Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone
Chapter 73: Safe Travels (3)

Jessica—Jeshinkra—had received a letter. That was how it started. She’d been expecting friends of hers for a visit. Three from her unit, traveling a bit on their way home, leaving the safety of their caravan for a detour to this little town. This was not spring with its dragons, or winter with its lean hungry things. It was summer, the weather mild, and her village only a few days from where the caravan had parted ways with them. Still a risk, but. They were veterans, they were together, and there were towns they could shelter at along the way if they kept a good pace.

They were coming from the west. The letter came from the east. It arrived; they did not. She sat, and she read, and then she told her husband in no uncertain terms that he was to pack his things and leave their house and not return.

Her husband’s hands twisted grass into rope as he told them this, methodical and mindless, a counter-twist that went first one way and then the other, the rope held together in the tension.

“I was so angry with her, I didn’t even argue. Intelligently. I argued, just not…” He let out a breath. “I left.”

“Why did you think she sent you away?” Adelaide asked.

The man laughed, once. A breath too painful to keep in. “She’d been fighting on the border since she was of age. In the same unit, too. With the prince.” Neither of them corrected him to king. “They saved each other’s lives a few times. I never heard the end of it. I wasn’t her first choice; I know that. But there was nothing in it for him. No grand dowry exchange with another blood noble house, no solidifying of allegiances. Nothing except her. And I told her, if that wasn’t enough for a person, then they didn’t deserve her. And she chose me. But then she gets a letter coming from the direction of the capital, and she sent me away. One letter, and I’m gone. What was I supposed to think?”

Well. He could have trusted that his wife really had chosen him, for one. But Aaron wasn’t much a judge of that kind of thing, and the people that were seemed to put a lot of their mind towards imagining the worst, and getting angry over their imaginings. Love was an even more fickle thing than family, so far as he could tell.

Jessica turned away their friends, too. Her sister. Her mother. Her husband, again and again, when he’d cooled down enough to think maybe there was more to this than the things his own mind had made.

“She wedged shut the door of her goahti. Said we couldn’t talk to her, or we’d catch her plague.”

Do not come near me, for the plague I have can spread through hearing. Her words, as relayed by Duke Sung.

That didn’t sound like a cheating thing. That sounded like a hiding thing, like trying to protect people from a truth too dangerous to spread.

“But she wasn’t sick,” said her husband, who didn’t get it. Or didn’t want to.

“What happened next?” Adelaide prompted.

Next was the fire.

It had been noticed almost immediately, middle of the night though it had been. These forester villages lacked most recognizable defenses, but a night watch wasn’t one.

Most of the villagers had tried for her door. Still wedged shut.

“But she liked to prop the window, in the summers, even at night,” her husband said. “She hadn’t been during the day, not with all us bothering her, but I thought— I tried. It had fallen shut, but it opened.”

So he’d tumbled into a bedroom too full of smoke to see, down next to her funeral pyre. Her straw mattress had been lit aflame. She’d been on it, at the time. She hadn’t been alive.

“Her—” he swallowed. Took a breath. His hands had worked new fibers onto the rope, extending it while his mind was elsewhere. There were scars on his hands, flecking up under his sleeves like embers, emerging again above his collar bone. Little pink things, healed and fading. “Someone had done her like they do doppels, in the capital. Her throat.”

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They found her dead inside with her sword laid out in front of her, the Duke had said. Which was certainly one way to summarize things.

“The prince was sent a sword,” Adelaide said. “He was told it was from her.”

“That stupid sword,” the man said, and unkinder things besides. “She never left it behind.”

It had been next to her. He didn’t much remember the next few minutes. Just a door broken open behind him, the heat at his back and all around him, enough to make the woman in his arms feel feverish instead of cold. Their neighbors had taken her from his arms and laid her on the ground. Nightblind from the fire, her sister shaking her, not seeing her throat past the burns.

He’d been left holding her sword. Her stupid, awful sword. He hadn’t remembered picking it up, and still didn’t.

“She would never have left it,” he said. “If she’d been— She would never have left it.”

So he’d carried it out for her, as if she’d still want it back.

He found the note later, wrapped around the polished blade inside. It was to be sent to Orin.

Everything else had burned with their house. That last piece of her was not for him.

“Was there anything else on the note?” Adelaide asked.

“Just to send it on to him,” the man said, his voice hoarse but his fingers steady. “With haste.”

“Did you read that letter of hers?” Aaron asked. “The one that started things?”

“She,” he laughed, a little. A hitch of breath. “She burned it. Before…”

Before the rest of the burning, Aaron presumed.

