Winterkeep

by Kristin Cashore

  Quietly, Lovisa boiled water, set her sachet to steep, then sipped the odd, bitter tea, wondering why doing so didn’t remove her worries about the guard. She couldn’t stop replaying what they’d done. His small kindnesses, his excitements. The questions he’d kept asking. Was she comfortable? Was she cold? Did this feel good? Were his hands too rough? No. They hadn’t been too rough, but his mouth had grown rough, a mix of tender and rough all at once that had made her dizzy with want.

  Something moved in a distant corner. Lovisa nearly jumped out of her skin before realizing that it must be the fox again. Except that she’d closed the fox in the attic.

  I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating and scaring myself. I need to go to bed.

  On her way back to her room, she had another fright when she encountered one of the guards on the dark stairway. First she gasped, but then she laughed, because it was him, it was her guard. In relief and surprise, she kissed him again. Again, his mouth was soft and urgent and his hands had the same effect. To her astonishment, they ended up back on the schoolroom floor. Lovisa couldn’t believe her own body.

  After he’d gone away the second time, she stood outside her brothers’ bedroom doors, trying to understand herself. Needing an anchor, she peeked in again on Vikti, who was still snoring evenly. It helped to see him there, stuffy-nosed and familiar. Then she peeked in on Erita.

  In Erita’s bed, Erita and Viri were sleeping together, Viri curled in a tiny ball, Erita curled around him, as if Viri were his treasure. Lovisa was so surprised that she turned her lamp on briefly, to make sure.

  Yes. That was Erita and Viri. They would get in trouble for sleeping together like that, if anyone found them. And something about their smallness in the bed, the tightness with which they were wrapped together, made her feel small too. Involuntarily, she touched her hair, which was bound into the usual twists around her head that framed her face and made her look young and unthreatening. Her hair had weathered tonight’s activities well.

  What was she doing? Standing here, staring at her brothers, thinking about her hair, when she’d done what she’d done tonight? She hadn’t expected to like that guard so much. A sick feeling inside her, a kind of discomfort about having used him was starting to turn into a misery on which she didn’t want to dwell. She would learn from whatever happened, but she wouldn’t dwell. And next time she needed an alibi she would choose someone she didn’t like the way she was starting to like that guard.

  If Viri wasn’t in the attic room . . . then, what was that light? That clunking sound? She realized now that she’d been trying to solve the wrong puzzle. This was about that snatch of conversation between her parents, that day weeks ago, when her father had come to campus looking for her mother. Some storage problem Benni had. “Could I store it in the attic room?” he’d asked Ferla. “It would be in a banker’s box. No one would look twice at it. We don’t have a good place in the house for these kinds of valuables.”

  “I don’t love that idea,” Ferla had replied. “We’ll discuss it later.”

  Now the snake inside Lovisa touched its tongue to the air, mildly curious. Benni shipped fuels, metals—but gold and silver, too, and sometimes even jewels. Did he have something others wanted to steal? Something interesting? The secrecy of the thing tugged at her.

  Could it hurt to know what her father was keeping in the attic room?

  Lovisa, who was thinking more clearly now about what the fox had seen her do, had a feeling that her mother’s vengeance in the morning was going to be unsparing. Well. If she was already in trouble, why not risk more?

  Almost disbelieving what she was about to do, Lovisa closed Erita’s door, checking the latch to ensure the fox couldn’t get in. Then she went back to her own bedroom and collected a few supplies.

  Chapter Eight

  Lovisa had two goals.

  First, she snuck down the corridor with the guest apartments, where the Monseans would have been staying had the queen not died. In one of the bedrooms there was a window with a latch that she and Mari had deliberately broken as children, for there was a trellis and a tree outside. They’d never actually climbed up to the window and snuck in, but Lovisa wanted to know if anyone had fixed the lock since. She went to the window, checked that the latch was in the locked position, then tried the frame. The window opened easily. Good.

