of hunting them, instead? She thought again of a fox’s gleaming teeth, of the blood-hungry gullet of its throat. Her throat.
Saskia snickered. “Your face, new girl. It’s not like that. No blood and body parts. We hunt what’s inside them. There’s a vitality to mortal life. Their lives are so short, and all that intensity is bottled up, and—”
“And it has a power of its own,” finished Nancy.
“And we can hunt that?” asked Emma, fascinated. “Doesn’t it hurt them?”
“No, love. We only take a little at a time. To mortals, what they lose might feel like a night’s sleep. The color blue from their dreams. The memory of their first hiccup.”
“That sounds useless to me,” Emma said frankly. “I can’t see what the Night City would want with it.”
Saskia waved a bone at her. The peacock’s talon was still attached, gnarled and crispy. Emma was not going to wonder what it would taste like. She shoveled another spoonful of rice into her mouth.
“Mortals, especially the ones at the University, they feed on the power of the Night City without even knowing. They get knowledge, power, all of the good stuff. And in exchange, the City feeds on the mortals. On their vitality—the thing it’s our job to gather.
That gives the City more power, and the next mortals feed upon that power—and so on. ”
“Symbiosis,” said Emma, and Saskia and Nancy looked rather blank. “Host and parasite live in mutually beneficial balance. You see it a lot in nature.”
“A scientist among us,” said Saskia with an ironic bow over her plate. “We’re honored.”
Nancy scraped her bowl clean. “And one with a token of protection, no less.”
Saskia whistled. “That’s rare enough. You’ve got diplomatic immunity, new girl. You can get up to all sorts of trouble now.”
“Then how about starting with a proper drink?” Nancy grinned. “I stowed a bottle of firefly brandy in the fire scuttle last solstice.”
There was no harm in it.
Sprawling with the other two on the sofas by the fire, Emma meant to feel strong.
She took a swig for it being a day she had not died, and another for the thousand years she did not want to think of.
But then she had to swallow away the Boar lurking in an alley, and the red coats that came swarming from the dark corners of her mind, every one wearing Jasper’s face. Sip by sip, she drowned them all.
Someone had carved a row of foxes above the fireplace, Emma noticed.
Each with a swooping tail wrapped around the next, so they were linked together.
Linked, or chained? In a thousand years, that might be her.
Sitting in just such a line, too changed by centuries trapped in the House of Foxes to break free.
She could not bear it. She would not.
She rounded on Saskia and Nancy. “But how can you stand it? The Court is all golden halls and parties and feasts, but we have to work hundreds of years for something that wasn’t even our fault? Do you not see how unfair it is, the whole Night City?”
Saskia gave her a strange look. “Yes, we’re workers.
And yes, that means the deal we get is unfair.
Did you really find the mortal world so different?
I’m not sure England can have changed much since I was mortal, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
I never found out what happened to Thatcher once I was gone. ”
“Dead,” said Emma. A light glinted in Saskia’s eyes.
“Of natural causes,” Emma hastened to add. “I think.”
“Oh. Well.” Saskia was downcast only for a moment.
“I would have preferred deposed over dead, anyhow. Still, you’re not wrong about the Court.
Bunch of gilded bladders bumping into each other.
The Upper Houses swan around, intriguing and subjecting each other to their poetry.
They’re not stuck with any work, or tied to just one beast form, like us.
They get to play with the higher magics too.
No collars, of course.” She flicked the silver band at her neck.
“They’re nobles, love.” Nancy laid a hand on Emma’s arm. “The lords and ladies, and their households and servants. The City granted them their power a long time ago, and they’ve a lot of it. They swear oaths to the City, but not like ours.”
“Their oaths’ll promise loyalty, but never labor.” Saskia snorted viciously. “Still, as long as we pay our dues and don’t dirty their hems, they’re happy not to think much about us. The Lower Houses work for a living.”
“But not at Court,” Emma guessed.
“Exactly. And there’s a reason for that. Think of the Night City as like—a layer, almost, over the mortal world. We share the same space as them—the same streets, the same river, the same college buildings—right on top of them, but they can’t see us.”
“But at night? Some mortals saw me.”
“They get glimpses. But it’s like they’re on the other side of a thick veil.”
“Only we get to see the full glory of the Night City.” Nancy clasped her brandy glass reverently.
“Or the horror.” Saskia ducked Nancy’s swat with a grin.
“But the Court is different. It’s underground, beneath the mortal streets.
And it wouldn’t show on any mortal map, or turn up under the spades of mortal diggers.
In the mortal world, that space does not exist. It’s pure Night City.
It’s the source. Imagine it as a generator, powering the whole layer of the Night City above ground.
Which means?” She raised her brows at Emma in challenge.
Memories unglued themselves from the blur in Emma’s mind. In most environments, the organisms that secured closest access to a power source—like the sun, or water—tended to be the strongest.
“The closer you are to the heart of the City’s power… the more important you are?”
