Or, thought the fox, tapping gently on her mind, maybe it would be more accurate to call it a ball of toughness. It was hard to get into her mind. She was like those other Monseans, Giddon and Hava, who lived in Quona Varana’s house with his siblings: She often closed her mind, made a wall he couldn’t push through.

Other times, though, she opened her mind, and he could feel the person she was. A hundred times a day, she told herself, I’m stronger than the way they make me feel. Then she would sit there, stubborn and fierce, trying to think her way out of her prison. The fox was trying to think her way out of the prison too, but it was a frustratingly fruitless exercise. Humans were not as easy to manipulate as he’d been led to believe as a kit, not when they were humans like Ferla or Benni.

The queen had figured out a lot, considering her isolation. She’d guessed that Ferla was careful, logical, the kind of person who might decide to kill her as the result of sound deduction. But she hadn’t seen Benni; she’d been asleep by the time he arrived. So she hadn’t seen him strike Pari. She couldn’t know that there was a man involved who could kill her in an impulsive moment of deciding it was the best next step in a haphazard plan.

She’d also guessed too much about the fox. This was due partly to her sharp, stabby mind and partly to his own limitations when it came to watching her starve. The food deprivation was so distressing. It made the fox feel empty too, as if the hunger of this little stubborn queen made a hole inside him, beside his own well-fed tummy. He couldn’t sneak her a water bowl, not without spilling it everywhere. But the night the Monseans had come to dinner, he’d brought her a pastry. She’d gobbled most of it down while he’d sat in a corner pretending not to care, then had a bad hour while her confused stomach tried to force it back up again. She’d done something surprising and clever: crawled under the bed and tucked the pastry remains inside the heat duct, to finish later. Then she’d said, “Thank you, fox,” and gone back to thinking hard, tucked into the far corner of her bed.

She hadn’t guessed that the two people she thought of most often, Giddon and Hava, had been downstairs, eating dinner, snooping. Not even knowing she was alive. How close Giddon and Hava had come to finding the queen’s rings, which Benni kept in the secret drawers of his desk. Then they would have known, and something would have happened to put an end to this torture.

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