Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

Orin handed him a neatly tied stack of letters as the meeting broke up. Each bore the crown’s seal: a dragon rampant, caught in the spiked ring of a crown.

“As we discussed,” he said, and left it at that.

“You’re carrying his correspondence?” asked his sister, once His Majesty had left the room.

“I’m the go-between for the field investigators and the committee at the castle.” That was to say: for the southern lords not trusted enough to depart the castle’s hospitality. Aaron tucked the letters into the inside of his coat, in a clean pocket. “These are mostly for them. He doesn’t want to be the only one not having a say on his own trial.”

“And the ones that aren’t for them?”

“Aren’t for you, either,” he said, flashing his teeth.

“Come, children,” the Lady said. “On to the interviews.”

They went.

* * *

The first was with Captain Martinson. Mabel’s mother had spread her coat on the back floor of her cell, perhaps as bedding, or perhaps to dry. It was performing neither task particularly well. The woman herself was looking rather more harried than Aaron had last seen her. But equally alive, so there was that.

“Were you born a dragon, or have you since become one’s doppel?” the Lady asked. The question that was to begin all of their conversations, as they progressed down this cellblock. Each cell was small—not a place a dragon could shift in, not without breaking themselves on the stone that lined three sides. The bars were iron, and thick. Adelaide stood at her mother’s side, her kirin’s bone hilt at her hip. Was kirin’s bone so hard to come by in Salt’s Mane that they’d truly needed hers, or had this been the Lady’s idea of a bonding activity?

“No to the both,” the captain replied. And added, because it seemed she had to: “Far as I know. But I wouldn’t know what it feels like, to be a doppel. Can’t say I haven’t thought how useful it would be, being that strong. But I’m loyal yet, and I’ll be loyal at least to the end of this season. Let me fight, ‘til then.”

The other prisoners could hear them. See them, too, if they’d a good enough angle for it. There was nothing private about this affair. It wasn’t as if it would change anything.

“Thank you, captain,” the Lady said, and moved to the next cell in line.

“Lord Kitten,” the captain said, catching Aaron’s eye. “My daughter’s a worrier. Tease her for me, would you?”

“I can manage that,” Aaron agreed.

“Were you born a dragon, or have you become one’s doppel?” the Lady asked anew.

* * *

After, he found Rose up on the seawall. He’d dreamed of the place, once. A fever dream. It hadn’t prepared him for recognizing the exact spot he’d sat. Right there, and his Death had sat there, and the waves had been a deeper color but the view out over the ocean towards the distant hint of land had been the same.

At the end of the wall’s wide curve, near where it broke to allow the fishing boats passage to deeper waters, a wave surged and broke and sent a spray of white cascading up and over. Rose hissed her indignance. Lochlann barked what might have been a laugh, the sound quickly drowned by the fuller laughter of people Aaron had not properly met. Rose’s team, the ones she’d fought with last night. They’d brought their new companions-in-arms out here, without warning them of the sea spray at high tide. The next large wave crashed up against the breakwater, and Rose joined the laughter.

Aaron picked his way towards them. The wall was wide enough, and stable enough. It was the ocean he didn’t trust. Rivers and lakes didn’t heave about like this. Not without something large moving underneath. It seemed a suspicious thing, that no one looked askance when an ocean acted so.

Lochlann came to meet him, probably as much to get away from where the waves were breaking as to talk. “Is there something wrong?”

“Not wrong, exactly,” Aaron said, and checked that the others were still far enough away, and distracted by the waves besides. “Orin knows I’m not Markus.”

“And you’re still alive?”

“I think he has bigger concerns than looking too closely at me,” Aaron said. “And kings occasionally find me useful.”

The lieutenant narrowed his eyes at the plural, but let it go. Let a breath go, too. “That is… a better outcome than I had anticipated.”

“I told him I was telling you and Rose. Connor, too, when I go back to the castle. I’ll be making my first run tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“His Majesty would like the committee to have plenty of time to consider how not dead some of those witnesses to his so-called doppeling are.” And Aaron had a pardon in want of a back-up king’s signature, but that could go without saying. “Send Rose my way, would you? When she’s done with your new friends. I’d like to make my goodbye proper, but it’s a thing that will keep.”

