Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

The first matter that needed attending was the duke’s wound. The man’s own shirt did nicely for a quick bandage, and his coat was of fine enough quality to tie it in place, once Rose had cut it into strips. Between the duke’s belt and Aaron’s own, the girl was able to truss the man securely, hand and foot. She seemed to derive grim satisfaction from Aaron’s impromptu lesson on securing prisoners. He certainly didn’t need to coax her into making things tighter.

The next order of business was his own wrist. Probably. It should be, at least. Delaying it did not help matters; he knew that. In fact, it quite made things worse, since a splint would hold the bones in place. But getting it made…

His dagger’s sheath would do well enough as a splint for now. He talked Rose through the process, and corrected her, here and there, through gritted teeth. Further strips of the duke’s proud argent coat secured the sheath in place, and others made for a rough sling. It would do. It need not last long.

“Are you all right to stay here?” he asked her. He didn’t get to his feet yet. He needed… just a little time to breathe.

Her eyes narrowed, and her hand tightened around the silk-wrapped hilt of her knife. “I’m coming with you. I can handle it.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He nodded over towards the prone Duke. “Are you all right to stay here with him? One of us needs to watch him, and one of us needs to go tell your brother what’s happened. The one who goes needs to be fast—there’s probably still fighting out there, and they’ll need to get through it without getting caught up. The one who stays needs to be able to handle themselves in a fight, if the duke wakes up and tries something. Which of us would you have go, and which would you have stay?”

The girl considered this for a moment, seeming to search for any insult in his words. Finding none, she nodded. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

He took a deep breath. Then, tucking the duke’s sheathed sword under his injured arm and gripping his dagger in his good hand, Aaron got back to his feet, and ran. He took the first exit he came across. It led to the grounds, letting out close to the north gardens.

Banshees. The banshees were still keening, in that continuous mournful wail. He’d forgotten them behind the stone of the old ways, but they had not been neglecting their duties out here. Theirs was the first sound that assaulted him. The second was the clash of blades. The place where he’d stepped out was peaceful; the castle itself was anything but. From the main courtyard, he could hear the sounds of battle. How long had he been in the old ways? It was still dark outside—that was all he knew. Someone from the upper town might have been able to look at the stars, or the position of the moon, and rattle off the time. Nonetheless, he could feel it: he hadn’t been gone long. It was the fight at the barracks he was hearing. They were still subduing the duke’s men. They had not yet even begun to work their way up to the guest floor, and the other nobles in the duke’s party.

Where would Orin be?

In the middle of the fighting, of course. Aaron didn’t need to think long on that answer. He checked the strap of his sling, and readjusted the unicorn horn sword where it had slipped. He rolled on his bare feet, from toe to heel and back again. Then he took off running.

Things were a bit of a blur from there. He paid no attention to allegiance: wherever men clashed, he gave as wide a berth as possible. Where Deaths gathered, appearing with rather more alarm on their faces than he found comforting, he skirted their rapid conversations with the nonchalance of a cutpurse past chatting militiamen. Wherever men were casting appraising glances around the torch lit yard, their last opponent at their feet, he redoubled his pace.

It was easier to do on the grounds. Those he flew through, protected by speed and the dark. Inside the castle was trickier. Much. There, he had to start paying attention again: it suddenly mattered very much whether a soldier was supporting the king, and it mattered very much that they knew he did, as well. Especially with all the ducal argent he had wrapped about him.

“The prince,” he gasped, holding up his good hand, stopped short at the point of a sword. It would have been a better gesture with both arms, and without the dagger in his palm. But its sheath was playing doctor, and he had no desire either to lose it or to impale himself by tucking it in his sling. All in all, it was not the completely harmless gesture he was aiming for, but it gave the guard pause long enough for him to be recognized.

“Aaron?” the man asked. He was wearing that obnoxious plate armor—Aaron didn’t know his voice, and couldn’t see his face. It didn’t matter.

“The prince? I have a message,” he panted. “Rather urgent.”

The man raised a gauntlet, and pointed down a long hall. “What happened to you?”

“The duke,” he replied simply, and was off running again.

He found the prince in the main barracks, mopping up the resistance there. He’d lost his helmet somewhere, and was engaged in one-on-one combat with some member of the duke’s party. Someone important, by the looks of him. It seemed the sort of fight that honorable men dreamed of: evenly matched, each taking careful measure of the other, the other men around instinctively giving them space to test each other.

Frankly, Aaron didn’t care. With Rose as his most excellent role model, he did not halt his pace. He simply used it to send his shoulder straight into the lord from behind, knocking him flat.

Orin had his sword tip pressed to the man’s throat within the same heartbeat. It was that utter unflappability that Aaron admired about the prince.

