Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone - Chapter 102: Against Orders (2)

Those with misgivings were sent back to their captain to tattle. Those that remained were fewer, but not significantly so. And not so few as Aaron would have guessed. They also understood the need to move now, without waiting for another round of conflicting orders to come down.

And so their group suddenly had enough militia with them to simply walk out the front doors, with full—if confused—permission from those stationed there. The door guards had been sending persistent requests for aid since this had begun.

“The town’s burning,” one of them said, to Lochlann. “The enclavers have broken out of the longhouses; those that could. But they’ve not come to ask the doors opened.”

It was entirely unclear whether the doors would have been opened. Unclear even to those who’d been standing here, watching through arrow slits as the town burned, waiting on the question.

The enclavers hadn’t even bothered.

“Fight with us,” Lochlann said. It wasn’t an order.

“Yes,” the guard said. And took his place with them, as Lochlann arranged his new men: who was to stay on the doors, who was to come out with him. Who was to guard the hall, so that when this was done, there would still be those with the loyalty to let them back in.

The lieutenant didn’t order any enclavers to remain inside. The battlesmith didn’t order her people to give up their crossbows for the militia to use. Leadership in parallel.

Then the doors were open, and there was gravel under their feet and tar-smoke thick as black night in their lungs. There was screeching from above and shouting from ahead and wood snapping and wings beating and the town was, indeed, burning.

Two of the longhouses had been hit with dragonfire. Not stray shots, because they were too far from the main fight here: deliberate destruction, and Aaron didn’t know if it had been meant for distraction or simple cruelty, because he didn’t know if the dragons who’d done it understood what padlocks were.

The enclavers hadn’t much needed his nudging to revolt.

There were at least three dragons on this side of the fort, or three that Aaron could make out through the darkness, whose scales couldn’t keep up with mimicking the smoke around them. The nearest twisted and shrieked, battling to gain height against the griffins that swarmed it like ravens on a hawk. A ballista fired. And then the dragon and a griffin were both screaming, as a bolt impaled the white wings of one to the chest of the other, the both of them crashing to the ground as the rest of the flock scattered from the shot.

Other griffins had already torn their way into the burning longhouses, through roof or wall or door, joining efforts with those who’d been fighting to tear their way out. Those they’d rescued were returning the favor, working to pass tables and shattered doors out of the wreckage, setting up barricades for the griffins to duck behind as the ballistae sighted their next targets. The griffins made for easier shooting than the dragons: they couldn’t retreat. Not without leaving their humans undefended in all this. And if that was a thing they’d been willing to do, they’d have done it decades past when the enclaves were first formed.

A smaller one stared—wings half-spread, chest feathers foofed forward—at a bolt that had gone half-way through a piece of wall and lodged just short of the beastie’s face. It backed away, chirruping high to itself, in the eloquent single-note cursing of any creature who’d had too close a call.

“Wings!” John’s twin shouted, and the little griffin spun towards them. It wasn’t a name; only an endearment, every bit as much as the griffin’s equally enthusiastic, “Heart!”John’s twin hugged his other half around its neck, and was wrapped in turn by sheltering wings.

Lochlann took in a breath. Let it out. Didn’t choke on any smoke, which Aaron found admirable. “Leave the griffins be,” the lieutenant shouted. “They’re not here for the fort, and we’re not here for them.”

And then he got his militia to work, helping finish with the evacuation of the longhouses and the setting up of barriers. Most importantly: he got his militia mixed in with the enclavers. The ballista fire above them came to a halt at their presence, even as several rather flustered griffins puffed out fur and feathers, posturing like cats as Lochlann more or less succeeded in getting his own people to work around them.

The kids who’d come out with them were getting weapons passed out, to mothers and uncles and grandfathers, to all those uninjured enough to wield one. One old woman watched a demonstration on cranking her new crossbow. Then she walked over to the dragon heaving its ragged breaths against the ground, and put her first shot through its head. The bolt shattered its way through scale and skull, and the dragon finally relaxed into stillness. Its Death appeared above it, neck coiled back in what may have been affronted. It wasn’t the same dragon Death that Aaron had seen circling with the rest; too small. This hadn’t been an expected death. This hadn’t been an expected fight, with how few of their kind were about.However the Deaths knew what they knew, it was failing them. Had been failing them since the day Aaron had left Markus behind on an alley floor.

Six, six, the bells around the fort repeated, like someone’s answer to this confusion.

