Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone

On the sixth day, His Majesty did not leave his bed, and no meetings forced him from it. That night, his letter to Connor was dictated through Princess Rose.

* * *

On the seventh day they had to poison the king twice, as he could not keep the first dose down. Similarly, his meals.

Jeshinkra maintained a steady stream of stories from their time as a team. Years of fighting at the dragon border and the waiting between those fights. Their team was fortunate to have only rarely lost members; those that had first started with them had mostly stayed with them, to the end.

Less fortunate, that.

“What of your team?” Orin asked, turning his head towards Rose, and smiling, and it wasn’t clear which of those was the more tiring action. “Have you any stories yet that your commanders shouldn’t know?”

Rose looked at her brother. Then she stood, and left.

Aaron followed her into the hall, past Adelaide’s guards on the door, to an empty little study in which she could properly bottle her screams.

“Why aren’t we helping him?” she demanded.

“He doesn’t want it,” Aaron said.

“We could switch the doses,” she said. “You’re with Adelaide every morning, I know she keeps them on her; you could do it.”

“I could.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

“He wants to know what he is,” Aaron said, with a shrug.

“But he doesn’t need to,” said the fey-marked princess. “It’s not worth his life.”

He shrugged again, because there wasn’t much else to do, and he wasn’t about to pretend he understood. But a thing could be important to someone without him understanding it.

“You’d do it for me,” she said. “You’d change the poison without me even asking.”

“You’d want me to,” Aaron said. “He doesn’t.”

“Don’t you care?”

“I do,” he said. Because the king was a friend, more or less. Someone Aaron would prefer remain alive, certainly; which wasn’t the same thing, but it was at least easier to be sure of.

“What does caring matter if you don’t do something? Are you even trying to save him?” there was an accusing sort of hope in her voice, like she wished he was hiding something from her. Something that would make this all worth it.

“I’m setting things up for if he lives,” Aaron said, gentle as he could. “Dying’s his own choice.”

Princess Rose gave him a look exactly like she’d given her brother. Then she left him, just the same.

The good lieutenant had followed them from Orin’s room, with all due discretion. He was standing outside the door when Aaron finally left. Like a guard, or like he’d been waiting to be noticed.

“You didn’t follow Rose?” Aaron asked.

“She doesn’t actually require my presence at all

Aaron gave a little mock gasp. “He admits it. Are you feeling quite all right, lieutenant?”

Lochlann gave him a little shove back inside the room. The lieutenant himself didn’t follow, not all the way; he stood in the doorway, keeping an eye on the hall, like a man who wanted to make sure no one could come listening at closed doors. Theirs was a quiet hall, a dead end; down at the next junction, servants and militia were passing regularly.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, with whatever games you’ve been playing,” he said. “But if King Orin dies, the court is going to press for her testing next. Have you taken that into account?”

“To be honest, I don’t particularly like Orin’s court,” Aaron said. And smiled.

The lieutenant gave that smile the skepticism it deserved, and asked of it exactly as many questions as he wanted answered.

“If the king dies,” the man continued, “Prince Connor will be a child left sitting a throne. The south will press for your sister as regent, but the north will have its own ideas. Humanity could fracture if his councilors choose differently.”

Aaron cast his own glance down their still-private hall, then looked back to Lochlann. “My dear lieutenant,” he said, smile growing, “have you been plotting?”

“Planning,” Lochlann corrected. “I have been contingency planning, not…”

The lieutenant drew in a breath, and visibly decided not to justify himself to the likes of Aaron. “You’ve been planning for if His Majesty lives. If he dies,” the man continued. “Help me bring them both south. Three Havens would take them in, until Prince Connor reaches his majority.”

And Adelaide could serve as Connor’s regent from the comfort of her own keep, rather far from the ability of anyone in One King to remove her. Not bad, for baby’s first power subversion. But then—and hard as it was to think of the man—this wasn’t Lochlann’s first, was it? Not his first time thinking of such things, at least. He’d grown up in Three Havens. Grown up there, because that was where the Iron Captain had taken him, after that night when the Executioner was killed in his bed and Lochlann’s grandmother had made herself and her little family scarce.

Still. Connor was one matter, but Aaron could think of one rather large difference between bringing baby Lochlann south for safety and bringing Rose.

“You’d trust the south with her?” Aaron asked.

“We know how to live with the Good Neighbors, in the south,” the man answered, rather stiffly. “One of the first rules is to not look too closely at their children.”

“Oh, she would love that,” Aaron said. Much as she’d loved being treated to half-glances and bowls of milk. Salt’s Mane had been good for her: they weren’t so familiar with fey, there. The same couldn’t be said of the south, with the Fair Lands their neighbor.

Better milk than iron, though, if it came to it.

“If he dies,” Aaron agreed.

Lochlann nodded to him once, then left to catch up to his charge.

Aaron took himself out for a walk in the forest. Not the northern one. He cut through the enclaver’s fields, with their new green shoots; made a great show of knocking on a tree at the edge of the fake boundary, before stepping inside. There weren’t any oak trees here, he noticed for the first time; none with more than a few hopeful months of spring growth to their name. That must be how the enclavers kept up their fake border—they killed the Lord of Season’s trees, long before they were old enough to claim a piece of forest for themselves. Aaron walked deeper, keeping a hand on his knife and an eye all about him, until he was close enough to knock again at the real border.

The Spring Lord lowered its head down from the canopy, as if it had always been there. It was taller, again. Black swathes of bark were opening up in the white fur of its legs, like the stripes of a birch tree.

