Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

It went like this: a mouse born in the fox’s forest was a crafty thing, because the four-tailed fox had been a crafty thing. Where a greater beast dwelt, all things warped to them. Near a kirin’s council, perhaps this hypothetical mouse would be an honest sort, very upright and noble and prone to getting a bit bossy about who was fit to rule. Having grown up under the four tails’ influence, it was more inclined towards figuring its way past a pantry lock.

But a mouse was a mouse, and even the craftiest tended to get eaten before their second year was up. Rabbits and the other small prey, similarly.

Deer could live five years or so. Stoats the same. Owls ten, cougars and wolves and hawks and bats even more. Each year lived was another spent with their bones steeping in the fox’s presence.

Which was to say: there were reasons that poaching from the fox’s forest had been forbidden, and as many had to do with the hunting itself as with being hunted back.

“It fades quickly enough, of course,” the Lady had told Aaron, when she’d given him the same sort of briefing that Captain Liu was now giving for the benefit of Rose. “A granary fills year by year, but a famine clears all. Without the four tails among them, they’re starving in a way they’ve never been before; their minds waste away. We’ve records from the Hunts on the process. It only took a month for those in the unicorns’ forests to return to baseline intellect. Near where the kirins’ council met, it was the better part of a year, though there may have been a mitigating factor there.” She smiled at him, like this was a pleasant sort of thing to hear. “I’d rather hoped the fox’s people would have reverted before planting time was upon us, but it seems the oldest are holding on a bit longer yet, and they’ve grown desperate enough to force a fix to their problem. There’s not much training we can do with you until you learn the trick of dressing yourself—undressing, all right, don’t give me that growl. But you should be able to manage pest control. Go, indulge in a bit of hunting. I always enjoy wearing that cloak.”

“That’s terrible,” Rose said, to a captain that still didn’t seem sure whether the fey-marked girl should be directly spoken to or not. “So they’re out to doppel the people in town?”

The people in town, she said, like the others weren’t people, too. Ones who’d never raised hand—or claw, or tooth—against him, outside that one pesky attack on the castle. Which was a thing he couldn’t say for the good members of the citizen’s militia, who came into Twokins every winter with weapons drawn. Aaron scratched at his ear with a leg, and reflected on how one person’s terrible was another’s turnabout.

“It was my understanding that you’d help patrol outside the walls tonight.”

Both their eyes were on Aaron. Aaron canted his head, getting his claws in deep for that extra-satisfying scratch. It was distinctly easier to ignore people as a wolf.

There was quite a bit in this town to ignore.

Besides: Aaron was already in the Late Wake. It was Rose who needed to make an impression, here. Enough of one that when the palace guard inevitably showed to drag her back, she’d have a case to make before the Lady and the king.

“...What are you already doing? Perhaps we can find a place to help,” asked Rose, turning back to the captain.

The captain very pointedly did not return her gaze. The captain continued to face Aaron, as she had this whole conversation, her body at a right angle to the fey-marked girl next to her. Captain Liu, like the station’s guards, was erring on the side of changeling over child.

“I’m not a…” Rose began. But she apparently couldn’t finish that sentence conclusively, not even to herself. “I’m not going to run off in a huff because someone looksat me, or talks to me, or has expectations of me.”

Not being able to talk at the moment, Aaron absolutely did not point out that running away because someone had expectations for her was, in fact, how they’d met. And what she was doing right now. Granted that the expectations weren’t ones she cared to live by, but he imagined the little fey found just as much offense in those that humanity placed on them.

“Just speak to me like I’m a normal person, please,” the princess said.

With great awkwardness, the captain did.

Their town was the normal sort, as far as he knew of such things. This close to the plateau, it was assumed they’d retreat to the Downs if any serious trouble started. Their walls were high but thin, and wood. Their well was inside the walls, of course, along with their little patch of vegetables and the village hen house. Good to last them a few days while help rallied; not meant for an extended siege. Most families lived in the village’s longhouse, where thin walls and cloth partitions helped a person to hear if their neighbor was being murdered in the night. It wasn’t so different from living in the Downs—same little family rooms, same common hall running through it all—just made all of wood instead of proper stone.

