The night the queen started throwing her letter opener against the window, a Friday, the fox was in his bed, feeling it happen. It frightened him to pieces. He strained to hold all the minds in the house and sense whether anyone overheard. At one point, that poor, miserable guard started up the steps to the attic and the fox went so far as to shout an undisguised command in her mind for her to run downstairs again. The guard had no idea where the sudden, urgent, panicked instinct came from, but she ran downstairs, which got her away from the noise.

Then the fox went to the attic room himself to put an end to it. He sprang upon the letter opener and held it in his mouth until the queen got her senses back. Her mind was more open than usual afterward; open, aching, unhappy, and vulnerable. She was thinking about that big, pale Monsean man, the one called Giddon.

Should I? thought the fox. Shouldn’t I?

It was the question he’d recently started asking himself: Should he, shouldn’t he, talk to her? Openly, no longer pretending? Since she suspected so much already?

Why did he want this so badly?

He decided he wouldn’t. He’d do something else instead: Bring her the small envelope that had fallen from Giddon’s pocket in Benni’s library.

The fox brought the queen the envelope to make her happy. To comfort her while she thought about Giddon. But once she opened the envelope and stared at the notes inside, a horror overtook her. She began to gasp, sob. He suddenly understood, with a flash of impatience at his own stupidity for not anticipating this, that she thought it meant Giddon was dead. That her captors had learned something about him, killed him, and, in this very house, emptied his pockets. It was the first time the fox had ever known the queen to be flooded with despair and it was intolerable, it was the opposite of what he’d meant her to feel.

And so he overwhelmed her with a different feeling, trying to make it seem like it was coming from inside herself, rather than from him: a clear, singing sense that Giddon was safe. That the envelope was a gift, not a message of anything bad. A treasure. Didn’t humans like treasures?

She calmed down after that. She dried her tears and looked at the little papers differently, with new questions, with wonder at Giddon for keeping them in a tiny envelope like this. She held them to her face as if they were precious. She tucked them back into their envelope, and tucked the envelope into the heat duct.

Then she stared hard at the fox, for a long time.

The fox wondered, as he wondered more and more lately, how any fox who cared about any human ever managed to keep the secrets of foxkind.

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