CHAPTER 25
There was an awful stillness in the House of Foxes, like the moment before a scream.
The fox maidens huddled in the hall. They barely glanced up as Emma and Saskia slipped in.
After several minutes of tense waiting, the front door swung open again.
Nancy went rigid, and one of the fox maidens let out a choked cry.
Two male shapes in green uniforms carried in something on a litter.
Something twitching and bloody. They deposited it on the floor, none too gently. A snarl rumbled around the room.
“You’ve done enough. Leave now.” The Librarian’s sister stood outlined in the doorway. The look on her face would have frozen mercury. The two carriers ducked past her. She slammed the front door after them.
“I came as soon as I heard.” The Sister knelt over the bundle on the litter, resting a battered leather bag beside her. “Nancy, take the others and ready the sickroom. And you, come here. I need you with me.”
Emma realized that this was directed to her. The Sister’s voice had sounded gruff, but the hand that beckoned her trembled. Emma knelt with her.
The bloodstained bundle on the floor was a person. Someone had covered it—her—with a blanket. Red blooms had already soaked through the fabric.
The hair was matted, not smoothly tucked under a nightcap. Instead of glaring, the eyes were unseeing. But the face was familiar. The Sister looked at Emma closely. “You know her.”
“We met last night. We had a disagreement. About me sharing her room.” Emma looked down, saw her hands clutching her elbows tight to her body. Realized she was shaking. “What happened to her? Did those men—”
“Do this to her?” The Sister smoothed the hair from the girl’s forehead. “No, this is what happens when you cross the Night City.”
The Night City had done this. The sick feeling clawed up from Emma’s stomach to her throat.
“Sara must have fled the house while the others were sleeping.”
“Is that why she didn’t want me in the room? So she could leave—”
“Unnoticed. Indeed. The girl believed she could escape. Start a new life, outside the City.”
Emma looked down at the figure on the litter. Sara’s lips were moving soundlessly.
“She did what is forbidden. She tried to flee the City.”
Emma’s voice shook. “What happened?”
“There are beasts that guard the outer reaches of the Night City. Monstrous, ravening things. Answering only to the City. There was no hope of making it past. It was madness to try.”
Saskia’s pale face appeared in the stairway. “Sister? The sickroom’s ready now.”
“Right.” The Sister got to her feet with a grunt of effort. “All of you. Lift her gently. We can only move her once. She’s close to the end of her strength.”
The fox maidens gathered around their sister, each taking hold of an edge of the litter.
Emma joined them. Her panic was threatening to spill over.
Fugitives were not treated kindly. There were consequences for those who crossed the Night City.
She saw them now, etched in blood on another girl’s face.
What would happen if she were caught searching old books for the secret to crossing between worlds? If she were discovered planning to escape?
When they lifted the litter, Sara screamed.
The sickroom had the cold look of a barely used space.
The Sister set her bag on a countertop and began whisking labeled jars from its insides.
Emma watched her sort linens into baskets by the bedside, lay out instruments in precise rows on the worktop.
There was an ease to her movements Emma had never seen.
In the sickroom, the Sister finally looked at home in herself.
She lit the candles and beckoned Emma to her side.
The other fox maidens filed out. When the Sister finally lifted the blanket from Sara’s body, Emma flinched.
But after one rebellious roll, she forced her stomach to stay put.
“You have no medical training, I suppose?”
Emma shook her head. “I studied law.” She clamped her lips shut again quickly. The salt-metal scent of blood was in her mouth.
“Pity.”
“Did you? Have medical training?” Emma asked, watching the deft way the Sister’s gnarled fingers unrolled bandages.
“I might have done. Had I been born in a different age.” Before Emma could ask what age she had been born into, the Sister had turned to rifle through a drawer. “You might give her some water.”
Emma tried, but the water mostly dribbled from the sides of Sara’s mouth. Emma forced her eyes downward, to what she had been trying not to see. Beneath the blooms of blood, the sticky gleam of raw flesh. Emma realized that her hands were knuckling into her stomach.
“Will she—” She could not say it.