The old woman hmmed over her killand reloaded. The other two dragons circled high; they were joined by a third from the other side of the fight, and the three circled far out of range of ballistae and easy mobbing, their scales flashing through colors Aaron couldn’t begin to decode.

Other griffins and their humans took this opportunity to snap the shaft holding the pinned griffin to the dying dragon, and helped it back behind cover. Aaron watched long enough to make sure no one was fool enough to pull out the remaining wood out in the middle of a fight. When he heard a griffin shrieking for their healer, he turned back to business.

“Right,” he said, from his own safe sort of spot behind a singed table, the battlesmith near him. He turned to her. “So I’m supposed to ask for help. I’ve got the seeds, if you’ve got people who know where to put them. And I would appreciate if that included a few in front of the fort, as well.”

It would be dangerous to plant them on the cliffsides, in this. But it wouldn’t be much help to those inside if this new barrier included everything but the fort.

“Jedineja,” she called, which was apparently her son’s real name, as he was the one that turned to it. And it certainly wasn’t a proper Onekin name. “Help him. And remember that your brother prefers him breathing.”

John’s twin had the nerve to tsk into his other half’s feathery neck. Aaron had the nerve to promptly and irrevocably forget the boy’s name.

In any case, his griffin was pulling away from him already, one gentle nudge of hooked beak against clutching fingers at a time. When that proved ineffective, the griffin simply shifted. And then he was rather too small for where those hands had been aiming, and ducking away before they could find a new grip.

“I’ve got to,” the griffin said, in the voice of John’s twin, which wasn’t quite John’s own voice, now that Aaron listened. These two spoke a bit lower; a bit closer to the edge of manhood, for whatever that was worth. The griffin twin had a large satchel slung over a shoulder. He skirted around one of Lochlann’s men and ducked one of his own people’s wings, settling on the ground at the injured griffin’s side. He didn’t have the heavy muscles of a blacksmith’s apprentice. But he did have an apprentice healer’s deft hands, as he started bandaging the wing to secure in place the shaft that remained. There were downy feathers mixed in with his hair, and his eyes reflected the firelight in a way no human’s could as he worked. They must have doppeled young for the changes to be so apparent. And only one of them had done much shifting since, with how very human John’s twin still appeared.

Another griffin shifted to human, and the woman Aaron had met in the forest stepped over to the battlesmith’s side. Her sister, or her doppel, though one was certainly more likely than the other. She looked at their newly armed people, and quirked a brow with just as much wry amusement as her other half.

“Well. There’s no going back now you’ve brought those out.” She flashed a grin, with particularly sharp teeth. “Good.”

The smith’s answering smile was a thinner, closed-lip thing.

“What’s with the southerners?” the griffin woman asked, her teeth pointed now towards Lochlann.

The lieutenant met her gaze with his very best blank face; then he turned away, all unhurried, and continued keeping his own nervous followers in line. Aaron liked to think he’d prepared the man for ignoring her through long practice.

The battlesmith had little enough time for answer: the dragons above had gone black-scaled again, their conversation at an end. And then the first of the fireballs dropped.

It was almost a beautiful thing, before he’d quite realized what it was: a shooting star, but too near and too fast—

And then it struck the ground. Flaming tar broke and splattered, and neither clothes nor feathers were immune to burns. Dragons had never much valued enclavers for doppeling: they were already griffins in soul, if not body, and no dragon would want that allegiance crammed up into their own memories. The enclaves were a place for hunting, not for seeking doppels in. And so there was no particular need to either spare enclaver lives or minimize casualties as they would in any southern town.

Barricades set up for ballistae were hastily tilted to catch fire. In both meanings of the phrase. But it was a better thing to have the table above lighting up than to have flesh do the same, and Aaron joined the scramble to get under cover. He found himself pressed up against John’s twin and another griffin chick. The one from the forest; the one with lighter feathers and an accent too far off from human for his ears to fully hear. It bobbed its head to him. He nodded back, and tried not to crowd its wings too badly, as around them the tarballs fell.

They struck a few times more among humans and griffins and the barricades under which they huddled. Then the dragons got a sense of their aim, and their tarballs moved. Empty ground caught fire in splotchy craters. Then the fort’s roof, though it was made of stone and rather immune to true damage. One of the enclavers’ little gardens was less so, and saplings burned alongside the hopeful sprouts of herbs. And then the first hit the stables.

