Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

There was a knock on his door, far too early.

“You didn’t wear your sword yesterday,” his dearest sister said, when Aaron found his way to opening the door.

“And that’s a reason to wake a body…” he leaned back from the doorframe. Checked the light through the nearest arrowslit, or the lack thereof. “...Before dawn? Who wakes before dawn when they’ve no need to?”

“The training grounds will be free.”

“They were free after breakfast, too.”

“You,” she repeated, “didn’t wear your sword yesterday.”

“...This is a punishment,” he said, and did not bother making it a question. He did try to close the door. Slam it, in fact. But she shoved her wooden arm into the gap before he could get it shut—he should have been suspicious the moment he saw her wearing the thing—and then she was shoulder-checking his door and wrapping an arm about his shoulder. Like she was here because she liked him, instead of hated him.

“Let’s practice,” she said, smiling.

“I’ll remind you,” Aaron said, “that I was wearing your sword instead.”

“So you were,” she agreed, amiably enough. And tightened her elbow around his neck. “Were you intending to wear yours today? Or simply leave it behind, like an unwanted sibling?”

There was so very much in that joking description, and he was not awake enough for any of it. “Distrusting me without even giving me the chance, sister?”

“Answering questions with questions over kirin’s bone, brother? Come on. Training time.”

“Before breakfast?” he asked, and tried to grab hold of his doorframe on the way through. Succeeded. Failed to keep the grip, though. “Before breakfast is an abominable time of day.”

“Perfect, then. It matches your skill.”

When the sun was risen and the castle awake and Aaron gasping against the wall with a water flask she’d very helpfully brought for him, half of which he’d simply dumped over his hair, she set an elbow on his shoulder.

“Wear it all of today,” she said, “and tomorrow our practice will be after breakfast.”

“That’s not as appealing as you make it out to be.” He took another swallow of water. “Can’t I learn the bow, instead? I’ve got plenty of things for stabbing people up close. If I’m going to put in this work, I’d like to stab things from a greater distance, at least.”

“On your own time. I’m not much of a bowmen, myself.” She took her elbow off his shoulder. Picked up her prosthetic, from where she’d propped it against the wall, and waved him along with its jointed hand. “Go clean up. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

He did not, however, see Orin at breakfast. Aaron met Rose’s eyes as she came into the room. Raised an eyebrow towards His Majesty’s empty chair, which she met with her own determined nod. Then she was picking her breakfast plate up from its place on the table, and he had a fine excuse to grab just as much as he’d like, and the both of them—with an apologizing Lochlann in tow—were headed down the hall.

His Majesty had breakfast in his room. Lunch, as well. They joined him for both. This was… likely the way things would be, until matters were decided. Jeshinkra got him out for another ride in the afternoon. Just the two of them this time, on a short loop around the enclaver’s fields. The lot of them were evicted from Orin’s rooms shortly thereafter, because listening to them play cards while he napped was a line in His Majesty’s pride that was not to be crossed.

Rose was becoming quite the cheat, anyway.

The Lady and Adelaide knocked on Orin’s door just before dinner. Either of them alone could have been there as a friend; together, whether intentional or not, they were poisoner and witness. The Lady had a smile just for Aaron.

“You’ve been keeping yourself scarce,” said the Lady, smiling at Aaron. “Pastry?”

He declined. She popped the little treat in her mouth, smile intact.

It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to politics. There were few other shared interests in this group.

“They’re locked in their homes, and the Lord Protector calls it curfew,” Rose said, too indignant to finish the food on her plate. Aaron eyed it, mostly on principle.

“And how would you contain a people overly prone to rioting?” Orin asked, his own food continuing its fork-point migration.

“Why do they need to be contained?” Rose said. “What are the nobles here doing, that their people riot at the sight of a deer?”

“A reindeer,” Aaron put in, on the Spring Lord’s behalf.

“I’m told it symbolizes change,” she continued. “Hope. Why do they riot at the sight of hope, brother? We can force the land to be ours, but not the people.”

Aaron doubted both of those. Though lands, in a change in the ownership thereof, was an interesting thought.

“If they are our people,” Rose pressed, “then are they less so, when they are griffins?”

“Yes,” Orin replied, like a man too tired for justifications.

“Should they be killed?”

“Yes.”

It was entirely clear that they weren’t talking about griffin doppels anymore.

“Why are you letting them poison you?” Rose asked.

“It’s not my choice—”

“Whose choice is it, then, King Orin?”

“If I’d refused,” Orin said, “if I’d tried to shut this investigation down, that would just have been more proof for them. They’d assume it was a dragon’s mind, a dragon’s possessiveness showing true—”

“They didn’t needmore proof,” the princess said. “You’ll be just as dead at the end, for not having fought them.”

“I’m going to—” And it was abundantly clear that he’d been about to say live, but was sitting too close to Adelaide’s sword to lie like that.

“I have often wondered,” said the Lady, cutting into this dance, “if it would not be to our benefit, to have a few dragon minds among the ranks. Even if a dragon doppel could not be king—and I do agree with them on that,” she said, with a rather pointed look to Aaron. To be fair, most everyone at the table was looking to Aaron at that. “Even so, would not a few dragons, who claimed possession of our people and our lands, only be an asset in humanity’s defense?”

“Tell my lords that,” the king said. He’d set down his fork, and was not even pretending to eat anymore.

