Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

They passed out of the central mountains and into the foresters’ lands. King Orin presented a string of bleating goats to the elders at the next village they came to, with rather more solemnity than the occasion warranted. The fattest of them had its Death walking next to it, so Aaron was unusually confident of tonight’s dinner. His keen supernatural insights astounded even him. Truly, if he was a ghost, then he was a creature to be feared.

The lands here had rules that the mountains did not. Not the unspoken kind of rule, the if you do this you’ll probably die sort of rule. And not the Gentry’s sort of rule, where the loopholes were as important as the words themselves. These rules were extremely clear, and codified, and summarized in one easy line that the villagers were making very certain every single person in the caravan heard straight from one of them: Don’t cross the rope lines. You’ll die.

He had a feeling there was more to it than that. But then, he also had a feeling that years of troops tromping through their lands hadn’t left the foresters with much respect for the verbal comprehension of outsiders.

“Do the lines move?” Aaron asked, because that seemed the sort of thing to know.

A villager stared at him over-long. “Only in the wind,” he said finally. And then reiterated, like he thought Aaron was going to go off and poke at warnings of certain death: “Don’t cross them.”

Meanwhile, the Lady was making her own casual inquiries. “Any sightings of the Spring Lord?”

“None yet, Lady,” said another villager. “Winter Lord’s a bear, though. Slept all through the snows.”

“I imagine that was a season of stepping lightly,” the Lady said. The villager did not disagree.

They’d packed their cloaks away before entering. The Lady hadn’t said why, but Aaron could see it. In the villagers’ usually fair skin, in the way light wisps of hair escaping from under hats, in the colorful patterns that edged their clothes. He’d seen similar on John Baker’s things, on the rare laundry days the boy had been caught with all his other outfits dirty. It seemed the foresters had more enclavers in their family trees than the typical Onekin citizen.

He only saw one Death here, beside the goat’s: one of the elders, a stooped old woman with frown crinkles about her mouth and laugh lines around her eyes. Her Death had gone over to coo over the goat’s excellent bearing, which the goat’s Death seemed quite pleased by. The woman herself was pacing the village square with a younger woman, coaching her breaths as she walked through her labor pains.

Aaron wasn’t much needed for anything, as King Orin kept talking pleasantries with the other elders, and the rest of the villagers did their best to keep the caravan’s camp far away from wherever these ropes were. So he took out three turnips, somewhat more wrinkled than they’d been at the start of this journey, and started idly juggling while Seventh Down tried to nip them from the air. He grabbed one out from between her snapping teeth, threw it up behind his back, and promptly fumbled his catch on all three. Juggling wasn’t actually much a skill of his.

Behind him, the pregnant woman laughed. The elder huffed. Aaron kept his smirk facing forward, and managed to rescue two of the turnips from his horse’s maw.

The village healers no doubt had better medicines at their disposal than the ones in his pocket pharmacy. Fresher, at least. But he was well versed in being a distraction. Sometimes even a pleasant one.

“Please put that menace in the stable,” Lochlann said, in passing. Aaron was unclear on what his sweet flea-bitten mare had done to the man the last time he’d gone flying. But the good lieutenant was limping a little, so. Like rider, like horse, he supposed.

He left Seventh Down in the probably-capable hands of a wary stablehand, and started wandering. The stable itself was in a typical Onekin style, rather rectangular and solid. The longhouse next to it, where the royal party had been invited to stay, the same. He didn’t get the impression it was much used outside of travelers. They’d a few too many empty rooms for that.

The village itself was unwalled, the trees coming right up to the buildings with no regard for cleared sightlines. Their homes were low to the ground, built around wooden poles and covered over in sod, so that they looked ready to fade back into the earth. Past them, at the village’s edge, sat a line of heavy stones with ropes tied between them. White and red streamers hung from them, twisting in the wind. Beyond that line, the forest.

“Going somewhere?” asked the elder who’d been walking with the pregnant woman, and who hadn’t tried to be subtle in first frowning at him, then walking an intercept course. Her Death was still chatting with the goat’s, for which he was grateful.

“So what will kill me, if I cross this?” he asked. And he almost expected her to say try it, see how that goes for you, but she opted for a question of her own.

“Are you going to cross?”

“Probably,” he said. “I’m supposed to be a messenger at some point, so. The roads to the enclaves lead through the forest, don’t they?”

“Trails,” she corrected. “Not roads. You’d best take the coastal route, if you don’t know that. A shorter path isn’t faster if you never arrive.”

That was fair. But there’d be dragons flying over the coastal route, soon, and he was twitchy enough about all this sky overhead without it being full of fire-breathers.

“There’re safe ways to travel it, though,” he said.

“Take the coastal roads, my lord,” she said.

Which he tried not to twitch at, because he knew how he looked with his red coat and his hair just starting to brush at the back of his neck. He should shear it short again, except Rose kept making noise about braiding it when it got long enough. But. My lord was an ill-fitting cloak. Sometimes he dreamed he was wearing Markus instead of a griffin, and couldn’t find the clasp.

“I will if I can,” he said. And asked: “Have you had any sightings of a kaibyou?”

The elder’s eyes narrowed. “Are they one to watch for?”

“I think she just wants her people safe.”

“Those are the most dangerous ones,” the elder said.

* * *

They did indeed have goat for dinner. Having met this particular goat, which had never once tried to talk, or done anything more clever than get its lead rope tangled up in the legs of itself and its fellows, Aaron was less vigilant about picking it out of his meal than usual. It was… chewy. He’d have preferred a few more roast carrots, honestly.

