“A triumph, a candle-bright and timely pleasure lit up by gorgeous prose and an exuberant love for the world and for hope.” —Cassandra Khaw, author of The All-Consuming World
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks…but will she be clever enough to save her own ancestors?
A trickster Fox god challenges a quick-witted (but underachieving) acolyte to save herself by saving her own ancestors. But are Nesi and her new friends from the past prepared to defeat the ferocious Wolfhounds of Zemin?
“Fox-fleet and brazen, merry and mischievous.”
—C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
[STARRED REVIEW] “A marvelous and heartbreaking tale of a lone warrior for good who learns that she can’t succeed alone but that making friends carries its own devastation.” —Library Journal
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
“A triumph, a candle-bright and timely pleasure lit up by gorgeous prose and an exuberant love for the world and for hope.”
—Cassandra Khaw, author of The All-Consuming World
[STARRED REVIEW] “A marvelous and heartbreaking tale of a lone warrior for good who learns that she can’t succeed alone but that making friends carries its own devastation.”
—Library Journal
“Fox-fleet and brazen, merry and mischievous, haunted by mercies: Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox has the trick of doling delight. The language leaps and laughs, teeming with a trickster’s teasing. This book made me happy: both while I was reading it, and long after I’d finished.” —C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
“Tricksy, generous, timely—Audition for the Fox reminds us that we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves…and stories can change.”
—Premee Mohamed, author of The Butcher of the Forest
“Nimble, sly, and strange as the title character, Cahill has wrought a fine filigree of a tale—with a bold, uncompromising heart.”
—Catherynne Valente, New York Times bestselling author of The Fairyland Series
“Reading Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox both soothed my soul and ignited it. A fable for our times, Cahill expertly weaves an enchanting world of gods and the stories that made them. Acolyte Nesi is all of us, seeking to find our place in the world while challenged to make it better. This book is timely and timeless, heartbreaking and inspiring. Hug the pages when you’ve reached the end. Then light a candle for the fox.”
—Lyndsie Manusos, author of From These Dark Abodes
“Filled with elegant yet thrilling prose, Audition for the Fox drops you headlong into a fascinating setting where the stakes ramp up until you’re turning the pages with bated breath and mourning the moment you will reach the last page and have to leave this world behind.”
—Jordan Shiveley, author of Hot Singles In Your Area
“In Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill gives us a world of gods and stories and hope against oppression. He writes with great warmth and heart, and—as in any good book with a fox in—sharply sly trickery set to the best of ends. I predict many readers will want to be this Fox’s acolyte.”
—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
Martin Cahill has published short fiction in venues including Fireside, Reactor, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Nightmare. Cahill’s stories “The Fifth Horseman” and “Godmeat” were respectively nominated for the Ignyte Award and included in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut and a contributor to Critical Role: Vox Machina – Stories Untold. Cahill, who works at Erewhon Books, lives just outside New York City. Visit him on the web at https://martintcahill.wordpress.com/.
Part One: Girl Out of Time
An hour ago, Nesi had crept through the red and gold trees that were the Woods of the World, invited to prove herself. She knew to be sly in her audition for the Fox, remembering as many clay and cloud tales of their schemes as she could. T’sidaan, she knew, was a trickster, the first and only trickster of the Pillars, and any slip-up before them could certainly result in eyeteeth meeting eye.
She’d expected riddles, a test of wills. An ancient, unnecessarily complicated game of Grasshopper’s Gambit with, yes, the extra pieces. Even a staring contest, with clear but unspoken cheating involved on both sides.
What she hadn’t expected was coming to consciousness bound in chains, already in motion, walking with hundreds of others through a field of yellowing grass, the clouds above her gray and rumbling with thunder.
Marching in silence, not trusting herself to speak, it was a full hour before it came back to her: what she’d gotten herself into, how she’d gotten here, in the past, and the trickster who’d done it.
It came to her in fits and starts, the memories that were a moment ago and still yet to come. Nesi had made her appeal, spilling her heart to a deity she knew for a fact she should not trust and had to try anyway, in that little, homey cabin in the Woods where the Fox had made a den for themself.
And after having done so, she’d been met with an utter silence and stillness reminiscent of the moment before the hunter’s pounce, the flash of teeth.
Until.
The Fox of Tricks had taken a sip from a chipped and paisley porcelain teacup with an annoying slurp, put it down amidst a riot of cheap, well-loved paperbacks on a cluttered side table in their otherwise spare den and finally said, “I think I’m going to send you back in time. See what happens.”
All they did in response to Nesi’s clueless stare was give a mild little shrug of their orange-cream shoulder, like it was nothing at all. And maybe to them, it was.
Then that flash of light, the sudden whisk of clammy autumn air, the mighty lurch in her already queasy stomach as she felt and heard the flutter of a hundred butterflies encircle her . . . Nesi felt like she was a kit being grabbed by the scruff and flung into a darkness she couldn’t see the bottom of until she hit, coming to in irons.
