A fuzzy, odd, not-quite-dreamlike feeling accompanied the thought. Saf had the Grace of giving people dreams. The dreams he’d given Bitterblue, back when they’d loved each other, had had a sort of edge, a border, that felt like him somehow, like his enclosing arms, rather than like something that sprang from inside herself. She’d learned to recognize the difference between dreams that were his gifts and dreams of her own.

This thought about the foxes felt like a gift dream. It also reminded Bitterblue of the thought she’d woken to previously, about how she shouldn’t tell anyone about that first fox.

Bitterblue looked around, unsurprised when she saw a single pair of golden eyes glimmering at her from the corner. Blinking, staring, blinking.

Are you talking to me? she thought at the fox. I thought you didn’t do that, unless we were bonded. Are we bonded?

When the fox gave no indication of having heard or understood her, she tried speaking the same message out loud, in Keepish, but that garnered no response either.

Oh well, Bitterblue thought. You probably don’t hear me. But I won’t tell anyone about you, or your friends. If there’s a hole in the wall under the bed, or something, that my captors don’t know about, I don’t want them to know.

And then she became paranoid, wondering if the whole thing was a test; if her captors were filling her room with foxes, then pretending not to know about the foxes, to see if she reported them. To tell if she was trustworthy. To catch her on the day she tried to crawl out of her prison through a hole under the bed, and laugh, and tell her they knew it all along, and punish her, by depriving her of food or water.

This is what they want, she suddenly realized, remembering the drawing, the rule, the lack of information, the humiliation. They want me anxious.

When the gray dimness of morning began to turn pink, the fox scampered under the bed and disappeared.

Thinking, Bitterblue waited.

—

When the light came, Bitterblue crawled back to the door and peeked through the keyhole. She saw nothing but more light and decided she was looking into a room with large windows.

Once more, she crawled back to the bed, but this time she examined the space under it. She could make nothing out in the shadows; no visible escape hatch. She grabbed one of the bedposts and tried to shift the bed, but the pain left her gasping. She tried moving it with her shoulder too, but it wouldn’t budge. She felt her weakness, her exhaustion.

I will do it, she told Giddon, knowing that he could have moved the bed with one hand, but refusing to be ashamed. I will, as soon as I can. My hands will heal.