An arrow whizzed past her from behind, striking a nearby tree with a deadly fwop. Runa didn't have time to look back; she had to keep running, deeper and deeper into the woods. The humans were right behind her; three or four men armed with swords and crossbows, shouting their brutish obscenities. She stood little chance of fending them off if they caught up to her. Why did humans have to be such assholes all the time? Sure, she had snuck off with a bit of their gold and ale while they were snoring, but did that really warrant this cutthroat chase to the bitter end? Runa rolled her vulpine eyes, dashing behind a tree to narrowly dodge another arrow.

Glancing back through the spaces between the trees, she met eyes with one of her pursuers. She stuck her tongue out at him and gave him a taunting wink. Catch me if you can, you metal-clad idiot, she wanted to say.

Around another tree bend she dashed, followed closely by her pursuers. Using her kitsune tail she picked up a clump of half-dried bird droppings, and flung it at one of the men, splattering it directly on the forehead of his helmet with a wet metallic *CLANG*. Runa burst into laughter. This was just as much fun as the humans were irritating.

Runa tore through the lush green forest as a storm of arrows sliced through the air behind her. Shouts and curses echoed as the nimble foxgirl leapt from branch to branch, never slowing. But she knew she wouldn’t last—her pursuers would catch up, and her strength was already fading. Skidding to a halt, she turned and drew in a breath, gathering energy deep within her. She had never wanted to use the hidden technique passed down by her ancestors. Power swelled in her chest, heat burning fiercely along her tongue. In a blinding flash, a brilliant flame erupted in front of her. As it roared, thoughts of her parents surfaced, along with the memory of humans driving them from their home. She had always seen humans as cruel and heartless, and part of her wanted to make them pay. Yet deep down, she longed for the fighting to end—for a world where she could live in peace alongside them.

Runa leaped through the flames, which flickered harmlessly against her skin and clothes, and spun around to watch the knights. The men stumbled to a halt, staggering backwards. "What is this?" one of them roared.

She laughed, throwing her voice from the trees and letting them hear it from every angle. The one closest to the flames flinched as the heat warmed up his armor. "We must retreat!" he declared. "Back to town. The ale isn't worth this."

Only once they were gone did the foxfire disappear, turning harmlessly into air. The secret to foxfire, known by no human, was that it couldn't really burn anything. It was an illusion that felt just as hot and painful as real fire to anyone who touched it. She recalled the words of her mother, explaining the technique as they stood among the standing stones of the moor. The power comes from the breath, the heat inside your chest. Take in a breath, then heat it with your heart, then blow it out and turn the air itself to fire. Ordinary fire needs fuel. Foxfire is air and mind.

But how can it be dangerous if it doesn't really hurt anyone? Runa had asked.

It's dangerous precisely because it doesn't really hurt anyone. Burn a living creature in fire, they will die. Burn a living creature in foxfire, they will feel the pain for as long as you choose to keep the blaze going. This is why the secret is hidden, why we teach it only to the most promising kits.

Runa crept quickly and quietly through the woods, moving towards her home. She lived inside a huge hollow tree, in a home she had carved from the trunk. She sat down on her wooden bed, with its sheets made from feathers and cattail down, and closed her eyes. Every day the humans got closer to finding this place and destroying her fragile peace. Maybe it was time to try something different. Maybe it was time to try talking with them instead of stealing from them.

The colony lay a mile deeper into the forest, where the old oaks grew so thick that sunlight reached the ground in thin strands. When she was a kit, the hollow had rung with noise: the yipping of children, the clatter of cookpots, the grumble of the elders arguing about whose turn it was to keep the night watch. Now there were six cookfires where there used to be twenty, and only four of them were lit. A few tails flicked in the shadows of the tree-homes as she passed. Old Bramwick was mending a net on his doorstep and didn't look up. Two of the younger kits, Pip and Sorrel, peeked out from behind a root, saw that it was only her, and ducked back in to continue whatever mischief they'd been planning.

"You're late," said a voice from above.

Runa didn't jump. Her mother sat on a low branch with her legs crossed and her nine tails curled around her like a grey-and-russet blanket, a pipe dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her name was Isolde, and she had never stopped looking at Runa like she was seven years old again and had just been found with her paws in the honey.

"I was busy," said Runa.

"Busy." Isolde dropped lightly to the ground and circled her daughter, sniffing once, delicately. "You smell of ale. And bird droppings. And... smoke." Her ears went flat.