The villagers were, currently, boarding up the building’s arrow slit windows.

“Why are they doing that?” Rose asked.

They were doing that because of the body. Which was the first thing the captain had thought of, when it came to making them useful.

“We weren’t sure if the Late Wake would want her,” the captain said.

The her in question had been laid out on a bed, her arms tucked at her sides in that way that was supposed to look natural, but Aaron had never seen the living sleep all straight-lined like that. They’d bothered to clean the blood off of her, which was nice, given they’d been the ones to spill it.

“What happened?” Rose asked, a hand over her mouth, because she’d never seen the militia kill a person and call it kindness.

“Found her as an owl in the room this morning, beating her wings on the walls. We think the thing came to her window in the night; caught her half-dreaming, doppeled her before she realized it was really there. It was a pretty one, her owl.”

One of those tucked arms was broken and never set. Why had they broken it: because she’d tried to escape them, or because they’d been afraid she might try?

She was maybe five, six years older than Aaron’s seventeen. Under the scent of blood was a trace of dried salt; she’d died with tears on her face.

Captain Liu turned her gaze away from the doppel she’d killed, and towards Aaron. “Did you need her?”

For one of the Late Wake’s cloaks, she was asking.

Aaron didn’t know. Didn’t know if John Baker had been right, telling him that the Late Wake made its cloaks by skinning doppels alive. Didn’t know if the Lady would find an owl cloak—even a particularly pretty one—of any use, even if one could be made. But he met the captain’s gaze and gave a very clear shake of his head. The captain swallowed, and nodded tightly.

“She’ll have a pyre, then.”

Like they still cared what happened to her soul. Nice of them. Still; may she not wander.

“There, you see?” said one of the things Aaron was ignoring. “They’ll give you the proper rites. You can come along, now.”

The body made no reply, but the one asking sighed, rather fondly. “Until the pyre, then.”

“You’re not calling a scribe?” Rose asked, softly.

“We knew her,” the captain said. “We aren’t about to forget her face, even if she would have.”

A little gray tabby stuck its head in the door. The captain’s lips turned down. “Out,” she said, taking a sharp step forward. The cat bolted, out of the doorway and down the wide hall with all the clutter of shared lives and through the open door of the longhouse, back into the sunlight. They left, too; Captain Liu shut the door tight behind them.

“Cats don’t really eat souls,” a voice inside the room soothed, in a conversation he could only half-hear. “Well. Not while there’s one of us to watch.”

Outside, the cat sat down, rather huffily, at the foot of yet another thing he was ignoring, because apparently he couldn’t go five paces in this village without seeing a Death. Aaron sat down somewhere mortality-free, and started worrying some mud out from between his toes. It was an easier feat than to avoid looking at anyof them. There was a mountain lion’s Death, up over the main gates, apparently basking in the sun. A few bats were hanging from the overhang of the longhouse, chatting away. More were the Deaths of animals; he’d only seen two humans, and that was including the girl’s death, still back in the longhouse comforting her charge. The other human-shaped Death was a woman, currently scratching under the gray cat’s chin.

The woman to whom that particular Death belonged was looking towards the captain, a question on her face she seemed reluctant to have answered. “Are we…?”

Captain Liu nodded. “We’ll burn her tonight. See if the fire won’t keep a few of the beasties at bay.”

How practical, to make the girl’s funeral pyre into part of their village’s defense. Their equally practical boarding up of the longhouse’s arrow slits continued, along with their practical butchery of the other animals that had come to call last night—those who’d stayed animal once killed. And, of course, their practical poisoning of the meat. The worst cuts; the good parts were getting tossed in a large stewpot, already simmering over a cook fire.

