Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

Flying hurt. Ached. There were muscles in his back and chest that had never been used like this before; maybe hadn’t existed before.

The Lady, of course, was having him fly everyday. Building stamina for when he’d scout for their noble troops. If he didn’t know better, he would think she was keeping him too tired for further murder attempts.

Currently they were circling above said troops, out of arrow range. The armored merchants—Raffertys, of course they were Raffertys—had arrived a few days back, and begun the work of organizing the militia for its march under the nominal direction of King Orin and the very real command of the Iron Captain, whose task it was to fill their army’s roster each year. The sight was an impressive one: near a thousand people, armed and ready. A full tenth of the city’s population, once those too young or too old had been set aside. He wondered how the Iron Captain had done it. It wasn’t volunteers. Not with this many, not for a war the late king had unilaterally chosen. Had she made a lottery, drawn names from a hat? Asked the militia’s trainers for their most trustworthy, or their most troublesome? Run her finger down the militia’s rolls, and chosen every tenth name?

If every holding sent even half so many, there’d be thousands upon thousands guarding the coast. Thousands upon thousands, away from the fields and the shearing and all their other work, for the whole of spring season. Just watching for wings, and eating through the supplies they were bringing along in that rather extensive baggage train the merchants were wrangling. Granted that Aaron hadn’t done much in his life to help fill humanity’s grain stores, but still. War was a hungry thing. And food a harder thing to acquire, with each year their surplus was shipped out with the spring forces. It wasn’t that Aaron could remember a time before; he was as old as the war itself. But he knew there had been a before, could see it in the way those in Twokins had grown more willing to tear each other apart with each year he’d grown. Though maybe starving them out had been considered a perk, by the late king and his council.

Down below them, the merchant’s spotter lowered her spyglass, apparently satisfied that the patterns on their wings were the same they’d flown out with earlier in the morning. She raised her horn and sounded six. The notes carried over the column, generally causing the bows pointed their way to be lowered. Aaron gave the twitchier archers a moment more. Then he swooped down and gratefully, if not gracefully, fwumped to the earth.

“Must you,” said Lochlann, from under a sprawled-out wing. As it had been the man himself who’d cleared a space for Aaron to land, the good lieutenant could hardly be surprised by this outcome.

Aaron sqworked a greeting.

“You’re a majestic white beast, a construct of ancient magic. How you make that undignified,” the lieutenant said, shoving the offending wing off and pointedly dropping it to the ground, “I do not know.”

Sqworkle, Aaron rebuked, fussily tucking it back against his side. He turned his head this way and that, preening first one feather and then another until all were in their place. His gaze caught on the lieutenant’s hair. The lieutenant’s rather mussed, entirely out-of-place hair.

“Are you going to change back,” the man said, eyeing Aaron’s beak in turn, “or am I going to have a muzzle fitted for you.”

“Perhaps a saddle, instead?” suggested the Princess Rose, with too much speculation to be entirely joking.

Aaron sqwonked his opinion on the matter, tail lashing. He did not know if griffins could be ridden, but he knew that he would not be.

The Lady had landed some distance further back in the column, reclaiming their horses from the end of the baggage train. Though she’d unclasped her cloak upon landing, it was easy to track her progress towards them in the people who shied away from her. It was the same way they shied from him. Them, really. Lochlann had not needed to overexert himself in clearing that space for his landing; most had already been giving the lieutenant’s fey-marked charge a wide berth, though Aaron knew she’d been properly introduced to the caravan as their princess. Rose was holding her head high, her face uncovered, stiffly ignoring the whispers around them. But then, a griffin could hear better than most.

“Think it through,” one woman said, elbowing another. “What kind of Gentry would deal fair with an O’Shea? Not one you’d want to anger. If they just killed the thing, might be her real parents would come calling. It’s the smart thing, putting her to use.”

“Still no reason to let her into the militia.”

“Skin stealers are hardly militia.”

“Don’t eavesdrop on ignorance, Markus,” the Lady said, reaching them. “You’ll learn nothing from it.”

She held out his horse’s lead rope. He unclasped his cloak. And was promptly struck by how messy his clothes were. A wrinkle there, a skewed hem there; he tugged them all into better order, and finger-combed his hair beside, so as to not look like Lochlann. His fingers twitched; the lieutenant stared at them with exactly the same wariness he’d stared down a griffin’s beak. The Lady cleared her throat. She was still holding the rope out to him, one eyebrow raised. He took it.

