Chapter 11 - Names Hold Power

I wake with a small warm weight curled against my chest, and for one moment, I am simply happy.

Then I remember, and I look down, and the fox is there, tucked into the curve of my body with the tip of its tail resting over my heart, the little flame burned down to a soft orange ember in its sleep.

It is alive.

It made it through the night. I had one of the healers take a look at the creature before we both had gone off to bed. I pet it gently now, and smile. Its breathing is deep and even now, not the shallow waiting-to-die breathing of the wood, and something in my chest twists, but in a different way then it did at the market square.

“Good morning,” I whisper to it. “You are still here. I was afraid you would not be.”

I ease out from under it and fetch the dish of water I set by the bed, and the strip of dried meat I stole from the kitchens like a thief in my own house, and I settle back against the pillows and offer it to them.

“Here. You must be starving. Small sips, if your belly is delicate. How are you feeling this morning? Better, I hope. You look better. You look less like you are deciding whether to die.”

“Much better,” says the fox. “Thank you for asking.”

I go very still.

Did it just talk? Talk?

The water dish is in my hand. The fox is looking up at me with its two drops of molten gold, calm as anything, as though it has said nothing at all remarkable.

I am startled and nearly fall out of my bed.

“You alright?” the creature asks as I blink and sit up.

“Ugh, yes. Yes I’m okay.” I say as I struggle to process what exactly I am hearing. “It’s just….” I pause.

“....You are talking?”

“Yes, of course I am talking.” It tilts its head, as though I am the strange one here. “All creatures can talk.”

“No, they cannot.” I say with confusion.

“Yes, they can. Just because a creature does not speak your common tongue does not mean it cannot talk.”

“Then that proves my point, not all creatures can speak the common tongue.”

The fox considers this, and dips its head, conceding. “Hmm. I suppose you are right about that. But the common tongue is not the only language that matters, and I would not lean too hard on it if I were you. You would be surprised how few things worth saying are said in it.”

“I suppose that is true.” I admit and stare at it.

It stares back, entirely unbothered, and I realize I am standing half-dressed in the dawn losing an argument to a fox, and that the strangeness of that is somehow steadying rather than frightening.

“But. How rude of me. What is your name?”

“Ahh. Now that is a good question” It muses as its gold eyes stare up at my blue eyes. “Names are powerful things. Dangerous, in the wrong mouth. But you pulled me out of the roots of a dead tree and did not let them kill me, so you have earned this right.” It settles its chin on its paws. “You may call me Aodh.”

“Aodh.” The word feels old in my mouth, older than the room, older than the empire. “I am Bree.”

“I know,” says Aodh, and does not say how.

“Thats an odd thing to know, but why were you injured and in the SIlva woods?” I ask. “Were you apart of the dark beast attacks?.”

“Yes and no.” Aodh responds.

“What does that even mean?” I snort.

The creature moves to the edge of the bed and it’s little flaming fox tail flicks. “It means, I am both a part of it and not.”

I huff from the riddle. Annoyed. I try to ask a different question. “Okay, then why were you there?”

“The same reason your emperor's men were there,” Aodh says. “The beasts. I was watching them.” He says.

“Watching them, why?”

For the first time the fox is quiet in a way that is not playful. When it speaks again its voice has lost its lightness. “Because they are wrong,” he says. “They did not always come out of the trees like that, in packs, toward the noise and the people. That is not how they are made. A beast is a solitary thing, a wary thing. It keeps to the deep dark and it fears humans.”

“So then why did they?” I ask as I scoot closer.

It pauses, as if choosing his words carefully, “something is in them that should not be. Something old is loose in the world, and it is getting into them, the way rot gets into a tree’s roots, and it is turning them from what they are into what you saw yesterday. I came to see how far it has spread.”

My skin has gone cold. “So what is it then? A disease?”

The fox beast shakes his head no. “No, not quite. It is complicated.”

This is valuable information. If the dark beasts are attacking because they are sick, or something is infecting them, then that means it could be stopped.

“I don’t mind complicated things” I blurted out. “You must tell me, this means the dark beasts aren’t attacking of their own will. That means there is a way to prevent it”

“Prevent it?” Aodh scoffs. “Humans are responsible for part of it.”