  Next, she went straight to her parents’ bedroom on the second floor. She took a moment in the corridor to light a single candle. Both of her parents drank teas to help them sleep. Hoping the teas were working tonight, Lovisa opened their door and passed inside.

  In the flickering light of her candle, Lovisa saw the sleeping faces of her parents in their mountain of a bed. Her mother’s face, small and tight and so much like her own, was angry. Her father’s was slack and foolish, which made Lovisa inexplicably sad.

  She went to the chest at the foot of the bed, where her mother always laid her clothing. It was an odd quirk, in a woman of such wealth and with so many responsibilities, to insist on managing her own wardrobe. But one thing Ferla never seemed to mind was more work.

  Lovisa sat on the floor, then quietly, methodically, made her way through her mother’s pockets. She found some money, which would serve as her excuse if she got caught: She was here to steal money, she’d say. Ferla would never question monetary greed as a motive, seeing as it was one of her own motivating principles.

  The remaining items in Ferla’s pockets included her identification papers, a leather wallet wrapped with a cord, and a pen nib that scratched Lovisa. She’d never seen the wallet before. Quickly, she unwound the cord. The wallet popped open, for it was crammed tight with candies, of all things—hard, black, northern candies, called samklavi, that tasted like ammonia and burning and that no one in the world liked, except, inexplicably, her mother and Katu. Lovisa hated samklavi so much that she wound the wallet closed and shoved it back into her mother’s pocket in disgust.

  She reached into the next pocket. Finally, her fingers closed over the large, sharp key that she knew, from a childhood of punishments, opened the door to the attic room.

  Pulling a small box from her own pocket, Lovisa opened it, noting with relief that it was just big enough for her purposes. Each half of the box contained wax, for making impressions of keys. Mari had given it to her as a present when they were children, heroically offering to rescue her from the attic room when necessary, if she would only make a key. They’d worked out a way to communicate with flashes of light from a candle held to the attic room window. Two flashes meant “Stand by,” three flashes meant “Rescue me at midnight,” four meant “I’m on the verge of starvation.” It was why they’d broken that lock, so that Mari could climb the tree and the trellis, sneak in and rescue her. But it had been a game, a fantasy. Lovisa had never actually attempted to replicate her mother’s key until now.

  After making wax impressions of both sides, she checked the key for signs of wax and, finding none, slipped it back into her mother’s pocket. She also returned the money that would have been her excuse had she been caught. Then she snuck out. On the way back to her own room, she encountered no fox and no guards.

  Once she had a key made, Lovisa could wait until everyone was out, especially the fox, and satisfy her curiosity about what her father was keeping in a banker’s box in the attic room. Lovisa knew the combinations to her father’s banker’s boxes; she’d spied them out long ago. Maybe, next time one of her brothers was in serious trouble, she could even join him, bring him snacks, act out the Keeper stories with him. She could bring him paper and crayons too, for they all loved to draw. The Keeper was never specifically described in the stories the silbercows told, beyond being big, but Viri usually drew her with twenty-four spiderlike legs around a bulbous, one-eyed body. “Icositetrapus cyclops,” Lovisa always said, a name for a twenty-four-legged, one-eyed creature that she’d made up after doing some research in the academy library, and h
e would dissolve into laughter, as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

  With her own way in and out, Lovisa could be the spy, instead of the spied upon. The rescuer, instead of the prisoner. She could do what she liked.

  In her own bed, the face and the voice, the body of her sweet guard wouldn’t leave her alone. What would happen to him when the fox told Ferla about the kissing?

  Lovisa was so exhausted that even her guilty feelings couldn’t keep her awake.

  * * *

  —

  The blue fox was in the airship on the roof, standing at the bow in the dark, like a courageous captain exploring the night. He was reflecting on the last few hours.

  He’d had to make a lot of tricky, sudden decisions tonight. Lovisa Cavenda had kept him on his toes, literally. At one point, he’d had to streak through a heat duct and leap down from the attic ceiling, so that she would see him, and believe that he was spying for her mother.

