She’d crouched at the top of the stairs, shivering in the cold. She’d listened and heard one, two vital words; and then a bonus, something about an increase in orders next spring. And a second bonus-another supplier was being brought on to help the Pollinger manufacturer-might Serbio consider a reduction in his bulk prices, and meet his competitor’s prices? A lower figure per unit ton…

Her client began to haggle. She had to admire a businessman able to defend his turf while standing in a freezing hall in nothing but button-bottomed pantlettes.

It was enough. Reclaiming her skirt, she stole back to the chamber and made three notes in pencil while the birds began to clamor again.

They covered the noise of Serbio’s tiptoed return. He had wanted to find her cowering with her head under the pillow, her rump exposed; she was busy writing instead.

“A letter to Mama about what a naughty girl you’ve been?” he said, though his arched eyebrow defined his attention as keenly suspicious.

She gasped and managed not to fling the book away from her. She said the first thing that came into her head.

“Notes for a story.” A long pause. “I write fancies; they only come to me when I am in distress.”

She pulled her skirt over her lap, making a game of it, but Serbio grabbed her paper, saying “Whaddya fancy then, so I can provide it times three, heh-heh?”

Blessings on the team member who had insisted she learn code. “This looks like dragon drool,” he said. “Words en’t involved here.”

“I was just starting,” she said.

“Tell me what your big idea is, that you got to get up from your sweet bed of pain to write it down.”

Maybe it was his mention of Mama. Just in time, she remembered a story from her childhood. She had no way of knowing whether it was a famous legend or an invention of her own mother. “It’s about a Witch,” she said, “a Witch who has a sudden yen for a dinner made out of fox babies. But the fox mother howls down the moon, which rolls like a grave door in front of the Witch’s cave. And there the wicked old Witch stays, for ever so long.”

He wasn’t so drunk as not to be dubious; the unexpected business negotiation at midnight had corrected his thinking. “All that in this little sketch, these scratchy lines?”

“I was just beginning,” she said.

“I’ll sit and watch you write,” said Serbio. “You can read it out loud as it occurs to you.” He dropped on his knees by the side of the bed and pulled the skirt away from her lap. He dug his hand. “I don’t know whether we should beat that old Witch out of her cave,” he said, twisting. “What do you think? What do you think we ought to do?”

“Once there was a fox mother,” she said, but where she had avoided weeping earlier, the memory of the story retold in this situation gave a greater grief.