Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

The library fey who’d helped him out of the dungeon took in a gasping breath. Then another, steadier. Her cloak’s hood had fallen back, and in the dim light he could make out red hair, light eyes, and the rosy blotch of a wine stain birthmark spilled across the left side of her face. Straw peppered her clothes.

She was younger than he’d thought. Twelve or thirteen at the most. Or at least, that’s all the older she looked—a man never could tell, with her kind.

A certain tension left Aaron’s shoulders. After a moment of thought, it came right back.

“Sorry,” he said, taking a hasty step away.

She pulled her hood back up, tucking herself safely under its shadows. Her other hand clutched at the front of her cloak, just below where he’d pressed his arm to her throat.

“Sorry. Really. I thought someone was up here, but I didn’t know it was you.”

“Do you make a habit of accosting people in stables?” She tried to make herself sound properly offended, but she was breathing a bit too hard to pull it off, and pressing a bit too close to the wall.

“This is a first, I admit.” He took yet another step back, for good measure. “Thank you. For your help the other day. And the warnings, even if I didn’t read them right.”

She took in a deep breath, and straightened herself up. It didn’t make her much taller, but it seemed to help with her confidence. “What would you have done? If I wasn’t me?”

There were squares of hay behind him. Aaron sat himself down. “I’d have figured something out. Probably.” To be honest, he’d been expecting either a Kindly Soul or one of the Raffertys’ hires. He knew how to deal with each, in their own way.

She frowned. “ ‘Probably’?”

“Probably. What are you doing up here? If I may ask. I thought you were a library fey.”

She gave another tug to her hood. He wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he saw a blush under there. After a moment’s pause she joined him on the hay bales, keeping an arm’s length between them. “Just watching. Listening. The stable is the best place for hearing things.”

“Try the kitchens sometime,” Aaron suggested. “Especially while the baker’s boy is getting a letter scribed.”

Her gaze was serious and without humor. He stretched out his legs in front of him and took great interest in staring at his hand-me-down boots.

“So what do they say?” he asked. “The stablehands.”

“That the king is dying.”

“I suppose he is, at that.”

“Don’t you care?” Her vehemence startled him. “You work for him. It is the king’s family that gives you food and shelter. Don’t you feel a… a debt of loyalty to them?”

Was that what fey felt towards those who housed them? It was clearly too serious a thing for him to make light of, but he couldn’t just sidestep the question, either. She deserved better than that, with what she’d done for him. Aaron leaned back on his palms.

“I didn’t mean offense. But it was you who gave me a chance, and John, and Mrs. Summers. Even one of the guards. The king’s had nothing to do with me. The only time I’ve seen the man was during the fox’s attack. He and his family wouldn’t know me from a sparrow on the roof. Loyalty’s an earned thing. What have they done to deserve mine?”

“But—” she began, then started again: “But you— I—”

He interrupted her eloquence, his curiosity getting the best of him. “Don’t you ever feel the same? If the royals don’t know we’re alive, why should we care if one of them dies?”

“That’s treasonous talk,” she said sternly. “You could be hanged for saying such things.”

“Could be, if I were stupid enough to say it to their faces.” He raised an eyebrow. “And anyways, sneaking around His Majesty’s stables at all hours of the night isn’t the most loyal behavior either, last I checked. No matter how many books you’ve dusted.”

She sniffed. A little majestic sniff, whose purpose was apparently to change the subject. “Have you been leaving offerings for me?”

“Did you find them, then? I wasn’t sure where to leave them. Going back into the dungeons didn’t seem like the best idea—”

“Stop it. I don’t need your stale bread.”

“It wasn’t stale when I put it out.” A weak defense at best, but the only one he had. What else was he to do? Bread and cheese were the only things safe to leave sitting. He wasn’t sure if fey could be food poisoned, but he didn’t expect she’d like him testing the theory. He wasn’t about to insult her with dried meats, either. He didn’t know if the Gentry felt the same about that as doppels did, but with as many shapes as they could take on, he wouldn’t be surprised.

“That’s not the— You can’t leave stale bread tucked between books. It’s… It’s…” Words seemed inadequate to describe her distress at the thought. “Do not put offerings in a library.”

Oh. If it was only that. “Where would you like me to put them, then?”

Her hood had inched back again; she tugged it forward with more force than strictly necessary. “Don’t leave me offerings at all. You say you don’t care about any of this; why are you still in the castle, then?”

He’d been leaning back too long. His palms were covered in straw, and even when he picked the pieces off, one by one, the impressions remained. “I like it here, I guess. And I don’t have anywhere else to go. What about you? Why are you here?”

