But Ferla had a temper. It could burn low for hours. For days, even, heat snaking along her voice, glimmering in her eyes, slowly growing. Eventually, it would explode into a conflagration that could be felt all over the house. It was invariably one of her children who set it off, by being loud or asking one too many questions, by whining or crying, by interrupting her when she was with Benni. On those days, the punishments were different. She would close Lovisa in the room with a flint, a candle, and no food, taking the books and the lamp away, locking the door. “This is harder for me than it is for you,” she would say. “This is soft compared to what some parents do. When your uncle and I were children, our father would put us in a cave. It was cold and hard. Our only visitors were birds and our only view was the sun over the ocean as night fell. Do you understand, Lovisa? Do you understand that your life is soft?” She would shut the door, turn the lock, then not come back. When her anger burned itself out, she would send one of the guards to release the child. Lovisa would have to guess at how to ration the candle, not liking the darkness, but never knowing for sure how long her punishment would last. Sometimes it stretched well into the night. She’d learned to control a nervous bladder, and to hide food in her pockets all the time. She’d learned a lot of things.
Lovisa continued around the house. She noticed, with surprise, that no lights shone in the guest apartments on the third floor. Were the Monseans already asleep? It occurred to her that their presence in the house boded well for whichever boy had misbehaved. Ferla did not lose her temper in front of foreign delegations.
Atop the house, the Cavenda airship was tethered, a bulbous beast, dark against the falling snow. Lovisa doubted she’d be able to see it if she didn’t already know it was there. In daytime, the decorations of its balloon were visible: a purple, blue, and gold scene of silbercows swimming with the Keeper, as on the Keepish flag. Airships like this were Winterkeep’s pride. The technology was proprietary, no other Torlan nation had them, and Ta had been right when she’d said that Flag Hill was showing them off tonight. Her parents’ airship might be in darkness, but a number of the houses Lovisa had passed had lanterns glowing on their roofs, illuminating the most expensive possession a Keepish citizen could own.
Lovisa scaled the wall again, in the back of the yard where the rocks made it easiest on this side. Then she circled around to the front, where she went to the gate, rang the bell, and waited.
* * *
—
The blue fox who was bonded to Ferla Cavenda loved it second-best of all when Lovisa came home. Lovisa was one of the more interesting Cavendas, a born liar like Ferla, but better at it, because she didn’t need people to admire her.
First-best, of course, he loved the airship, into which he was never invited. He snuck up to the roof sometimes and sat inside, imagining the wind whipping against his fur as he flew toward adventure.
The fox was dozing on the hearthstone of Ferla’s study fireplace when he sensed Lovisa on the grounds outside, snooping. Sometimes Lovisa did that, climbed over the wall and circled the house before announcing herself at the gate. She snooped in the politics and government building too; the fox always knew when she was listening through the vents. Humans didn’t appreciate how much foxes could perceive. This suited foxes, for humans would sneak a lot less and be a lot less interesting if they knew. It was one of the secrets of foxkind.
He wasn’t surprised Lovisa had come home tonight. Lovisa had an instinct for when drama was brewing, and it was certainly brewing tonight. Ferla was a tornado of rage that coiled tighter and tighter as the evening progressed. Benni Cavenda, her husband, swept in from time to time to announce something boring about stupid zilfium. When he did this, Ferla would stare at him, throwing daggers with her eyes, until he went away. Ferla was furious at everyone and everything. The fox didn’t always like being bonded to Ferla Cavenda, but he did like these moments, for Ferla was a human composed of sharp motivations, passions, and ambitions, like a tangled pile of pins, always interesting. He might not always understand what her thoughts meant or what they referred to, but he always understood how she felt about them. And she had a warm, cozy house; an airship; a beautiful fur coat with a hood he could nestle into; and a family with a penchant for drama.
Casually raising his head from his paws, he touched Ferla’s mind with a question. Shall I make a round of the house, to see that all’s well?
All is not well, she stormed. I don’t care what you do, Fox. But you’d better be available if I want you.
I’ll check back often, of course, the fox reassured her quickly, wishing, as he always did, that she would ask him his chosen name. All the other bonded foxes he knew, including his seven siblings, had humans who called them by their chosen names, but Ferla always just called him “Fox.” A round of the house, no more, he said, to check that everyone’s behaving as you would wish.
Scowling, Ferla grunted, then ignored him. With a small sigh of regret for the hearthstone, he rose to his feet and tiptoed to the door. Pushing through the fox flap, he stood in the corridor, bracing himself against the cold air that plagued a fox in almost every part of this house in winter, for heat rose and cold sank, and a fox was low to the ground. It would be warmer once he’d snuck into the heat ducts, though sneezier. It was an unfortunate irony in the life of foxkind that achievable comfort was often inversely proportional to achievable interestingness. He thought that even his seven siblings would agree with this, and they were the most spoiled foxes in Winterkeep.
The blue fox entered the heat ducts through the secret hinged vent grate in the low wall of the second-story privy. It was his most recently converted vent grate and he was proud of it. Hinging a grate took a blue fox days and was neither comfortable nor interesting. First he had to hurt his mouth and risk breaking his teeth pulling out nails, then he had to thread yarn through the grate, again with his mouth, and wind it tightly in place. No one in the Cavenda household knew that he was capable of any of this. Not even Ferla; especially not Ferla. It was very satisfying.
Once in the heat ducts, he could reach every room in the house. He could check on any of his secret tools, which he kept in various nooks and crannies. He could also follow any individual human around the house without that person knowing. No one made the heat ducts more worthwhile than Lovisa Cavenda. She had a fire inside her that burned as hot as the fire inside Ferla, but she kept it to a low, steady blaze, always controlled, always hungry. Always just nearly about to make something happen. He loved her visits home.
The fox worked his way to Benni’s library on the first floor, guessing that that was where Lovisa would go first.
* * *
—
When Lovisa entered her father’s library, her father wasn’t there.
In the middle of his desk sat a stack of papers covered with his big, bold handwriting. No doubt, her father was drafting another argument in favor of the legalization of zilfium use: She could see the word zilfium repeated several times. She felt a little sorry for him, and for the irony of his position. By chance or fate, in the elected, fifty-member Parliament, there were currently twenty-five Scholars and twenty-five Industrialists, dead even. In the case of a tie, the president was permitted to cast a tie-breaking vote. And of course, the president was Benni’s own wife, a Scholar who would vote against him.