She bumbled through her classes, carefully avoiding her mother in the halls, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t search the house during the day because her father’s schedule was unpredictable. A nighttime search was out of the question, because of her mother’s fox.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night that week, she ran home after dark, snuck onto the property, and watched the attic window for signs of life. More guards were on duty than usual outside the house. If the queen was dead, why would the house need more guards? But though she hid behind a tree, shivered in her fur coats, and never shifted her gaze from the window, nothing ever happened. No movement, no light. This didn’t prove anything, of course. The window was too high to access from inside, and the queen, if she lived, certainly had no lamp or candles.

Could she get to that window? It was possible to climb partly up the outer face of the house, in theory. She and Mari had mapped it as children, identifying a stone’s sharp edge where a toe could balance, a crack where some fingers could brace. Protrusions of windowsills, areas of slanting roof, et cetera. They’d never tried it, of course, just as they’d never tried the tree-to-trellis route. The climbing route stopped a floor below the window, where the face of the house became perfectly smooth.

What if there was a way to climb partly up, then do something with a rope?

It was when Lovisa found herself thinking along these lines that she would scramble over the wall again and push back to the dorm, fighting with herself, sometimes almost crying in frustration, over her wish to stop caring about whether the queen was alive or not. What did it matter? If she was alive, what could Lovisa do?

Every night, she tried to sleep in her own room; then gave up and tapped on Mari’s door. They played City, or did homework together. Then she slept in his bed, a beautiful, deep night’s sleep that her body only ever surrendered to if she was in this room, with Mari near. She woke in the morning when pink light touched her face, then opened her eyes to the sight of Mari on the rug, wrapped in blankets threaded with gold, his brown face slack and peaceful, snoring gently. In the morning light, his freckles were more noticeable.

“Okay,” she’d say, dropping her feet to the floor. “You can have your bed back. See you later.”

With a sigh and grumble, Mari would awaken. “When I’ll destroy you at City?” he’d say, smiling, his eyes still closed.