Ysabet noticed the new eyelid because Pip would not eat.
She had put clean clay beside the mouse’s box, near enough for Pip to reach without moving its warm chest away from the wood. Usually a piece disappeared before she had straightened. This time the creature touched the clay with one narrow foot and left it.
The lamp stood on the shelf, well clear of the repaired oilcloth. Its light caught a bright line above the side of Pip’s jaw that had always been blind.
Ysabet crouched.
The line closed.
She moved the lamp, shading it with her left hand. The line appeared again, dark beneath a smooth ridge of hide. It did not belong to a cut. The edges were even, and the lower one moved while she watched.
“Oh,” she said.
Pip turned its head sharply. Its original amber eye narrowed against the light. The other side remained toward the box, the new slit almost hidden.
Ysabet set the lamp farther away.
Chaska had been gathering her boots, bag and unused harness. She came to the shelter when Ysabet called her, leaving Lilt asleep with her broad fins folded against the wall.
“Look above the jaw.”
Chaska bent, then bent farther.
“Don’t put your face there.”
“I wasn’t putting it there. I was looking from it.”
She shifted back. Pip’s hide shivered from the pouch rim to its shoulders. It drew its feet together, then planted them wide again.
“Was that there this morning?” Chaska asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Ysabet thought of the hare on the board and all the hours she had spent looking at the wrong things for this question. She wanted to be sure.
“I didn’t see it.”
They watched the thin line part. Something pale and wet showed beneath it. Pip pressed that side of its head against the mouse’s box.
“Should we stop it?” Chaska said.
“With what?”
“I don’t know. A cold cloth?”
Ysabet brought a clean, damp cloth and laid it on the ground within reach. Pip put one foot on it, withdrew the foot and resumed pressing against the box. She left it there anyway.
The mouse emerged down its wooden strip. It moved past the clay, nose close to the earth, dragging the bad leg until the foot caught up beneath it. Pip lowered its warm fold. The mouse climbed in, turned twice and settled with its tail over the rim.
Pip’s trembling eased.
Chaska sat on her heels. “It did grow that room.”
“Yes.”
“I thought perhaps we’d have longer before the next thing.”
Ysabet had thought so too. An animal could change after surviving something it had not been built to survive. She had seen a pack beast grow gripping pads where a broken track had forced it to climb, and a marsh runner’s breathing slits thicken after a season in dusty fields. Usually there were weeks of hunger and rest, small changes one could miss between visits.
The warm pouch had formed overnight. Now this.
She put a larger piece of clay beside Pip’s forefoot. It bit through the corner. The sound was dull and surprisingly loud in the quiet shelter.
Chaska glanced toward Lilt.
“Go home,” Ysabet said.
“I can stay.”
“You’ve a room and a bed.”
“So have you.”
“Mine’s nearer.”
Chaska rubbed her eyes. She considered the ground, then seemed to decide she had spent enough of the day on it. When she rose her knees cracked.
“Tell me if it gets worse.”
“I will.”
“Don’t wait until you’ve decided what it is.”
Ysabet nodded. Chaska collected the harness and woke Lilt with a touch at the base of her leading fin. The sandray took a long time to unfold. They went out through the front gate together, walking.
In the street, Mara was telling someone the dyer had agreed to come a day late. Ysabet heard the relief in her voice before she heard the words.
She brought a stool from her room and placed it beside the shelter. From there she could see Pip without looming above it. She also brought her notes, then found she could not write and hold the lamp where she wanted at the same time. She put the lamp back on the shelf.
For the next hour Pip ate.
It broke the clay into small pieces, swallowed, paused and began again. The loose folds across its back had sunk inward. Beneath the thin edges she could make out ridges which had been covered that morning. The mouse remained tucked inside the warm chamber, one ear visible.
Ysabet fetched the last of the clean tile scraps from the bowl beneath the bench. Pip took those too. It drank from the shallow dish in short, repeated touches of its mouth plates. By the time it stopped, wet grit surrounded its forefeet and Ysabet’s lamp had burned low.
The new eye opened fully.
It was amber, like the first, but smaller. It moved badly at first, showing a pale edge when Pip turned its head. The creature stared at the lamp with one eye and at the crate with the other, then shook itself hard enough that the mouse squeaked.
Pip became still at once.
“All right,” Ysabet murmured.
The eye closed again. Above the two eyes, on the low ridge of its head, a faint white line had appeared. Ysabet leaned forward before she could stop herself.
There were other lines beside it. Two upright strokes and a low horizontal one enclosed a small patch of hide; a finer line ran down the middle. At the top the pale strokes met. It looked like a door shut in a little wall.
Soot might have made the skin around it seem darker. She dampened the corner of the unused cloth and held it out. Pip touched it with its jaw. When she moved toward the white ridge it turned away.
She put the cloth down.
In her notes she drew a shape that looked more like a crooked window. Beneath it she wrote: Pale mark above eyes. Not there when bought. Seen tonight. She could not think what else she knew well enough to put on paper.
A moth dropped from the edge of the shelf.
It had been there for some time, a gray ragged thing Ysabet had mistaken for old web. Its wings were furred with soot. It landed on the earth beside the dish and dragged itself in a small circle.
Pip lifted its head. Ysabet steadied the water dish with her right hand as the creature leaned forward, and one of its braced feet settled against her wrist.
The moth stopped moving when its shadow passed over it. Pip lowered a narrow foot. Two toes touched the little body’s side.
Ysabet felt a cold hollow beneath her ribs.
It was so brief she could have called it a draught. But her coat had not stirred, and at the same moment Pip pulled its foot back against its chest. Both eyes were open now, fixed on the moth.
She eased her wrist out from beneath Pip’s foot and waited until she was breathing easily again.
The insect moved one leg. Its wings trembled without lifting it. Pip extended its foot, stopped just short, and let it rest on the earth instead.
Ysabet slid a dry leaf beneath the moth and set it in the shelter’s darkest corner, away from the lamp. There was nothing she knew how to mend in that small, smoke-fouled body.
When she looked again a few minutes later, it had stopped moving. She watched for longer before folding the leaf over it.
Pip had not followed the leaf. It had drawn the original mouse gently out of the warm fold and set it beside the half-covered box. The mouse objected with a squeak, seized the access strip and pulled itself inside.
Pip hurried after it.
The creature’s head fitted beneath the uncovered half of the top. It put its jaw against the mouse’s side. The small body shifted, pressing close to the wall, and Pip moved with it.
Ysabet watched the pressure of its jaw. The mouse shifted again, took a few steps beneath the cover, and resumed washing its face. She kept her hands outside the box.
The moth had still been alive when Pip touched it. The mouse had been hurt for days and was still alive now. Had Pip felt what was happening inside the moth? She could not tell. She wrote down the contact and the recoil, leaving the explanation blank.
Near midnight Mara came to the door with a mug of hot water.
“Is it ill?”
“It’s changing.”
Mara looked at the smaller eye. Then she looked at the empty bowl of tile scraps.
“Of course it is.”
She left the mug on the stool and went back through the passage.
Ysabet drank half the water while it was warm. Pip had found a position with its head against the mouse’s side, the new eye half closed and all six feet folded awkwardly beneath it. When the mouse turned, it adjusted its jaw by the width of a toe.
She went to her own bed with the door open. Once, in the hours before dawn, she rose and looked into the shelter.
The lamp had gone out. In the faint light from the lane she could just make out the mouse’s flank moving. Pip’s head rested against it in the same place.
Its eyes were open.