Saskia clinked her glass, grinning. “Yes, new girl. That’s what the Court is about. Upper Houses only, a few City favorites and hangers-on. Most other citizens, and all of the Lower Houses, have to find places outside the Court. Above ground, mixed in among the mortal spaces.”
Emma remembered the alley at the entrance to the House of Foxes, choked with the bins and smells of restaurants that mortal Emma had known well: the late-night chip shop she’d dragged Julia to after nights out; the discount pizza takeaway; the vegan bakery her mother had loved when she visited.
“There are places above ground that are just for City folk, though.” Nancy picked out a plump date. “Pockets, like secret rooms. Mortals can’t see ’em or wander in. There’s bits of the Library—and Saskia, we have to take her to the night market—”
Emma’s head was whirling. She could not be drawn in, though the scientist in her longed to investigate it all.
A veil separating mortal and magical worlds, held in place by a power below ground.
Mortals and immortals sharing the same space, feeding from one another.
Thought of as an ecosystem, it was beyond fascinating. It would be groundbreaking to study.
“And there’s still so much we don’t know about the Night City, that’s the thing.” Saskia propped herself on her elbows for a long, gleeful slurp of brandy. “I bet they don’t tell us half of what’s really going on. I’ve heard stories…”
“Get out of it.” Nancy chuckled. “Our Saskia is a bit of a conspiracy theorist.”
Saskia bolted upright, grinning. “Am not. And just because we haven’t seen the filament spiders in the sewers, that doesn’t mean…”
Emma nestled close to Nancy, watching the debate spark.
A cozy sort of feeling was settling over her.
She realized, to her horror, that it was contentment.
Something about this room, and these companions, felt like home.
Perhaps it was not so bad to find a little comfort, for the time being.
She would be no more likely to escape by staying tense and lonely.
Perhaps the fox maidens and their knowledge might even be the key to helping her escape.
She held out her glass for another round of brandy.
In the end, Nancy forbade them to sleep on the sofas, even as the firefly brandy was making Emma a persuasive case to the contrary. Nancy swatted Saskia to her feet. “It’s our own beds we need. You’ll thank me for it later.”
Saskia peeled off at a doorway covered with a moth-eaten velvet curtain. Nancy led Emma down a third flight of stairs, to a door decorated with deep-scored claw marks, and left her there. Staring uneasily at the violent pattern, Emma braced herself to be brave. She opened the scarred door.
A face glared through the darkness. The threat it emanated was quite undimmed by a long ruffled nightgown and the bow that topped its nightcap.
“Who are you?”
“I—This is my bedroom, I thought?” Emma trailed off.
The fox maiden in the bed looked at her scornfully.
“I am not,” she said, enunciating each word as if for somebody particularly slow, “sharing my room. Go tell Nancy to put you somewhere else.”
“I don’t know where Nancy is—she said to go here, so—?” Emma stammered.
“For Night’s sake,” snapped the girl. Then she seemed to make an effort to speak softly. “Fine, you can stay. Whoever you are. But first, could you step outside so I can get changed?”
“Oh, of course,” Emma moved toward the door. “Sorry, I understand, I’m—”
The door shut in her face with a slam. Surprise turned to rage as she heard the unmistakable sound of a lock snapping into place. She pounded on the door, to resounding silence.
Planning ten kinds of revenge, Emma stalked the darkened corridors of the house.
She tried door after door. None would open.
And with a tearing inside that felt like relief, her fury poured out.
She’d had no room to feel it, not as the Boars dragged her off, or as the Judge stared at her with those clever eyes.
It had not been safe then to feel something so fierce and all-devouring.
Another door, slammed in her face. Another hour of wandering, footsore, heartsick, with no place to call safe.
Because of them. The Turnbulls. The hiss seared her throat.
They would pay. And she would be the one to make them.
There had to be a way back to the mortal world, with or without the City’s permission.
In thousands of years, someone must have managed it.
Every city had an unwatched exit; an illicit trade route; an underbelly.
There would be stories. She just had to find them.
And then the Turnbulls would be the ones made heartsick and afraid.
Then a door slid open beneath her hand. The room was carpeted with a layer of dead leaves. Its only contents were a four-poster bed festooned with drapes of spiderweb, and a corner given over to a mound of bones, laced with shattered twigs and the skulls of small rodents.
Emma looked at the bed, uneasily aware she ought to have been more drawn to it. Her eyes were heavy. She was ready to sleep. But something about that mound of bones and twigs called to her. It smelled of earth, of juicy worms and warm burrows.
safe smell
burrow smell
She knew that voice in her mind as well as she knew the shape of tail and pelt and paws.
But she was not a fox now. She was a girl-shaped being and she ought to have wanted a bed.
The other fox maidens read books and wore fine fabrics and ate from shining platters.
They did not sleep on bones, she was sure of it.
safe
the voice insisted, a sinuous brush of fur in her mind.
Well. There was no one around to see. Wrapping herself in her cloak, Emma curled up on the bones and fell deeply asleep.