It would certainly keep for an afternoon, while she played. And wasn’t that a sight: the princess, with friends. The team she’d fallen in with seemed to be a younger one; none of them looked older than Lochlann. Some looked rather closer to the princess’ own age. And they seemed to have already gotten over any weirdness concerning her fey-mark, in a way some who’d traveled with her in the caravan all the way here still hadn’t. With all the rivers flowing near Salt’s Mane’s plateau, mayhaps the good neighbors found crossing here to be too difficult.

Seabirds squawked above harbor, gathering in opportunistic numbers. On the sands behind them, the butchery of the dragon carcasses was well underway. Aaron hadn’t been looking for these two when he’d come down here.

He looked to the beach. Mabel was about as subtle as a seabird in staring back.

* * *

“I did not mean to,” another woman had said, sitting in her cell, her voice every bit as small as she was holding herself.

The woman hadn’t been one of those dragged back; she’d come walking to her death.

“Figured if there were any real dragons sneaking in with us, I could help fight them,” she’d said.

“Do you think flying would have been a natural thing, or would I just have flopped about?” she’d said. “I’m always making a fool of myself, so I guess that wouldn’t have changed. Is it… supposed to feel different? Being a doppel?”

“Not for the human,” the Lady told her, before Aaron could.

“How do you want it done?” Adelaide asked.

“Hanging. With a long rope. I always thought—thought that looked too quick for any pain.”

Short ropes left a person to strangle under their own weight. Just right snapped the neck; Aaron understood there was a sort of science to figuring that out, but he didn’t think he’d trust any that knew it. Too long did a bit more than that.

“It’s too much a risk, moving you from your cell,” said Adelaide, in what passed for her comforting voice.

The woman in the cell gave a wan smile. “Anyone got a sword sharp enough to do the same?”

“We’ll arrange it,” his sister assured.

They moved on to the next cell.

“I’ll be coming with you to One King,” Adelaide informed him as they walked, like this was reassuring timing.

* * *

Mabel met him at the harbor’s edge, fresh from the butchery.

“Aaron,” she said, and, “I heard you’d been one of those on the questioning,” and then she went to tuck a strand of blowing hair back out of her face. Stopped at the look on his face, and took a moment to peer at her own hands. And arms. As for the rest of her: at least she’d been wearing an apron.

She crouched down to the surf, and scrabbed blood and bits off with sand and saltwater.

“Right,” she said, a moment later, as she reached up to redo the tie on her hair with hands that wouldn’t turn her hair red. “Have you… talked with my mum?”

“I have,” Aaron said. “She calls me kitten.”

The taller girl paused in her tying, both hands caught up in her hair. She’d let it grow out some since she’d come to the castle. Or forgotten to get it trimmed. It was just long enough for her to attempt tying it back, with no guarantee of success.

“Well,” she said. “That’s not a fact that needed knowing.”

“She also expressly requested your teasing.”

“Course she did.” The tall girl closed her eyes briefly. But there was a tension that had been in her shoulders, which was leaving now. “...She’s all right, then?”

“She passed the questioning. There’s a few that didn’t answer right; your mother’s among those taking care of them. She’ll be formally released by tonight.”

She let out a breath. “Thank you, Aaron.”

And then she was headed back up the beach. Some of the pelts had been stretched now, after the laborious task of their cutting, and lay staked out in the dunes far past the high tide line. Most of the meat was being packed in salt or hung for smoking, while choice cuts were already being pit-roasted for tonight’s dinner.

* * *

“They were weird,” another man had said, behind his bars. “You know that. But weird. Most of them just set us down and let us be. It was only a few tried scaring us into a change. Do you think they’d doppeled already?”

“Did you see any of them shift?”

The man shook his head. “Not in front of us. But some of them had a look, even with how small they were. Those ones weren’t babes.”

Doppeling didn’t leave a human feeling different. But for the beastie, it was years of memories forced into their mind. Twenty, thirty, forty years of a human’s life.