They sat silent a moment, as somewhere behind them children squealed and a teenager yelled, and the steady thwump-thwump-thwump of a rug beater added just a little more dust into the breeze.

There was an obvious question, here. But also a grieving man, there. Aaron eyed his sister, who eyed him back, and apparently that meant he’d lost the contest of who was going to ask it.

“Could you recognize her? Really recognize her. With the burns.” Well. That was as painfully direct as he was likely to get.

And there came another silence, much less natural.

“I thought I could,” the man answered finally, his eyes on the rope between his hands. “But I was mistaken.”

“You were sure enough of it to tell the others who asked,” Adelaide said.

“That was before I knew she lived, wasn’t it?” he snapped. “Who else could she be?”

A doppel, or any of the other things that had no doubt flashed through his own sister’s mind when she’d hugged a Markus who wasn’t Markus.

Being any of those could be a death sentence in Lastrign at large. Yet this was a village—an entire duchy—in which the Lady had them pack away their cloaks. As if wearing the stolen skin of a doppel would be an insult, here.

That first forester village had given just as much weight to Rose’s blessing on those babes as the king’s. Rose, who was a twin, asked to bless twins.

“She would have had to burn the body to hide that she’d gotten away, if they didn’t look alike,” Aaron said, casual as a fellow could. The chain of his necklace itched against his neck. He scratched it, equally casual. “It would have been good thinking. And better luck, if the one who came to kill her was of the right height to make the switch. I hear height can be quite the give away.”

His sister glared at him, which gave Jessica’s husband a moment to wipe the surprise off his face, as his head jerked up. He stared at Aaron, and the pendant peeking from his shirt collar. And furrowed his brow, like he almost understood.

Maybe they used different symbols, outside Twokins. Aaron would have to figure out what those were. Easier said than trusted when it came to that sort of information, though.

Still. The husband was quick to agree; quick as a man who didn’t want to get his wife killed. Maybe for a second time, maybe not. Stranger things had happened than a single faked death.

“It’s more likely she’s a doppel,” Adelaide said, as they left the village behind him. Apparently this wasn’t a conversation to have in front of the people who’d loved the girl. His sister was walking, leading her horse behind her, in some sort of strange solidarity with his own feet.

“Is it?” Aaron asked. “It would have been easier to hide the body entirely than to burn it in a place a fire might be noticed too soon. Just drag her off into the forest a ways, let some beastie deal with her. Maybe cut her up a little first, if there’s nothing big enough around here to eat a person whole.”

“Have experience with that, do you,” said his sister, unimpressed.

“We let the little fish deal with it, where I grew up.” Aaron shrugged. “Burning the body meant she wanted the body found, and thought hers, even though it might not have looked it. The finding was important. People thinking her dead was important. A doppel interested in continuing on with their life would have been better off making that body disappear, not using it to play dead. Besides, it’s only dragons that kill their doppels, and it was the wrong season for that.”

“Unless it was part of the plan we’ve been seeing them enact. It’s obvious it started last year, somehow. I know this is your first year at the border, Aaron, but… It is your first year, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he said, a little amused.

“Right. Then I know you haven’t seen what’s normal, but this isn’t. Dragon hatchlings don’t plan. They don’t work together. They don’t follow people inland like they did with us.”

“Why not?” he asked. “People seem softer targets, here.”

She gave him a look, like maybe “soft targets” wasn’t a way he should be describing his fellow humans, any more than he should be suggesting ways to divvy up dead bodies for the local fauna. She let out a slow breath, and kept talking to him, even though.

“That’s my point,” she said. “Dragons aren’t strategic. Not like this.”

“Not since Michael,” Aaron said, and she stiffened. “Are you the one who killed him?”

“A dragon killed him,” she said.

“Are you the one who killed that dragon?”

“Yes.”

He’d thought so. Seemed a responsible thing to do. “And that’s a known thing, right? People who pay attention to that sort of thing, people who fight dragons every year, they’d have heard?”

“Yes, Aaron. It is quite well known.”

“Right, then,” he said. “So why would any doppel of Jessica come to you?”

It was a doubt, which was all he’d needed to give her. The least he could arrange, for a husband that wanted his wife to live, even if she wasn’t the woman he’d married.

His sister got back on her horse. Apparently they were done with the walking together thing. She dug his wolf cloak from her saddlebags, and tossed it to him. He chose to interpret this as a courtesy rather than a request for his silence, and draped it over his shoulders.

“So,” he said, as her horse started walking again, and so did he, “are you going to tell me why you were glaring so hard at their laundry, when we first got there?”

The change in topic was accepted, even if she kept her eyes on the road ahead, rather than on him. “Those were reindeer pelts, Aaron. They’re illegal.”

