Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone - Chapter 86: Lives Included (2)

The Winter Lord came at them. Not as a subtle stalking thing, but with the crashing of something large that didn’t care over much for the little things crushed in its wake.

The kaibyou scruffed her final kitten and shoved it into Aaron’s hands.

“The clearing,” she ordered, now that her mouth was clear. And swiped her claws at him, as if he needed further incentive to start running.

Aaron would have rather made a break towards the coast than the clearing. But he didn’t know how far they’d left to go, and there was a rather large obstacle between him and there. The bear heaved in lungfuls that strained its sides, squinting at them through eyes pollen-rimmed and reddened. Squinted at him, because the calf had bolted already, and Aaron was the one shoving a spring kitten down his shirt. It charged.

The kaibyou leapt on its face, four paws full of claws and yowling fit to rend the air. She was furious, and coiled with muscles, and entirely too small against the backdrop that was the Winter Lord’s face. Aaron was already running. He didn’t see what happened behind him. Just heard a bear’s deep whuff, and a crack that might have been tree or bone. And its heavy tread, which hardly paused in coming for him.

Aaron stumbled into the clearing. Over a femur, he thought. His hands hit bones and the tacky jerky between as he pushed himself up, kept running, veering now towards another edge of the clearing he’d just entered because if there wasn’t a monster cat on his side anymore—she’d better be alive, but mothers were hardly the most reliable—then he’d have to try for the coast after all. Which would require circling around the thing behind him, which was the sound of a giant bear crushing bones. Aaron reached the trees again. Aimed for the densest thickets. The bear snapped branches and trunks just as easily. No kaibyou appeared to save him, and no leshy either; apparently they didn’t interfere when it was the forest’s own spirit wrecking things.

The bear was getting closer. It had never been far, but now there was dark fur and icemelt in the corners of his eyes and a cold wind against his back that he really, really didn’t want to be its breath, but nature rarely cared what people wanted. Startled kitten claws jolted against his chest as he grabbed the branch of a tree, swung to a new direction, kept running.

The bear was after the kittens, not him. The reindeer’s parents had proven how stupid it was to die for children that were dead anyway. But.

The point was moot. The Winter Lord would be on him before he could get the first knot of the sling untied. He’d barely left the clearing; he’d never stood a chance of making the coast.

The bear did something; shouldered into a tree, or felled it with one of those boulder-sized paws, or just failed to notice it in its path. The trunk fell into his path. Aaron threw himself to the side, rolled with his arms over his chest and kittens mewling, and…

Well. He didn’t know what had happened to the tree. But that was a paw coming for him, right enough. He saw it with a final sort of clarity: the thick black pads on its bottom, their crags splintered through with shattered ice; the antlers, piercing from the side, white as bone and red as blood and shoving the paw off course.

There was a dead reindeer between himself and the Winter Lord. He could see through the tatters of its ribcage to the bear beyond, who was wearing the first emotion Aaron had seen on it besides rage: befuddlement.

Another reindeer charged, driving deep into its flank. The bear bellowed. Aaron scrabbled to his feet and got himself out of there.

Back to the clearing, where the kaibyou danced.

In the Downs, the dances they did were focused on the feet; jigs and sean nós and the other step dances.

The monster cat had four feet, a lithe spine, and a tail split to two. She twisted, she sprang, she spun; on one paw or four, she moved. She danced in the clearing’s center. Around her, the dead dragged themselves upwards to join her. She was their caller, and they her round, lurching to join the growing circle around her in parody of the way they’d circled to defend their calves while alive. They let Aaron pass; or rather, Aaron felt where to step, how to duck between figures like he’d do at a proper party when the shenanigans had gotten started. He made it to the center, as the bear reached the edge.

The Winter Lord was not invited to this céilí.

The cat jumped; a twisting leap, and the dead reindeer spun with her. Where there’d been a gap for the bear to cross through, now there were antlers at all angles. It raised a paw and swatted clear a corpse. Roared, as three more impaled it. What gushed from its wounds was pink: blood and spring melt, spilling from the dam of its fur.

It crushed a skull between its jaws, a ribcage under its paw; pulverized an entire skeleton when it rammed its shoulder into ground and body both. Stumbled as it stood.

The cat rose on two legs, briefly, as if she’d another dance partner supporting her. Yet more corpses stood. The bear crushed them, again and again, lumbering closer against the tide of bones and scavenger-stripped flesh that moved with fey grace to intercept. Hooves against earth and antlers against flesh and the cat’s own feet over the leaves formed a stomping beat even the dead must answer to. Aaron felt it; the need to move, the place he’d step next, where he’d stab if he’d his knives or his deer cloak and could join this dance too.

Antlers found their mark, again and again.

Again and again, the Winter Lord shattered its dance partners, until there was not enough holding them together for the cat’s puppeteering to raise them again.

The bear pushed forward.

Aaron had the time to untie the cat sling, now; just enough. But he was also standing right next to their mother. So. He threw one of his rocks, instead. It bounced off the beast’s fur, and was precisely as pathetic as it sounded.

“How far to the forest’s end?” he asked. “Can we make it?”

