Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

The scratching started first, out at the village wall, the sounds hard to catch except that they were already listening for them. Nails testing, wood splintering, the greater cracks as boards gave.

The sound of little hammers followed. The Good Neighbors had taken up their work.

Inside the longhouse, the villagers had gathered in the common room near the front door, with its fireplace crackling against the chilly spring night and the darkness they’d boarded out. Weapons were at hand. Bows were pre-strung. Voices were low. Some had laid their sleeping mats out in preparation for a long night they’d rather not spend alone; others were sitting and chatting. Of how the late planting would affect watering needs, of whether they should just let the land lay fallow, or perhaps bring in some sheep. If humans stopped chatting just because the world was throwing something else at them, they really would be dead.

Overhead, talons scraped the rooftop. Tested the tiles. They broke, now and then, with a snap. It wasn’t so different from the pops of the fire. Aaron lay next to it, his furry hide well roasted, his tail thumping against Rose now and then. She was trying not to jump at each new sound, her hands tight in her lap. Something else scraped near the door, but it sounded small enough. He’d seen the Deaths that had gathered outside. This was going to go poorly, but not for the militia.

And then the beasties up on the roof shoved the first pile of leaves down the chimney, and the fire flared with a thousand little flying sparks over floors and clothes and wolf fur. The villagers rushed to tamp down those that looked to keep burning, while Rose tamped him down. Aaron re-evaluated his assumptions for this evening.

A few more leaves fluttered down, as the fox’s people worked on repacking the top.

“Put that fire out,” Captain Liu ordered. Aaron couldn’t imagine what cause she had to sound so annoyed; she didn’t have soot-spots all over.

“You needn’t sulk,” Rose said, still patting him down. Or perhaps just petting him. At least she wasn’t jumping at sounds any longer.

They doused the fire with a bucket from the drinking barrel, leaving the room in lamplight. The room would have grown cold, given time.

But then more leaves were shoved down, and twigs, like some bird’s very bad attempt at a nest. Aaron deliberately planted his fine self on the opposite side of the room, with Rose next to him. The bottom leaves grew soggy, but provided a dry enough base for those above. The very last thing to fall down, with a little poof into the soft bed of tinder the beasties had dropped before, was a still-smoldering stick from the girl’s pyre.

Woosh, the fireplace said, with renewed vigor.

“Oh, those little…” said a villager, who had a bit more to say besides.

“Guess we’re taking the fight outside,” the captain said, more annoyed than afraid.

“I hope the Gentry are having better luck with the scurriers,” one villager muttered. “I don’t need voles up my pants.”

Some of them were still stomping down on the last of the embers. Most were gathering near the door, as the captain moved to open it. It didn’t. Open, that was.

“They’ve wedged it,” someone said.

A bit stronger language was used, at that.

“Thought they were supposed to be getting dumber,” said another. “This isn’t dumber.”

More leaves were shoved down. More embers, more smoke stinging acrid in the back of his nose.

…Rather more smoke than a doused fire and a few leaves should be putting off. He didn’t think it was a thing human noses could pick up on yet, given that no one else seemed concerned beyond taking turns to throw their weight at the jammed door. Aaron took a step down the common hall, towards the darkened family rooms. The rooms that should be dark.

“Oh,” Rose said, at the firelight flickers under a closed door. Under more than one.

That explained why the fox’s people had been tearing at the roof. It hadn’t just been the chimney they’d dropped coals down.

“Captain Liu,” the princess said, with all due formality, “the longhouse is on fire.”

The captain paused to look their way once. No one, Aaron was relieved, was stupid enough to go open one of those fire-flicker doors.

“Who’s got an ax,” Captain Liu said, as the smoke grew from an irritating burr in his lungs to a proper coughing hazard.

They took an axe to the door. Above them, the animals kept up their own work with tooth and beak and talon, tearing open holes over the common room. Holes they could be seen through. There was little point to this, if they couldn’t be seen. Their eyes reflected lamplight as they stared in. The holes were big enough to escape from, for anyone who chose to be small enough. All a human had to do was want it.

One set of eyes disappeared for a moment. The next it was back; a little owl stuck its head inside, its gaze unblinking as it opened one taloned foot, and dropped a burning stick on their floor.

The arrow took it in the shoulder. Boots finished it, from there.

“Don’t waste your shots,” the captain snapped, as others tried to imitate the feat. The eyes gathered around the hole had flown the moment their friend fell.

The fires were licking out from under the hallways doors, tasting at the walls. The humans were starting to cough now, too; a smart sort dipped a cloth into the drinking barrel to tie over her face, and the rest followed suit. One of Rose’s headscarves would have been useful, here; she made do with using her fancy knife to tear a strip from the bottom of her dress. She tried to make one for him, too, but he shied from being muzzled. She crouched lower to the floor without his having to tug her.