The stables, with all the southerners’ horses, which they would need to make it back south without exposing themselves to further attack for those extra days on foot. Some of Lochlann’s militia made an aborted effort to reach the doors, but fireballs were still dropping and the burning tar scattered across the ground could burn straight through the sole of a person’s shoe and up into the flesh. No griffin or enclaver even tried: horses were a thing that brought southerners to their lands faster, not any ally of theirs.

There was squealing from within then barn, then screaming. A horse’s scream was not a human thing, but it was understandable all the same.

“Lochlann,” Aaron called.

The good lieutenant was under his own splintered part of what had once belonged to a roof, not far off. “It’s too exposed,” he called back.

“So you’d let them burn to death?” It wasn’t the fairest thing he’d ever said. Lives weren’t all worth the same. Aaron understood that most horses probably weren’t people, but he also doubted that any member of humanity’s militia had checked.

One of the kelpie-blooded horses tried to call water from within; it rose from a trough outside the locked doors and splashed against the building’s side. Splashed, too, against the spots of tar that had dripped there, which exploded outward into greater flame. There was no saving the place now.

The dragons realized it, too. They shifted their target practice back to the barricades, keeping them all pinned.

“We need to evacuate,” the battlesmith’s twin said, to no one’s disagreement.

The militia had helped to move the injured farther away from the burning longhouses, just in time for them to be fully exposed to this barrage. The fort was the obvious place to shelter. But it was hardly a place for griffins to enter, or for enclavers who’d taken up weapons they’d no intention of setting back down.

Hardly a place for the militia who’d aided them, either.

“Where do you want them?” Lochlann asked, shoulders set.

“Outside the walls,” the battlesmith said, like a test. “We’re leaving.”

And though it was entirely unclear as to whether the formerly strict-kept humans among them were included in that “we”, Lieutenant Lochlann Varghese nodded. And his people listened, when he gave the orders that got them moving.

The griffins were moving, too. They watched for gaps in the fire, golden eyes unblinking as they traced the flight paths of the dragons above; then they leapt into the air, their numbers growing by ones and twos until they’d the mob they needed to raise and take the fight to them. The dragons fought against the first few. But the claws and teeth that a single griffin would have no choice but to dodge were glancing off the wings of the mob. Because griffins were greater beasts, and greater beasts changed the world around them.

It was southerners that had named them mobs. In their own tongue, griffins flying in their numbers formed a protectorate. And that was their power: when they acted together, when they defended those that were theirs to defend, there were few attacks that could reach them.

Starvation couldn’t be defended against. That was why the Executioner had gone for their herds. How insulting it must have been, what an extra little dig, for the Held Lands to have been placed under a Lord Protector.

It was a sight, watching them fight. But not one to watch overlong with the town very much still on fire. As it was the enclavers with the dragon bows, Lochlann’s militia set themselves a different task: carrying the injured. Aaron found a woman light enough to carry, but not so injured she couldn’t half-hold onto his back herself; someone he could run with, if he needed. And if she happened to be another barricade between his own flammable back and the sky, well; good deeds could be their own reward. As the griffins protected against the dragons above, enclavers and militia alike made a break for the closed western gates, towards the fields and—so much farther—the mountains.

Above, one of the griffins gave a warning shriek. Then a wing of them were breaking off from the fight above, diving with wings tucked and talons stretched—

Towards the ground just outside the gates.

Towards where an answering bellow rose up, and then there was a fourth dragon climbing over the wall in front of them, snapping and writhing against the talons scratching at its scales. It wasn’t even bothering with camouflage. Though to be fair, the red and gold of its natural scales were right at home among the fires.

The grandmother who’d put down the last dragon was the first to get off her shot. But the first to hit was the battlesmith’s twin, who’d brought her own crossbow to the fight. It would have taken the dragon through the chest if the thing had the decency to stay still; instead it caught a glancing blow above the shoulder joint and through the wing membrane and straight on through into the night beyond, at which point the battlesmith herself shouted to Hold fire, even as the griffins that had been attacking it scattered.

“To be fair,” the battlesmith’s twin said, “the shot was clear from this side.”

The battlesmith had likely gone many a year without truly speaking to her other half. By the scathing look on her face, she could have done with a few more. Apparently impulsiveness was not a trait doppeled between them.

The red dragon reared above them, its head tilting side to side as its gaze darted amongst those in the lead of their group—which Aaron was not, thank you much—and then it was opening its jaws, and dropping back down, but what it intended to do didn’t much matter given the griffin that barreled into its side and sent it sprawling into the flames of a longhouse. The dragon thrashed and snarled and worked its way free, retreating into clearer ground. The griffins rammed it into the side of the stables, next.

