Scowling, Ferla grunted, then ignored him. With a small sigh of regret for the hearthstone, he rose to his feet and tiptoed to the door. Pushing through the fox flap, he stood in the corridor, bracing himself against the cold air that plagued a fox in almost every part of this house in winter, for heat rose and cold sank, and a fox was low to the ground. It would be warmer once he’d snuck into the heat ducts, though sneezier. It was an unfortunate irony in the life of foxkind that achievable comfort was often inversely proportional to achievable interestingness. He thought that even his seven siblings would agree with this, and they were the most spoiled foxes in Winterkeep.

The blue fox entered the heat ducts through the secret hinged vent grate in the low wall of the second-story privy. It was his most recently converted vent grate and he was proud of it. Hinging a grate took a blue fox days and was neither comfortable nor interesting. First he had to hurt his mouth and risk breaking his teeth pulling out nails, then he had to thread yarn through the grate, again with his mouth, and wind it tightly in place. No one in the Cavenda household knew that he was capable of any of this. Not even Ferla; especially not Ferla. It was very satisfying.

Once in the heat ducts, he could reach every room in the house. He could check on any of his secret tools, which he kept in various nooks and crannies. He could also follow any individual human around the house without that person knowing. No one made the heat ducts more worthwhile than Lovisa Cavenda. She had a fire inside her that burned as hot as the fire inside Ferla, but she kept it to a low, steady blaze, always controlled, always hungry. Always just nearly about to make something happen. He loved her visits home.

The fox worked his way to Benni’s library on the first floor, guessing that that was where Lovisa would go first.

—

When Lovisa entered her father’s library, her father wasn’t there.

In the middle of his desk sat a stack of papers covered with his big, bold handwriting. No doubt, her father was drafting another argument in favor of the legalization of zilfium use: She could see the word zilfium repeated several times. She felt a little sorry for him, and for the irony of his position. By chance or fate, in the elected, fifty-member Parliament, there were currently twenty-five Scholars and twenty-five Industrialists, dead even. In the case of a tie, the president was permitted to cast a tie-breaking vote. And of course, the president was Benni’s own wife, a Scholar who would vote against him.

The door opened and her father pushed in. “Lovisa! We weren’t expecting you. Is everything all right?”

“I just wanted to sleep in my own bed tonight,” she said.