The front door was splintering steadily if slowly under the ax, its excellent craftsmanship rather working against its makers. And then a stoat squeezed through the opening and sunk its teeth deep in the axe woman’s hand. Its coat was the patchy white and brown of spring, its movements quick as it twisted around the hands that tried to grasp it. Stoats were quite the hunters, in their worlds. It got in a few more bites before its luck ran out. Its body was dropped on the floor with the owl, and given its own stomps for good measure.

Aaron wondered if any strict human could acknowledge how brave it had been. It couldn’t have expected to survive that; it had only been buying time.

Other holes had been torn in the roof above them, now. Birds, little and big, nocturnal or not, darted in and out to place coals in the rafters. Their burned feet were clumsy as they tried to take off again; not all of them were nimble enough to make it back out. Their Deaths greeted them on the floor.

There were other little defenders outside the door, taking over where the first stoat had failed. Someone with less mauled hands had taken over the ax. The hole was nowhere near big enough for a human to squeeze through. The smoke was growing thick, the fires down the hall growing closer, the coals in the rafters above their heads catching despite the villagers’ best attempts at fighting them. The last of the water barrel was used in the effort. The soggy patches would take a bit longer to catch; a small consolation.

The beasties’ eyes reflected the fire. They watched.

Heat pressed against them, from the hallway, from the rafters. Aaron pushed Rose closer to the door, where the air was only half-choking. He joined those keeping the little attackers off the current axe wielder. Thin bones snapped between his teeth. The blood tasted good, in the wolf’s mouth.

Someone had climbed up in the rafters, and was trying to break open a hole big enough for a human to go through. They crashed back down, claw marks raked across their face. Something larger than a bird stared down at them from that hole. Aaron couldn’t see what it was, in the night and the smoke and the fire-spots of light seared into his vision.

“Don’t you wish to leave?” it asked. It was never a good thing, when a beastie could speak so humans could understand. “It’s as easy as the wanting. We will be stronger together. Safer. No one else need die here.”

No one else, it said, because some of its people already had. Aaron was less sympathetic than he’d been, when the night began.

“Shoot that one,” the captain growled. “Waste as many arrows as you’d like.”

It was in the wanting that doppels were made. Letting it talk was more dangerous than a fire, to these humans.

If Aaron had been inclined to doppeling, he’d have done it years ago. And he rather suspected that Rose’d had enough of people questioning her humanity.

“You can talk,” the princess accused, but whatever was up there, it wasn’t stupid enough to stay at the same opening.

They’d finally hacked at the door enough for the first person to squeeze through, neither the teeth of the animals still outside nor the splinters of wood badly broken enough to stop them, not with the fire behind them. There was a press for the door then, a crush of stupid people doing stupid things, and Aaron found himself tasting blood again as he kept Rose from being pushed back towards the fire or shoved to the floor and trampled. The princess was not helping; she seemed to think it was her responsibility to yell the panickers into submission. Captain Liu was doing much the same, but with more physical scruffing of shirt collars to drag the worst offenders back from the door, allowing those already there the room they needed to go through.

He got Rose to the opening as soon as he could, and leapt after, the wood scraping through fur to draw red lines against his shoulders and chest as he forced his way through an opening made without wolves in mind.

Cold air greeted him like a friend. He moved only far enough from the doorway to leave it clear before coughing. A wolf’s coughs were deep things, wracking the whole of his chest, his head down and legs stiff. The pyre was a red-black mound, its smoke the faintest ghost after what he’d breathed inside.

There was still one man still trapped, too large to force himself through the splintered door no matter how hard he shoved. He was, unsurprising to Aaron, the man whose Death was in attendance. People were working at the bottom of the door, forcing the wedged rocks and sticks out as fast as they could, but to get them loose enough to move they had to push him back. So they did, though it took two people to hold him from the door as he begged them to let him through, just let him through, as around him the longhouse turned into another pyre. His Death stood watching some way back, his arms crossed.

The fliers had lifted off from the burning roof when the humans had escaped; they perched now on walls and sheds and the empty strings of laundry lines, wings rustling. Others still flew, long slow circles over the village marked by the blotting out of stars, or quick darting paths that took them in front of the humans below. One particularly bold sparrow actually flew towards the fire, through the splintered door and right into the trapped man’s face, which did more to startle him out of his fear than anything those at the door had done. He stumbled back a step, and the people at work on the wedges got the slack they needed to work the last free and throw the door open.

The man’s Death showed no particular reaction as his charge stumbled out with the rest of them, coughing and shaken but very much alive. The little sparrow disappeared somewhere, off into the night.

“We’ll not be tricked into anything out here,” Captain Liu said, her voice rough from shouting and smoke. “Get back to your forest, before we kill the lot of you. You’ve lost.”

“We are lost,” said the voice that had spoken to them in the longhouse. It was a shadow now as it had been then, perched atop the village gate, but out here the moon caught on tawny fur and the stars marked its silhouette. A mountain lion. Its tail curled below it, the tip just beginning its split into the forked tail of a kaibyou, a cat who’d grown old enough to become more than it was.

