Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

Unlike with a certain wolf cloak, the Lady did not simply lead him to a courtyard.

“For some unfathomable reason,” she said, “the guard has asked me to limit flights over the city.”

“How mysterious,” said Aaron, with equal dryness.

It was to the stables they went, instead. To the very back, past the more frequently used messenger and riding horses, to a corner that was apparently the Late Wake’s own.

“They’ve a bit of pooka blood in them,” she said, as a red roan stretched its neck over its stall gate, and began bumping rather insistently against her chest. “It gives them a high tolerance for the sort of things we do. Isn’t that right, Shenanigans?”

The Lady scratched the sides of the horse’s face; the mare kept up her seemingly affectionate headbutts. As the Lady soon produced an apple from under her cloak, this affection turned out to be the result of dedicated bribery, pure and simple. The cloak was her white-barred griffin; its eyeless hood stared back at him. Though she’d put hers on, she’d insisted that Aaron carry his.

“Don’t pookas drown people?” Aaron asked, side-eyeing the freckled gray mare in the next stall over, who whickered at him as if in invitation. Possibly to said drowning. He hugged his own white cloak a bit closer to his chest.

“Not so often as kelpies,” the Lady said, which failed to reassure.

The stablehands soon had both horses saddled. A good thing, as Aaron’s horsemanship was limited to a single hurried lesson Lochlann had given him when he’d learned that Aaron would be accompanying the spring forces on their march.

The freckled gray Aaron was to ride was named Seventh Down. Apparently her patterning was called flea-bitten. Equally apparent was the Late Wake’s opinion on the hygiene of those who lived in the real Seventh Down.

If he didn’t think too hard, then mounting a horse wasn’t much different than vaulting rocks. Unstable rocks, that kept flicking their ears back towards him, and shifting their shoulders under him, and he did not quite understand how anyone found this more appealing than using their own feet.

“I never did ask,” the Lady said, “but you didn’t arrive at the castle with a horse. Did you walk all the way north?”

“Possibly,” said Aaron, who hadn’t given much thought to Markus’ travel arrangements. But she had a point.

She shook her head. “I know you don’t much care for horses,” she said, “but please endure.”

“I didn’t even complain,” said Aaron, who was complaining with every rigid muscle in his body, and every awkward lurch as the horse shifted under him. Given that they hadn’t even started walking yet, it was as well that Markus had apparently been an equal horseman. Which was… actually rather odd, for a noble’s son. Though he supposed he didn’t know the first thing about actually being a noble’s son. Or, probably more to the point, whether the terrain around Three Havens was the sort one frequently rode horses on.

“Mmhm,” said the Lady. Then she gave a soft command to her horse, a little whistle of walk, and walk they did. Aaron’s horse followed, with very little input from him, which was a thing Lochlann told him that horses did.

They went past the same guardhouse that he and Rose had briefly waited in, a few days past. He recognized one of the officers outside. They didn’t recognize him. Before long, he passed through the city’s gates for the second time in his life. They went down the switchback road, the same as he’d taken with Rose and Captain Liu. It felt significantly more precarious from the back of an animal that only questionably understood him, and very questionably cared to.

They didn’t curve towards the fields, and the towns. They went ahead, to the forest.

“Come here often?” Aaron asked, as his horse followed the Lady’s off the road, with no particular permission from him.

She flashed a smile back at him, and kept going.

They followed a deer trail, under prickly pine branches in need of ducking, through groves of white-barked trees with their leaves only just begun to sprout, to a sun-dappled clearing not so very far in. There was a little mound in its center with foxgloves growing all over, their blooms too early for the season. The Lady slid from her horse, and stood before them with a considering noise.

“That’s new. One last jest, I suppose. I’d avoid touching these were I you.”

“I’d figured as much,” said Aaron. Foxgloves were poisonous enough without whatever this was.

He was glad he didn’t have a wolf’s nose just now. The blossoms smelled sickeningly sweet, even from here. At the base of the plants, hidden by leaves exactly as well as those flowers covered the scent of decay, lay a dozen or more little bodies. A crow; a mouse; a rabbit; others.

…The Lady’s back was still to him. And they were rather alone, with no one expecting them back at any particular time, and it was still within the realm of possibility for some animal in here to remember itself enough to attack them. He slid from his own horse, unpleasantly aware of how very much noise his booted feet made on last autumn’s leaves. But she didn’t turn, so.

He’d had a dream a bit like this, once. A clearing at night, a knife. Blood over a hand he hadn’t felt was his.

Under last year’s decaying leaves, under the new death of small things and the densely growing foxglove with its spears of blossoms, lay the base of the mound itself. He saw a hint of black fur just beginning to pull away from a desiccated paw; it made the claws seem longer than they were, the bones underneath gaunter. Nothing had been eating the Four Tail’s corpse. Nothing that hadn’t joined him.

This was the same clearing, in sunlight. Not a dream, then. Not that he’d much thought it was.

The Lady’s horse had turned its head to the side. Its dark eye took in him, and the hand on his dagger’s hilt. It opened its jaws. Both Lochlann and Rose had been right, when they’d told him wolves didn’t grin. Horses shouldn’t, either.

