Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

Fever dreams.

The Lady. He remembered the Lady kneeling; remembered that she was not wearing her pretty white and blue dress, but dark pants and a dark blouse, her hair drawn back except for loose strands that framed her face. A sword at her side; slim as she was, a rapier. A dagger sheathed opposite. Leather armor on her chest, her arms. A black-scaled cloak draped around her shoulders. A necklace tumbled out of hiding as she leaned over him, and swung from its chain in the air between them: two keys, iron and silver, and a heavy gold ring. The crest of a dragon rampant was pressed into its metal. The Lady was saying something to him, something urgent, but the dragon

was staring down at him.

“Well,” she said, her eyes burning amber, “are you a ghost, then? A brave ghost, to haunt a dragon.”

“I don’t think I’m dead yet,” he said, sitting down on a rock next to her. It seemed the thing to do. The whole of his height did not even set him equal to the height of her paw, but he was not afraid. He’d left that emotion somewhere behind him. It was comfortable here, neither warm nor cold.

She sat with him, and they watched through the night, and looked down on the sun as it rose under their cliff. The mountaintops were islands in a sea of fog, stained gold and red, and it seemed that he could stay there forever. But the sun lifted higher, until it was blinding

and his brow furrowed, and he opened his eyes, though it took so much more effort than when he was with the sunrise dragon. There was a hand atop his own, small fingers light against his skin. There was a white cat curled up on his chest, but he didn’t think that was why it was hard to breathe.

“Rose?” he tried, his voice cracking, and the girl jerked awake.

“Aaron? I’ll get the doctor. Just—just wait here—”

And she was off, running. The cat cracked her blue eyes open and stared down at him. His hand slipped over the side of the bed, and

He sat on a stone wall as waves crashed below him, the sound muted. He looked out over the ocean, towards the mountains on the next island over. The dragon’s nesting isle. Was this the view that Mabel could see from her home town? The sun was setting, and his Death was at his side. Aaron’s feet dangled, bare, over the drop.

“There is no return,” the man said, his eyes on the horizon.

“I’ve already been out there,” Aaron said. “I met a dragon. She wasn’t as scary as they say.”

“Markus,” his Death said, then corrected himself; “Aaron. You must understand: there is no return. Not for either of us.”

And Aaron followed the figure’s gaze, past the mountains, past things that it seemed to him he had seen before, or should know; but they eluded him. And when his eyes refocused, he found himself still sitting on the wall. He got the impression that they had talked. That they had been talking, for a very long time, and they had reached some conclusion.

“What was the other Death’s plan?” he asked.

“To use your life to rekindle Markus’. You would have died, and he would have lived.”

“Would he have done something special?”

“He would have saved the kingdom,” his Death answered, staring out over the water. “Last Reign would have been safe for centuries to come. Men would have rebuilt a shadow of their past. Enough to face what awaits them, when the continent turns its gaze on Last of the Isles.”

“Oh.” Aaron scuffed his heels against the stones. “Will I do that in his place, then? Is that how this works?”

“No,” his Death answered, with a certain finality. “He is dead. That path is closed.”

The sun had nearly fallen below the western edge of the wall. The mountains were gone: in their place only black wedges that blotted out the stars.

“I want to see what’s out there,” Aaron said. “All of it.”

Though it was dark, he thought he saw a smile quirk on his Death’s lips.

“Then you’ll need to wake up, first.”

He hadn’t asked what his own Death’s plan was. Maybe he’d been told, and had already forgotten.

Aaron woke.