She didn’t get far, not even past the first story, before logic returned and she saw it was too dangerous and difficult. But she got high enough that she could hear it more clearly, and confirm for herself that it came from the attic window. It sounded like something small and hard crashing against the window glass, over and over.

The letter opener, Lovisa thought. She’s trying to break the window with the letter opener. And, Oh, I wish she would stop, because they’ll hear her, and then they’ll kill her.

She’s alive, she thought, dropping back down to the ground, rubbing her painful fingers against her coat, almost sobbing. She’s alive.

What do I do?

Chapter Twenty-four

Bitterblue wasn’t coping well in her attic room.

It was a kind of torture to have little to do but think. Was this what it was like for the prisoners in her jails, all the time? When Bitterblue got home, she was going to learn more about her jails.

That young woman, that guard, visited most days with a bowl of soup or stew, but rarely brought water. When she did bring water, she put it in a shallow bowl on the floor by the door, just like she did with the food, except that it was an even more deliberate effort to cast Bitterblue as a pet, or a fox. As if Bitterblue should mind sharing the behavior of a fox. Of all the Keepish people Bitterblue had met since her arrival, the fox who visited her regularly was easily the one she liked and respected most. He kept her company. And he brought her things. One night when she was feeling more hopeless than usual, he’d brought her a pastry.

Bitterblue had come to think of that fox as her fox. He wasn’t the only fox who visited. Sometimes she woke to several foxes blinking at her with incurious gold eyes. But her fox was different from the others. He had a long nose and particularly large and perky ears, and he felt different. She thought—she was almost sure—he might be touching her mind sometimes. That girl who’d burst in—Lovisa—had said that the fox was bonded to her mother, but then, why did the fox feel like he was trying to help? Did blue foxes ever defy their humans?

She’d found the vent in the wall behind her bed and the heat duct it served, pulling the bed from the wall with hurting hands. But the vent was too small for her to climb into. She’d cried for a few seconds about that discovery, for sometimes she allowed herself a brief burst of tears, to relieve some of her pent-up tension. She never let herself cry for more than a few seconds, though, because she couldn’t afford to dehydrate herself.