Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

“Put it down.” Lochlann’s sword was steady and rather close for comfort. Still, there was room to dodge. Room to run. Run where was the problem.

“Put what down, Lieutenant?” Aaron asked.

“Whatever you’ve got. Just surrender.”

Aaron managed not to laugh at that, but it was a near thing.

The bell kept tolling. Once, twice—

He felt his own shoulders tensing, even as the lieutenant’s eyes flicked towards the wall.

Three times. Four.

It wasn’t their bell tower that was ringing. It was at the outer edge of the city, the sound coming closer as it was taken up by the nearer towers. Four and four again, until the whole city was awake with them. Up in the royal tower, the answering tolls confirmed it. Four. Fox at the door.

Both their eyes had strayed to the sound. Aaron didn’t know which of them looked back first, whether he did and the motion snapped the lieutenant’s gaze back to him, or whether it was the other way around. He met the man’s eyes.

“You don’t have time for me.” Aaron said, shoulders relaxed, grip on the carving knife tense.

“I’ll make time.”

“Lieutenant Varghese, do you really think I’m going to stand here and fight you with—what? Pocket lint? If you attack, I’m running. You don’t have time for me, and you don’t have men to waste in chasing me down.” He could see the man’s expression darkening. Aaron’s foot slid back on reflex, and the redcoat tightened his grip on his sword.

“So I let you go free. In the castle. In the middle of an attack.” None of these were questions. “Some might call that timing suspicious.”

“No.” Aaron took his hands from his pockets and held them up, harmless as can be. The knife he left tucked away. “Let me fight with you.”

“Why?”

“I’m human enough for this. It’s my city, too.”

Once more the bells repeated. The silence they left behind stretched out over the upper town. At the top of the castle wall, a man started shouting orders.

Lochlann’s jaw tightened. “You don’t leave my side.”

Aaron held his hands up just a little higher. “Kirin’s own council.”

The lieutenant swore and rammed his sword home in its sheath. He grabbed Aaron’s arm and dragged him towards the nearest stairwell up.

The ramparts were already growing crowded. The Captain of the Guard was shouting orders and people were getting in position, but the plain truth was that no one knew where to be. Four bells. This wasn’t griffins or dragons, where archers and ballistae would win the day for them. It wasn’t someone breaking a Letforget seal, where the only thing to do was lay lines of salt and iron and wait for the old magic to run its course.

Four bells was the fox, up from his forest.

“It can’t be our fox,” a guard near them said.

“Four bells,” his companion replied. “Same as his tails, ain’t it?”

Aaron lost the rest of their conversation as he was dragged along. The lieutenant was pausing now and again to bark his own orders, to tap shoulders, to gather the men and women he was responsible for. A sword contingent. Aaron looked at their weapons and didn’t feel much safer in their midst. They found a position on the west wall near to the main gate, out of the archers’ way.

“Varghese, how do we fight a fox?” one of his men asked.

“Find the real one,” Lochlann said, eyes on the city.

Aaron could see Queen’s Stair from here. Evacuation to the lower town was going smooth enough. There were twists to the stairs, overlooks, places that made it easy to kill anything coming down. The militia would fight from there.

The castle would defend itself. Blood nobles were fools like that.

“I’m not actually much of a fighter,” Aaron said. “Maybe I should—”

“No.” The lieutenant didn’t even dignify him with a glance. Aaron set his elbows on the stone battlements and returned a smile to any puzzled looks cast his way. For the most part, people were too busy worrying for their own hides to care about him, as long as he stayed tucked in the lieutenant’s shadow and out of the way.

Well. Mostly.

Farther down the wall, a mousy head had paused to stare at him. Mabel looked absolutely ridiculous. Her short hair was sticking out at all angles, and he couldn’t tell if she’d only half-bothered to tuck her nightshirt into her pants, or if the white cloth had already half pulled itself free. She’d paused while stringing her bow, her lanky body half strung up in it herself. Her eyes were wide. Probably wondering how fast she could tattle on him. Aaron gave her a friendly wave.