Audition For the Fox
Martin Cahill
“A triumph, a candle-bright and timely pleasure lit up by gorgeous prose and an exuberant love for the world and for hope.”
—Cassandra Khaw, author of The All-Consuming World
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks…but will she be clever enough to save her own ancestors?
Audition For the Fox
by Martin Cahill
ISBN: 978-1-61696-444-3 (print); 978-1-61696-445-0 (digital)
Published: September 16, 2025
Available Format(s): trade paperback, ebook
A trickster Fox god challenges a quick-witted (but underachieving) acolyte to save herself by saving her own ancestors. But are Nesi and her new friends from the past prepared to defeat the ferocious Wolfhounds of Zemin?
“Fox-fleet and brazen, merry and mischievous.”
—C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
[STARRED REVIEW] “A marvelous and heartbreaking tale of a lone warrior for good who learns that she can’t succeed alone but that making friends carries its own devastation.”
—Library Journal
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
“A triumph, a candle-bright and timely pleasure lit up by gorgeous prose and an exuberant love for the world and for hope.”
—Cassandra Khaw, author of The All-Consuming World
[STARRED REVIEW] “A marvelous and heartbreaking tale of a lone warrior for good who learns that she can’t succeed alone but that making friends carries its own devastation.”
—Library Journal
“Fox-fleet and brazen, merry and mischievous, haunted by mercies: Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox has the trick of doling delight. The language leaps and laughs, teeming with a trickster’s teasing. This book made me happy: both while I was reading it, and long after I’d finished.”
—C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
“Tricksy, generous, timely—Audition for the Fox reminds us that we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves…and stories can change.”
—Premee Mohamed, author of The Butcher of the Forest
“Nimble, sly, and strange as the title character, Cahill has wrought a fine filigree of a tale—with a bold, uncompromising heart.”
—Catherynne Valente, New York Times bestselling author of The Fairyland Series
“Reading Martin Cahill’s Audition for the Fox both soothed my soul and ignited it. A fable for our times, Cahill expertly weaves an enchanting world of gods and the stories that made them. Acolyte Nesi is all of us, seeking to find our place in the world while challenged to make it better. This book is timely and timeless, heartbreaking and inspiring. Hug the pages when you’ve reached the end. Then light a candle for the fox.”
—Lyndsie Manusos, author of From These Dark Abodes
“Filled with elegant yet thrilling prose, Audition for the Fox drops you headlong into a fascinating setting where the stakes ramp up until you’re turning the pages with bated breath and mourning the moment you will reach the last page and have to leave this world behind.”
—Jordan Shiveley, author of Hot Singles In Your Area
“In Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill gives us a world of gods and stories and hope against oppression. He writes with great warmth and heart, and—as in any good book with a fox in—sharply sly trickery set to the best of ends. I predict many readers will want to be this Fox’s acolyte.”
—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians
Part One: Girl Out of Time
An hour ago, Nesi had crept through the red and gold trees that were the Woods of the World, invited to prove herself. She knew to be sly in her audition for the Fox, remembering as many clay and cloud tales of their schemes as she could. T’sidaan, she knew, was a trickster, the first and only trickster of the Pillars, and any slip-up before them could certainly result in eyeteeth meeting eye.
She’d expected riddles, a test of wills. An ancient, unnecessarily complicated game of Grasshopper’s Gambit with, yes, the extra pieces. Even a staring contest, with clear but unspoken cheating involved on both sides.
What she hadn’t expected was coming to consciousness bound in chains, already in motion, walking with hundreds of others through a field of yellowing grass, the clouds above her gray and rumbling with thunder.
Marching in silence, not trusting herself to speak, it was a full hour before it came back to her: what she’d gotten herself into, how she’d gotten here, in the past, and the trickster who’d done it.
It came to her in fits and starts, the memories that were a moment ago and still yet to come. Nesi had made her appeal, spilling her heart to a deity she knew for a fact she should not trust and had to try anyway, in that little, homey cabin in the Woods where the Fox had made a den for themself.
And after having done so, she’d been met with an utter silence and stillness reminiscent of the moment before the hunter’s pounce, the flash of teeth.
Until.
The Fox of Tricks had taken a sip from a chipped and paisley porcelain teacup with an annoying slurp, put it down amidst a riot of cheap, well-loved paperbacks on a cluttered side table in their otherwise spare den and finally said, “I think I’m going to send you back in time. See what happens.”
All they did in response to Nesi’s clueless stare was give a mild little shrug of their orange-cream shoulder, like it was nothing at all. And maybe to them, it was.
Then that flash of light, the sudden whisk of clammy autumn air, the mighty lurch in her already queasy stomach as she felt and heard the flutter of a hundred butterflies encircle her . . . Nesi felt like she was a kit being grabbed by the scruff and flung into a darkness she couldn’t see the bottom of until she hit, coming to in irons.