“Who do they think is killing who?” Clever Hands had asked him once. Vented, more like. “Not that I approve of all that killing-your-other business dragons do, but really. What do humans think is going on in our heads? That we’re the same little bitey critters we used to be?”

“Thought you said it was worth it,” Aaron had said.

Clev tossed a knife. Fumbled the catch, and let it drop rather than skewer himself. He was not a knife thrower, was Clever Hands. Not with those stubby fingers. “I do. Don’t know if that little stoat would have. But I’m not much of him anymore, am I?”

* * *

The dining hall at Salt’s Mane was as large as the room the O’Shea castle used for trials. Communal meals were a thing the salters did. Sometimes just with their own families or neighbors. But in the spring, it was for the whole of the plateau, and the visiting fighters besides. Aaron raced some local noble’s toddler for the last sweet potato and dramatically lost, to the child’s crow of triumph. He could get used to all these plates of food being passed about, for each to take from as they liked. He another of dragon meat go by him, untouched.

Mabel’s mother joined them late and loudly.

“Look at you,” she said, having picked her daughter up in a hug from behind, chair and all. “What have you even been eating? You’re a twig fit for snapping.”

“Put me down, mom,” Mabel said. “Mom. Momma.”

The toddler graciously dropped the potato’s peels on Aaron’s plate. They were crunchy, and went well with cheese.

* * *

Another cell.

“How did they do that?” the woman inside had asked, rather more focused on this worry than on any doppeling that may or may not have occurred. “They didn’t even hurt him, no more than the rest of us. He just… stopped breathing, like his own Death had touched him.”

Aaron had forgotten, for a moment, that Deaths were just a kingdom tale to everyone else.

…There were tales. Which meant that others had been able to see them, once. And lived long enough to speak of it. And hadn’t been killed, in the speaking.

Well. That was a thought.

* * *

Duchess Morgan found him on a balcony as dinner wound down. The sunset was red shading to black, the waves below reflecting the same in glittering shards.

“You’re a bit of a strange one, aren’t you, Lord Sung?” She rested her crutches against the rails, and her crossed arms, too.

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific, Your Grace.” The lighthouse had already been lit; its broad beam moved above them, making the balcony feel darker beneath its sweeps.

“You avoided the head table,” she said.

“Seemed crowded.”

“You’re avoiding your sister, too. Which is interesting, after years of hearing of you. Finally I get to meet you myself, and Adelaide is nowhere with her gushing. I’d expected her to shove you in my face the moment you arrived.”

“Have you a point, Your Grace?”

“And you’re rude,” said the duchess, with equal rudeness. “Wasn’t expecting that. Though they say that of my salters, too. So this is me welcoming you, as one rude forfeit to another.”

“You were a forfeit?”

“Four children ahead of me, one behind,” she said, as the light swept over them. “None, now. And no parents, and no cousins. The pact was broken that first spring I was to stand on the sands. How relieved I was. And how grim my parents, and my cousins, and their responsibles. Where do you stand on the pact, Lord Sung?”

“It’s a broken thing,” he said.

“Broken things can be mended,” she said. “Dead things can’t.”

“I think,” Aaron said, “sometimes things had best to die. Bit hard for anything new to start living, otherwise.”

“A strange one, indeed,” the duchess said.

Below them, the harbor lay calm, its ships quiet in their berths.

“Your lighthouse,” he asked. “Is it just to draw the dragons here? Your boats don’t leave at night.”

“It does that, too. Did you know this was our landing point? Salt’s Mane was the first home our people found here. And one of the first things they did was build that light, to guide the rest in. Tell them we were here. Near eight hundred years, and we’re still here.”

The duchess leaned over the rail. Low tide had come in below. The beach was a pale thing, stained dark where the carcasses had lain. The littler bones were already being tugged out of place, by things that scurried between passes of the light.

“When did the last ship come?” Aaron asked.

“That’s an unlucky thing to say around here, Lord Sung. There’s never a last ship. But the second-to-last,” she said, “made it to us seven-hundred and forty-eight years ago.”

The light slowly swept the sea. Again, and again.

“Safe travels,” she wished him.