Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

It was night now, and Aaron didn’t know how long the Lady had been watching him practice in the courtyard. Maybe she had just arrived; maybe the slight swing in her woolen cape was from having stopped a moment ago, rather than from the wind. Maybe she had been there five minutes, ten, more; maybe that was why she looked cold. Her arms were crossed, her hands running lightly up and down over her coat sleeves for warmth. She did not speak until he noticed her. Even then, it took her a moment. They stared across the courtyard at one another. Gray eyes, watched by blue.

“So this is where you disappear to,” the Lady said.

He straightened himself, letting his knife drop back next to his side. “It’s a poor place for disappearing,” he said, gesturing up at the wall. “Most of the guards know I come here. And a few others.”

“The princess,” she said, and Aaron nodded. Rose, of course. And Connor, and Orin. The elder prince had passed by some time ago, with a preoccupied nod; escaping, however briefly, from the banquet. If any of them had told the king about this spot, then Aaron would have the complete royal set.

The Lady took a step farther into the space. He could see her moving, but he couldn’t hear her; the soft leather of her boots made no sound. It was like watching a deer step into a clearing. Her footfalls light, her head tilted at a graceful angle, strands of her blonde hair caught up in the moonlight. A deer wasn’t quite right for the Lady, though. Perhaps a vixen, or a wolf.

“A decent enough place, to pretend to be alone,” she said.

“And what brings the Lady herself out tonight? Pretending to be alone?”

The curve of her smile matched his own. “Your father requested my presence after the banquet. Happily, I have acquired pressing business outside the castle. I was in such a hurry, my room was left in quite a state of disorder as I departed. I fear his request will go unseen by my eyes until the next time a kirin lies. Or when the archipelago rejoins the continent; I haven’t quite decided which.”

His smile twitched uncertainly. “Your father.” Had she actually just said that? “Your father.” Not Duke Sung, not even simply the duke; “your father.” Outside of her rooms, he was always Aaron. Always the errand boy, the reformed cave rat. Generally, not even someone worth paying attention to. She’d only visited him once while he was recovering, and only briefly—he’d pretended to be asleep. She’d tucked his covers up a little higher, and stood by the window for a few minutes before leaving as quietly as she’d come.

Aaron didn’t have a father; it was Markus who did. It was the first mistake he’d ever heard her make. Her hands were still rubbing at her arms, trying to bring some warmth into them.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Come with me, Aaron,” she said.

“Wouldn’t that be odd? The Lady and the housekeeper’s errand boy, leaving together in the middle of the night?”

Something flashed over her face, or he thought he saw something flash over her face. It was gone before he could read it.

“So practical,” she said, her voice even. “Who raised you to be so practical, I wonder? You’re right, of course; it was only a whim. Good night, Aaron.”

“Good night, Lady,” he said, and she did not look back at him as she left. She wore boots, pants, light leather armor, and a cloak of no particular magic so far as he could tell; on her hips, her rapier and dagger. He could not hear her footfalls as she left.

When he went back inside, he was unsurprised to see the guards in the royal wing looking more stirred up than usual, especially not in that very particular way they had when they were trying not to appear stirred up. Nor was he surprised to see the activity centered around Rose’s room, or to find his favorite second lieutenant in attendance, still dressed in his finest. It appeared Lochlann had been called away from the feast.

“Is she with you?” Lochlann asked.

“Doesn’t seem to be,” Aaron replied.

The guardsman spared him exactly the look that deserved. “Aaron.”

“I haven’t seen her since this morning. She was rather miffed over a conversation with her big brother—something about, ‘Stay in your room for once, this is not a game for children.’ ”

That got exactly the look it deserved, too. This time, it wasn’t directed at him. “The prince said that to her. He actually said that to her.”

“I may be paraphrasing. Oh—and ‘I order you as the crown prince and your brother’ went in there, somewhere. I don’t remember where.”

He could actually see the moment the lieutenant gave up hope in finding Rose until the girl herself was ready to be found. It came with a certain slumping of shoulders under his dress uniform.

“You’ve checked my room?” Aaron asked. The man nodded. “Well, I just came from the courtyard. She’s not there, either.”

No, it really didn’t surprise him at all. What surprised him was when he opened the door to his room, and found the princess waiting for him in her usual chair, reading the book of children’s stories she’d left with him. Kingdom Between the Hills and Other True Tales. He’d managed a few sentences earlier, enough to know that the first story was The Fox’s Tongue.

A human child was alone in the woods. A fox found her there. He was hungry, and he had kits to feed back in his den.

