Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

There was still a Death here. The man he’d come for, the one who’d been last out of the fire, was still very much alive. His Death watched him. Aaron watched, too. At the way the fellow’s hands shook when he wasn’t working. How he was sitting a little ways away from his friends, laughing a little too loudly at the jokes of tired men, glancing to the sky like the blameless blue was going to spring a new sort of trap on him.

A sparrow had flown to him, Aaron remembered. At a time when he’d been very, very desperate for escape.

Aaron caught the edge of the man’s sleeve, and tugged. Led the way around a building.

Twokins, he wrote, in the harsh lines of claws on dirt. As good a use for his new-found literacy as any.

The man flinched at the word. Didn’t protest his innocence. Didn’t run, either. That was a start.

Aaron tapped the word with a paw, holding the man’s gaze. He hadn’t written Downs, the crown-approved word. He’d written what he wrote, and that was where the man needed to go.

The man’s Death ambled around the side of the building. Watched, as he’d been watching. It wasn’t the attack last night he’d been waiting on, nor the fire.

This was a town that killed its doppels, and this man was not being subtle.

Aaron tapped the ground again, once, hard enough for the action to jolt up his still-healing wrist.

“Right,” the man said, swallowing. “Right, I’ll… right.”

Right. Aaron nodded, and moved to scratch the dirt clean with his paws. The Death stepped closer, examining the word as it disappeared.

“You’re not Markus, are you,” the Death said, and he was looking right at Aaron as he said it, though Aaron kept his snout pointed to the ground and his eyes on his paws. “Not any longer.”

The man gave a jerky nod to Aaron. Turned to leave, back towards the people who would kill him and build him a pyre and say nice things over the flames, if he didn’t get out soon.

The Death reached out a hand, and caught the man’s shoulder. The man stopped a moment, as if uncertain.

Crumpled to his knees, then his side, his eyes open in that way that didn’t care about closing again.

“I know you can see me, ghost,” the Death said, and reached a hand for Aaron. And smiled, very tightly, when Aaron dodged back. “There we go. I do find it frustrating when I am ignored.”

He crouched down to a wolf’s eye level. And stared, a moment, before speaking again. “I’ve never met a ghost before. Thought you’d be a bit… spookier.” He wiggled his fingers at the word. Aaron was keeping a very, very close eye on those hands. “Not a talker? That’s fine. Listen, then: I’ve no ties to court, no cats I keep with, no quarrels with you or yours. I never did set foot in your Kingdom, before or after. But my ward should have been found out by now, without that little distraction the princess provided. This was his time to die. And so he’s dead, and so will my next life be, and my next, in their time. Let’s have no more little scribbled notes between us, hm? Or perhaps we’ll test your undeath a bit.”

He wiggled his fingers again. Smiled, again. Stood, and stretched out his back, and disappeared from one step to the next as he walked past the body of his dead charge.

Which was of course when Captain Liu came around the corner looking for them. There was a certain novelty in being caught over a dead body that never did grow old.

She had her sword half-way out on instinct and her mouth opened to shout before something, somehow, made her reconsider. Aaron was absolutely unclear on what, given that he was a shady fellow in a wolf skin standing over a dead man, while the word Twokins was barely half-cleared behind him. But he held himself still, because he knew the village gate was still open and the forest fairly near and he had quite enough adrenaline to make it; because knew he could run for it, but would rather prefer not to.

“So he was, then,” she said, easing her sword back into its sheath. “It was that sparrow, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. Once, and rather slowly.

“So you, what, took him back here to test his reaction to that?”

That was the scrawling of Twokins. Aaron’s wolfy eyes darted to it. To her. Another nod seemed appropriate. And to be fair, the man’s reaction to it had been fairly condemning.

“He should have died at the hands of a friend,” Captain Liu said, rather sternly. Which seemed to be her primary complaint with this situation. “How did you even kill… no, I don’t want to know.”

But she clearly did, considering her next move was to crouch next to the body. She rolled him to his back. Straightened his limbs out, a little. His eyes were open still, and seemed intent on staying that way. There was not a mark on him. It seemed to rattle her, a bit.

Aaron shared the sentiment.

She let out a slow breath. “If I tell his family it was the smoke and the shock that did for him, are you going to tell anyone different?”

A single wolfy head shake, even if he paused a bit first. Which was as good as he’d give, and she’d have to take it. He wouldn’t tell anyone, no. But little white lies like that were the kind he hated most, because people acted like they were a kindness. Maybe it would have done the man’s village some good to know what he’d been, and ask themselves whether they could have stomached killing another of their own so soon after the owl girl’s pyre. How many they’d have been willing to kill, if the night had gone differently.

Just a little white lie, to take away the pain of the truth. Far be it for them to feel that pain, and change.

At least the lie would leave his doppel about, and no one looking for it. It would know better than to come near these people.

Around the building’s side, life had continued on, which was as jarring as it always was. Rose was accepting goodbyes from the villagers. Lochlann seemed to be taking a deep breath with each new person that knew she was the princess; knew that the O’Sheas had been hiding a fey-marked royal for thirteen years. Captain Liu very discreetly motioned someone else behind the building, presumably to start the spread of the man’s tragic and completely human end.

They left, back towards the castle. Rose rode Lochlann’s horse. Lochlann walked, rather pointedly holding the reins. And Aaron padded after, trying to ignore the smell of fresh death in the fields; the little bodies fallen here and there. There weren’t many, not more than other animals wouldn’t carry off in the next day or two. But there weren’t few. Some might have died of the smoke, or the shock of burns from carrying those still-lit coals. But he suspected rather a few would have no marks on them at all.

The man’s Death had called him a ghost. Which was… Ghosts were the reason they let forget. He should probably call to his Death again, make sure that wasn’t true, because even though it couldn’t be it was still the sort of thing he’d like confirmed. That he wasn’t.

But there was a dead man in that village and dead animals in the fields, and realizing that his own Deaths were the lenient sort was only as much comfort as a retroactive terror could be.