“So they poach a bit. Seems like their forest can take care of itself, if it cares to.”

“It’s not about poaching. Reindeer are… they’re a symbol, the further north you go, and on the other side of this forest is as far north as you can get. The Executioner didn’t break the enclaves until he broke their herds; foresters are just enclavers who bent the knee before it was bent for them. White reindeer, in particular, have a weight to them. For the superstitious ones, anyway. Which most of these people are.”

She eyed at the stones bordering the road, with their ropes. A few had little white streamers, but less than at that first village. A difference in tradition, or were they still replacing the ones that had been torn off by winter’s storms? It was ropes for these rocks that Jessica’s husband had been making.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve set these stones well before the actual border,” she said. “They could have a herd a hundred strong between here and the true start of the forest, and no one the wiser.”

He had wondered why the road would run so close to the Lord of Seasons’ domain. But humanity did like poking at borders, so. Maybe she was right, and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Jessica was the same woman who’d married the man they’d met, or maybe she hadn’t. Bit hard to tell either, without stepping on dangerous grounds.

The main road showed through the trees, up ahead.

“Are you putting that back on?” Adelaide asked, eyeing his cloak.

Conversation over then, he supposed. Aaron slipped on his hood, and fell down to four paws. He stretched, from forelegs to tail tip, then trotted into the human side of the forest to stick his nose into things. Mostly the little patches of strawberry plants, to see if any were ripe, and whether wolves had a taste for strawberries to begin with.

The answer was yes, on both counts.

Adelaide had reached the end of the village road. She halted her horse just before the main road, looking up. Aaron tilted his own head back.

Their draconic admirer was back, its wings rippling with whites and blues that didn’t quite keep pace with the pattern of the clouds behind it. Its spirals seemed to be moving slowly westward. So it had suspected they’d slipped away from it, then.

He sat back on his haunches, and unclasped his cloak.

“Wait, fight, or bluff?” he asked, quietly. Ahead, her horse stamped its foot, not sure what they were waiting for, with the road so open before it.

“That village can’t defend against dragons,” Adelaide said. Which Aaron already knew. He hadn’t meant for them to involve the village; the woods were better cover, anyway. They’d just need to…

Wait until it was safe to move on, and invite themselves on to the next undefended village? Backtrack to the last town? That one had ballistae, at least. But they’d be arriving unexpected, and near nightfall by the time the dragon was too far to sight them. The towns that lasted were the ones who left suspicious visitors waiting outside their gates until morning.

“Is it so bad, spending a night out of a town?” Aaron asked. Asked genuinely, even though he knew it for a stupid question. But it wasn’t a thing he’d any real experience with. Only endless tales, cautioning against. The closest he’d come was those nights with the king’s caravan.

“It’s not bad for the ones who survive it,” his sister answered. She’d put up her hood, and checked that her prosthetic was resting in a natural enough position. The hood was a bit more suspicious than it had been this morning, now that the sun was beating down.

“Bluffing, then?” he asked, from under the relative safety of the canopy. They’d left the last town under its nose; they might hope to do the same here, if it was still looking for two riders. But it had to suspect some trick, by now, or it wouldn’t have started searching the road to begin with.

“Maybe,” Adelaide said, still watching the sky. Her horse took a step forward, before she could reign it in.

The dragon’s head jerked towards the motion. They had very good eyesight, had dragons. Like hawks spotting field mice, but on a scale that made horses and people the mice. It was not a comfortable scale to exist on, speaking as the lesser of those parties.

“I don’t think a regular messenger would be trying to trot past under the dragon, either,” Aaron said. “Maybe just stay here, a bit.”

“And what are you planning to do,” she said, as it tightened its circle overhead. “Run off as a wolf? Leave me to deal with it alone?”

Her tone was neutral enough, but he couldn’t help but think she was still a bit bitter over certain balcony fights.

“That really depends on what happens next,” Aaron said, because if she didn’t want the truth, she should stop wearing it at her waist.

What happened next was the dragon peering down at Adelaide. Adelaide, who was unsubtly stopping her hood from falling back as she stared up at it. Adelaide, whose horse was right across from where Aaron still sat under the safety of the forest’s canopy.

The canopy that had just enough breaks for him to see out of.

He’d watched a kitten learning to hunt a string, once. Had found it adorable, how it thought that crouching behind things hid it from view, when the person pulling that string was tall enough to see right over.

Aaron looked up, and the dragon looked down, and he had a great and sudden sympathy for all things too inexperienced to know when they’d already been spotted.

Aaron flipped up his hood. Adelaide kicked her horse’s sides. The dragon dove.

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