Rose looked up as he entered. For his part, he resisted the urge to glance back down the hall towards the distraught lieutenant, and simply pulled the door shut.

“Can I trust you?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said. “Huh.”

Which was, by the furrowing of her eyebrows, not the answer she had been looking for. “What does that mean?”

“Could you be a little more specific?” It was a reasonable enough request, he thought. There were a lot of kinds of trust. Could she trust him not to run and tell Lochlann where she was? Of course. Could she trust him with her virtue? No problem there, either; that wasn’t exactly an interest of his, and she was a kid, besides. Could she trust him to be truthful with her? More or less. Could she trust him to keep her safe? He wasn’t sure he could, but he’d try. Could she trust him not to disappear the moment all this was done? Probably not.

“With a secret,” she said. “Can I trust you with a secret?”

“Oh,” he said. “Well then, yes.”

“Leave your coat on,” she said. She shut the book. He left his coat on. “I wanted you to know that I really can do it. I can protect you. Here, help me move this. It’s a tight fit otherwise.”

“There’s a door to the old ways in my room?” Aaron asked. Which, come to think of it, rather explained how she was in here.

Her only reply was to grab one end of an ornate wooden table. He obligingly grabbed the other, and together they moved it a few feet to the side. She held out her hand, small and determined. He took it. Then she pulled him through the stone.

Inside, he stood facing a wall perhaps four feet away, in a corridor that stretched to the right and left, and quickly fell off into shadow. There was no light inside except that coming from the space they’d just stepped through—dimly, as if through heavy curtains. Most of the stone seemed the same gray as the rest of the castle, except for the blocks directly across from them: those were a patchwork of browns. He took a step closer, and blinked wordlessly.

Handprints. The wall was covered in handprints; man-sized, woman-sized, child-sized, even infant-sized. One was missing the pinkie finger of its right hand, above the first knuckle. They were rust-colored, grouped most tightly in the space directly across from the door. He’d seen their like before, without realizing what it was he looked at; the passageways he’d gone peeking in before the Wake for the Old Year had held the same marks, but too overlapping to distinguish the separate prints. He’d taken the patchy rust spots for some discoloration of the stone. This guest room had seen less traffic through the years, it seemed. Those here stood distinct.

Rose stepped up next to him, and drew her knife.

He did not think Orin had taken her quite seriously when she’d asked for a blade, or perhaps the castle smithy had taken liberties when they’d heard who it was intended for. It was an ornate little thing: golden roses inlaid on its scabbard, a pretty red silk wrapping around the hilt, and some sort of script carved in unnecessarily difficult letters on the blade itself. Still, it was true steel, and the edge was sharp enough. As she demonstrated, before he realized what she was doing.

With no trace of hesitation—though perhaps with the smallest of flinches—she cut a red line down her palm. As the blood welled thick, she pressed it against a blank spot on the wall.

She spoke clearly, and with no small authority: “Blood knows blood.”

A gold-white light traced around her palm, dipping in and out around her fingers, until the whole of her hand was outlined. Letforget script flared around it; then it was gone, and the whole thing faded back to stone. She showed him her hand when it was done: no trace of the cut on her palm remained. No trace of blood, either. The flesh was clean and whole. A new handprint, rather fresher than the others, had joined the wall.

“I have to feed it every time I open a door,” she explained. “I don’t think it used to be that way—there’s not enough handprints for that. But it’s been so long since anyone’s maintained it, I think it’s been starving to death. Sometimes the doors won’t open again unless I give them more.”

Aaron flexed his own fingers uncertainly. “Do I need to…?”

“Oh,” she said, “No. Only those with royal blood pay tribute. It’s how it learns who we are, from generation to generation. There are stories about people who try to trick it. Don’t try. Blood knows blood.”

…Ominous.

Behind them, the light began to dim. Aaron spun to face the way they’d come. He could still see through the wall back into his room, but every moment the stone was growing more opaque, more solid. The princess looked up at him, and held out her healed hand. “Do you trust me?”

It was an easier question to answer than her earlier one. Aaron set his hand in hers as the light disappeared.

Pitch black. Cave black, complete and utter. Well. That was something he’d been hoping never to be caught in again, the rest of his life. She must have felt his pulse racing; she gave a small squeeze to his hand.

“Do you want a light? We can get a lamp from the room.”

“I don’t need a light,” he said reflexively. And for a moment they just stood there, her fingers wrapped around his. Then she pulled her hand free, reopened the door, and got the little lamp that sat on his bedside table before rejoining him. He watched with wordless guilt as she slit her palm, and fed the wall again to pay the price for his light.