“How did youhear them?” Because Aaron certainly couldn’t, now that his hood was off.

“Someone is always speaking of things they don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t need to hear to know that. Also, you were murdering that patch of dirt.”

There were furrows clawed into the ground where his paws had been. Ah. Right.

“Lady Sung,” said the princess, with unusual awkwardness. “I hope you are well.”

“I am, Your Highness, thank you,” said the Lady, with none of the same. But she tilted her head, clearly appraising the girl, and her expression could pass for pleased. “That outfit suits you, I believe.”

“I quite agree,” said Rose, who had flushed a very pleased shade of pink. Her coat was the usual O’Shea red, its buttons the same dragons that infested her brothers’ garmentsand Aaron’s own gifted coat. The morning was warm, and she wore it open. The leather armor beneath was tooled with her namesake in gold. Her ornate dagger hung proudly at her hip.

Add a rapier to the other side and do her hair in gold rather than fire, and she’d have been a perfect little image of the Lady. It made their relation rather hard to ignore, though everyone seemed quite intent on continuing to do so.

Aaron’s horse lowered its head, and gave his own breastplate a thump. He obligingly dug a carrot from his pocket pantry, and offered it to her, his palm flat. He’d learned that lesson.

Personally, he wasn’t quite sure how he felt in armor. It changed how he moved, in ways he hadn’t quite gotten used to, yet. But he did like being harder to stab.

“Would you mind keeping our horses with you, Lieutenant?” the Lady asked. “We’re the last of the Late Wake to depart from here.” By which she meant there was no one else to watch them, and she’d rather not trust their horses with the kind of people who whispered.

Or, Aaron reflected, with an eye on his mare’s overly sharp teeth, perhaps it was their horses the Lady didn’t trust.

Ahead, the merchant’s spotter sounded on her horn, a short cadence outside the usual bell system. The column’s veterans recognized it, and the merchants spaced regularly through the militia’s numbers translated it for the rest of them: ready, move out. The pipers began playing, the bagpipes calling them off to war. The sentiment was all well and good, but with this many people and wagons, it would be a bit before the movement reached them.

Orin rode at the column’s head—as a blood noble, as humanity’s king, it was the only place for him. With him rode a full dozen redcoats, thoroughly stifling any heroic urges the young king may or may not feel upon their journey. Tradition did not mean one had to be stupid about things.

The caravan just ahead of them stepped into motion. He could see Mabel among their numbers, made necessarily taller by the horse under her. She was out of her scribe’s robes and into her traveling clothes, with a gray cap on her head and her long bow on her back. John was not here, for very many reasons.

They were leaving. By day’s end, he might not even be able to see Onekin except as more than one more shape in the distance.

Lochlann was working with the Lady to tie the pooka-blooded horses properly for ponying over a distance. Rose had already mounted her horse, after declining the good lieutenant’s help. It had taken her two tries, but she’d done it. Aaron stepped up to her, and spoke to the only other person he knew who’d never gone further than this.

“What do you think it’s like, out there?”

“I’ve only read of it. I know the maps, and the distance between fortified towns, and the average time it takes a caravan to travel between them. But I don’t know why the little villages hold themselves apart, or how to tell if the fields are growing well, or—or how the people really feel about this war. About my family.” She wasn’t looking at him, but at the wagons ahead of them, just creaking into motion. “I want to see it for myself. Everything.”

“Only everything?” he asked, lips quirking.

“And more,” she said, the wind tugging at strands of hair too short for her braid. “What about you?”

“Everything sounds a good start,” he said.

Once, his Death had asked him a question. He didn’t remember what it had been, but he knew his answer. “I want to see what’s out there,” he’d said. “All of it.” He was glad Rose felt the same. The difference between fear and anticipation was whether he’d an ally at his back.

“Aaron,” the Lady said. She and Lochlann had finished with their tying; the lieutenant was now atop his own horse, holding the lead for two more who seemed as skeptical of him as he was of them.

He and Rose didn’t say goodbye. Lieutenant Varghese nodded slightly, or maybe just coughed from the road dust; it was anyone’s guess.

The road stretched out in front of him. It didn’t end, too soon, on the far side of a cave, or at the wall of a city. It just… kept going. Winding around the fox’s forest, towards green hills and a hazy blue-gray horizon that might have been mountains or might have been sky, and he was about to find out which.

Aaron tugged his hood back over his head. His wings hurt; that would go away, with practice. They ached, which was another matter entirely. He flew.