They hadn’t stopped fighting until bedtime, when they’d turned toward each other with that focus that always, briefly, made the hard, sharp, inexhaustible ambitions of Ferla’s nature drop away. Usually, after sex, Ferla let herself fall asleep. This time, she’d waited for Benni to fall asleep, then she’d risen from bed. She’d gone to her study.
At her desk, she’d sat with her back straight as a poker, surrounded by golden silbercow light, a strange, almost jubilant look on her face. She’d felt like . . . too many things. She’d felt like the end of something, and the beginning of something new, as if a limb were tearing away from her body while a different thing grew in its place, a distorted growth that would allow Ferla to do things she hadn’t thought of before. Unnatural, wrong things.
I might go to sleep now, the fox said to her, shaking with his memories of that boy crashing down, a trickle of blood on his face, if you don’t need me.
All right, Fox, said Ferla calmly, while that lumpy, raw scar tissue grew over the way she’d used to be.
* * *
—
The little queen was having a hard time of it. She was alive, and her hands and feet were healing. She was exercising, trying to stay strong. But she also spent a lot of time on her bed, curled in a ball of hunger, pain, and fear.
Or, thought the fox, tapping gently on her mind, maybe it would be more accurate to call it a ball of toughness. It was hard to get into her mind. She was like those other Monseans, Giddon and Hava, who lived in Quona Varana’s house with his siblings: She often closed her mind, made a wall he couldn’t push through.
Other times, though, she opened her mind, and he could feel the person she was. A hundred times a day, she told herself, I’m stronger than the way they make me feel. Then she would sit there, stubborn and fierce, trying to think her way out of her prison. The fox was trying to think her way out of the prison too, but it was a frustratingly fruitless exercise. Humans were not as easy to manipulate as he’d been led to believe as a kit, not when they were humans like Ferla or Benni.
The queen had figured out a lot, considering her isolation. She’d guessed that Ferla was careful, logical, the kind of person who might decide to kill her as the result of sound deduction. But she hadn’t seen Benni; she’d been asleep by the time he arrived. So she hadn’t seen him strike Pari. She couldn’t know that there was a man involved who could kill her in an impulsive moment of deciding it was the best next step in a haphazard plan.
She’d also guessed too much about the fox. This was due partly to her sharp, stabby mind and partly to his own limitations when it came to watching her starve. The food deprivation was so distressing. It made the fox feel empty too, as if the hunger of this little stubborn queen made a hole inside him, beside his own well-fed tummy. He couldn’t sneak her a water bowl, not without spilling it everywhere. But the night the Monseans had come to dinner, he’d brought her a pastry. She’d gobbled most of it down while he’d sat in a corner pretending not to care, then had a bad hour while her confused stomach tried to force it back up again. She’d done something surprising and clever: crawled under the bed and tucked the pastry remains inside the heat duct, to finish later. Then she’d said, “Thank you, fox,” and gone back to thinking hard, tucked into the far corner of her bed.
She hadn’t guessed that the two people she thought of most often, Giddon and Hava, had been downstairs, eating dinner, snooping. Not even knowing she was alive. How close Giddon and Hava had come to finding the queen’s rings, which Benni kept in the secret drawers of his desk. Then they would have known, and something would have happened to put an end to this torture.
* * *
—
The night the queen started throwing her letter opener against the window, a Friday, the fox was in his bed, feeling it happen. It frightened him to pieces. He strained to hold all the minds in the house and sense whether anyone overheard. At one point, that poor, miserable guard started up the steps to the attic and the fox went so far as to shout an undisguised command in her mind for her to run downstairs again. The guard had no idea where the sudden, urgent, panicked instinct came from, but she ran downstairs, which got her away from the noise.
Then the fox went to the attic room himself to put an end to it. He sprang upon the letter opener and held it in his mouth until the queen got her senses back. Her mind was more open than usual afterward; open, aching, unhappy, and vulnerable. She was thinking about that big, pale Monsean man, the one called Giddon.
Should I? thought the fox. Shouldn’t I?
It was the question he’d recently started asking himself: Should he, shouldn’t he, talk to her? Openly, no longer pretending? Since she suspected so much already?
Why did he want this so badly?
He decided he wouldn’t. He’d do something else instead: Bring her the small envelope that had fallen from Giddon’s pocket in Benni’s library.
The fox brought the queen the envelope to make her happy. To comfort her while she thought about Giddon. But once she opened the envelope and stared at the notes inside, a horror overtook her. She began to gasp, sob. He suddenly understood, with a flash of impatience at his own stupidity for not anticipating this, that she thought it meant Giddon was dead. That her captors had learned something about him, killed him, and, in this very house, emptied his pockets. It was the first time the fox had ever known the queen to be flooded with despair and it was intolerable, it was the opposite of what he’d meant her to feel.
And so he overwhelmed her with a different feeling, trying to make it seem like it was coming from inside herself, rather than from him: a clear, singing sense that Giddon was safe. That the envelope was a gift, not a message of anything bad. A treasure. Didn’t humans like treasures?
She calmed down after that. She dried her tears and looked at the little papers differently, with new questions, with wonder at Giddon for keeping them in a tiny envelope like this. She held them to her face as if they were precious. She tucked them back into their envelope, and tucked the envelope into the heat duct.
Then she stared hard at the fox, for a long time.
The fox wondered, as he wondered more and more lately, how any fox who cared about any human ever managed to keep the secrets of foxkind.
* * *
—
His seven siblings didn’t have a lot of sympathy for his plight.
Very, very late on the same night he’d brought the small envelope to the queen, he sensed his siblings entering the Cavenda house, then making their way to Benni’s library. All seven of them: Rascal, Rumpus, Lark, Gladly, Sophie (short for Sophisticated), Pickle, and Genius.
With a heavy sigh, the fox dragged himself out of bed again. In the library he found them perched together on Benni’s desk, gathered around the little drawers.