“What do you mean?”

The fox, Aodh, shakes his head.

“That,” Aodh says, “is a longer story than you have the stomach for before breakfast.”

I am frustrated and sigh, but as I get ready I decide to bring up something else. “I heard a song,” I pause. Wondering if maybe this strange creature could explain it. “At the market. Before the beast came, and after it died. A song like birds, but wrong. I have heard it my whole life, but only ever near the beasts, or near, very strange things like you. No one else can hear it. I thought I was mad.”

Aodh goes very, very still. Then it hums.

“How curious,” he mumbles, his golden eyes resting on me with a weight that is almost unbearable, and for a moment I am certain it is going to tell me something enormous, something that will change everything.

“Eat your breakfast,” Aodh says instead. “All that fear and curiosity will do you no good, and you will need your strength for today.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” Aodh agrees. “It is not, but you will not get any more from me for free” And it tucks its nose back under its tail.

“Then what can I give for an answer?” I ask as I poke him.

“Hmmm… nothing at the moment.” I scoff. Annoyed and frustrated that in the space of one morning I have learned a huge secret, yet I do not have any more answers for it.

As I pet Aodh gently and process everything, Iona enters and looks pale.

“Is everything alright?” I ask her as she helps me with my hair. Aodh moves to lay in my lap as Iona helps me to finish getting ready for the day.

She is oddly quiet, and I know when she is quiet she has likely heard something that likely requires my attention, but doesn’t know how to bring it up.

“Say it,” I tell her, “before it makes you ill.”

“It is only talk, my lady.” She gently tugs on my curls. “Kitchen talk. One of the emperor's knights came back from Sabine and he was, he was telling it in the yard, about you. About how you knew. How you got the town to the church before the wardens had heard a thing.” She hesitates. “Some of them say it is nothing. That you are a clever woman and you saw the wood and put it together, that anyone might have. But some of them,” and here her voice drops, “some of them are asking how a hollow woman knew a beast was coming when the wardens with all their bells did not. They are asking if you have some magic no one knew of. Or a weapon. Or,” she swallows, “or if the daughter of the north came south already knowing where the beasts would fall.”

The last one lands like cold water, because it is the dangerous one, the one that turns a marvel into a betrayal.

“I don’t control the beasts. That is crazy,” I say as I pet Aodh. Then again, me bringing home a pet beast probably isn’t helping my image.

“And what do you think?” I ask her. More out of curiosity.

“I think you are the best woman I know,” Iona says fiercely, “and I think you should be very, very careful, because a court that cannot explain a thing will invent an explanation, and those rumors are never kind.”

She is right. She is always right about these things. I think about what Aodh has told me about the dark beasts, and how I was able to hear him speak.

“I will be careful,” I say as she nods. She hums a gentle song and I hum with her. There is still so much I don’t know. More that I need to learn, but for now I decide to take a walk once I finished getting ready and before the start of my duties for the day.

This is where Master Torsten finds me. He appears beside me as I walk through the gardens, and falls into step beside me as though we are two people who happened upon the same path.

“Lady Bree,” he says, low. “You should smile more. You look like a woman going to her own hanging.”

“What do you want, Master Torsten.”

“I want a great many things. Your father wants more.” He produces, from within his coat, folded small, a square of paper, and holds it where only I can see it, and does not yet give it to me. “I have here a gift, to remind you why you are useful.”

He holds out a letter, the envelope has hand writing on it addressed to me. I would know it anywhere. It is my mother's, but it is wrong, the letters thin and wavering and pressed too lightly, a hand that used to be neat gone shaky as a much older woman's, and my whole chest seizes.

“Give it to me.”

“In a moment.” He lets me see it a heartbeat longer, the cruelty of it precise and deliberate before he pulls it back and away from me before I could snatch it from him. “She is not well, Bree. The medicine helps her, but she is needing more of it than she did before, and your father is a busy man with a great many calls upon his purse.” He gives me a knowing look. “The medicine is expensive. I’m sure you understand what I am hinting at, girl. Despite your literal nature, you have always been quicker than he gives you credit for.”