  He didn’t want to tell on her for the kissing with the guard, and bring her mother’s wrath down upon her. But he needed to do something that would keep Lovisa from being so curious in the future, and nothing could restrict Lovisa’s movements more effectively than telling on her to her mother.

  So he would play Lovisa’s game, because yes, of course he knew it was a game. He knew that Lovisa had gone to the attic thinking one of the little boys was there, needing comfort. He knew that the guard had been her cover, for foxes, all foxes, could read the thoughts of all humans, not just humans they were bonded to. This ability was one of the secrets of foxkind, and guarding this secret was one of a fox’s gravest responsibilities. Of course, his ability to read human minds depended on how open the human kept her mind, and it also depended on how complicated the thoughts became. Even his own human, Ferla, could become hard to read when she wasn’t explaining things to him specifically. But the fox could follow basic plans taking place inside the house.

  So he would play, because maybe this would keep Lovisa out of worse trouble. Anyway, now that she’d seen him, he had to play. Lovisa would expect him to tell. If he didn’t tell, then everything about his loyalty to his bonded human would be brought into question, an unthinkable consequence with the potential to damage the welfare of all foxkind.

  Almost letting her see him in the kitchen after the kissing, when he was supposed to have been trapped in the attic, had been an accident. He was so distracted tonight. He supposed this was the inevitable complicated life of a fox who had chosen to bond to someone like Ferla Cavenda. Most of his fox friends and relations had simpler existences. They didn’t need to spy on everyone and interfere. They liked their humans, only ever disobeying occasionally, maybe for the sake of extra treats or a warmer hearthstone. Not because they were trying to keep terrible things from happening!

  But there wasn’t much point in questioning something it was too late to change. At the time, the fox had bonded to Ferla because he’d felt it was his only choice. The day it happened, he’d been scampering down a corridor, trying to decide whether to sneak into the airship now or later, when he’d stumbled upon something interesting: little Lovisa, with her ear pressed against her parents’ bedroom door. How oddly proud he’d been of her in that moment. Such a young human, yet she already knew her parents had interesting secrets. And she knew to pretend not to know. Foxes were born with that kind of knowledge, but how had she figured it out? Were little humans born that way too?

  He’d reached out a mental thread to see what she was thinking. Before he could gather any details, however, three things had happened, very fast. First, a biscuit had slipped from Lovisa’s fingers and slapped down onto the marble floor. Second, Lovisa had broken away from the door and fled, faster than the fox had ever seen a human move. Her feet, socked but shoeless, had made the smallest thudding noises as she ran.

  Third, the bedroom door had been flung wide and Ferla had thrust herself into the aperture, peering quickly up and down the corridor with a focus and ferocity that had made the blue fox think of an avenging bird of prey. Ferla’s eyes had narrowed on the fox, then on the dry, crumbly biscuit.

  Instantly, the fox had understood that things could be bad for Lovisa if her mother suspected her of eavesdropping. Without consideration, he’d begun jumping and prancing, slapping his little feet against the floor as hard as he could, trying to mimic the sound the biscuit had made before. Then, remembering that a fox was probably expected to eat a biscuit, he’d bitten down on it, which had turned out to be a true sacrifice, for it had been stale and disgusting.

  Ferla’s lips had stretched into a bright, false smile. “Is there something you want, my beautiful darling?” she’d said, in that cloying voice she’d always used back when she’d wanted him to bond.

  No, he’d said, responding inside her mind for the first time ever. I’ve just been out here, dancing with a celebratory biscuit. Did I bother you? I’m sorry. I’m dancing for happiness, because I’ve decided to bond to you.

  The thrust of Ferla’s joy—or greed? (it was always complicated inside Ferla)—had almost thrown him against the opposite wall. She’d motioned him into the bedroom, then pointed triumphantly at his little body, for the benefit of her husband.

  “It worked,” she’d said to Benni. “I told you I would make it work.”

  Benni had started to laugh. “I give up,” he’d said. “You win.”