Afterwards, he took up a position on the longhouse roof with Rose, per their usual star watching arrangement. Unlike previous villages, she’d been explicitly included in the invitation to stay in this one. But their own party had still posted her to the night watch, so. They night watched.

It was lucky to keep a watch while a babe was being born, in any case. And the babe was definitely being born, in one of those little homes towards the edge of the village, to its mother’s entirely reasonable complaints.

“I have never been so glad,” the princess said, “to be out of the line of succession. I will gladly refrain fromproducing heirs.”

* * *

The elder approached the royal party after breakfast to request His Majesty’s blessing on the new babes. Twins. A boy and a girl, born nearly as vocal as their mother, though they’d settled down around dawn.

“Of course,” Orin said, rising.

“And the princess’ too, if she would be so kind,” the elder added.

Aaron was to the side, helping the villagers wash dishes. But he nodded at Rose, who seemed entirely baffled by her presence being desirable.

Beneath his shirt, a medallion hit lightly against his chest as he scrubbed. The sword and shield of Man’s God, mirrored on front and back. Twinned, some would say. A perfectly innocuous necklace.

“It’s too bad your brother isn’t here, as well,” the elder said.

A perfectly innocuous statement.

The mother—looking tired, but rather pleased by her labors—came to sit at the village center, in a chair brought for her. King Orin washed his hands, and his dagger, and pricked his thumb so the blood just started to well. He touched it to one sleeping babe’s heart, then another.

“Strength and health,” he blessed the first. For the second, “Quick mind, steady spirit.”

Standard, and unobjectionable.

The princess cut herself a bit too deep, not having done this before. Or perhaps being a bit too used to being healed immediately afterwards, by the magic of a castle far behind them.

“Be his mind when he isn’t thinking,” she wished on the second, and moved to the first; “Be her heart when she loses it. You’re each other’s other half.”

Not exactly standard, but well received, judging by the murmurs around them. Aaron wondered if she knew how well received.

“Thank you,” their mother said.

Aaron rubbed his necklace between thumb and forefinger, quite idly, as the elder stepped up for her own blessing.

“You’re our last bear children. Born at the changing seasons, before the Spring Lord’s showing. You are the fallow before the planting. The seed before the bloom. Rest now; the world will change when you wake.”

* * *

“They believe it’s all the same creature, you know,” Rose said, as they mounted their horses. “The Lord of Seasons. Spring and Summer, Autumn and Winter. That each new monstrous animal is the face of the same thing, dying and being re-born.”

And why not? The Twinned God had two faces; four didn’t seem much of a stretch. But that might be a bit blasphemous of an example to use with so many troops around, and not an example she’d be best familiar with, besides. Even if her blessing on those babes had come awfully close.

“Man’s God has two faces,” he pointed out, instead.

“Man’s God doesn’t walk around a forest,” she said. “Or leave its bones behind.”

“What do you think it is, then?” he asked. She’d been the one to send the kaibyou and the rest of the fox’s people here.

“The forest itself,” she said, like that had to be a different thing. People from Onekin were always trying to pick things apart, to find the place where they became separate.

The elder stepped over to them. “Thank you again,” she said, with a bow to the princess. Her eyes settled on him.

“If you must enter the forest, touch wood first. Take only what you need to, lives included. Leave nothing unwanted. Most importantly,” she said, “just take the coastal roads, my lord.”

“Thank you,” he said, and tucked his necklace away.

He hoped she’d still be alive, the next they came this way.

* * *

The forest was only a reaching hand this far south, quickly passed. The land sloped down ever further. Rivers cut across the land, the mountain streams having joined and joined again into these winding monsters than even the Minnow could have gotten lost in. Villages turned to towns, towns grew closer together. Some stood on stilts above running water, sending ferries out to greet His Majesty. A good defense, that. Though not against anything coming from the sky.

Storms grew more frequent, and more violent, as they approached the coast.

There was a smell on the air, one that had him raising his head and sniffing about like he was still in the wolf cloak.

“I can never decide if it’s a good smell or not,” King Orin said to him, because apparently this was a scent Markus would know.

“It’s certainly a strong one,” Aaron replied.

“It’s salt,” Lochlann said, after they’d fallen back a bit. “You’re smelling the ocean.”

They reached the crest of a hill, and a break in the storm. With streamers of sunlight cutting through the clouds, he caught his first sight of the fitfully sleeping titan that was the ocean. And rising from it, the only other land visible from horizon to horizon of gray depths, the mountains of the dragon’s isle. They were too far away to tell their true scale, which was telling in itself.

Below them, a river made from what seemed like all other rivers rejoined the sea at a hundred points, with slivers of white land between them. The road wound north of it, where the land rose to black cliffs. The first plateau humanity had burrowed into, when it arrived on Last of the Isles. In front of it lay the seawall, keeping safe its harbor as great waves broke over it, coming down in sheets of white spray like a horse tossing its head.

Salt’s Mane.

He could make out more details, as their column drew closer. The ships huddled in the harbor. The balconies carved into the cliffside. The arrow slits, used everywhere in place of windows. They could see light through them, and Aaron and Rose watched them instead of the stars during her shift that night.

They saw the flags the next morning, on the final approach. The highest pole stood empty, awaiting the raising of the king’s flag. Below it, a gray kelpie swam on a blue field; the flag of the local duchess. On lower poles hung a dozen others, from various vassal houses that Rose hadn’t yet made him memorize. Equal with the duchess’ own flag flew the kirin rampant, speared through on its field of red.

Aaron nudged his horse up next to the Lady’s, and spoke rather conversationally. “I thought she was supposed to be here a week after us.”

“So her letters implied,” the Lady agreed, equally mild. “She must have made good time.”

Very good time, indeed.