“Afternoon,” Aaron said. “Do you have any acorns I could borrow?”

It lowered its head farther, until its antlers pointed to him. Which was a sight that should be more intimidating than it was, but felt mostly like having a sapling be particularly eager to greet him. The acorns sheltered between lichen-draped vines were as green as their season; when he picked them, they aged to brown in his hands.

* * *

Rose returned to her brother’s quarters long enough to scribe his letter for him. She shoved it into Aaron’s chest, the wax still warm, and did not bid either of them good night.

* * *

On the eighth day, Orin did little enough of anything. Rose was too angry to visit with him. Or with Aaron. So Aaron went to keep His Majesty company, with badly read kingdom tales. He omitted the ones with dragons.

When Orin wrote his eighth letter to Connor, it was through Aaron’s own terribly misspelled hand.

* * *

This was how the last night was to go: Orin would not be alone, at any hour of the day. He hadn’t been before, but now there was no acting otherwise. When the time for the final dose came, Adelaide herself would take over for the guard she always posted on his door. The castle’s doctor was to be on call as well, which was the only remaining pretense to the situation. Orin would live or die, as man or dragon; there was very little the doctor could do. It was not the sort of poison that had a ready antidote.

“We could fake the dose,” Aaron offered, because Rose would want him to.

His Majesty declined.

Aaron’s fingers traced over the bezoar in his pocket. He could shove it down the king’s throat. But it would be wasted on the man, if Orin let it come to that.

“You’re not spending all day waiting for—for that,” Jeshinkra said. “You’re not. Come on.”

“I’ll not have my last act as king be falling off a horse,” His Majesty said. Though he’d little enough strength to counter her efforts, as she tugged him upright and off of his pillows.

“You’ll ride with me,” she said. “We won’t bring anyone else with us, and I’ll swear you rode like a prince. A king.”

She’d known him far longer, as a prince.

“This is humiliating,” he said, as she dressed him in the coat Aaron provided.

“It’s not the circumstances I’d pictured, either. But you’re getting out of here. And we’ll stay out, as long as you like.”

It was a stupid thing, for two people to go off into the woods alone. The kind of thing they might not have returned from.

That was the point, Aaron expected.

Orin didn’t have to return. Didn’t have to take that final dose. He didn’t have to be king, either.

Jeshinkra brought a wrapped package with her, slender and sturdy. When they returned, Orin was holding his head up higher. He stumbled sliding off their horse, but when he walked, it was straighter than he’d done that morning, even if it was still with assistance. He wore the sword she’d commissioned at his hip. She’d been right: this one really did suit a king. Aaron wondered what they’d done with the old one. It wasn’t like humans to abandon a good sword in the woods. It might have been fitting, though, to leave it at the grave of his last chance to walk away.

Night came. So did His Majesty’s witnesses, and his friends. Even Rose came, little as she had to say to her brother.

Orin took the last dose, grimacing at the taste. Then he settled in his bedchamber, which was entirely too small for a dragon to shift in without pinning itself against the walls. Jeshinkra and Adelaide took up the guard outside. Lochlann and Rose took up the watch, rather nearer. And Aaron and the Lady stepped away. He would come back later, of course; he still had tonight’s letter to collect. And tomorrow’s, which he would be sure to remind Orin of, lest he think himself excused. But for the first time since this had started, His Majesty had not immediately sat down to write. Aaron could grant him a bit of space.

Besides, he had questions. The sort he should have thought of nine days ago.

“Was that the right dose?” he asked, when they were alone. Because at the start of this, Adelaide had asked about ingredients, about effects, but never dosage. And the Lady could have just lied then, could lie now, but…

“Are you implying that I would stint on the king’s own poisoning?” the Lady asked. “Or the opposite?”

“It is simply occurring to me,” Aaron said, “that you might have little use for a strict-kept human on the throne.”

Better to be generous in the dosage; better to be sure of forcing a shift, so neither His Majesty nor his subjects could ignore what he was. And if he was merely human, if he had no stronger body to mitigate the poisoning, well. She still had her own heir to the throne, sitting safe with his council in Onekin.

Aaron wondered how she’d react, if he and Lochlann did bundle up the royal twins and run south.

Her lips quirked. Fox’s tongue or no, she wasn’t stupid enough to give voice to a true answer. And whether she had or hadn’t, it didn’t change that Orin had allowed it.

“Did the Late Wake have a hand in his team’s deaths?” Aaron asked. Because it had occurred to him, too, that there would have been no suspicions to raise, no petition for Duke Sung to have brought forth, no investigation or ostracizing by his nobles or preemptive poisoning without that trail of bodies pointing like an arrow back to His Majesty.

“Is it either crime or confession,” the Lady asked, “to be beaten to the chore?”

…Well. That was its own problem, then, wasn’t it?

She smiled at him. It was a disturbingly genuine expression. “I’m glad that you’re willing to be alone in a room with me again. It has been great fun, trusting you. I hope you can play the same game with me.”

“A game,” he repeated, because what else was he to do with that. “Don’t you expect it to be real? Don’t you want it to be?”

“In my experience, things are only real until someone changes their mind. It’s better to be clear on such rules going in, wouldn’t you agree?”

“And what are the rest of your rules?”

“I believe we’ve just gone over the most important.” She gave him another wide smile, with perfectly human teeth, much as he looked for them to be too many or too sharp. “Don’t you trust me?”

“No,” he answered. No kirin’s bone required, for that bit of honesty.

There was many a beautiful thing in this world. Her laughter was the sort he could have done without.