“Too far,” she panted. And, “If you dare leave them, you’ll die before they do.”

Which narrowed his options rather considerably, while she still stood. The kittens squirmed against his chest, warm and alive and aware that not all was well, in the way squalling babes were. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to care for them; even if they’d not been overgrown with signs of their forest birth, even if their mother hadn’t been a monster cat, they were still mountain lion kittens. Fit for a mercy kill, and little else. Perhaps they’d make someone a nice pair of gloves down in Salt’s Mane. Were their pelts even useful, or would they just be left somewhere to rot like the rest of the spring children?

Not all of the reindeer corpses had antlers; it had been mostly calves that had died here. The kaibyou had raised the antlered first, the larger skeletons next; she’d left the children’s graves undisturbed until the end. Likely because they were useless. Their charges did about as much damage as Aaron’s rock had, and induced about the same reaction as they bounced off the bear’s thick hide. It just waded through them, nearer and nearer its goal, with not a hint of victory in its gait. It would kill the kittens. Find the white calf next, probably. Then move on to its next target, and the next. Its trailing parade of Deaths had caught up to it again; he could see them just off in the trees, still treating this like a social call.

He didn’t see anything particularly human among them. But then, he wasn’t sure his own Deaths were the sort to give him warning.

Aaron edged to put the kaibyou between himself and the bear.

He didn’t see anything cat-shaped among the Deaths, either. Neither split-tailed nor kitten-sized. The white calf’s Death was not chatting with the others; it stood at the clearing’s edge, exactly where it had always been, and waited.

The bear broke through the final line of their defenders. The kaibyou still danced, and the corpses still moved, but there were no longer enough to force it back. It lumbered forward, its breathing not much improved for its new holes.

How did this end? It couldn’t just kill every newborn thing in the forest. There wouldn’t be animals in the forest, if the Winter Lord’s rampage went unchecked each year. Winter had to give way to spring; a new lord had to take its place. And the bear’s own Death was waiting, sitting back on its haunches, towering behind all the rest.

The Death’s head turned. So did the white calf’s Death. And the kaibyou’s, through some sound or smell.

The white calf had came back.

It charged into the clearing like it thought it could help. Which was heartwarming, but made Aaron want to scream, just a bit. Was this what Adelaide had felt when he’d come back during that fight against the dragon, by the forester’s village? The calf lowered its proud new antlers and gored into the bear’s hind leg, like a smaller, fleshier version of all the others the bear had already broken. It shook itself free and dashed away again, back into the ranks of the dead calves still dancing, just barely clearing the bear’s claws as the it spun to slash. The cuts on the calf’s flanks, the ones Aaron had treated the other day, were a match for the Winter Lord’s claws. And suddenly the bear wasn’t focused on the kittens anymore. The calf wasn’t another corpse, prancing in its path: it was one of the things it wanted dead.

The kaibyou dropped her dance. “Run,” she spat, as bones clattered to the forest floor, free of her magic.

Aaron had the sudden, stupid urge to shove the kittens at her, to tell her to run. But handing them over sling and all would have lost them what little lead the calf was buying. Aaron wasn’t the one with hooves and antlers to fight with. And Rose would be incredibly upset if she had to attend another funeral for him. To sit there while they told her he was dead—again—then to wait and wait for him to prove them wrong, again. How long would it take her to believe it, this time?

He’d obligations, and they weren’t to an acquaintance most would consider stew. He’d run, because it was the only sane thing to do; he’d run, because if the calf wanted to risk itself for people it had only just met, then Aaron wasn’t one to waste such naivete.

But even as he turned, there was something changing in their fight. The calf struck again, pulled its antlers out again, and red lines drew back with it. Blood, Aaron thought, for a moment. But blood didn’t stretch and string, like spit from a particularly noxious kiss. Then the first leaf grew, and his eyes could focus properly. Not blood, but vines; vines rupturing from the bear’s side where the calf’s antlers had pierced it, growing between them, with new leaves unfurling spring-shiny as they flicked away the bear’s blood.

The Winter Lord bellowed. Pulled back. The calf was jerked forward with it, as tethered to the bear as the bear was to it until it braced its legs and shook. The vines snapped, but didn’t leave either of them. They dangled from the bear’s side, like lampreys. They coiled around the calf’s antlers, like a crown.

There was a pause in their fight, the same as happens when some weak scrapper lands a hit in a brawl, and believes it about as much as the fellow they’d made bleed. There was a scrabbling in the sling on Aaron’s chest, and he was too slow in pushing the kitten’s head back down. It tumbled free, and hit the ground with a mewl, and started towards the fight on its tottering little legs—

Aaron ducked to grab it. The kaibyou lunged to scruff it. Their collision would have been funnier, if it hadn’t kept them far too close to where—

To where the calf wasn’t actually losing. And wasn’t properly a calf anymore, either. It was growing again. It was taller, broader. Its antlers split and split again, branching to directions and dimensions past its own Death’s. The vines on the bear’s side were growing, too, tangling its paws. And the white reindeer was rearing, hooves striking again and again against the ice dam still clinging to the bear’s back, until with a final crack it shattered and fell from the Winter Lord’s shoulders.