The dragon’s back cracked clear through the burning wall. And then the black hoof of Adelaide’s horse was cloud-stepping straight over its face, her scaled shoulder knocking the hole wider at speed. She really did seem to run on air a moment before touching ground again. And Aaron’s Seventh Down was on her heels, albeit with grace more akin to a goat as she trample-clambered over the draconic obstruction in her path. Other horses were not so nimble. The flea-bitten mare raced around to the stable’s front—the scaled horse was too busy kicking at dragon and griffins alike—and took very little time nudging the latch clear with her nose. And then they were free, all of them that could be, with the Lady’s Shenanigans herding from behind, and Aaron rather sure that the militia didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the general intelligence of their horses.

Lochlann and the battlesmith stepped up to lift their own gate’s crossbar out. And then they were free, too.

Free was never the same as safe. But they were out, which was as good a chance as anyone ever got. Aaron lost track of the fight behind him as they made it out into the fields, the horses not far behind—and soon, much farther ahead. Past the gates was air that didn’t scratch the lungs, and a cold spring night. A world dark with the lack of fire, with the green smell of the enclavers’ just-sprouted crops as they died under the escapees’ feet.

Next to him, an enclaver cupped his hands to mouth, and shrieked the same alarm call the griffins had used earlier to alert for the dragon at the gates. Though the man stumbled at the start of it, and had to try again—louder, clearer—like it was a thing he’d never used before, or had never practiced at volume. Aaron followed the man’s gaze back towards the fight over the town. And beyond it.

Dragons, as it turned out, could receive reinforcements much faster than humans could. The newcomers, like the gate dragon, weren’t even bothering to camouflage themselves. Not that they needed to. They were coming up from the south, another twenty or so to add to those already attacking, and there was nothing either the fort or griffins could do to stop them joining. The fort couldn’t even try: they were coming in too high for the ballistae. The griffins did, but an uncanny ability to shield did not translate to not being shoved from their place in the sky by the force of too many bodies. Which was what they did, as they flew to join with the main flock.

The main flock, which greeted them with claws and teeth, and was returned with the same.

Ah. Those would be the dragon doppels—the human ones—that the north’s nobles had been so eager to kill. Aaron resolved to be smug about it later. For now: he helped the woman he’d been carrying slide to the ground near the other wounded. Then he found John’s twin again, where he stood hovering over his other half like a blacksmith’s apprentice was any help to a healer.

“The battle ends when we get these grown,” Aaron said, tossing a few seeds in his palm, and hoping John’s twin wouldn’t think overmuch on whether he actually needed Aaron’s help for this next part. Or needed to do this tonight, or while those in the fort were still alive.

There was nothing stopping them from taking their own people away. For waiting for the dragons to finish here. They could come back to plant their trees later; could ask the Spring Lord for help all on their own. The overgrown reindeer was really not so unapproachable as they made it seem. They might face some harrying on their way to the mountains, but they’d their griffins to protect them. And the dragons had never been here for them.

The accented chick stood watch nearby. Whether because it was too small to join the main fight, or for some other reason, Aaron couldn’t say. It tilted its head towards them, its gold eyes sharp.

John’s twin took his eyes off his other half long enough to frown at Aaron. “Right,” he said, like a boy who’d not had enough time to think this through. “Okay. We’ll… not plant in the town, obviously. But we can ring the walls, and lay them thick on the road, all the way to the cliff’s edge.”

And they did. The adults had long taken over the crossbows, which left the children free to accept handfuls from Aaron and begin digging under the directions of John’s twin. The boy sounded confident again; bossy, even. But he still hadn’t thought things all the way through, so Aaron kept mum and planted. It wasn’t much hardship, being bossed into doing the things he wanted done. His own planting took him to the edge of the town wall, where he looked out over the cliffside to the battle above.

The griffins had retreated from the fight. Some kept up the occasional mobbing run, but it seemed a thing done mostly on principle; the fight had moved out over the ocean, where the true dragons and those forced to their shape could settle things between themselves without others interfering, and where they’d all the room to maneuver that they could wish. Aaron took his eyes off the tangle of colors above. He peered into the darkness far below, where waves crashed regardless of what happened above, and tried to see either seals or the Lady. But the beach was too far, and the night too dark, and his vision ruined by the fires still burning behind the wall beside him. If he were a selkie, he’d have taken himself and his pups to a quieter beach for the night.