It very pointedly stepped on a branch. The crack drew the Lady’s attention; she turned, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Relax,” she said. “There’s only death here.”

No, not even one of those. Just them, and some horses of questionable intellect.

Aaron didn’t startle, or rush to move his hand. Didn’t hide what he’d been doing. He was but a jumpy boy in a particularly eerie clearing; who wouldn’t reach for their weapon while creeping up particularly close behind their mentor. What a safe place to stand, for all parties.

They tied their horses out of reach of the foxglove. Then the Lady sat down upon a fallen tree, heedless of what the old lichen-covered bark might do to her riding clothes. Her eyes found his.

“Name the greater beasts. As many as you can.”

“Leshy,” he answered, still standing. “Griffins. The fey—”

“Not the fey,” she corrected, slipping off her boots. “A common enough mistake; they’re another sort entirely. But go on.”

“Cait sidhe and pusses—”

She dug her toes into the soft moss. “Are fey. I’m not entirely certain that all cats aren’t.”

“Orphan birds?” That met with silence and toe wiggling, which he supposed was approval. “Foxes, once they’ve earned their second tail. Kirin. Unicorns. Ah. Shadhavar. Sirens—”

“Really? You remembered shadhavar before sirens?” She was amused, and making no attempt to hide it.

He glared a moment.

“You’re missing one,” she said.

“More than one, I’m sure.”

“The most important, so far as our lesson today is concerned.”

He remembered again a knife, and the hand that had killed this forest’s master. Opposable thumbs could be more dangerous than any teeth.

“Humans,” Aaron said.

“Yes.” She stood, running a hand absently over the clasp of her griffin cloak, and began to prowl the clearing’s edge on silent feet. Aaron turned his head, keeping her in sight. “Most humans don’t count themselves as beasts. But we’re no fey, and we’re not animals. We don’t need a fox in our forest before we start making music and telling stories. We’ve our own magic to us, our own influence upon the world.” She paused, her hand cupping a bud of new leaves hanging low from a tree. “Foxes have their lies. Unicorns bring healing, and kirin raise empires. What do humans do?”

“We create. Music and dance and such.”

“Shadhavar make the most beautiful music on their horns. It can take a week or more to grow a new note for their songs, and every year they shed their old melody and begin anew. Their herds grow symphonies for the joy of it, played in full only once. Does that not rival any composer’s greatest creation?”

“But it’s more than that. We make castles, cities. We hollow plateaus, change the land around us—”

“A five-tailed fox can raise in a daydream a palace entire, the likes of which would make One King’s towers crawl back to their quarries in shame. Even beavers change the land. Don’t insult humanity.”

“What is it, then?”

“We break.” She pulled the branch down, further and further, until it snapped under her hand. Its leaves remained vibrant in their newness, hours from realizing they’d already died. “Anything and everything. We’ve broken the future itself when we’ve had the mind for it. There is not a thing that exists that we cannot unmake.”

She started her pacing circle again. His mare snorted, and watched her every bit as closely as Aaron did. Her own horse swished its tail, apparently quite inured to this show. It did keep one eye on him, though.

“Dragons destroy whole towns each spring,” Aaron said. “We’re hardly the only ones who break things.”

“But none do it so well as us. We’ve rather made an art of it.” She stepped up to him, toe to toe. It reminded him of a wolf sizing up his throat. “Do you want to fly, Aaron?”

He swallowed, and nodded.

“When you put on the cloak of an animal doppel, it’s humanity’s magic you wrap around yourself. That’s an easy thing; natural as any change of clothes. When you wear a greater beast, you’re donning their magic, too. Not humanity’s; not yours. There’s no room for that in you. So you must break.”

She reached behind his head, and pulled his hood into place. He fell to his hands and knees, his still-healing wrist an afterthought of pain—

It was like being torn apart.

It was like when the duke had cracked a sword hilt on his arm, except in every bone, every muscle, every vein and cell and heartbeat.

It was like realizing that, perhaps, he wasn’t the only one with murder on his mind; realizing it too late, again.

The cloak was a strangling thing, pressing in on him like a spiked cage, forcing something to fit inside him that didn’t, that couldn’t,that did.

It took longer to remember how to breathe than he would have liked.

His claws were dug into the dirt, deep trenches carved into the moss under his paws. The flea-bitten mare snorted and bucked, tossing a great white wing off her back. His wing, he realized, when its flop against the forest floor pulled at muscles that a human simply didn’t have. The Lady’s own horse had lowered its head to graze, no stranger to this foolishness.

Aaron was a Northern Griffin. A white one with its black spots far between, entirely lacking the darker wing barring of a female.

“Don’t worry,” the Lady said, daring to smirk. “It’s only so bad the first time. For each of them. I do have quite the collection.”

His tail lashed behind him with a mind of its own. The Lady’s head, he noted, was smaller than his paw. It bore a closer comparison.

She ducked his swipe, laughing. Attempts to maim the instructor were, perhaps, not an unusual reaction to this lesson.

“We break,” she said, “and we do with the rubble as we please. Remember that, and fly.”

She pulled up her hood and took her own advice.

Aaron stretched his wings, and followed.