What was Ferla to do, if Benni kept making decisions that shattered her plans beyond any ability to recover them? How could he not see that everything they’d planned for was impossible now? And what came next? Was Ferla supposed to end up in prison? The Queen of Monsea could not be in her attic. It was an obstacle that had to be removed.

And Lovisa? Her own daughter! Lovisa knew too much, Lovisa was unpredictable. What was Ferla to do?

The fox did not entirely understand the roots of all these thoughts. He couldn’t comprehend the details of what messes Benni had made. But he could feel and understand Ferla’s feelings about them, as clear as if they were his own, and he had some ideas of things Ferla might do.

That night, after Benni had returned from dumping that boy into the sea, they’d fought, viciously. Ferla had always had a terrible temper, but Benni’s could be fearsome too, when things got bad enough: slow, methodical, and not always smart. Benni’s temper had been getting worse lately. His shipping business was losing money, and he was scared.

They hadn’t stopped fighting until bedtime, when they’d turned toward each other with that focus that always, briefly, made the hard, sharp, inexhaustible ambitions of Ferla’s nature drop away. Usually, after sex, Ferla let herself fall asleep. This time, she’d waited for Benni to fall asleep, then she’d risen from bed. She’d gone to her study.

At her desk, she’d sat with her back straight as a poker, surrounded by golden silbercow light, a strange, almost jubilant look on her face. She’d felt like . . . too many things. She’d felt like the end of something, and the beginning of something new, as if a limb were tearing away from her body while a different thing grew in its place, a distorted growth that would allow Ferla to do things she hadn’t thought of before. Unnatural, wrong things.

I might go to sleep now, the fox said to her, shaking with his memories of that boy crashing down, a trickle of blood on his face, if you don’t need me.

All right, Fox, said Ferla calmly, while that lumpy, raw scar tissue grew over the way she’d used to be.

—

The little queen was having a hard time of it. She was alive, and her hands and feet were healing. She was exercising, trying to stay strong. But she also spent a lot of time on her bed, curled in a ball of hunger, pain, and fear.