The bear stumbled sideways. Black fur was underneath. And strawberry leaves, still green under the ice that had held them. Autumn leaves fell from its flanks, washed clear by the spring melt drenching its sides.

The Winter Lord sat, heavily. The white reindeer, its antlers wreathed in spring vines, circled it carefully. All it did was breathe. Finally, the reindeer stretched out its furry nose, and was met with the bear’s smooth one. The bear blinked, almost sleepily. Fell to its side. Exhaled its breath, and did not draw in another. Its strawberries were blooming.

The Spring Lord raised its antlered head, and looked back at them. It had lost an eye to its predecessor; Aaron hadn’t seen when. Toothwort grew around the wound, as healthy and bushy as the patch they’d harvested from the other day. There were lights in the black depths of the socket, glittering like green-gold gems. Glowmoss.

The bear’s Death touched foreheads with its ward. Then with the reindeer’s Death, in a sort of affectionate headbutt; then the both of them were gone. The rest of the Deaths were departing, one by one, like a crowd come for a show newly canceled. Aaron wasn’t the only one who’d glanced to where they’d been. He side-eyed the kaibyou, who simply finished picking up her kitten, and dropped it back in his hands.

“You can see them,” he said. “How?”

“I’m a cat,” she said, and would say no more.

Mrs. White, the late king’s cat, had been able to see them too. He’d never thought to question that.

“So you knew you weren’t in any danger.”

“No cat needs her Death to tell her she’s in danger,” the kaibyou said. “Or when it’s her time to die, for that matter. Though we do sometimes desire a friend, on the occasion.”

“Do you know how I can see them?” he asked. “Am I a ghost?”

“Ghosts are more a cat sidhe’s expertise,” she said. “Would you like to see if you’d dance for me?”

“Not at present,” Aaron declined, a kitten squirming in his hands.

Her whiskers twitched. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Is there something we should do?” he asked, looking back to the Winter Lord’s body. “Funeral rites?”

“This is the way we end,” the kaibyou said, with a shrug he suspected she’d learned from humans. She turned away.

It felt a weird thing, leaving a body where anything could find it. Soon it would go back to being what it always was: meat for the scavengers, bone meal for the trees. At worst, a thing for puppeting, should the kaibyou or one of her ilk come back to this place. Not a thing for wearing, like a human’s corpse would be.

They were escorted to the forest’s edges by the Lord of Spring itself. The kittens seemed quite content with this turn of events. They’d stopped their needle-pawed flailing. Replaced it with needle-pawed escape attempts, as each tried to push the other down in an effort to reach his shoulder. The blossoms in their coats were turning to seed. He wasn’t sure what that meant, except that something had passed. The one that had crawled towards the Winter Lord was larger than the others. He didn’t think it had been, before.

Was the white calf always the new lord, or could any of them have been? Did the old lord need to die for the new to rise, or need it only bow to its successor?

By the time they reached the forest’s edge, the white reindeer towered over them both, its antlers blending with the canopy above. It didn’t have any trouble with getting stuck, anymore; it was the forest. It waited at the edge as they crossed the stone line, into a field that bordered road and cliffs and the ocean below.

“Would you mind me coming back through here, if I’ve the need?” Aaron asked, staring up at it, as it stared back down. He didn’t get an answer, which wasn’t a no.

The cliffs weren’t far from the forest, here. The mountain lion stared over the edge, at the seals sunning below. It was sunny. Barely midday.

“Not my usual fare,” she commented, “but I’ll make due.’

“Some of them can talk,” Aaron told her. “Probably.”

“I’m a carnivore, kitten,” she said. “What do you think I was eating in the fox’s forest?”

She didn’t show him where her new nest would be. But the kittens had started mewling their distress at the forest’s border, their little leaves sagging; one had left claw tracks on his shoulder and half-way down his back when it had tried to jump back inside. So. Probably she’d still live out of the forest, even as she came out to hunt prey whose rules she knew.

“Do you smell any dragons around here?” he asked. And with her snort, and more distinct no, he showed himself to the nearest messenger station. They were surprised to see him alive. Aaron wondered how many times he’d have to not die, before they got out of that habit.

“If you could refrain from sending word north,” he said, “I’d be much obliged. Let’s call it a bit of a wager I’ve got going on; it’ll have more of an impact, if I show up unannounced. And I’ll carry news south myself. Oh—and watch out for a kaibyou near the road.”

The militia captain on duty winced. “We’ll gather a hunting party.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “She’s an acquaintance of the royal family.”

If by royal family he meant Rose, and by acquaintance he was implying more friendship than might actually exist.

“She can be a friend if you make yourself of use,” he said. “But don’t show your back to her.” Things that talked were still meat.

He borrowed a horse, and a dagger he didn’t mean to return, and started south. He’d nearly a whole sun-shiny day left in which to travel.

And if not stopping helped him not to think overly much, well.

He’d gone between the reindeers’ circling bones, when the kaibyou had called the dead to dance; slipped between them as smooth as if he’d heard the beat himself. It wasn’t a thing a fellow wanted much to dwell upon, when he’d only just survived.