Runa's grin faltered. "Mother--"

"Inside."

The council hollow was the oldest tree in the colony, wide enough that all of them could fit in it with room to spare, which was a sad thing to notice. They gathered anyway, with Bramwick grumbling and the healer Tansy. Then came a few hunters, a few mothers, and a scattering of kits who had been told firmly to sit still and were not listening. Runa stood in the middle with her tail tucked behind her, feeling the weight of every eye.

"I stole from the humans," she began, because there was no point lying to people who would smell it on her. "Gold. Some ale. They chased me. A lot of them. With crossbows."

"How many?" asked one of the hunters.

"Four. Maybe five."

"Four or five?" Tansy asked.

"I wasn't counting. I was running." Runa swallowed. "And when they got too close, I used foxfire."

The hollow went silent. Even the kits stopped squirming.

Bramwick set down his net very slowly. "You what?"

"I had no choice--"

"There is always a choice!" he snapped. "That technique is not a party trick for a thieving girl to show off to knights. If one of those men survived and talks--"

"They don't know what it is. They think it's a witch's fire, or a spirit. Nobody was hurt." She lifted her chin. "That's the point of it, isn't it?"

"The point," said Isolde quietly, from the shadows, "is that it was never meant to be used in front of them."

Runa turned. Her mother was no longer smiling, and she looked tired in a way that Runa hadn't noticed before. There was more grey in her fur than there had been last winter. Fewer of her tails seemed to move when she was thinking. A colony shrinks, and so does its matriarch.

"When your grandmother taught me the foxfire," Isolde went on, "she made me swear that I would use it only when there was nothing else. Do you know why we kept it secret all these generations?"

"Because it's dangerous," Runa said.

"Because it works." Isolde stepped forward into the light. "Right now the humans fear us a little. The day they learn of the foxfore, they'll stop thinking of us as vermin and start thinking of us as dangerous. They'll hunt us to the last tail."

Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the back, a kit started to sniffle, and was hushed.

Runa looked at the faces around her. There was old Bramwick, whose son had gone to the northern settlements and never come back. Tansy, who had buried two of her sisters in the last three winters. Pip and Sorrel, who were too young to remember a time when the hollow had been full. She had thought of herself as the colony's clever thief, the one who kept them fed with a bit of nicked bread and a pocketful of coins. She had never thought of herself as the thing that might end them.

"I'm sorry," she said, and took a breath, looking at the faces in front of her. "Every year there are fewer of us. They've already found two of our old dens this season. It's only a matter of time before they find this one." She spread her paws. "So I've been thinking. What if we stopped running? What if, instead of stealing from the humans, I went to them and talked?"

The silence that followed was somehow worse than the shouting would have been.mThen Bramwick began to laugh. "Talk," he wheezed. "Listen to her. A foxgirl, walking into a human town to talk."

"They shot at you today," Tansy said gently.

"They shot at a thief," said Runa. "I'd shoot at me too. But maybe there are some who'd listen to someone who comes in the front gate, instead of over the back wall."

Isolde said nothing. She stood very still, her pipe gone cold, studying her daughter with an expression Runa couldn't read. At last she turned to the gathered colony.

"Everyone out," she said. "Except Runa."

They filed out in a murmur of rustling tails and whispered opinions. When the last of them had gone, and the hollow was empty except for the two of them and the dim gold light, Isolde crossed to a wooden chest at the back wall and opened it. She drew out something wrapped in oiled cloth and laid it on the floor between them.

"If you're going to be foolish," she said, "you may as well be foolish nd prepared."

Runa knelt and unwrapped the cloth. Inside lay a small, worn medallion of carved bone, etched with a pattern of nine curling tails. It was warm, as though someone had been holding it a long time.

"It was your grandmother's," said Isolde. "Once, long ago, the foxes and the humans of this land had a treaty. The humans have forgotten it. I haven't. Maybe it's time someone reminded them."

Runa stared at her. "You wanted me to try?"

"I wanted you to forget this whole thing," her mother said, and for a moment her voice cracked. "But, if you won't hide, then you'd better go in with every advantage we have left."

Runa closed her fingers around the medallion and, for the first time in a long time, felt something other than fear. It felt a lot like hope. And hope, she was beginning to suspect, was going to be a lot more dangerous than foxfire.