She shied back, but under her hood, he glimpsed a face set in obstinate lines. “I don’t have anywhere else to go, either.”

He looked at the far wall, out the window. The moon was out of sight from this angle, but there was a silver framing to the stone sill. He cast her a sidelong glance. “Do you really live in their walls?”

She gave another little sniff. “Did you really live in their basement?”

“It’s a spacious basement, to be fair. Twokins could fit more folk than the upper town.”

“The walls are spacious, too.” If there had been a trace of humor in her voice, he’d have laughed; but she was serious, and that was all.

“Is there… space in there, then?”

She nodded slightly and did not comment on how stupid it was that he’d half-wondered if she was walking in solid stone. “They’re the old ways. They’re all over the castle. It’s how the royal family was supposed to escape, if the castle fell.”

“ ‘Was’?”

“They’re all dying, now. The books say they used to go all through the castle and the plateau itself, but whole passageways have collapsed. You can barely get from the royal quarters down to the ground now, and the way into the Downs is all blocked by rocks.” The Downs: she called it the same as most uptowners did. Two Kingswas a bit blasphemous a name for them. “They’ve been sealed up, and no one’s been tending them since Rillan’s time. It’s disgraceful.”

“Rillan?”

“He ruled before the Regent Queen. The king’s grandfather.” Sensing his continued confusion, she added one last descriptor. “The Executioner.”

“Ah.” She could have just said that to start with. The man had ordered the island’s kirin killed, and their puss-in-boots; even the unicorns. He’d died bloody in his bed. The official story was that a beast got to him, but everyone knew the Iron Captain had left that same night for the fey border and not come back north for twenty years.

Aaron shrugged. “If it’s Letforget, it’s better to leave it die, isn’t it?”

“But why? It’s so much knowledge, and they’re just… they’re killing it.” Another topic of passion for her.

Aaron rubbed his heel along the floor, clearing the straw off the boards in a little half-moon. “Can’t say I know much about it. But it’s the people who knew it best that decided not to pass it on, isn’t it? That’s the kind of decision folk are better off respecting.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, almost hesitantly; “Is it true? That the old castle still stands in the stone caves?”

“That’s a fancy way of putting it.” Not wrong. Not even half wrong. But fancier than he’d ever heard and with a lot less swearing than he was used to. “Yes. It does.”

She leaned in. “Have you been inside? What’s it like?”

He shivered a little. “The Letforget is still awake down there. Whatever the O’Sheas did when they sealed the place, they didn’t leave any chinks. I’ve seen men die just from brushing against the outer walls. I’ve only looked at it from the bridges. And not the nearer ends of them, mind.”

The O’Shea line had sealed it for a reason, and it wasn’t because their new castle was grander. He didn’t know what that reason was, but a man didn’t need to understand fire to know that sticking his hand in was a fool idea.

“I want to go there. I want to see it.” There was a force to her longing that was painful to hear. “I don’t want to stay trapped up in here forever.”

“Then don’t.” His words startled him. But he couldn’t stop speaking them, now that they were out. “You said the way into Twokins is blocked, but can you get out anywhere else? Outside the castle walls, I mean.”

She sat up a little straighter. “There’s an entrance on the south wall, under the guard tower.”

Of course it was under the guard tower. Well, he’d work with what he could get. “Meet me there. A week from now.”

“At the Wake for the Old Year?”

“The—? Yes. Yes, exactly; at the Wake. I’ll show you the lower town. It’s a better offering than stale bread, isn’t it?”

The little fey thought about it very seriously. Then she nodded.

They set the details: a week from today, just after sunset.

For long moments, he stared at the place where she left. It looked like just a wall to him. The same stone that everything in the plateau was made of. He rose and examined it closer. Set a hand against it, tentatively. It was rough and solid. But when he pushed, when he thought Are you open?, his hand slid through as if it wasn’t even there.

* * *

The doors into the old ways stayed open after she left. He wasn’t sure for how long, exactly—wasn’t sure whether they ever really were closed, or whether he’d just forgotten where to touch. Once he’d lost them, he couldn’t find them again. But if he saw her come or go, if he didn’t take his eyes away…

Aaron experimented. He put his hand through, then his head. The next time he was smarter and brought a shuttered lamp.

The fey’s doors let into the stone of the castle itself. To straight and even corridors, and simple flights of stairs. She was right about them—they were dying like a spider, the side halls atrophying and crumbling, or simply dead-ending. But the main passage, the one that connected the ground floor with the royals’ apartments, clung to life.

Aaron didn’t explore much. He didn’t want to run afoul of the halls’ Fair occupant. He stepped back into the castle proper and blew out his light.

A week would be enough.