Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

It went for Adelaide first, which was a thing she probably wouldn’t like him feeling grateful for, but there it was. She jerked her horse’s reins towards the forest. Almost made it, too. But the dragon got there ahead of her, her path predicted, talons broad enough to crush boulders outstretched. They hunted with their hindlegs, a part of Aaron’s mind noted, in a glance over his shoulder before he went back to minding where his own paws were racing. Its forelegs were tucked to its chest, its wings stretched above it. It was a brilliant copper, now that it wasn’t trying to camouflage itself against the sky.

It was bigger than the dragons that had attacked Salt’s Mane, but nowhere near so big as the stories said they grew. A second year? Older?

Adelaide’s horse was screaming behind him. Another look back, and he saw the horse on its side, legs kicking, his sister already rolling back to her feet. The mare had balked under the dragon’s shadow, maybe. Had saved both their lives, definitely. The dragon, its mark missed, had apparently opted to take this fight to the ground rather than risking its prey disappearing into the trees before it could dive again.

It wasn’t out to doppel them. Not with the force it hit the ground, the dirt and rocks thrown aside in its wake, the lines rent in the road from its passing. It dug its talons into the road, all four paws now, and bled its momentum through claws and wings, going faster and farther than they could have run. As demonstrated by it passing Aaron. Well. That had been the wrong direction to bolt, then. He veered.

There was a bend in the road ahead of it. Just a slight one, but enough to put the line of carefully roped stones in its skidding path. It leaned back, like a Twokin’s kid who’d started sliding down a rock face, and only now realized the bottom wasn’t so soft a landing as expected. It stopped itself just before the stones. And sat there, a moment, panting.

One of its toes had nicked an old rope. Already frayed with weather and age, it slid to the ground.

That was the first Aaron saw the leshy. The first the dragon saw it, too. It was just… there. Standing among the old trees, directly in front of where the dragon had almost crashed into the Lord of Seasons’ forest. The forest guardian was twice as tall as a human. Half as tall as a second-year dragon. It stood on two legs, in the rough shape of a human, since humans always thought human-shaped things were after their own image. Draping lichen hung like fur over the old gray wood of its bones, strung together by the thick corded vines that moved the rest. There was a place atop its shoulders that could be called a head, but there were no eyes that Aaron could see in that leafy mound. Nor ears, nor mouth. It stood there, just behind the stone and right under the dragon’s nose, as if it had grown in the place years ago.

The dragon removed its offending claw from the stone, slowly. Scooted backwards on its rear a good few feet before, equally slowly, getting its feet back under it. Whether it had personal experience with this forest, or only its dam’s memories as warning, it knew enough to be cautious.

The leshy continued to stand there. The dragon might have kept standing awhile too, except that Adelaide drove her sword into its wing as high up as she could reach and just—dragged it down, a long and final line, like a seamstress cutting cloth.

Right. Because grounding the dragon with them was exactly what they needed.

…Actually, that would make it significantly easier to evade the thing. It would still be fast, but not dive-from-the-sky fast. And there would be no more spotting them from above. Now if Aaron could just get his sister running. But Adelaide’s horse had found its feet, then promptly found the road away from all this, which… did make it rather hard for her to outpace even a grounded dragon. She was retreating into the forest—the human side of the forest—but it was to hamper the dragon’s movements between the closely spaced trees, to fight on more even terms. Not to run. There was a village near, and she was a blood noble.

He wasn’t responsible for Adelaide Sung. He barely even knew her, even if she was putting a rather absurd amount of effort into getting to know him. Which was not a thing people generally bothered with. And if she survived—as she had on the balcony, and at least one time before that, given the Michael situation, so really this was a pattern with her—if she survived, and he’d run off on this fight, well. It wasn’t best to let powerful people he’d betrayed also remain alive. More prudent to keep such things to one or the other: the betrayal, or the still-breathing.

And Aaron did not actually want his sister dead. Also, he had an idea, which was the stupider of those statements.

His claws left furrows in the dirt as he pivoted. The dragon was forcing its way through the trees behind him, trying to get to his sister. Its head was held awkwardly low under the branches of trees maintained by and for humans, its wings pinned to its sides by their trunks, its lunges and strikes hampered enough for Adelaide to avoid, so long as she stayed on her guard. Perhaps the foresters’ villages weren’t so ill-defended afterall. Or perhaps the dragon didn’t feel free to break trees or start fires, not with a leshy so near.

Aaron raced past them both. He wanted nothing to do with claws or teeth or the potential for it to change its mind about that fire. He ran out into the road, and latched onto a far less deadly target: the dragon’s tail. Which he bit, right near the end, where wolf jaws could wrap all the way around and clamp tight. He jumped clear again, just as quick.