With the lamp, he could see that there really was a door on this side. Around its edges, carved into the stone itself, was the same sort of script that had sprung to life around her palm. To the left of them was a dead end; the outer wall of the castle. To the right was a stairwell leading upwards.

“See? The old ways aren’t just for library fey,” Rose said. “If you get in trouble again, I can rescue you. I’ve been feeding the passageways through the dungeons. I can get into almost any cell block now.”

That was… actually quite reassuring. Except for the almost, but he had to give her credit for trying.

“Can I use them on my own?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Only someone with royal blood can open the doors.”

Aaron looked around them in the warm light from their little lamp, and said the first thing that came to mind: “Poor Lochlann. Does he even know about these?”

Her smirk was eloquent. “He has to suspect. There are only so many times I can escape from locked rooms. But he’ll never catch me; father and Orin want this place to die, so they won’t offer up their blood just to search for me.”

“They’d be drained dry in a week, if they tried chasing you.” Aaron commented. He was rewarded by her laugh. Had he heard her laugh since that night in the Downs? Had it been such a bright sound? He was trying to remember when she wrapped her hand around his, and gave a tug.

“Come on,” she said.

They took the stairway up. It was only a half flight: there it joined another corridor, lined with short stairs going down. Connections to the other royal apartments, by their positions. At its ends were two stairwells: one that led down, and another that went up and up, out into the night itself.

It let out on the roof, as any good secret passageway should. Rose left their lamp tucked back inside the old ways, and stepped out. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust.

“Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

The roof was a playground of peaks and gables guarded by stone gargoyles. The wind and the elevation made it far colder than the ground; patches of snow and ice still clung to shaded areas. The city, the whole of the countryside, was spread out below them. To the east, on their plateau’s gentler side, were the rolling hills with their patchwork terraces. To the west, below a sheer cliff, sat the dark blotch of the fox’s forest.

Beyond it, he thought he saw the moon reflected on water. For a moment his heart sped up, until he realized that it had to be a lake. It had to be. They were too far from the seawall here; not even on the clearest of days could a man see the ocean. Not even from this height. More immediately, in the city itself, there were lights: not many, but lights, sitting behind window panes like caged stars.

Rose took his hand, and led him on a winding route between peaks that kept them out of sight of the royal tower above. They found a hidden place on the very edge of the roof. He crossed his legs, his knees poking over the side. She dangled hers over the drop, and wrapped an arm around a gargoyle’s neck with the familiarity of hugging a pet dog.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s okay to be a princess.”

It was his turn to laugh. She was wearing her winter coat, same as him; underneath its long edges, he saw suspicious hints of a nightgown peeking out. Her hood was down. She had her headscarf on, but it had slipped back into her hair; wisps of red curled out above her forehead. Up here, she did not seem to care that her fey mark was showing. A changeling: he could see it.

“Do they believe it?” he asked. “Orin, and Connor, and the king?”

She didn’t need any prompting to know what he was talking about. “Orin and father do. It’s why they always try to keep me shut away when we have important company. So help us if a fairy child should speak with the important company—who knows what sort of words would come out of her mouth.” She tucked a strand of hair back under her scarf. “Connor thinks it would be cool if I were. He loves the stories of the court; trading the memory of a warm summer day for another year of life, and all that. If I were a changeling, then he’d have two sisters, and the both of us could show him around the Fair Fields some day.” Another strand tucked. “Or at least, that’s how he used to talk, when we were kids. He doesn’t joke about it anymore. I think he’s afraid of hurting my feelings.”

From her tone, she’d trade a warm summer day to have that joking back.

“You can open the old ways. Could a changeling do that?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t think it’s ever been tested.” She tucked a knee up under her chin. “Unless I’m testing it now. Changelings base themselves on the original child; maybe they copy enough of the blood to fool the ways. I don’t know how it works. Maybe doppels could use them too, if they copied a princess.”

“Your father asked me if I was training you to fight,” he said.

Her grip tightened around the gargoyle’s neck; just by small degrees, hardly even noticeable. “Did he.”

“He ordered me to keep doing it,” Aaron said. “ ‘This is a direct order from your king,’ he said; ‘Even when I’m dead, keep training her.’ ”

In the silence between them, he was not at all sure she believed him. But her grip on the gargoyle relaxed.

