Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone - Chapter 85: Lives Included (1)

The calf’s antlers had branched by morning. It had also tucked itself up against Aaron’s other side, somehow squeezing into the last little space under the roots. This made for a warm way of sleeping, if not the most spacious. Aaron had to help it detangle its new adornments from the roots before it could follow them out.

“I hope my kittens do not grow so fast,” the kaibyou commented, with motherly trepidation.

“How long to the forest’s edge?” Aaron asked, remaking the kitten sling. With extra padding for his much needled chest, this time.

“We’ll reach it before noon, even at your pace,” the mountain lion said. “If, of course, nothing impedes us.”

Aaron did not reply to that. But he did pause to give her a look; the look he reserved for people who were rather asking for it. She twitched her whiskers. And then they were walking again. This time, the calf stayed near to Aaron. He didn’t know if that was a good sign.

The smell certainly wasn’t.

It started as a good thing—a shifting breeze, and Aaron caught his first faint trace of ocean salt. It was a relief, until he caught the hint of something sour. The kaibyou paused, nose to the wind, ears slanted back. The white calf likewise sniffed. Then snorted, shaking its head.

Aaron didn’t have a nose to match theirs. But there was something white up amongst the trees in the distance, a thing the kaibyou was staring straight at but wasn’t much reacting to, which gave Aaron a rather bad idea about what it might be.

“I really don’t think,” he said, staring at the place the calf’s Death waited, “that we should go that way.”

“We go by sprints,” the mountain lion said. “It’s not far now.”

“This isn’t a good idea,” Aaron said, a hand on the squirming bundle tied to his chest. One of the kittens had woken up, and taken the liberty of waking its siblings with it.

“Would you have us go around, to take longer in this place? There’s death ahead,” the kaibyou said, unaware of how very correct she was. “Which means the bear’s already done with there. Which means we will be harder for it to smell. And besides, kitten,” she said, with a slash of her split tail, “don’t you know your stories? Death is my domain.”

She meant it as reassurance, he realized.

“Not so much as you’d think,” he said.

A kaibyou could puppet the dead, which made whatever was up ahead—whatever bodies were numerous enough that even his human nose could pick up on them—an asset to her. And to be fair, it wasn’t a mountain lion’s death he was seeing, nor her kittens’.

He eyed the calf. “You can’t follow us out of the forest. There’s no place for you with me, and she’s like to eat you. Now’s as good a time to go your own way as any.”

The calf did not take this advice. When they moved again, it came with them.

Sprinting through a forest untamed by human hands wasn’t pleasant. Rocks and rotten branches hid under leaf litter years thick. The cat snarled whenever he tripped; fussed over her kittens, until they settled again. The smell was there, too, growing steadily, but at least he’d other things to focus on while they ran.

Their breaks were worse. Cutting back to a walk, his pulse pounded against his skull where John’s twin had done his best to crack it open. The lungfuls of air he dragged in grew fetid, then putrid, then rancid, the oily-sour taste of rotting meat thick on his tongue. The kittens mewled and shoved their paws against his chest, but there was no getting away from it. Not even their mother could settle them.

They reached the first corpse soon enough. A reindeer; a calf like their own, though in a more usual color. Its flowers were withered, its blood dried. This wasn’t new death. Scavengers and rot had both found their place. It didn’t even smell that bad, relatively. Far too small a thing on its own.

The rest of the bodies weren’t much farther. Calves, mostly, but some adults too—those who’d been in the Winter Lord’s way. He didn’t know how much loyalty reindeer had to their children. He wasn’t even an expert on humans, when it came to that. Maybe the stags and does that had fallen here had put up a proper fight, one with desperation and true intent. Maybe they’d just been driven by instincts, or not fast enough to get out of the way. It came to the same in the end: a clearing of corpses, death so abundant that the scavengers had their fill before the meat grew too rotten to stomach. Aaron didn’t know if it was the same herd he’d sought shelter with, the first he’d come into this forest. But this was about the right place, and they’d been dead for about the right time. The white calf’s Death stood at the edge of it all, politely waiting for its charge to join the rest.

The kaibyou picked her way to the center of it all, her split tail swaying low behind her. “I don’t understand this place,” she said, like she’d never seen a massacre.

Probably she hadn’t, in the fox’s forest. To be fair, Aaron wasn’t used to seeing this much death in the open, either. Sunlight and open sky and bird song made it a bit too cheerful to feel wholly real; it was an easier thing to believe, down in the caves. An armor’s clatter in place of birdsong; tunnels instead of sky; torchlight instead of sun. He wondered if the Lord of Seasons’ killing fits came as regular as rat hunts. Which was the more dangerous place to live?

The calf was still sticking close to his side. Aaron couldn’t tell which was its mother, if she was here at all. He wasn’t sure it could, either.

“Not as fresh as I’d prefer,” the cat said, “still, they’ve enough meat.”

“I think you’ll find better meals once we’re out of here,” Aaron said.

“Not for eating,” she said. “For dancing.”

That was not a thing that made sense to him. By the twitching of her whiskers, he didn’t think it was meant to be. He could ask, but that would require opening his mouth again, and he’d enough of this stench coating his tongue for a lifetime. A point in favor of the rat catchers, that: they always cleaned their kills before things got to this state.

In their sling, the kittens were crying, loud enough it might prove an issue.

“We’ll break here,” she said. At the look on his face, she at least deigned to move them past the worst of it. To the far side of the clearing and a bit beyond, where trees stood polite as a changing screen and the wind carried only fresh air. She stepped past the calf’s Death on her way, leaving somewhat more than the usual gap the living unconsciously afforded Deaths. Aaron did rather much the same. It turned its head to watch them leave, not moving so much as a hoof.

Its antlers were larger than the calf’s; ten-pointed, where the calf’s held only two. Small consolation with how fast they were growing.

The cat settled in to nurse. Aaron settled in to checking his knives. …Which he didn’t have, because they’d been taken. Right. Settled in to checking his pocket rocks, then.

The calf stretched its neck up, straining to reach the top of a sapling. Two more prongs were just beginning to bud up on its antlers. It grasped the tip between its teeth, and pulled it down to a more comfortable height, destroying all of last year’s growth in a few moments of chewing. The prongs pushed up, lengthening even as Aaron watched.

“Is that one done?” he asked, nodding to a kitten who’d nodded off, still suckling.

The cat glanced back to the clearing, where the white-furred Death stood among the corpses.

“Done enough,” she agreed, and didn’t protest when he bundled it back into the sling. The kitten squirmed in protest, rather less content to sleep without its pacifier.

The calf left its stripped sapling behind for greener victims. On its antlers, another branching had begun.

“Is it just me,” he asked, “or are those growing faster than before?”

“She’s done, too,” the kaibyou said, nudging a second kitten towards him. Said kitten mewled a protest. When he picked her up, there was a leaf stuck to her paw where she’d tried to claw her way back to her mother. As her mother was already evicting the third and final kitten, there would be no sympathy from that quarter. Aaron tucked her in on top of her still squirming sibling, and glanced at the calf’s antlers again. They still had time to—

There was a mistake people made on jobs. It went like this: they agreed on a time. But in one person’s head, it was the time to head out. In the other person’s head, it was the time to be in position.

The antlers weren’t a countdown to the Winter Lord’s arrival. They were a countdown to the calf’s death.

There was, as it turned out, a bit of time between the two. Four prongs’ worth, to be exact.