Did the scribe even remember what four bells meant? It couldn’t be a signal they used on the dragon front. Foxes weren’t so common as that. Not the old ones. Not the ones who’d earned their tails. Foxes grew stronger by killing those that wronged them, and didn’t think much of snapping their teeth through a few other souls on the way. If someone in the city had been fool enough to offend the beast, it could be a long night. Or a short one.

He’d not heard four bells since he was a child and the fox’s forest had just been a forest. Who’s at the door—four used to be the signal for an unknown threat. The fox had come knocking about that vacancy like a vagrant after a room.

“Where did you get that coat?” Lochlann asked, into a lull that had settled around them.

Aaron looked out over the city and shrugged. “It was on the ground.”

The guard’s hand was tense on his sword hilt. Maybe he’d have said more, but at that moment Chereau came up the stairs. Her jaw was already starting to darken. Her pace was rushed and her breathing fast. Also, she looked a bit cold, with only her shirt to guard against the autumn air.

“Reporting, sir.” She was so hurried, she’d even left her sarcasm behind.

The lieutenant took in her disheveled appearance at a glance. His mouth started working, but it was easy to tell the moment when his brain caught up. “Where have—? Ah. Never mind. I can guess.”

It took the disoriented guard a moment longer. “It’s hardly my fault, sir. Some bastard—”

Aaron tried to be small and still and silent and very much stay behind the lieutenant. Probably he’d moved a hair too fast getting there. She looked at him. A moment later, she really saw him. Her eyes narrowed and her grin was anything but pleasant.

“Oh. Oh, you’re dead, boy.”

Lochlann held an arm between them, interposing against her advance. Aaron gladly sheltered behind him. “We’ll settle this later, Officer. There are more pressing concerns, as you may have noticed.”

Chereau’s gaze flashed between them. “Yes, sir.”

“Aaron. Give the officer back her coat, please.”

He shrugged out of the thing and held it out. Like a dog snapping at a piece of meat, she just about took his arm off jerking it away. The lieutenant made sure to stand between them at the parapet, for which Aaron was grateful. He barely noticed John Baker bounding up the steps until the boy was running behind them, still covered in flour, a militia-standard crossbow in his arms. He joined the other archers without so much as a glance towards Aaron. Aaron returned the favor.

They waited.

He saw it first from the corner of his eyes. A flicker of something off, something wrong. Even after he’d turned to look, it took him a moment to put a name to it.

The lanterns above the main gates were burning blue.

“A fox only has its lies,” Lochlann’s voice carried in the sudden stillness. “Everything you see is illusion. Find the real one and kill it.”

“Simple enough,” Chereau muttered.

They shouldn’t have been able to see the city gates from here, much less the forest down below. The moon was only a sliver in the sky. All of that should have been shadow.

Nonetheless.

Pale blue fire wreathed the trees, until the fox’s forest cast a glow up into the sky. One by one, the lights from the watchtowers wavered, their color seeping out. Some of the flames were more green than blue, but none of them were the familiar reds and yellows. None of them were the color of warmth, or safety.

Aaron let out a slow breath. Now might be a good time to—

Lochlann’s gaze flicked to him.

…He’d have to wait for a bigger distraction, then.

The fox obliged.

At the gates to the city, twenty feet or more above the ground, great claws reached above and over. Dark little shapes dove out of the monstrosity’s way—the redcoats on the outer wall. It might have been a paw, once, or a hand. Each digit was thin, long, twisted. Each had more joints than any living thing needed. They were black as the night behind it, and wreathed in blue flame. The hand lifted high into the air, the bony wrist giving way to a knotty elbow. All of it was disproportionate as a fever dream. All of it was wrong.

The claws bent over and down. It ignored the men on the wall, with their little weapons furiously hacking. It curved inside the gate and scratched against the thick timber until its claws hooked on the heavy bar that kept them closed. It lifted. And, in one casual flick, it dropped.

Aaron rubbed his arms, cold now that he was missing his second coat. “Illusion, is it?”

The lieutenant didn’t answer, but Chereau did. “Some lies are true enough.”

The arm retracted, snapping and bending, joints appearing where they hadn’t been before.

The gates swung open.

The fox strode in, nightmares dripping from its fur.