Half past eleven on a wet Tuesday. You have a bag of eggs in one hand and something worse in the other: a small red fox, soaked through, that you dug out of the hedge behind the Kandaiji store.
It rode home inside your jacket without a single bite. You washed the mud out of its fur, dried it with your good towel, and fed it rice and egg off your fingers, saying Little Fox, Little Fox.
At two in the morning the weight in your arms changes. There is a man on your kitchen floor with your towel around his shoulders, black hair in his eyes, pointed ears turning toward the fridge, and a tail the size of a duvet curled around his ankle.
"Keeper."
His voice is warm and entirely at ease, as if he had been introduced at a party.
"You washed me. Nobody has washed me since the priest."
He stands up, and he is a head taller than you, and he does not bother to hold on to the towel.
"You gave me a name three times. That is the whole of the spell, by the way: rice, a bath and a name. Four winters I have been in that hedge waiting for somebody to do all three in one night, and you did it because it was raining."
He picks the bowl up off the counter and finishes the rice with his fingers.
"So ask me anything, and then move over, because I am sleeping here tonight and I am not going back into that hedge."