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The fox sits under the apple tree, its eyes idly focused on the emerald leaves that have fallen from its branches. It should be out catching chickens, it knows. It hasn't eaten in days, and the only water it has drunk is the rainwater that happened to pool in its den the other day. Even then, it drinks sparingly. It tells itself that this is a matter of survival, of saving as much water as possible so that it doesn't run out. It refuses to confront the real reason why it's become like this.
It asked for the prince to tame it, that was true. The tears are its own fault, just as the prince said. It knew that this would happen to it, and yet it asked, begged even, to be tamed. But the prince seemed so lonely… it was the least that the fox could do, to offer its love in exchange for taming. It seemed a reasonable exchange at the time. Now, though, the prince has not returned, and it becomes all too clear that he never will.
For the first time since before the prince left, the fox looks at the cornfields in the distance. The stalks shine like gold in what's left of the sunlight, just like the prince's hair did. The fox only briefly tries to keep itself from crying again. Where is he now, it wonders? Is he alive? If he is dead, did he have someone to bury him, or to comfort him in his last moments? The fox knew the same loneliness as the prince when they first met, and it knows it even better now. The thought of its friend being dead is one that claws at its heart, sharper than the fangs of any hunting dog. No, it cannot dwell on such things. He must be alive somewhere out there.
Stars begin to dot the sky as the sun leaves for the night. The fox once overheard one of the hunters say that some stars are actually not stars at all, but other planets… did the prince not say that he had come from one of those planets? Perhaps that is where he is now. The fox briefly gets the idea to follow him there, but remembers that the stars are quite a long way from the earth, even if it were to climb the apple tree and jump towards them from up there.
The fox's heart stings as though it's been slashed again by the claws of its loneliness. By now, its tears have made dark trails across the orange fur covering its face. If the prince is so far away, perhaps never to return, then what was the point of being tamed? Even one of the men of the village, with their interests limited to hunting and raising chickens, would have been better to be tamed by. At least a hunter would stay with the fox until the end of its life, were he to pity the poor creature instead of aiming his rifle at it.
Then the fox remembers that it is not the only one whom the prince has tamed. It told him itself, he is responsible for his rose. He must have missed her terribly, while he was down here and she was up there. And though the fox thought that the days it spent with the prince were enough to believe that it is now tame, it knew from the slight inflections in the prince's voice that he had spent even longer with his rose. It was a hard choice for the boy to make, the fox knows, between a creature that he tamed down on earth and a flower he had tamed back at home.
The fox, for the first time in days, sets foot outside of its den. It knows that any one of those stars up there could be the prince's, and so it has no choice but to address all of them. It calls out to the prince, and tells him that it will always love him, no matter how far away they are or how long it would take them to reunite. It smiles, and finishes by asking the prince to say hello to his rose for it — odds are, she has never met a fox, and it adds a request to assure her that it is no danger to her. Foxes eat chickens, not roses, anyway.
The thought of chickens makes the fox's stomach growl. It hasn't eaten in days, after all, and it realizes that it had better get to hunting if it wants to survive long enough to see the prince again one day. It crouches down and skulks through the field towards the village, and cannot help but wonder whether the shape it sees out of the corner of its eye is just its imagination twisting the starlight into shapes, or if there really is a golden-haired prince walking beside it, a radiant smile on its face.