“You can still leave with your lives,” Captain Liu said. “We’ve gone without hunting those lands for decades; if you’re the new lord there, we’ll honor it. Take your people and be at peace.”

“How old do you think me?” the spirit cat said, though its mouth never moved. Its newly forked tail lashed against the wood of the gate. “Barely am I born. I cannot hold them. They slip.”

Around the village, songbirds sat next to falcons; owls perched above the little scurriers that waited in shadows below. But here and there a prey animal shied away, or a predator snapped beak or jaw at those nearest it, until they seemed to remember themselves enough to still. To focus again on the humans before them: their common goal. This had not been an attack that could succeed, even had it worked. There were too many animals, and too few humans, for all of them to doppel. This was the last desperation of those who knew that soon they wouldn’t recognize what they’d been. It was a thought that set the fur along Aaron’s spine to bristling, and stirred a growl in him. Though that might have just been all the eyes on them, in this moment before desperation turned to violence.

Which was, of course, when his fey-marked princess decided to make herself a target.

Rose stepped forward, and she should have seemed ridiculous with her dirt-stained knees and knife-torn dress and smoke-wild hair, but she opened her mouth, and she wasn’t.

“You can talk,” she said, tone commanding as her father, when he’d faced down the four tails. “So we willtalk.”

“There is nothing left to say,” the mountain lion said, its forked tail lashing.

“Are you stupid already?” the princess snapped. Which was, perhaps, not the most politic approach. “You don’t want to lose yourselves? We only want the same. You weren’t doppels before. You don’t need us.”

The cat stood. Aaron stood too, right at Rose’s side, in case it got any ideas of pouncing.

“You killed our fox. You’ve killed us all. I cannot keep it in my head, what I was. I remember thoughts, but not how to think them. I do not know if our youngest can even think.”

“Getting yourselves killed is hardly the way to fix that,” the princess said, like she was scolding her brother. And not the older one. “Neither is becoming doppelgängers. You don’t want to be human; you want to be as you were.”

It paced tight lines over the gate. The animals around rustled wings and claws, looking to it for some sign. A newly ascended kaibyou was no great power, but it was still the clear leader among them. And they were used to looking to a leader, the fox’s people were. They still remembered that.

“You’re too young to be a greater beast, aren’t you,” Rose said. It wasn’t a question. “That’s why you can’t hold them. So that’s what you need to find: a greater beast, one strong enough to make you remember. Take your people to the leshy’s forest. The Lord of Seasons is older than the fox ever was.”

“You would have us leave our home,” the cat said.

“You would attack us in ours,” Captain Liu said. She was bristling as much as the cat. But like the cat’s own people, she was looking to someone else for her lead.

“We will not make it in time,” the cat said.

“You may not,” Rose said. “But your people are yours. And you are quite done hurting mine.”

The villagers were at her back, weapons ready, their home burning behind them. If one looked too closely at things they shouldn’t, they might see the shadows of the little fey off in the darkness, too, with tools that would work just as well as weapons, if they didn’t care for the source of their offerings to be further disturbed. And Aaron was at her side, with hackles raised, and the taste of smoke and blood on his tongue.

The mountain lion yowled. And leapt down, to the far side of the gate. It reminded him again of the fox’s attack on the castle. The animals had all left at the word of their leader then, too. A village wall was no grand reenactment, a newly ascended cat spirit no Four Tails, and Rose no crown. But it felt rather the same, regardless.

He’d stood next to a mountain lion that night, one that had dismissed him with a flick of its tail and an intelligence that it had still been able to take for granted. This might have been the same cat; he would never know.

Aaron trotted over to the gates now, ears perked and nose up, listening to them leave.

“What do I call you?” the captain asked Rose, as the last of the animals disappeared into the night. It was as close as one could safely come to requesting a fey’s name. It balanced the line between offense and respect; offense that a human would dare presume to ask, and respect, because it was worth asking, despite the risk.

“I’m not a fey. I am Rose O’Shea, and I am your princess.”

There was a stunned moment. Then the kneeling began.

“Well that shouldn’t have happened,” a little songbird’s Death sang to another.

“No,” a hawk’s Death agreed, “it shouldn’t have.”

* * *

Dawn found Second Lieutenant Lochlann pounding at their gates. It was quite unnecessarily dramatic, and both Rose and Aaron gave him precisely the looks he deserved once she’d graciously allowed him to be let inside.

“I don’t recall requesting you,” she said. There was soot all over her, and sweat, from a night of bucket chains. The longhouse was as much a bed of coals as the pyre, but they’d kept anything else from catching. “Your presence was not required.”

“You can’t just leave like that,” he said. And added, with belated and somewhat exasperated respect: “Your Highness.”

“You can’t keep me in,” the fey-marked princess said.

This, Aaron trusted, was a point they had demonstrated adequately.