A soft breeze blew across his cheek, as the accented chick landed near-silent next to him. Aaron bobbed his head; the chick chuffed back.

Then it enunciated, slow and deliberate and nowhere near the full range of pitches it could make, so Aaron could understand: “What do you need?”

“To not get hit in the head when this is done. Or during, if you please.”

Its laughter was a soft whuff-chirping and a resettling of wings. It leaned in slow—slow enough for him to move if he didn’t like the idea—and headbutted his shoulder with a skull fully the size of a horse’s, and a bit broader.

“My Heart likes you. What do you need?” it repeated.

Aaron opened his palm on the last of the acorns. “I need these on the cliffside. We have to fully ring the fort.”

Without that ring of trees, the fort wouldn’t be inside the forest’s protection. And the fight could just keep going as it was, until the dragons had killed those they’d come for.

“Dangerous,” the chick chirped, clearly picking words it knew he could hear. “Hard.”

“It’s fine,” Aaron said. He could do it himself. He’d just have picked darker clothes, if he’d known at the start of the day that he’d be shimmying over cliffsides in an active battlefield tonight.

“No fingers,” the chick said, holding up a heavy paw by way of clarification. Its forepaws were those of an oversized leopard; it was the hind legs that ended in an owl’s talons. Though what it really said was Nowiggly sticks, which was a joke that meant the same. Because apparently they were joking.

It tilted its head, clearly thinking the problem over. Then it opened its beak, and kept it open until Aaron tentatively placed in an acorn, then a few more. It practiced a moment rolling them around with its tongue, bringing only one forward at a time. Then it nodded the silent nod of a child with its mouth full.

“Good luck,” Aaron whistled. But he really said Don’t hit a tree, because he wasn’t opposed to being on joking terms with what he strongly suspected was John’s other half. Or, perhaps, the griffin who was meant to be. It would have been very dangerous to send an actual griffin doppel into Onekin; a single downy feather growing in his hair would have gotten the Baker’s boy skinned. But Heart and Wings could still belong to each other, even if they couldn’t yet be each other. There was a whole kingdom tale about it.

The griffin chick fluffed up its feathers, gazing up at the fight overhead. Then it tipped forward, and glided soundless over the cliff. Aaron watched as it made its first stop, grasping the cliff face with its rear talons as it kept up flapping its wings for stability, running its beak over the rock in front of it until it seemingly found a crack deep enough to wedge in a seed. Then it kicked off and flew on, past where the curve of the cliff hid it from his view. Hopefully the ballistae operators wouldn’t waste their shots on one chick poking its beak along the walls. Hopefully, it was a strange enough sight that they thought it Late Wake’s tricks to begin with. It wasn’t as if anyone else knew just how many griffin skins the Late Wake was down.

Aaron took himself over to wait by Lochlann. With the rest of the militia, and with everyone else as dark-haired as he was outside the fort’s walls. The militia themselves seemed to be realizing it now: that they weren’t the ones with the best weapons anymore, and this wasn’t a space they could defend. They were drawing together into their own nervous little enclave, as the true enclavers and their griffins largely ignored them. They’d still their injured to tend.

Lochlann was looking towards the fire, and the fort beyond. Its ballistae were silent as the dragons did the job of maiming each other for them.

“Orin will pardon you for this,” Aaron said. “Probably.”

The good lieutenant’s gaze didn’t waver from the flames. “My family’s not one to ask pardons for things that needed doing.”

Aaron thought about asking if the Iron Captain really had killed the Executioner King. But it didn’t seem a thing in need of answer. “Your grandmother would be proud,” Aaron said. “Probably.”

Lochlann laughed. It got him some looks from both sides. but that wasn’t a thing to beg pardon for either.

John’s twin returned with his child posse, their seeds all planted. So did the chick, panting hard but holding its head up proud. And then it was time to do a thing anyone could, but they were all waiting on Aaron for.

He stepped to up the forest, over by the roadside where there wasn’t any fake border between him and its true trees. No need for the militia out here to know about that, no matter what side of this fight they’d chosen. A leshy was already waiting. It stood between the trees, attracted by all this fire so close to its home, or the digging so near its roots, or something else only it could know. Aaron still didn’t know if there was more than the one of them. Or if it mattered, in any functional way.

He raised his hand, and touched wood.

The barred white of birch trees stepped from the darkness, jointed in a way that shouldn’t be natural, ending cloven hooves where there should have been roots and white roots where those hooves should have been rimmed by fur, their tips seeking for soil with each step. The Spring Lord lowered its head to look at him, with one brown eye and one the cavern where glowmoss still grew, fringed by toothwort. He thought of asking for some, but it wasn’t much good on burns.