The dragon’s tail whipped out. Aaron hadn’t drawn blood through its tooth-jarring scales, but slamming one’s finger in a door didn’t typically draw blood, either. He imagined wolf bites felt about like that, under all its armor. It didn’t actually turn towards him for more than a murderous glance—thank you, sister, for the continued distraction—which made the tail’s lashing easy enough to dodge. It thumped down just outside the line of rocks.

The leshy kept standing there, dust from the hit drifting over it. A bit closer, then.

Which would be difficult, with the dragon so focused on Adelaide.

Less so, when he remembered that Adelaide was a person who was, nominally, on his side. He could just… work with her.

He stood in the road where she could see him, and woofed his most annoying woof. She looked. He jumped a step back towards the rocks, and the leshy. Wagged his tail, for good measure.

She looked away, with no change in expression. His tail stopped wagging.

But when next the dragon swiped a claw at her—it wasn’t trying to bite, and Aaron wondered if the dragons passed around their own stories about her—his sister ducked it, and used the opportunity to run. Back into the road, to the line of stones, where she cast Aaron another glance before firming up her stance and raising her sword.

The dragon was after her as soon as it had worked all its limbs free of the tree line. It did not charge heedlessly at her, or anything so exploitably stupid. It glanced to the forest behind the stones, and stalked rather carefully forward, slanting the long length of its body along the narrow road to cut off her retreat back to friendlier woods. It held its wings in tight, and kept its tail to itself, because a second-year dragon was only slightly thinner than the wagons this road had been made for.

Aaron didn’t have the bulk necessary to shove the creature past the stones. Not without his griffin cloak, which was however far down the road in a fleeing mare’s saddlebags. But dogs twitched when fleas bit, and men went mad over a mosquito’s buzz by their ear. Aaron leapt up, and sunk his teeth into its wing. By the base, on the side of the Lord of Seasons’ forest. It flared its wing.

And clipped a tree, cracking a branch clear off.

Aaron dropped back to the ground and, in proper Twokins fashion, vacated the scene of the crime.

The dragon drew back its wing. Tried to. But another crack sounded, of a different sort; not of breaking, but of growth. The snapped branch regrew so fast that its bark crackled as it expanded into place, years of growth rings expanding outwards in an instant, piercing through the membrane of the dragon’s wing even as it moved. The beastie shrieked and tried to pull away harder, faster, an instinctive reaction to such sudden pain. This would have worked better, had not the new growth been branching again and again past the point of the piercing, leaves shiny with their newness growing through, flecked with blood as fresh as they were.

The leshy continued to simply stand.

The dragon thrashed with claws and snapped with teeth, tearing into branches and trunk, its other wing beating at air and ground, its hindlegs digging into the road for purchase as it tried to cross back over the stone line. The tree broke, and regrew. As did the others it maimed, until wood spiked through it at every offending point.

Its screams covered the sounds of the bear’s approach, if there’d been any. It did not appear from leaves and shadows as the leshy had. It walked, as mortal things do, for each Lord of Seasons died when its time had passed. And the Lord of Winter’s time had passed: meltwater drenched its fur like sweat, as the frost-speckled ice dam on its back gave way under the new season’s warmth. Its sides were gaunt, its ribs heaving out and in with each over-strained breath. Around its reddened eyes grew the flowers of spring, looking on it like the most pustulant of sores. Oft scrapped at like the irritants they were, until their petals were torn and stems crushed; grown back, just as surely, in the same tear tracks that pus would have followed. It wept spring, and found no relief.

It was not so big as a dragon. Bigger than any other bear, surely, twice or three times as big, but still small next to the length of one of the world’s largest beasts. The bear lumbered closer, breaths heavy. The dragon lashed at its face. The Lord of Winter cracked the taloned foot between its jaws.

Things proceeded from there, in a way that was somewhat hard to look away from, and entirely inadvisable to turn one’s back on. Or to move too suddenly away from, in any manner that might attract a predator’s gaze.

The dragon did not go down without a fight. Its teeth cracked through the remaining frost on the Lord of Winter’s shoulders, into the ice beneath, until real blood welled through. Its talons tore fur and flesh from those gaunt ribs. It had even tried its fire. But the leshy had turned towards the fight, just slightly, and the flames had been smothered under new growth until the tar beneath only smoked. The dragon died with vines in its mouth and a bear’s jaws around its neck. The Winter Lord shook its prey one last time. Then dragged it fully across the line of stones, and began to eat.

And as it ate, like a thing whose hunger had too long festered, its wounds filled in. Not with frost or fur, but with grass and ferns. The blood on its sides began to run clear; the coppery tang on the air turned sweet as newly tapped sap. More things of spring, more parasites of the changing seasons. It had stopped bleeding, its torn flesh knitted over by the filaments of roots, but this was no healing.

