“She put you in there?” said Lovisa, puzzled.
“She’s renovating the attic room,” said Erita.
“Oh, I see,” said Lovisa, trying to decipher this. “So she put you in the staircase instead, so you could”—she pitched her voice low to sound like Ferla’s—“‘think hard about what you’ve done’?”
“Yes,” said Erita, giggling in delight. “But I didn’t mind it at all. I just climbed down and sat at the door to Papa’s library, where it was warm and I could hear Papa working. But I pretended to be upset when she finally let me out, so she’d do it again.”
“I see,” said Lovisa. “It doesn’t seem like it would be very nice in there.”
“It’s dusty. But it’s way more interesting than the attic room. Are you staying overnight, Lovisa?”
Guilt stabbed her. “No. I have to go back to the dorm.”
“But why?”
“I have homework to do.”
“Couldn’t you do it here?”
“I didn’t bring it.”
“Could you go get it?”
“I don’t have time,” she said, knowing she could skip her homework, that the homework shouldn’t matter more than her brothers; but also knowing that she couldn’t stay overnight in this house, where at every moment she felt the darkness closing around her like a cold, lonely cave. Knowing that part of the reason she needed to go was to escape the sadness of these boys. Selfish coward.
She kissed their freckled noses before she left, told them to take care of one another. It was something Katu often said to them, when he took off on his adventures. “You kids take care of each other until I get back, all right?” It occurred to her to wonder—for the first time—if Katu left because he was excited about where he was going, or because he also felt the trap closing around him if he stayed.
Shutting Vikti’s bedroom door, Lovisa snuck out of the nursery wing and made her way to the door at the base of the attic steps. She was curious about her mother’s supposed renovations. When had these “renovations” started, exactly? Shouldn’t there be signs of disarray? Paper on the floors to protect the rugs from workers’ boots, or something like that? Lovisa knew better. Why all the secrecy about whatever Benni was keeping in the attic room?
Ferla’s fox sat in front of the attic door. She was certain it was him; though foxes looked a lot alike, she recognized that malevolent gaze, and her mother’s fox had a longish nose and jaunty ears. He was panting, and also guarding a pastry that sat on the rug at his feet. It was odd behavior, but it hardly mattered. What mattered were his glimmering eyes, resting on Lovisa’s suspicious face.
Downstairs, dinner was breaking up, guests milling through the drawing rooms and the game room, teas in hand. Lovisa decided to let her parents and Quona figure out for themselves that Giddon and Hava had gone. Finding her coat, she slipped outside into the cold. She wanted to go around to the back of the house and look up at the attic room window—for a light? A sign? A clue? Of what? Something impulsive her father had done? Some way in which he was damaging his own business?
But the fox had already seen her. It wasn’t worth the door guards seeing her too.
The house glowed with the light of silbercow oil as she headed toward campus.
* * *
—
When she reached her dormitory, a boy named Nori Orfa was on his way out. He was a northerner like Nev, but two-named like the Cavendas, from one of Winterkeep’s most prestigious tea manors in Torla’s Neck. In fact, he was one of the many Keepish who lived in a house on a cliff above the sea. Lovisa didn’t like Nori Orfa, at all. She knew a girl he’d hurt, with lies. And she wasn’t surprised to see him visiting this dorm; she’d noticed him and Nev chatting outside recently, stupid grins on their faces, like they thought they had a secret.
He smiled at her in that unsubtle, flirtatious way he always had, then held the door open for her in a way that crowded her and felt more intimate than it needed to. Ignoring him, she trudged up the steps, then through the corridors. As she passed Nev’s bedroom, she heard a scuffle inside, like someone was dragging the furniture. Then a yowl, then a laugh.
She knocked on the door. She couldn’t help herself.
A moment later, Nev swung the door open sharply. When she saw Lovisa, her face went expressionless. “Yes?” she said.
Lovisa’s eyes slid to Nev’s bed, automatically looking for rumpled blankets, the kind of disarray that might mean she’d just been having sex with Nori Orfa. She saw nothing. The blankets were neatly folded and a steaming cup on the desk suggested that Nev was doing homework. Her stove was burning and her window was full of plants, as always. Nev was one of those people who knew one plant from another.
“I heard yelling,” Lovisa said.
“Did you?”
There was a small movement under Nev’s bed. A dark nose poked out and one yellow eye peered up at Lovisa.
“You have a fox kit now?” said Lovisa.
“As you see.”
“Are you bonded?”
“Is that any of your business?”
“Do you know it’s against the rules to live in an academy dorm with an unbonded fox?”
“I have an exception from a teacher,” said Nev.
“You mean Quona Varana,” said Lovisa, understanding. “She gave you that fox, didn’t she.”
“As you know perfectly well, people can’t give people foxes,” said Nev. “Foxes choose their companions. She needed surgery. I performed it. She decided to stay with me afterward. It seemed appropriate to Quona, because I’m an animal medicine student. Now I’m caring for her.”
“Right. She’s homework,” Lovisa said as the kit emerged further, her enormous ears comical above her tiny, bandaged face. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know what she calls herself. I call her Little Guy.”
“Stupid name. She looks like a pirate. What happened to her?”
“I had to cut an aronworm from her face. It’s a pale, bulbous, wormlike parasite,” Nev said blandly, as if she were trying to be disgusting on purpose.
“She’s cute,” Lovisa said, startling Nev, and herself too. She pushed away from the doorframe, grasping for an insult. “So that’s what you and Quona do together? Remove parasites? Do you go to her house and pet her cats? Does she take you with her when she communes with silbercows?”
Something closed in Nev’s eyes. A curtain coming down, for Nev to hide something behind. It was interesting. “I’ve seen some injured silbercows recently,” she said. “Did you know that? Some have come to shore with cuts and burns.”