“Evening,” Aaron said. “The griffins have a gift for you, if you’ll thank them by defending it. They’ll need a bit of help in the growing, too.”

The reindeer raised its head to look, its antlers breaking the canopy above. It sniffed the air, with its smells of wood smoke and ocean salt; lowered its head back down, and pawed at the dirt that marked its forest’s edge. Then it took a step back.

The leshy did not step forward. But there was a rippling in the newly disturbed dirt, starting at scuffs the Spring Lord had made and radiating towards the little pockmarks in the road where the acorns had been buried. The rippling dirt didn’t mark a line between the seeds, but spread out from each, searching. Aaron took a step away. The bottom of his shoes stuck a moment before coming loose, fine white threads clinging to their undersides like the sort from which mushrooms grew. He took a few more steps back, and scraped his shoes for good measure. Thought of shucking them, but he didn’t fancy standing barefoot on something that grew that fast into leather.

For a moment, it seemed like nothing more would happen. The enclavers and griffins—those that had been brave enough to come witness, and Lochlann besides—waited, in their own quiet part of the night, while behind them ballistae thumped and dragons screamed and a fight they were no longer a part of did what fights do, loud enough to almost miss the pops. Such a little noise: the sounds of an acorn forced open from within, here and there and all over the road, and around the fort too. Not that they were close enough to hear those. But it became rather obvious, when the first little leaves began pushing their way through. Things moved rather fast after that, trees and people both. As shoots stretched to saplings, as brown-gray bark grew to cover green stems and branches split again and again and higher and higher, Lochlann shouted at his men. Got them running, right quick, to the empty fields where no trees had been planted, back where the injured were. The enclavers followed, with the griffins bursting into the air ahead of the trunks that surged towards them.

Aaron opted for simpler tactics: he stood still at the forest’s edge—at its former edge—where nothing new was growing quite so fast. And he watched, as spring did as spring does: it grew, and it changed, and the world was a new thing when it was done. Leaves that had never seen sun stretched out white above him, until fort and fight and starlight where just a patchwork behind the forest’s own.

“It matches you,” he said, staring up at the new leaves, and the way the moon shone through like glowmoss where an eye should have been. The Spring Lord snorted, and took a step out to stand beside him.

The night was fairly quiet now, plus or minus a few far-away shouts. The fort should be ringed, now, snuggly locked under the new canopy, everyone inside safe so long as they weren’t stupid enough to poke at things obviously best left alone. The leshy had left their side, presumably to go enforce its new border on any such fools. He sincerely doubted that anyone he cared for would count towards that number.

The reindeer took another step, and still another, as if testing this new ground. And then it was across what had once been the road, and looking out of its trees and over the ocean.

Aaron still couldn’t see either seals or Lady. But not so far off the shore, spouts of water glittered in the moonlight, from dark shapes too big to be anything but trouble.

“Don’t trust those,” he advised.

The reindeer snorted again. And reached down, with a maw bigger than a significant portion of Aaron’s body, to gently nibble a lock of his hair. It had come loose from its tail somewhere between the light treason and the more serious sort, and it was hanging loose in front of his face and—

—and turning white—

Aaron jumped away with a yelp, from a Spring Lord far too interested in matching.

“We do not age our friends,” Aaron scolded, to a creature that would only live this season. “Not even their hair.”

At least it was only the one clump. But it was a rather obvious thing, and not the sort he wanted to flaunt before any militia. Well. Any who hadn’t been here tonight; he had little doubt the ones who’d followed Lochlann were rather beyond questions, at this point.

He took his eyes off the whale spouts long enough to glance towards the town. The new growth was an easier thing to see through than the old forest; the trees more widely spaced, with no brush to speak of. One of the enclave children had planted a seed right at the town gates. They stood ajar, one of them torn off its hinges by the force of the tree’s growth, the other only gently pushed open. Someone else—possibly a winged someone else—had apparently tossed an acorn through one of the fort’s arrow slits. The tree had taken a fair chunk of the southern roof with it as it grew, which was just spiteful. And alarming, since he’d been planning on the fort itself being safe enough from the forest for a time.

“We would appreciate time to evacuate,” Aaron said, one hand still sheltering his hair.

The Spring Lord grew its own patch of grass, which it proceeded to bed down on, its eyes turning back out over the ocean. Answer enough.