Adelaide had begun taking careful steps towards Aaron, as the bear tore and crunched. Towards Aaron, or maybe just towards the path’s end, and the road away. He’d not have blamed her for the latter; it was certainly where his own paws were edging.

The bear snorted, and jerked its reddened muzzle towards them.

The future duchess froze. Then, in what had to be some manner of noble reflex, she bowed to the forest’s lord on bended knee. She even shot Aaron a stare, like he should do the same. He did not. For one thing, he was a wolf, and he wasn’t about to take off his cloak when all it would do was make him slower. For another thing, well. He’d only ever bent the knee to one person.

The bear huffed, and returned to its meal. Aaron gave it the respect of not turning his back on it until it was well out of sight.

* * *

“It generally doesn’t hurt,” Adelaide said, when they were out on the main road, and rather far away. “Showing respect to things like that.”

He padded a few paces. Then unclasped his cloak, and walked a few more. The sky above them was clear again, and not in the sense of clouds.

“If it can understand that kind of respect,” he said, “don’t you think it can tell when a person means it? That was not my king.”

She looked at him a moment. “Orin’s lucky to have you,” she said, like she was understanding something.

He didn’t correct her.

“Your first instinct is always to run, isn’t it?” she said, because apparently they were still talking about this. “Thank you for coming back.”

“How about you stop making a habit of this, and I’ll stop needing to decide,” he said.

“Seems we both have something to work on, then,” she said, with a smile.

“That wasn’t a joke,” he said, for clarity’s sake, and she laughed.

A little further down the road, she worked free her wooden arm. It had been as useless in battle as she’d said: flopping around, hitting trees as she dodged, hitting her side just as often. She was lucky it hadn’t gotten tangled up in anything.

Still. He raised an eyebrow, at the one-armed woman holding an arm.

“Don’t you have to carry that now?” he asked.

The look she gave him was withering enough to wilt a leshy on the spot. She pointed at him, with the half-curled fist of the prosthetic.

“I’m not sure I’m going to like you, brother,” she said.

“I don’t have much experience with sisters,” said Aaron, “but doesn’t that mean I’m doing it right?”

This was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. That was fine: he could smirk enough for the both of them.

They made it to the next village just after sundown. There were no walls to keep them out, no matter how disreputable they looked. The villagers let them stay in one of those empty longhouses the forester villages had. Made, he realized, for travelers not actually welcome in their homes. They stayed in the same room, and neither said anything on the topic. They stayed in the room farthest from the line of roped stones outside, which required even fewer words.

He wondered if a leshy could regrow a tree from the wood of their walls, and went to sleep with those thoughts.

The next day brought them to a messenger waypoint. Adelaide’s horse had arrived ahead of them, and had spent the night surrounded by the luxury of new hay. The sweat of her fear and flight had been meticulously curry-combed away by a stablehand who scolded them for leaving the poor creature in such a state, and all alone besides. But also could they tell him every detail of what happened, because the stablehand gossip network was very real and very hungry, and this was the most exciting thing that had happened since that time a stablehand on the coast had missed a kelpie in her stalls.

Adelaide glared at the man, already leading her new horse away, her old saddlebags on its back. The man did not repent.

Aaron thought a moment. “Saw a bear eat a dragon,” he said. “A few trees helped.”

And then he led his own horse away, past the desperate pleas of gossip-monger who’d glimpsed a feast, and would soon starve on these crumbs.

The last forester village they stayed at was the first he’d ever seen. The twin babes Orin and Rose had blessed were doing well. Not a scream out of them in days, not even when their tired mother was slow at getting them to her milk. Apparently they’d been quite colicky before that.

“They’ve been sleeping well, her little cubs,” someone commented. “Winter must be feeling full.”

They left the forest behind them. Entered the mountains, and started the winding way up, until they crossed through a pass and found a familiar plateau in the distance, tucked between the sheltering teeth of greater peaks. A day more brought them to the gates of Onekin, and the castle itself, where Aaron was recognized and greeted and generally welcomed home, in a way that made him think that home was a thing that he had. The guards and staff certainly seemed to think so. Adelaide entered with him, upon his introduction; it had been too long since she’d last come here for her to be recognized on her own merits.

And so the future duchess of the south was inside the palace, among all the southern lords who’d not been trusted on parole anywhere near their troops. And her father, too, who was locked up in the O’Shea’s basement.

It occurred to him, then, that perhaps this trip hadn’t just been about brother-sister bonding. And also, that he was exactly as poor an advisor to the king as he’d thought.