“You are threatening me with my dying mother,” I say, “in a garden, with flowers.”

“I am reminding you of the terms.” He presses the letter into my hand at last, and my fingers close around quickly. “And I’m here to give you new orders. The information on the Pass was useful. Your father was pleased. But numbers of men are a small thing. He does not need a clerk. He has clerks. He needs what only you can give him now.”

“And what is that?”

“The Emperor.” Torsten says it simply. “Not his soldiers. Him. What he plans. What he fears. Where he means to strike and where he cannot afford to be struck. Who he trusts, and why, and how those trusts might be broken.” He turns his head and looks at me, and there is no warmth in him at all, only the patient certainty of a man who holds every card. “You are his wife. Use him. Get close to him. A man tells his wife things he tells no counsel. That is what a wife is for. Use your body if you must, whatever you have to do to learn his weaknesses.”

I feel sick. I clutch the letter from my mother tightly, and the garden suddenly seems too bright. Too beautiful from what Master Torsten expects of me. What my father expects of me.

They are thinking of war, despite the peace created from my marriage, and the dark beast attacks. Attacks, which I learned just this morning, are only occurring because the beasts are sick. There is so much at stake here, and now this man wants me to take that thing, whatever it is, and sharpen it, and slide it between my husband's ribs.

“And if I cannot,” I ask. Wanting to verify my suspicions.

“Then the medicine becomes very difficult to arrange,” Torsten says, “and your mother's hand, which you can see is already failing, stops writing altogether. I do not wish that. I am not a monster, whatever you think of me. But I am a servant, Bree, the same as you, and my master's patience is not mine to spend.” He steps back, the interview over. “Get close to him. Bring me something worth the ink. You have a little time, but not a great deal of it.”

And he turns to leave. I watch him head up the path as I stand there with my mother's failing letter crushed in one hand and my whole life crushed in the other.

I take a deep breath. There is only one thing I can do. I must drown out the fear and get to work. Because I refuse to let my mother die. The mystery of the dark beasts can wait. I must figure out how to get close to Theron.

I summon Iona who helps me coordinate a meeting with my ladies-in-waiting. I summon them for some tea to see if they can provide me some advice on how to seduce my own husband.

I know the best way to protect my mother is to find a way for me to get close to Theron, and both Melina and Xanthe are the only two I could think to ask. We take tea in my garden, the small walled one, and Aodh trots along at my heel like a dog and then arranges himself in a patch of sun with his flame-tipped tail curled around his paws, for all the world an ordinary pet, if ordinary pets were the color of fire and had come out of a cursed wood.

“My lady.” Melina is staring. “There is…. Well…. What exactly is following you?”

“It looks like a fox.” Xanthe chimes in, sipping a cup of tea.

“It is,” I reply.

“It has fire on its tail.” Melina says with exasperation.

“It does.”

“Where,” says Xanthe, who has gone very still in her chair in a way I do not like, her gold eyes fixed on Aodh with an attention that is far too sharp, “in the hells did you obtain such a creature? Because that is no ordinary fox.”

“Sabine,” I say, which is true, and I leave out the rest. “He was hurt. I could not leave him.”

Aodh yawns, showing a great many small white teeth, and blinks at the two of them with the flat golden disinterest of any animal.

“He looks like one of the dark beasts, but smaller.” Melina says, finally relaxing a bit and staring in curiosity.

“I can see that” I respond, but decide to withhold the truth. I don’t need more rumors circulating about me.

“He is beautiful,” Melina decides, and reaches to pet it, and Aodh permits this with enormous dignity. “Strange, but beautiful. The court will talk of nothing else, you know. The empress and her fire-fox. You will be a legend by supper.”

I groan.

“That is a problem for another day.” I say and have just realized it, that in my rush to learn about how to get close to Theron I have accidentally brought the strangest creature in the south into a room with the two most connected women in the court.

I fidget in my chair, realizing just how right Melina is. By nightfall every noble house will know the hollow empress keeps a burning beast from a haunted wood, and that this will only pour into more rumors, and I have done it to myself without noticing, again.

