After their conversation about honesty, Jedao veers between affectionate and capricious. Some days he barely leaves Peter's lap, tucked into a red and gold orb, occasionally twitching his ears. Some days he takes off after stealing bits of Peter's breakfast - apparently a new tradition - and doesn't turn up again until after nightfall, sometimes alighting on Peter's windowsill after he's already in pajamas. He takes tentative and then almost vicious delight in declining to answer any questions about perambulations; sometimes he declines to speak at all.

But he always comes back, and only rarely places himself entirely out of reach. Sometimes he waits for Peter to pet him, sometimes he slips into the little pine marten form to curl around Peter's neck. The man appears less often, with Jedao using the raccoon whenever he needs hands for a small task. If Peter ducks his head into the aerie that's become the center of Jedao's information network, though, he'll see the human appearance taking down a spoken report as often as the fox pouring over maps or a ledger. For a week Peter barely sees him, and he stops sleeping in the bed with Peter, stretching out on the floor below the window instead. He'll take a pillow if Peter insists, but won't discuss his reasons for the change.

In the middle of the night on the seventh night of this, Peter wakes up to a cacophony of crashing, snarling, ringing noise. One of the chairs is upended and Jedao is in his larger form, the cloudy golden fox with all nine tails. His pelt flickers like a thunderhead lit up with lightning, although the warm fox colors gives it a cast like embers. Between Jedao himself and the moon shining through the window, there's enough light to the fox brawling viciously with a heavy, segmented scorpion bronze almost as big as he is. the scorpion's claws have sharp serrated edges mottled with verdigris, and the barbed hook of the telson is almost invisible in the dark, a stinger of black glass.

Jedao, already limping, herds the scorpion into the stone cul-de-sac of the fireplace, making the bronze ring every time a leg strikes the floor. He lunges forward, sinking his teeth into the elbow joint of one claw with an awful grinding sound, heedless of the stinger coming down. The claw comes off still twitching, throwing sparks when it hits masonry, the scorpion scuttling to get an angle on Jedao's neck with its remaining claw. Jedao surges again and bowls it onto its back, opens his mouth too wide for a fox's skull, slams shut with an awful clang and crunch, cracking the carapace of its blunt recessed head. The scorpion hisses like a teakettle, the dark green tarnish rippling over the bronze like forest shadows, or bruises; the whole thing twists and starts to collapse on itself melting into a mishapen unrecognizable lump.

The whole altercation takes maybe twenty seconds; Jedao shivers and seems to collapse into himself as well, falling into the smaller red fox, now missing chunks out of his shape. The ragged edges aren't bloody: there's just a space where there should be fur and flesh, and instead is nothing. Bordering them is a region of nauseating translucency, gentled by the dimness of the room. The bright gold seems to be draining rapidly out of Jedao's eyes, leaving something as colorless as water before Jedao closes his eyes, curling into a small, wounded ball and shivering.

"S'alright majesty," he whispers. He means to say go back to sleep, but he doesn't have the energy.