She spoke into Ferla’s cold silence. “Well? Am I looking for someone else’s remains?”
“Whose remains do you imagine you’d find here?” asked Ferla, her voice rising with outrage.
“I would vastly prefer to find no one’s,” said the woman in distaste.
“Listen,” said Ferla. “I want to be sure no one was hurt. What if one of my children or a staff member had a visitor I was unaware of? My daughter was always sneaking around the house with lovers. I intend to pay you handsomely for your time.” Then she stood with her palm to her throbbing head, sick and slightly swaying, while the woman, hard-mouthed, closed her eyes and raised her hands. She looked like she was trying to feel the parts of the air. She looked quite silly, actually, and Ferla lost patience with her long before she was done. Ferla also lost her dinner, staggering away and vomiting onto the base of a tree. Then she gave her own vomit a wide berth and timidly sat herself upon the ground. She put her head in her hands, because it hurt and because she couldn’t bear the sight of the ravaged house. This too was a whole new Ferla, emotional, unwell.
The woman dropped her hands and turned. “I’ve found no remains,” she said.
Inside her heart, Ferla cursed this news. “You’re certain?”
The woman let out a short sigh. “Why don’t you tell me whose body I’m looking for, President Cavenda? Then I could really help you.”
Ferla raised her chin and looked into the woman’s face. “Tell me,” she said. “Is it true what they say, that you’re the escaped property of the government of Estill?”
The woman cocked her head and studied Ferla. Her face was tired, her shoulders slumped, but her voice came out hard. “Why did you bring me here in the dead of the night to search for a body,” she said, “and why are you disappointed I didn’t find one?”
Ferla reached into her pockets, pulled out some money, and threw it on the ground between them. “I trust you’ll find that satisfactory,” she said. It was her chilliest voice. The fox, who recognized that voice, shivered.
The woman did something amazing. She picked a path carefully away from the house, walked toward Ferla, then stopped. For a moment, the woman’s feelings were bright and visible to the fox: Anger. Discouragement. Shame.
Then, not even touching the money, she turned and walked out through the gate.
The fox badly wished the woman hadn’t done that. Now he was afraid for her life.
* * *
—
Ferla and Benni worried constantly, but they did so in their own separate worlds. Each was trying to find a way out of the mess certain to ensue should Lovisa or the queen emerge somewhere and make accusations. Benni was trying to find a way out for the entire family, which, like most of his plans, was unrealistic. Benni was a romantic. He imagined success and glory for the Cavenda name. The fox tapped on his mind sometimes, puzzled by how someone with so much ambition could be so immature.
He was searching for Lovisa as discreetly as he could, but it was hard without his airship. To his friends who owned airships, he pretended to cling to the hope that since Lovisa’s body hadn’t been found, maybe she’d escaped the fire. Maybe she was out in the world somewhere, injured, muddled, confused. Would anyone be willing to lend an airship to Benni, so that he might have a look around for his child?
Benni went out in a borrowed airship most days, sad and apprehensive, unwell, then came back with nothing, slowly climbing the stairs. He took that guard with him when he flew, the young one with the dead eyes. The fox suspected that if that guard saw Lovisa or the queen from the airship, she might keep quiet about it. The fox suspected that Benni’s chances of success were very low indeed. Still, the fox worried, anxiously waiting.
Ferla, in contrast, was trying to find a way out for herself. She didn’t like that this essentially meant pinning everything on Benni, but she had little choice. And she couldn’t figure out what to do should Lovisa show up alive. Ferla had tried to pull the girl away from the burning house and Lovisa, her own daughter, had attacked her with a shovel. Ferla wondered what her father would have done, a train of thought that was no comfort to the fox, since Ferla’s father had basically been a sadist.
And Katu? Her baby brother, Katu, was where Ferla reached her rational limit. Ferla chose to stop seeing the truth about Katu, because it was too much. In their childhood, Katu had often been her charge, and always her ally. Her father had sent her into the cave alone for her punishments, until Katu had been old enough to understand; and then he’d sent them in together. And Ferla’s terror had vanished. She’d had something to do in the cave, someone to comfort.
In her not-seeing, Ferla chose to exonerate herself from any part of Katu’s fate. She talked to her dead father about it. You understand, Father, don’t you? she said. Benni made me. And you understand that sometimes people need to be punished, don’t you? You punished Katu many times. Remember? It was interesting, the way humans could decide not to see the truth when it made them too uncomfortable.
Sometimes Ferla took to flying into rages and breaking things. In the upstairs apartments, lifting ceramic statues, glass candle holders, or entire vases full of water and flowers from the tables, she slammed them against the stones of the hearth. Benni would stand there while she screamed, looking wary and far away in his thoughts. When members of the Devret family came to investigate the noise, he would rouse himself to say that he was terribly sorry, there’d been an accident.
“We dropped it,” Benni would say, or “It slipped” or “It fell.” One of these times, Mara crossed the room with a look of the deepest misgiving, took a portrait of her son, Mari, down from the wall, then carried the portrait away.
The Devrets believed, of course, that the Cavendas were mourning the death of a child. The fox liked to watch Mara and Arni Devret through the grate in their bedroom, where they spent a lot of time talking. Mara knitted in a chair, something pale and soft and blue that grew bigger in her lap every day, and he liked to steal loose pieces of the yarn. The Devrets had a warmth and an affection for each other, even in the midst of stressful houseguests, that the fox had never witnessed before, ever. They talked often about the little boys, who were trapped in grief. In fact, the boys’ anguish for their sister was so uncontrolled, their confusion so inundating, that the fox had taken to avoiding them. Their pain set every hair of his body on edge and made him feel terribly helpless. The Devrets tried to comfort the boys, but the Devrets didn’t understand what their lives had been. And anyway, what comfort was there for a sister gone?
Sometimes the fox watched Mara in her knitting chair when she was alone, tracking her feelings, her thoughts. She cried about her son, Mari, who was grieving Lovisa. Mara would hurt because Mari hurt, trying to think of some way to make him feel better. Deciding that there wasn’t a way to make him feel better, and crying a little about that too. Then heaving a sigh and pushing her mind back to work. Mara was a politician, and her husband a banker. She was clever and cynical and sometimes she was hard. But she contained kindness too, in her thoughts, and toward the people around her. Whenever the fox touched upon her kindness, he poked at it, sniffed it, with something like hunger.