“They want you to join ‘em for breakfast,” said the girl, who’d meet her Death one winter’s dusk with no knowledge of how anyone could mistake this man and his lean-limbed wife for monsters, what with their kindly manners, their insistence she do them no favours, only sit down and eat what they offered her: a fortune in good bread and cold butter, more ham and rare cheeses than she’d seen in her life.

Mr. Fox poured the girl a draught of plum cider and looked to his wife, who said quietly then: “Tell them we will come.”

The date they had elected was the eve of Lady Mary’s own mother’s birthday and it was hotter than anyone could remember. Yet despite the dripping heat, Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox both arrived in Lord Petty’s manor wearing rose-and-gold brocade, their coats brilliantly embroidered, the hems heavy with seed pearls and stitchings of warm amber. They wore their finery like they’d been born sleeved in those rich materials, like they were pelts only slightly too thick for the season.

“We have come,” said Mrs. Fox, striding through the doors like she owned every life in its walls and every generation that would come after. “As you have asked.”

Lord Petty stood with the men that Mrs. Fox had spurned, dukes and dour-faced barons and merchants made noble by the money they ferried to the vaults of their king, their chests gleaming with medals and cunning satin panelling. But none of them were as splendid as Mr. Fox. None of them had his easy grace, his sly fashion of smiling, his aptitude for entreating the light to love his face best. None of them had Mrs. Fox, who stood with her arm threaded around her husband’s own. They smiled, a matching set, far more beautiful than that bitter crowd deserved.

“We are pleased to see you well,” said Lord Petty.

Mrs. Fox nodded. “And I am pleased you look well, Lord Petty. I had a dream recently that distressed me to no end. In this dream, I saw you racing through glade and glens, down to the black pines, down to where the water is cold and pure it’d burn your tongue to ash. I saw you kneel by a lake, Lord Petty, and I saw you get down on your knees, and I saw you cut the heart from your chest.”

And Lord Petty swallowed then. “Why would I do such a thing?”

“For a ring,” said Mrs. Fox, glib as anything. “A silver ring with a sapphire as perfect and lifeless as a heart that cannot imagine happiness for anything but itself.”

Lord Petty said nothing in riposte, only stared at Mrs. Fox, the hairs that fronded the back of his neck prickling and for a moment, he was returned to those woods and he was, without question, afraid.

The doors to the dining hall opened.