“Never mind the fox,” I say, too late. “I wanted to ask you both something. About the emperor.”

Melina brightens. Xanthe's eyes come, reluctantly, off Aodh.

“I want,” I say, and fidget anxiously with my hands, because part of it is true, “I want to be closer to him. To my husband. We are married, and we are strangers, and I do not know how to cross the distance, and I thought, you are both cleverer about people than I will ever be. So. How does one get close to a man like that?”

Melina answers first, warm and immediate. “You let him see you,” she says. “The real you, not the empress. Men fall for the truth of a person, in the end, not the performance of one. Show him a true thing about yourself, something you would not show the court, and let him hold it, and see that you trusted him with it. That is how it begins. Not with strategy. With honesty and vulnerability.”

It is good advice. It is kind advice. It is exactly the advice that would make me the most effective spy in the history of the north, and I hate that I notice that, and I hate the man who made me notice it.

“That,” says Xanthe, “is how you get your heart broken.”

“Xanthe.” Melina chimes in as Xanthe huffs.

“She asked,” Xanthe responds, setting down her tea cup, “and I will tell her the truth, because she is one of us now and the empress to a tyrant.”

She turns to me then, her gaze intense and focused so much so that I have to avert my eyes.

“My brother is not a man who is won by being shown vulnerability. He will see it as a weakness to exploit. You do not reach him by opening your chest and hoping. You reach him with patience and persistence.”

“Persistence?” I look up to meet her gaze.

“Yes, persistence. You make yourself a fixed point. You are simply there, and there, and there again, useful, unbothersome and asking nothing, until one day he notices that the room is worse when you have left it.”

“Lady Xanthe, that is hardly the right thing to do. Communication is the best way to form healthy relationships.” Lady Melina chimes in as Lady Xanthe scoffs.

“Healthy? She is married to a cold ruthless man who values power. Communication is hardly the answer. What she needs to do is channel her stubbornness into persistence. You do not chase a man like Theron.”

At this Melina goes quiet. I take a sip of my own tea in thought.

“Then what do you suggest?” I ask.

“It’s simple. You become the thing he does not want to do without, so quietly that he does not see it happening.” She pauses. “And you will not do any of it in a receiving room, waiting to be summoned. He does not live in receiving rooms. He lives in his study, at his work, with his maps and his dispatches. If you want him to grow used to you, you must go where he actually is. Insert yourself into the hours he does not perform for anyone. That is where the real man is, if there is one left in there at all.”

The two of them look at me, the honest one and the clever one, having handed me two entirely different opinions on the matter. Suddenly I feel the anxiety in my chest again. A sense of dread creeping into my chest that settles into my stomach like a swallowed stone. In the end, both ways will get me closer to him, which is exactly what my father and Torseten want. The dread of knowing this fills me with guilt and fear of the future.

I take a deep breath.

“Thank you,” I say. “Both of you. Truly.”

Aodh, in his patch of sun, opens one golden eye and looks at me, and I would swear on my mother's failing hand that there is a warning in it.

After we discuss some matters of the court I dismiss both Lady Melina and Xanthe. Ultimately I decide to take Xanthe's advice, because she is right.

Theron is not a man who chases after women, and if I want to get closer to him I will have to insert myself into his life more. I just hope I am not walking into a snare.

That very evening, when the corridors have thinned, I go to find him where he works.

The corridor to the emperor's study is long and lined with iron lanterns hung low, built to deepen its shadows, and I have rehearsed what I plan to say over and over again in my head as I walk towards him.

I plan to bring up some small true things about the household, an excuse to be there, an excuse to be there. But as I come to the turn before his door I hear voices, low and hard.

“... trust her” a man says, as I catch the tail end of the conversation. Quickly I stop, I recognize this voice. It is Cassius.

“And I don’t care.” Theron's voice responds.

I know I should announce myself, but instead I press my back to the cold stone and I do the thing the north has taught me best, to be quiet, and listen.

