Wait! he cried. Don’t move anything! Don’t use my tools! Don’t go into my heat ducts! Someone will see or hear you, and I’ll never be able to explain about the heat ducts! It’s one thing to obediently crash a party and another to reveal that foxes aren’t always honest! That I’M not honest! That I’m a builder and a spy in my own house!
It’s not our fault that you’ve taken your dishonesty to such extremes, Ad, they said. YOU’RE the one who’s risking the secrets of foxkind, by lying to your human TOO MUCH!
You all smell like cats, he said crossly, a terrible insult, but they only sniffed.
Oh, stop worrying! We’ll be careful!
It was enough to turn his fur silver. Especially since there were Monseans at this dinner, and the fox had learned that Monseans paid more attention to blue foxes than the Keepish did. That strange-eyed Monsean girl, Hava, stared at him, trying to tell him apart from the others. And her mind was strong. The fox tried, at one point, to influence her mind with the idea that foxes weren’t worth noticing, and immediately she peered at him harder. Monseans seemed to notice when foxes tried to plant messages in their minds, which was a thing all foxes could do, with any humans, but which was supposed to be a secret of foxkind. How were the Monseans noticing that? Humans never noticed that! The fox influenced Ferla’s feelings all the time by touching her mind with ideas about how trustworthy he was. He influenced the cook, with a suggestion of benevolent generosity toward foxes, so that she was more likely to drop snacks onto the floor when he visited the kitchen. He was also working on Benni’s mind with visions of how distinguished Benni would look flying in the airship with a fox at his side, because Benni was the one who took the airship out most of the time. So far, the fox wasn’t making much progress on that, but sometimes it took a while.
The point was, the Keepish never noticed when foxes were in their minds. But Monseans apparently noticed. Their minds were harder to read too. You should be extra careful around the Monseans! he told his four siblings. They can tell when you’re trying to get into their minds! When they pooh-poohed him, he went electric with alarm, like a lightning bolt. He screamed. I cannot solely be responsible for keeping all the secrets of foxkind!
You’re one to talk about being more careful, they told him. Do you EVER do anything your person tells you to do?
They didn’t even know the half of what he did. The fox thought it must be nice to be part of a herd. To have six other minds on hand to come up with solutions, explanations, plans. To be able to hide behind someone else, if anything bad happened. To be bonded to a person who lived to please foxes and wouldn’t mind at all if she found hers in the heat ducts, instead of to Ferla, who lived only for herself, had eyes like whip ends, and hurt those the fox wished to protect.
Well? said Gorga Balava’s fox when he returned to the dining room. Why are they being so carelessly disobedient to their person?
She told them to come, he said.
Oh, said Gorga’s fox, interested. She’s a rather reckless human, isn’t she?
There’s something wrong with her, that’s for certain, the fox said. What kind of human bonded covertly—and illegally!—to multiple foxes, created a secret fox paradise for them inside her home, then disguised the fur, the smells, the noises, with a crowd of cats? Then imperiled her own secret by giving them risky adventures! Bonding was never allowed to be secret. A person wasn’t supposed to bond to more than one fox. She could get into so much trouble, and for what? He couldn’t quite get a paw on it, despite trying sometimes to get into Quona Varana’s head. She wasn’t even political. She seemed to do it for fun! And it was true that he might obey his person too little, but sometimes he worried that his siblings obeyed theirs too much. That they loved her too much. What if they got careless, trusted her too much, and told her too much? What if they let slip the secrets of foxkind?
He didn’t elaborate on any of these thoughts to Gorga’s fox now. She didn’t seem like the type who would cope well with tales of risk-taking. She was the sort of fox who pretended to have a temperature regulation deficiency so that Gorga would dress her in little fur booties and a coat whenever she went outside. Her chosen name was Earmuff.
* * *
—
The fox was in Benni Cavenda’s library, arguing with one of his sisters, Rascal, when those Monseans Giddon and Hava stumbled in.
The fox bolted under a sofa and crouched there, but it was too late to hide Rascal. He just hoped Giddon and Hava hadn’t been counting carefully.
Luckily, the Monseans were distracted by their own problems. They looked silly too, for Giddon had wrapped Hava up in one of Lovisa’s scarfs. They were clearly distraught. And they were also astonishing, because the moment they entered the room, Hava threw off the scarf and began snooping! She looked in the drawers of side tables. She lifted the edge of one of the rugs!
Giddon was very anxious about it. “Hava!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”
“Prying,” said Hava.
“What do you think you’re going to find?”
“Clues!”
“To what? We have nothing on the Cavendas! We should go back in there and eavesdrop on the Estillan envoy!”
“All these families are equally insincere,” she said. “Don’t you feel it? And maybe there’s some information about Katu in this house!”
Giddon was clutching his hair. Inside him, the fox could feel his surrender. “All right,” he said, turning toward the door. “I’ll stand guard.”
Then Hava spun to Benni’s big desk and began pulling on the top drawers. “There are hidden drawers in this desk,” she said. “See those panels? I bet there’s a latch here somewhere.”
The fox was impressed, because Hava was right about the secret drawers. The fox knew how to find the hidden latch in Benni’s desk and he knew what Benni kept hidden in those drawers. If Hava found it, big things would happen.
Suddenly the fox sensed that Lovisa was about to step into the room.
Chapter Seventeen
First Lovisa crashed into Giddon, who was making himself enormous in her father’s doorway. “Ow!”
Then, at the sight of that Graceling rifling through her father’s desk, Lovisa was blindsided by her own indignation.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she practically shouted at Hava.
“I’m looking for a handkerchief,” said Hava. “Calm down.”
In fact, Lovisa was trying to calm down. She wasn’t a yeller; she’d taken herself by surprise. “You’re the one who stole those formulas from Minta Varana, aren’t you?” she cried.
“What are you talking about?” said Hava. “What formulas?”