“Stay down,” Orin said to the noble, though his eyes were on Aaron. His gaze swept over such trivial details as the dusty state of his clothing, his gasping breaths, and his broken wrist, and found the only item of import on his person: the duke’s sword.

“Dead?” he asked.

“Alive,” Aaron panted. “Rose is guarding him in the old ways.”

If the crown prince had two swords, one of them might have ended up on Aaron’s neck. That was the sort of look that came into Orin’s eyes. “You left her alone with him?”

Aaron met the young man’s gaze, and did not flinch. “She’ll be fine, Your Highness. Trust her.”

The fight did not end so easily as that. Though the duke was captured, the nobles who had come with him were battle seasoned in their own right. They had not waited on the leader of their party to return, nor had they tried to make their stand at their own rooms as Orin had predicted; instead, when the banshees began their wailing, they had prepared themselves. The prince’s men had come down to subdue the barracks; the southern lords had descended after, catching them in a pincer movement. It was not a bad plan. Not at all. Only their lesser numbers failed them. That, and reports of a monster in the halls, pressing on the blood nobles from above. A black-scaled basilisk had claimed more than her fair share of their party. The doctor had several cases of paralysis to stabilize before he was able to see to Aaron’s wrist.

Aaron was perfectly fine with this reprieve. He spent it, primarily, sleeping in the kitchen. The fight was over; the duke and his people safely tucked away in the dungeons; Rose was being yelled at by her brother for trying to take on an experienced swordsman and, last he’d seen, she’d been yelling back. His part was done. It was nap time.

“You really defeated ‘im?” Mabel asked.

Aaron startled awake, reaching for his blade instinctively. Reaching, of course, with his knife hand. His eyes watered as he cradled the arm, as if babying it would make it forgive him.

“You beat ‘im with that?” the scribe asked. She looked tired, too—her coat unbuttoned, her longbow still strung in her hand, her quiver so full she must have made a point of visiting the armory after the battle just to refill it. “They got you on nightingale herb already? You’re starin’.”

Aaron batted away the hand that the willowy girl was waving in his face. This time, he used his off hand. “I didn’t beat him.”

That seemed to make more sense to the young woman. “Who did?”

“Rose.”

“The princess?”

“Mmhmm.” Aaron laid his head back down on the table. “I just distracted him for her.”

“You awake?” John poked his head around the doorframe. He had the fresh-faced look of someone who’d left the fighting to those who knew what they were fighting about. Aaron couldn’t fault him, though the scribe was making a point to glower. “Are you feeling any better?”

“Ask me again in a few weeks,” he replied. He heard the wood-on-wood clatter of a plate being set down in front of him. That required lifting his head again. For John, Aaron was willing to put in the effort. Fruit and cheese and honey rolls.

Aaron grinned. There was really nothing else he could do.

“Did Rose really beat him?” John asked, sitting cross-legged next to him on the bench. “I overheard her and the prince… discussing matters.”

It would have been rather hard not to, for anyone who had been anywhere near where they’d exited from the old ways. The secrecy of those passages had been rather loudly compromised.

“She did,” Aaron confirmed, and he told the story. Mabel took a seat across from them. Eventually she caved, and grabbed a roll from the tray. She glared at it with each new bite, but went back for an apple all the same. John brought out more snacks: things that settled Aaron’s stomach, and made his head feel a little clearer. When he was done with the telling, John made him start all over again, so the scribe could write it down for his next letter home.

The night wore on. It was hours yet until dawn, and there was still the matter of the king’s vigil.

King Liam was laid in the council chambers. Not in state; that was for tomorrow, when all of One King would be invited to pay their final respects. Tonight was for the family and closest friends. They would keep watch over the body, so that nothing came for the soul. Feill fadalach, the late wake. Their spy corps had only borrowed the name.

His Majesty was one of those corpses that could almost be taken for sleeping. The duke had spared them both the indignity of stabbing a sick man, and gone the route of poison instead. It did not surprise Aaron: His Majesty couldn’t have tasted anything strange mixed with what he’d been drinking.

The banshees continued their wailing. They were like the sound of a waterfall, or a summer storm: once his ears had heard them for long enough, his mind blocked them out of conscious thought. Their voices were beautiful, really. Mournful, but mournful in the way that a death ought to be—the way that showed him where his loss was, and sang into the space left behind, knitting up the torn edges.

Just what had he lost? He didn’t even know how closely the Sungs were related to the O’Shea line. It was something to ask Rose. Later. Not tonight. For tonight, he sat down in the servants’ hall off of where the princess and her family were in mourning, and rested his back against the wall. Mrs. White found him there. She climbed into his lap, curling her tail tip around until it touched her nose. He ran a slow finger through the fur under her cheek. She did not lean into the gesture, but she did not pull away. Cats were not allowed at the vigil; of all creatures, cats were not allowed. It was the cait sidhe who were known to steal men’s souls. Being a puss-in-boots apparently did not clear her name sufficiently. She seemed resolved, as him, to hold the late wake in her own way.

