Jack was halfway through the second scrollwork on the bench leg when the sky cracked open. Rain came down in ropes, not drops. Within a minute the clearing turned to soup, and her chalk sketches curled black at the edges. She grabbed the oilcloth off the stone and threw it over her sketchbook first, tools second. The bench itself she couldn't move. It was three hundred pounds of quarry stone, half-carved, and it was going to be the one she sat on with the Valkyrie when the work was finally done. She had been carving benches in this stretch of pine woods for two summers. Every one so far had been wrong. Too smooth. Too stiff. Not the bench a woman like that would sit on. Jack believed, the way some people believed in prayer, that if she cut the right one, the red-haired woman with the three foxes would come out of the trees and take the empty half. She had seen her twice on the road. She had not spoken to her either time. A bench was easier than a sentence. Jack shoved the sketchbook under her shirt and hauled the tool roll onto her shoulder. The chisels alone were worth more than a month of food. She scanned the clearing. The nearest overhang was the split rock at the north edge, maybe forty paces through mud. She ran. Her boot went out from under her once and she came down hard on one knee, but she kept the tools dry. Under the rock she crouched, breathing, watching water sheet off the ledge in a curtain. The sketchbook was smeared but readable. The chisels were dry. The bench sat alone in the downpour, taking the rain like it had been waiting for it. When the storm thinned an hour later, Jack walked back. The half-carved leg had a long pale streak down one side where runoff had cut a channel through her chalk lines and washed grit into the fresh grooves. She ran a thumb over it. The stone was softer there than she had thought. The rain had found a seam she'd missed. Her plan for the second leg was ruined; she'd have to recut the whole panel to match the new flaw, or start the bench over. She wiped her hands on her wet trousers and sat down in the mud beside it. Somewhere past the tree line, a fox barked once, sharp and close. Jack lifted her head.

The fox came out of the wet pines a few minutes after the bark. It was small and bright red, with a cream chest and yellow eyes, and it did not run when Jack stood up. It circled the bench once, sniffed the tool roll, and put a paw on the handle of her second chisel. Jack clapped her hands. The fox flinched back two steps and then sat down in the mud and watched her. She tried to work around it. She uncovered the ruined leg, chalked a new line down the soft seam, and picked up the mallet. The fox came closer. It nosed the oilcloth. It carried off a rag and dropped it six paces away. When Jack turned back to the stone, it was licking rainwater off the flat of her rasp. She lost an hour chasing it off and another hour finding the rasp again in the brush. The light was already thinning through the pines. If she didn't settle the animal, she would lose the whole afternoon, and she had lost enough days already. Jack sat down on the wet ground and thought. Foxes traveled with the red-haired woman she was carving the bench for. Three of them, she remembered. This one was alone and unafraid of a person, which meant it belonged to someone who fed it. She dug in her satchel for the strip of dried meat she kept for long carving days. She tore it in half. She set one piece on a flat stone at the edge of the clearing, well away from her tools, and went back to the bench. The fox trotted to the stone, ate the meat, and lay down beside it with its tail curled over its paws. It watched her work and did not come closer. Jack cut the new line down the soft seam until the light failed. The panel was not ruined; it was only different, a chevron pattern instead of scrollwork, following the flaw the rain had shown her. When she wrapped her tools, the fox was still there. She left the second piece of meat on the stone and walked out of the clearing. Halfway down the path she looked back. The fox had picked up the meat and was carrying it into the trees, north, the way she had never gone. Somewhere in that direction was whoever it belonged to. Jack marked the line of its going and kept walking. Tomorrow she would bring more meat, and she would carve, and she would see if the fox came back with company.