“Shall I?” she shifted her gaze among all of them, and Aaron did not think it his imagination that she held his gaze longest. “Shall we?”

“Debate the merits of pet dragons all you’d like,” Adelaide said, and she set a little paper medicine packet on the table. One of the poison doses, that had been put in her keeping, so that they could not be tampered with after that first day of their making. “But humanity’s king must be human.”

Orin drank the fourth dose. They did not find much to discuss, after that. Aaron made his excuses shortly after, and retreated back to the equally silent but far less weighty comfort of his own rooms.

His own unlocked rooms.

He’d not left a door unlocked since he’d realized he’d the option not to. He left his sword sheathed on his hip. Took out his oldest dagger, with another hand near his sister’s, and he eased the door open. The rooms were dark, lit only by the half-moon through the arrow slits. There was a shadow leaned over his bed, and the little heap of all his things dumped out over it, with the shadow rifling through a book of all things—the Lady’s population records—before tossing it, and reaching back down.

Aaron kicked the back of the figure’s knee out from under it. Got harsh fingers in its hair, pulling back, knife ready for a friendly chat when moonlight hit blonde hair and, well. He was more familiar with this particular figure than he should be, and not on the boy’s own account.

“I’m told,” he said, his blade against the throat of John’s twin, “that it’s your brother who’s the dim one.”

“Do it,” the boy hissed, exactly like a kid who thought himself brave would.

“Dim as a rock, I believe was the phrase. But I’m told you know your letters, so let’s tell me what this spells: I-D-E-O-T.”

The boy paused. “I… What?”

“…I spelled it wrong, didn’t I.” Well that took a bit of the fun out of this. Aaron sighed. He kept his knife where it was, and used his other hand to pat over the usual places for weapons. But enclavers weren’t allowed them, and apparently the risk of getting caught with one had been less tolerable than the risk of getting caught in Aaron’s private rooms. The rooms he’d not been back to until decidedly late for three days running, as he’d always waited for Orin to write his nightly letter before returning. And who was to notice one more enclave servant, going in or out of a room?

“What were you even here for?” Aaron asked. “I’m a poor one to rob.”

The boy stubbornly refused to answer, even as his heart was rabbit-quick against Aaron’s chest.

“I could kill you,” Aaron said. A casual phrase, mostly, until he realized it, and had to say it again: “I could kill you. An enclave boy, one already known for trouble, caught in the act like this—I could kill you, and the lord here would hardly bat an eye.”

And the boy had tried to kill Aaron first.

“Do it.” And now he sounded more scared than brave. Clearly whatever else he’d been up to with his spying for the griffins, it hadn’t involved a healthy frequency of death threats.

“That’s not how alliances are made. I don’t know how important your mother is among your people, but important she is. And your brother is coming north to see you soon. I can’t kill you where your family will know it’s me, idiot.”

At least he couldn’t spell things wrong in the speaking.

“Empty your pockets,” he ordered. “And that bag.” Because the kid had a satchel with him. Decent sized, but small enough to go unremarked.

John’s twin hadn’t gotten Aaron’s coin purse, because he always kept it with him. He had gotten the only other book Aaron had brought, but books sold well and merchants didn’t always ask questions, so Aaron couldn’t fault him there. The kid must have only just gotten started when Aaron had arrived, because that really was the extent of his larceny.

“Right,” Aaron said. He put his knife away, but kept a friendly arm around the kid’s shoulders. “We’re going for a walk.”

“Where?”

“Your mother,” he said.

The battlesmith was unamused by the hour, and Aaron’s cheer in rousing her, and by her especially pale son.

“Found this,” Aaron said, shoving the boy her way.

She caught the boy, and set her own heavy hand on the kid’s shoulder. He didn’t look to feel any safer with her.

“Where?” she asked.

“Here and there,” Aaron said, because he hadn’t particularly cleared these halls of listeners, and trusted her to figure things out on her own.

“Thank you for bringing him back.”

“It’s a service I provide.”

“For what fee?” Her eyes narrowed. He did love it when they caught on quick.

“One question. How does the Lord of Seasons know which lands are its own?”

The Lord of Season’s forest was contained by mountains to its east, and by roads to its south and west; roads the kingdom took great care in keeping clear of any saplings. But what kept it from spreading north, into that strip of trees between the true border and the enclaver’s fake stones? What made a forest a Forest?

“Its trees,” the battlesmith replied, with the sort of suspicion that said she didn’t know why he was asking, or how it could hurt her, but she suspected it would all the same. “They say the forest grew from seeds shed by the first Lord of Seasons. Or the Lord sprouted from the first trees. Either way, the forest can only grow from its own seeds. Get enough mature trees in one place, and that’s the Lord of Season’s forest, no matter where it grows.”

Aaron wondered if that little tidbit had anything to do with all the saplings the enclavers had planted in their gardens. It wasn’t a thing to ask, in a corridor that might have ears. Or a corridor with no listeners, in which case he’d be alone with two people, at least half of which had a track record of trying to kill or rob him.

“Thank you,” Aaron said, instead. “Maybe teach that one a bit more about locks. He seems to have their function down, but not so much their purpose.”

“Thank you,” the battlesmith echoed him, with a rather pointed look down at her son. Aaron gave a cheerful smile to the boy before leaving.

He went past the king’s rooms and picked up the letter to Connor before going back to his own. He wedged a chair under the knob of his relocked door, and went to sleep.