This was what he knew about the man who lay silent in the room behind him, ringed by his small family and his sparse friends: that he had a puss as councilor, one of the last of her kind, even though it was the king’s own grandfather that had ordered the extermination of her kind on their isle.

That he had been king for only sixteen years. Not nearly long enough to bury the crippling mistake of his first year: when he had decreed that the blood nobles would no longer offer up their children as forfeit to the dragons, but that mankind would fight to save those lives. He had broken the pact, and sent humanity to war. It was not a war they had won. Not a war they ever had a chance at winning: that was the entire reason the pact had been established in the first place. The dragons still came every spring. Where once they had plucked from the offered children like gourmets at a feast, now they trampled entire towns searching for suitable doppels.

The common people hated him for it. What use was a blood noble unwilling to shed noble blood? A waste of life, forced on them by the Wasting King.

When the king’s father had died, his body had lain in state for a full day and night and another again as the line of mourners stretched out the castle gates. Even after the funeral pyre, still they came to pay their respects to an urn and a charcoal drawing of the Steadfast King. How many would do the same for his son?

This Aaron knew, too: that a name which had ruled in Last of the Isles in unbroken succession was left now with only three members. Three children. One of them might be a doppel, and his life forfeit. The next would be hard pressed to find a regent who wasn’t trying to kill him. And the last? The last stood with the others in front of her father’s body, and didn’t know whether she was his child at all. Didn’t know, even, if she’d been loved.

The king had been on his deathbed, and he’d still tried to get Aaron drunk off the foulest burning concoction in his cabinet. He’d laughed like a man who still had time. Like a man who should have lived to see the sun rise. Aaron didn’t understand him at all. He only knew this: the king had been wrong. A man who died drinking phoenix ash stayed as dead as any other.

Lochlann found him next. The guard seemed to have escaped the battle unscathed, if weary. He leaned against the wall opposite Aaron and watched him pet a cat who would not purr.

“Adelaide Sung,” he said. Aaron looked up, and met his gaze. “The Lady’s name: Adelaide Sung. Her daughter is named for her. Though you of course would know that, seeing as the Lady is your mother. Or can you even call her that, when you’re the bastard she never wanted? Do you still think you know what you’re doing, Markus?”

The little cat flicked an ear. Aaron resumed petting her. He hadn’t realized that he’d stopped. “I’m his son. The duke’s. I’m not Markus, but I’m his son. He must have had a woman in town.”

Did the duke remember her? Her face, her name? He had a father now. Perhaps it was too greedy to hope for a mother, as well. Not knowing might be better—if he didn’t know, then things couldn’t end as poorly with her as they had with the duke.

“Are you lying to me?” the lieutenant asked. Aaron shook his head. There was nothing more to say. Lochlann ran a hand through his hair. “Of course you’re not. Of course you’re his son; why not.” He shifted, and let a moment pass. “I just thought you should know. Her name, that is. I never got the chance to finish answering you, and it seemed rather important, given who they think you are.”

“Rose knows the truth,” he said, running a finger down the coarse strip of fur over the white cat’s nose. “I can’t just leave her. Not right after this.”

“I won’t be able to protect you if they find out,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to protect myself, if they know I knew.”

“I won’t tell them,” Aaron said. He swallowed. “Thank you. For even thinking about it.”

The man frowned and cast his gaze to the side, though there was nothing there to see. “We’ve been over this, Aaron. If you’re staying, then stay.”

He didn’t know how long the second lieutenant stayed with them in the servants’ hall. Awhile. They didn’t speak further. Eventually, the man pushed off from the wall, and walked away.

Now Aaron knew this, too: that the king was a man who had loved his cousin’s wife. And she had loved him back. Maybe Rose was right, and Adelaide Sung really was her mother. It would make sense: especially as to why His Majesty had tolerated Aaron’s presence in the royal quarters for so long, and why Orin had not taken him to task for growing so close to the girl. Markus was the twins’ cousin. And the Lady had her own pair of bastards, to match her husband’s.

Aaron looked down at the white cat in his lap.

“Are you going to tell on me, Mrs. White?”

The little cat turned her blue eyes upwards, meeting his with the unblinking stare of which all felines are master. She butted her head against his chin. He wrapped his good arm around her, and laid his head down in her fur. The banshees would cease their wailing at dawn: until then, they each had the other for company.

It wasn’t until much later that he realized he’d never seen his own Death. Not during any of this. He didn’t know what that meant: that he hadn’t been in danger of dying, or that his Death wouldn’t always give warning when he was.