  Then she’d gone to Benni and kissed him and the fox had watched the two of them come together in a heady kind of pleasure that had felt more interesting than it usually did between them, like a meeting of both trust and mistrust, mutual competition, and surrender.

  And now, here he was. Tomorrow would be a long and challenging day. It was time for him to check on all the house’s secrets, and go to sleep. He jumped out of the airship, found the loose shingle, squeezed through, and began his rounds.

  Some minutes later, the fox scampered back to Ferla and Benni’s bedroom. He took the normal route, through the corridors. Pushing through the flap in their door, he crawled into his own little bed beside the fire, luxuriating in the warmth.

  He raised his nose once, sniffing. The room smelled like a visit from Lovisa.

  What had she done now?

  Sighing, the fox stretched his tired mind around the house. But when he found Lovisa, she was in her own bed, asleep.

  He wished sometimes that he didn’t care. His fox friends, especially his siblings, warned him that he shouldn’t care, especially not for a human to whom he wasn’t bonded; that caring led to dilemmas. But Lovisa and the fox had been children together. The fox had seen what it was like to be a child in this house. He’d watch her learn to lie, hide, sneak, just like a fox did. Then he’d watched her fall in love with each of her brothers, and begin lying, hiding, and sneaking on their behalf.

  Could he help it if it had created a connection, a different kind of bond?

  Suddenly the fox remembered something. Lovisa believed herself to have closed him in the attic. In the morning, he would have to be discovered closed in the attic.

  How tiresome. The fox dragged himself to his feet, knowing he should probably go there now, in case anyone woke up and found him where he shouldn’t be.

  Adventure Fox, he thought to himself wearily as he made his way through the heat ducts again. This was his chosen name. Not Fox, but Adventure Fox. Adventure for short.

  Though he wouldn’t mind if the coming days involved a tad less adventure.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Lovisa went down to breakfast not knowing what to expect. To her relief, she found the dining room empty of everyone but Viri and Erita.

  Their eyes widened at the sight of her. “It’s you!” they said, both small, dramatic in their happiness, their freckled faces glowing with the hope that she was staying for a while. Most Keepish people had brown freckles in brown faces, but Viri’s and Erita’s were
darker than usual, more noticeable. It was cute.

  “It is I,” she said, sitting down with a smile, waiting for someone to pour her some tea. “Did either of you spend any time in the attic room yesterday?”

  “No!” said Erita. “We’re not stupid. Mother is angry, so we’ve been good. Mostly! Vikti has a cold.”

  “Poor Vikti. Where’s Mother?”

  “Yelling,” said Viri.

  “Oh? Who’s she yelling at?”

  “A guard,” said Viri. “She fired him.”

  It shouldn’t surprise her; she’d made a conscious decision to sacrifice him. Still, a ball of sick dropped to the pit of Lovisa’s stomach. “Why?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “I don’t know,” said Viri. “She was whisper-yelling. Are you staying all day? It’s Wednesday. We have outside exercise on Wednesday and we could make a snow keep.”

  “I know,” said Erita importantly. “He’s a slut with no self-control.”

  “What?” said Lovisa, choking on her tea.

  “He put his dirty fingers on something he didn’t deserve,” said Erita.

  “You heard her say that?” said Viri, awed.

  “Yes. You were in the bath.”

  “What did he put his fingers on?”

  “Something he didn’t deserve,” Erita repeated, stressing each syllable significantly. “I already said.”

  “But what does that mean?” said Viri. “What didn’t he deserve? Did he steal?”

  “I thought maybe he touched her fox. Mother is weird about her fox.”

  “But maybe he had to touch it,” said Viri as a shape appeared in the doorway over his shoulder. It was their mother. Lovisa went cold. Not seeing her, Viri said, “Sometimes you have to touch the fox, like, if he’s in the way, or if he’s bringing you a letter from Mother. Are you staying all day, Lovisa?” he repeated. “And what’s a slut?”