“What about your mother?” he asked, before he could think better of it. “I mean, do you know who she is? It’s no trouble if you don’t. I don’t. It’s pretty common not to—”

“I do,” she said softly. And for the space of a spring breeze against their backs, she left it at that. “At least, I think I do. No one comes out and says it; father never has, and she certainly wouldn’t. But I know. There’s a way she looks at me and Connor sometimes, like she would get closer to us, if she knew how. And a way she looks at father. And father looks at her. Just when they think no one’s watching; but everyone always forgets that I’m there. And I’ve checked; she came just a few weeks after our births were announced. She’d only visited before that, just for a few days at a time, but the staff had been told to have her rooms ready even though no one remembers her sending word. And her husband stopped visiting, even though he used to come all the time. And they spent so much time together during the war, father and she, except at the end, when she dropped out of sight—out of sight for months, you understand. Eleven months, not nine, or six, or however many it takes from when a woman starts showing, but she’s discreet, so of course she wouldn’t just do nine months or everyone would know—”

“She lives in the castle, then?” Aaron interrupted, because it seemed like she needed someone to interrupt. The princess nodded. “Who?”

She didn’t ask again if she could trust him; she didn’t make him promise not to tell. “The Lady,” she said. “It has to be.”

I don’t know who else it could be. That was implied.

“You don’t believe me,” she said, finally.

He leaned back on his palms, and stared at the dark shapes of guards patrolling the castle wall below. “It’s not that,” he said. “I’m just trying to picture it. She’s not very… maternal.”

“No,” Rose agreed, resting her fairy-marked cheek against the gargoyle. “She really isn’t.”

“I saw her tonight,” he said. “She seemed… off. She as good as called me Markus, right out in the open, where anyone could hear.”

The princess nodded knowingly, her scarf rustling over the stone statue. An edge of it caught on one of the gargoyle’s horns, though she didn’t immediately notice. “It makes sense. With the petition, and all the southern lords here. Especially Duke Sung.”

For him, that wasn’t the point. Aaron uncrossed his legs. Right foot, left foot: he peeled off his boots, and set them safely behind his back, farther up on the gentle slope of the roof. He brought his knees up to his chest, his arms draped over their tops, and his sock-covered toes flexed over the roof’s ledge. He still wasn’t used to boots. The cold tiles bit into his feet with an ache he knew.

“She still hasn’t figured it out,” he said. “He’s dead. Markus is dead. She just keeps calling me that, and every time, I feel like his ghost is going to put its hand on my shoulder.”

Rose didn’t say anything. Silence wasn’t what he wanted right now; it rested uneasy in the air around them. If she wouldn’t break it, it left him no choice.

“He’s dead because I’m alive,” he said. “The night I came to the castle. The Rafferty brothers thought he was me; he was walking the way I usually came, and I’d gone a different road. They killed him. I was the one who should have died.”

“You can’t know that,” she said. “Maybe it was just his fate to—”

His laugh was brief, but heartfelt. “Oh yes,” he said. “I do know. On this, you can trust me: I was supposed to die.”

She didn’t ask stupid questions. Not How do you know? or Who are the Rafferty brothers? or even Why did they want you dead? No. She asked something he hadn’t already asked himself.

“Why did you go a different way?”

He was quiet for a moment, trying to remember. Before he’d stepped onto King’s Street; before he’d seen his own Death. Why hadn’t he gone his usual way?

“Someone was singing,” he said at length. “Just an old nursery rhyme. Something was familiar about it; I don’t know. I tried to follow.”

“Did you find whoever it was?” she asked.

He shook his head. No; the singer had stayed a turn ahead of him twice in a row, which was enough to make anyone from Twokins suspect a trap. He’d been afraid the singer was luring him on so they could kill him. So she could kill him; it had been a woman’s voice, low and sweet, like something from the memory of a dream.

“You can’t bring him back,” Rose said.

“I know. But still. I wish she wouldn’t call me that. I wish I could just be Aaron again, to everyone.”

Rose worked her scarf’s edge free from where the wind had caught it up on the gargoyle’s horn. It was in utter disarray by the time she was done; she had to take it off completely. She tried finger combing her hair under control in preparation of putting it back on, but between the tangled scarf and the wind, it was a mess.

“Here,” he said, moving over behind her. “Let me.”

He worked her snarled braid loose, and set about redoing it. She sat patiently, her hands in her lap. The wind tugged at the scarf under her fingertips as she looked out on the city.

“I’m glad you’re the one who’s alive,” she said.

Later that night, back in his room, she helped him finish reading The Fox’s Tongue. It gave his nightmares new ideas.