The Sister joined her at the bedside, a jar in hand. “No, she may not die of this. But with these wounds…”
“What can I do?”
“Good girl. Fetch me that jar—no, don’t open it yourself. I have everything here secured with alarm spells. Let me… there.”
The Sister drew out a pinch of purple powder. “This is deathsleep, girl. It’s best swallowed, but inhaled will do.” She held the powder to Sara’s nose. “This will keep her asleep while she heals. Now, come close. We’ll start by cleaning these wounds.”
The figure on the bed became the center of Emma’s world. They sponged and sewed, set and splinted, until her eyes were as heavy as her hands. But hour by hour, Sara slipped away from them.
“Enough,” the Sister said eventually. Her face looked gray, the eye patch digging into her wrinkles. “We’ve done all we can, for now.”
It took a moment for the sensation to travel from Emma’s tired brain to her fingers. They were starting to cramp around the mortar and pestle. Freeing them, she joined the Sister in her vigil by the bed.
The sound of the door opening made them both start. Emma recognized the labored breathing even before she saw the Librarian. The Sister tugged a dusty book from his grasp.
“How does the child?” He approached the bedside. A misshapen hand, like a gnarled tortoise, crept toward Sara’s face but never touched her.
“You found it?” The Sister’s wrinkled face was alight. She leafed through the book with swift fingers. “The regular cantrips only did so much, and I remembered something in this volume that… Ah! Here it is. The vervain preparation. We’ll try this next.”
The Librarian shut his eyes, as though to ward off a memory. “So cruel. Such cruel punishment.”
Emma saw the moment when something changed in his face. It was like a ripple crossing a pond. His eyes popped open, as vague as Emma had ever seen them.
“I must leave,” he said to the air, with some surprise. “How did I come to be here? The book is lost, I cannot spare this time…”
“Oh, Henry.” The Sister reached for him, but he shuffled past, eyes fixed on a point invisible to all but himself. The sound of his mutterings trailed away down the corridor.
It was not the first time Emma had seen the vagueness take him.
It had been the same in his study, when he’d been about to talk of his “return.” An escape story, she had hoped.
To the mortal world or back again. But she hadn’t followed the thought to its logical end.
Whatever journey the Librarian had made, the Sister might well have been with him.
She would not let her brother go into danger alone.
And the Sister had no fits of vagueness.
She might answer a question, if it were put to her.
Emma considered how to start. Lightly, she thought. On a safe topic. “Were you very fond of Sara?”
“Barely knew her.” The Sister emptied a jar of roots onto the worktable and started chopping. “But I have seen what the City does to those who displease it. I have learned how to help. Not always enough.”
A tear trickled from under the eye patch. The Sister caught her looking.
“I am an old woman, Emma,” she said, creasing her face into a wicked smile, with some effort. “They tell you incontinence starts and ends with the bladder, but the eyes are just as bad. Just you wait.”
“You were like Sara, weren’t you?” Emma said slowly. “The Night City hurt you. It did that to you. Your eye.”
The Sister made a half-hearted movement, as though to cover her eye patch.
Emma thought again of the Librarian’s mangled fingers. “And your brother’s hands.”
The Sister shook her head. “It is a bad story, girl.”
Emma pulled the book toward her. “I can work as you talk. Please.”
The Sister looked deep into one of the candles.
“The England of our youth was one of carriages and ballrooms,” she said.
“My only destiny, or so I thought, was to marry.
A gentleman of rank and fortune, an estate.
My brother was an artist, and my favorite person in all the world.
He painted things of great beauty from his studio near the University, rising in renown and riches.
“Until he disappeared. He told me once of a strange magic that summoned him.
“‘There is a power in this place,’ he had said, looking not at me but through me. ‘It fills these streets with beauty. I try, but paint cannot capture it.’
“Then he stooped to pick up one of his smaller canvases.
It showed a rear aspect of the Library. A door peeped from behind swathes of creepers.
‘If I am gone, little sister, it will be here. They have told me the way. Just through this door, a place more wondrous than any we could imagine. A land like the tales of old.’ He smiled.
‘Perhaps Queen Mab may take me as one of her own.’