“I have always disliked that poison,” spoke a hawk’s Death, perched on one of the posts holding the pot in place. “Lingers too long, if you ask me.”

“You can always take yours early,” the Death scratching the cat said.

The hawk foofed its feathers out to decidedly insulted angles. “Your jokes are in poor taste, as always.”

The woman’s Death grinned. The cat flopped onto its back, presenting a temptingly soft target and four feet of claws, all at once.

“Hey,” said a Death behind Aaron, one he decidedly did not turn his head to see. “Is that Markus?”

The hawk turned its head, its golden eyes pinning Aaron this way and that. “Perhaps. I never met him.”

“See, that’s the thing. I’m not to meet him until my next life, either. But that is Markus, isn’t it? Was anyone supposed to meet him here?”

Aaron felt a great many eyes suddenly upon himself. He stood, trotting to catch up with Rose, his gaze on her and nothing else.

A few villagers were outside the walls, patching the places where claws had widened cracks or tried to dig under. “It won’t keep out the fliers,” one man shrugged, not really looking away from his work, “but it might stop the scurriers. Though they’re as like to make new holes by morning.”

Rose had crouched down, and was examining a bit of hole that had been patched with more competence than the job had warranted: boards had been cut with puzzle-piece precision, slotted seamlessly into place, only the newer color giving them away. It wasn’t the sort of hammer-and-done work the villagers before them were doing.

“Will your Good Neighbors help?” the princess asked. “If they can fix holes as they’re made…”

“Might, but you can’t exactly ask them.” He reached for another nail, which led to him turning around, which further led to him realizing exactly to whom—or what—he was speaking. “…Can you?” he asked, his voice somewhat higher.

“I’m not a…” the princess let out a slow, only mildly murderous breath. “And even if I were, I am unaware of the proper etiquette of a direct request.”

“Huh. Raised away from the court?” the man asked.

Rose stared at him rather imperiously until he picked up that nail he’d been reaching for, and shrunk back towards his task.

“If you leave supplies along the wall’s length, and offerings,” Rose addressed the captain, “maybe they’d be willing.”

“That would be a bit… forward,” Captain Liu said.

“They can accept it or leave it,” Rose said. “You shouldn’t take their choice from them. They live here, too.”

The captain shrugged. “I suppose you’d know.”

“No I wouldn’t,” she said.

The villagers took her suggestion. Among the supplies and offerings was an extra cup of milk, set rather near to her.

Judging by the relative lack of little scurrying Deaths, he suspected the Good Neighbors would be accepting those offerings. Much as Rose had accepted hers.

She rather pointedly set the glass back down, glaring at him. “I was thirsty,” she said.

Aaron lolled his tongue, by way of reply. In rebuttal, Rose demanded a hammer, and began eloquently expressing her frustrations to the wall. He lay down out of the range of typical amateur-with-a-hammer mistakes, and enjoyed the sun whilst ignoring the mountain lion’s Death, which had come to peer down at him. At least it wasn’t chatty.

“Well,” the captain said, as the shadows were growing and the work they could do was nearing done. “That’s about all we can do, until they show. The rest is in our hands, after all.”

And so they joined the villagers congregating around the cookfire and its stewpot, which smelled disgustingly good. Meat: this cloak made it appealing. Rose, that most excellent of princesses, secured him a little bread round which fit neatly between his forelegs. He thumped his tail approvingly as his teeth skidded over its thick crust.

“Not exactly a dignified lordling, is he,” Captain Liu asked, rather more comfortable speaking to Rose after watching her practice her limited vocabulary of curse words against her hammer, and the fingers she’d kept nicking with it.

“He’s really not,” said the princess with new dirt stains on her derrière. He was glad he didn’t work for Mrs. Summers anymore. Though if he’d brought the princess home looking like that, the housekeeper would certainly have had him out of his cloak. By virtue of skinning him.