“I am telling you, you should care and listen to what the men are saying,” Cassius says in a frustrated tone. “And that whatever the men are saying, the court will be saying by morning. She knew, Theron. A hollow woman. That is unheard of. She knew a beast was coming before the wardens could sound the alarms. That is not cleverness. Either she has magic she has hidden from every soul in this palace, including you, or she knew that attack was coming because it was arranged,”

“Or,” Theron says, and his voice is cold and even, “she recognized the wood, and the road, and the season, and drew the same conclusion any soldier would, faster than the drunk wardens of a border town. She was here in my office when you came in. She could have easily concluded that it would be safer to lead others away then leave it to chance.”

I hear a slam of something. “Forgive me your majesty, but that is exactly what a spy would want you to think. Lets not forget why her father sent her here.”

“You keep saying she is a spy, but you saw what she did in that square.” Theron pauses. “Canutes spies would not be so generous.”

“I saw the daughter of your enemy in a town on the day it was attacked by dark beasts, she even kept one as a pet! Tell me you are not blind to this?”

Theron chuckles. “She was very stubborn about the fox.”

I hold my breath as I try to listen, but this time the two of them murmur. I can’t make out what they say except a single sentence Theron speaks.

“.... and so did I.” A silence falls between them before he speaks again. “I saw a woman with a torn arm on her knees in the dust, shielding a child with her own body, who could have run and did not. I have watched a great many people be exactly what they were sent to be, Cassius. That is not what that was.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I can know what I saw.”

“Then let me watch her,” Cassius presses. “Properly. Her letters, her movements, who she meets in your gardens when she thinks the guard has changed. If she is innocent it costs her nothing. If she is not, it costs us everything not to check. Confine her to the eastern wing, give me a month, and I will bring you the truth out of her one way or the—”

“No.”

The word is quiet and absolute, and it stops Cassius the way it stopped a court of sixty once, the way it stops me now, flat against the wall with my heart beating so fast that it might flutter away.

“You will not confine her,” Theron commands. “You will not read her letters like a common criminal. She is my wife, and she is under my protection, and until I see a reason with my own eyes and not the yard's gossip, she will be treated as the empress she is. Watch the borders. Watch the wood. Watch the men who bring me rumors dressed as counsel. But you will leave her be. Do you understand me.”

A long silence. Then Cassius, quiet, unhappy responds, “You are letting her get close to you.”

“Yes,” Theron says. “I am aware.”

Heat rises to my face. My back is still against the cold stone and my mother's failing letter in my pocket. Torsten's voice rings in my head.

Use him.

Get close to him.

A man tells his wife things he tells no counsel. That is what a wife is for. Use your body if you must, whatever you have to do to learn his weaknesses.

I suddenly feel sick. He is aware of the letters, but trusts me. Even if it is small.

How can the coldest man in the world refuse to let anyone touch me, refuse it against all sense, against his own spymaster, against every reason he has to throw me to the wolves.

He is protecting me.

He is protecting me, and I came here to learn how to open him like a letter and read him and sell what is written inside to my father. To a man who is withholding life saving medicine for my mother in order to obtain my compliance. Tears prickle in my eyes as I try to shove the guilt down.

I do not go in. I cannot go in, not now, not after that. Not with my face doing whatever it is doing as I feel my cheeks burn. I turn and I walk back the way I came, quiet as I can, and Aodh falls into step at my heel from wherever he has been waiting.

Together, me and Aodh walk in silence for a bit until we reach the safety of my room.

“I’m such a fool,” I whisper to him, when we are far enough away.

“Most humans are,” he comments as he crawls into my lap. “But do not worry. Guilt is not a wicked thing, it only means you still have a conscience.”

My cheeks on my face burn with shame and tears leave my eyes.

“I don’t know what to do. But, do not tell me what I already know. I just… I can’t right now.” I say with tears as I think of my mother.

I clutch Aodh a bit tighter.

“Very well, I won’t say another word. And you're not alone,” says Aodh.

I sniffle. “No, I guess not” I chuckle and wipe my eyes.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Exactly. I’m here. And I’ll be here tomorrow too. You should get some rest, Bree. Tomorrow is a new day. Let today's troubles lie in the dark for now.” And he presses his warm side against my chest, the small flame of him steady and harmless against my skin, and it does not burn me, it has never once burned me, and I am too full of everything else to wonder, again, why that should be.