“Why didn’t you just wait things out in Downs?” Rose asked, her eyes on the waiting pyre. The girl’s Death sat perched atop the stacked logs by her ward’s body, face turned towards the first touches of pink in the sky. She was not talking with her fellows.

“We tried. But the fields need planting, and we started to get word of a few beasties creeping around the plateau to bother the farther villages. We put it to a vote; decided not to pass that problem along to our neighbors. With enough of us here as lure, we can get started on the work again, and they’ll stay contained until they dull back out. Besides; they’re only as dangerous to us as the animals they are, so long as we keep each other strict.”

She said it like it was a simple thing. But her eyes were on the pyre with its cloth-wrapped parcel, waiting for its final send off. “Knew we should have left her back watching the children. She was always a dreamer, that one.”

They lit the pyre at sunset, with branches from the cookfire. Practical, again. They spoke their memories of her into the darkening day, like she’d been someone they’d wanted. Her Death sat cross-legged on the burning platform, fingers wrapped around her charge’s hand.

Aaron hoped the owl with her memories was well away from here. That it would live a long, long time, and die at hands that had never called it cousin or sister or friend.

The stories trickled off as the sky bruised to purple-black. The speakers glanced more towards the little bats darting overhead than to the tinder they were eulogizing. The bat Deaths were stretching their wings, as if readying for their own flights.

“They’re still smart,” Rose said softly, looking up at the darting shapes. “Even if only for a little while. Can’t we talk?”

“Can’t talk with a thing that didn’t come to talk,” the captain said. “They’d make doppels of us all, if we let them.”

If we let them. That was the thing about doppeling: if it were a power of animals, there would be mice who could turn into owls and snakes who’d ascended to dragonhood, because doppeling was simply in the wanting.But it was only ever humans that were copied. Which held certain implications about who was doing the copying, to anyone who thought overlong about such things.

But the Letforget was Letforget. And when a human and an animal looked at each other, and each thought I’d like to be that, then the doppeling was done. Simple as that. Final as that. And the animal’s head was stuffed all full of human-memories and human-thoughts, and Aaron had always wondered if that was how it was supposed to be. Or if, like the dragons, humans had once killed their other halves as soon as they were made. The humans gained no animal memories. Only a new body that worked as well for them as their own, until each shift blurred the line between what they’d been and what they’d wished for. He wondered if humanity’d had a way to stop that, when they’d still remembered.

It was why the militia swore in only strictly kepthumans. The ones whose parents pointed out each animal to their toddling babes, and gave them a reason for disdain. Pigs were squealers for the slaughter. Cows were dull walking cuts of beef. Mice were grain devourers, disease carriers, good only for stomping upon to crush their spines. Wolves were thieves of game; dogs servants; rabbits and deer and elk prey.

House cats were safe enough, of course; they already thought themselves perfect.

The little gray cat slunk in front of the fire. It paused a moment, staring up at the Death. The woman nodded down at it. Then someone yelled, and off it leapt to rejoin the darkening shadows.

Most of the villagers were going inside, now. Apparently they didn’t need to sit a doppel’s pyre to the end.

The person who’d yelled at the cat eyed Aaron. “So that one’s not going to help? Thought he was supposed to be out hunting by now.”

“He’ll be with me,” Rose covered for him. But she took him a little aside, and crouched down. “Can you help? …Will you?”

And why should he go out killing the fox’s people, for wanting to do what friends of his had always done? He’d not actively undermine the people here, and all parties present could count that his best effort.

Maybe if all the humans here got themselves doppeled, they’d stop murdering their own.

Might be the bigger sort of maybe. Doppeling, after all, was a choice; so every human who made that choice must deserve what came to them.

“Will you come inside, at least?” Rose asked.

The pyre crackled. A log snapped. The Death stood, reaching down, offering a hand to a girl he couldn’t see except for the burnt outline she’d become. From one flicker of smoke and flame to the next, the figure was gone.

Aaron stood from his vigil, and followed the others inside.