Fox’s Tongue and Kirin’s Bone - Chapter 87: Parallax

“Stop dying,” Rose commanded. “This is an order, not a suggestion.”

“It’s not as if I meant to,” Aaron said.

“Are you going to tell me,” she said, “that you weren’t doing something stupid, either time? Or any other time you’ve been in danger?”

“You can’t going making a question that broad,” said Aaron.

“Being a messenger is meant to be dangerous, but not as dangerous as you’re making it seem,” Lochlann said, entirely failing to take the reasonable side in this argument. “What are you doing out there?”

“Lieutenant Varghese, do I seem the sort of fellow who goes above his job description?”

The good lieutenant stared at Aaron through the bars.

Aaron stared back, for awhile. But it didn’t seem the sort of thing that was going to end, so. “More importantly, do either of you know how to navigate by the stars?”

“That is not more important,” said Rose, crossing her arms.

“It would get me out faster, if this happens again,” Aaron said. A statement which found no favor with either of his listeners.

“It’s not as if I mean to,” he felt the need to reiterate.

And, “Are either of you going to let me out?”

They did not. Apparently they’d promised to let his sister have a go at him, too.

In the end, regarding navigation by the stars, Rose referred him to her brother.

* * *

The crown prince knew significantly more about celestial bodies than Aaron had signed up for. But he sat on a castle rooftop and listened, and tried to understand how they’d gotten on the subject of measuring the distance to the moon. Which was apparently a thing people could do, and had done, even though Aaron couldn’t fathom how a body could measure a thing that hard to walk to.

“Now close your other eye,” Connor instructed. He’d his own thumb up in demonstration, held at arm’s length from his face. Aaron obligingly switched which eye he’d had closed. His own thumb appeared to jump a bit to the side relative to the bell tower behind it.

“And this… tells you how far away the moon is?”

“Yes,” Connor said.

“Uh-huh,” Aaron said, and Connor pushed his arm down.

“That tells you how far away your thumb is. Because you know how far apart your eyes are, right? So you measure how much the shift is, and that tells you how far away your thumb was, once you do the math. It’s the same for the moon. Except instead of your eyes, you have people stand really far apart and measure at the same time.”

Aaron thought this over. “Sounds like Letforget,” he concluded.

“It wasn’t,” Connor protested. “It’s not.It’s science.”

“Still seems simpler to just go there, and measure along the way,” Aaron said.

Connor’s mouth opened and closed, like that was a harder concept than the things he’d been talking about doing to numbers.

“There are flying things aplenty,” Aaron said. “Some of them talk. Why not just ask one of them to go check? If you can assume it’s safe to have two fellows out sciencing on the road at night, then I can assume some beastie or another would be willing to help. Send it with some twine, maybe, so you can double-check how far it went at the end. That’s an easier thing to measure.”

“Aaron,” said Connor, after a long moment. “How far away do you think the moon is?”

“Isn’t that what you’re trying to measure?”

Connor sunk his head in his hands, and stayed like that awhile. “I am going to make you read,” he said, “so many books.”

Which sounded rather like a threat, and one Aaron would like to distract from. He’d enough self-assigned reading material as it was.

“Why do you know all this?” he asked.

“…Rose and I used to talk about joining the Late Wake together. Traveling, not just our isle, but being the kind of scout that gets to see what’s beyond. Maybe even finding where we came from. The Kingdom itself, even.” The boy let his hands drop, with exactly the sort of half-smile that sort of aspiration deserved. “Well. I wanted to find it. She wanted to Red Trident it; take it all back. Except without the losing part at the end.”

“There’s probably not anything there anymore,” Aaron said. “If it ever was a place.”

Kingdom tales were kingdom tales for a reason, and it wasn’t because they were all true.

“But if there is,” Connor said, his eyes back on the sky. “They measured the moon, Aaron.”

That night, Aaron learned how to tell north from the trailing stars of the kirin’s tail, and from there all the other directions. But that was rather incidental, by the time Connor had talked himself to sleep.

* * *

Aaron sat down on a stool near the baker’s boy, and waited. Waited a bit more. Wished he had a few socks to darn, because waiting was quite a boring thing, actually, and a stool didn’t make for much of a moral high ground.

“Did you tell them to kill me?” he asked.

At least that got John to pause. Only a moment; then he was back to moving trays out of the ovens. “…No. What happened?”

Aaron grabbed a wooden spoon from another table, his stool wobbling under him. He stuck it under one of John’s fresh loaves and flipped it to the floor, where he knew he’d be the only one willing to eat it.

“Good,” he said. “Being dead would make it harder to carry more. Just so we’re clear.”

“What happened?” John said, and wasn’t even upset about the bread. Which made him sincere, or a sincere over-actor.

“Ask your brother,” Aaron said, and flipped off another loaf. “I’ll stop back in the morning. If that’s enough time for you to find a scribe?”

“Plenty,” said John, with a glare.

Aaron tucked his hands inside the sleeves of his much-abused coat, picked up his still-steaming loaves, and left.

* * *

There was a note tucked into a cranny behind the statue of man’s god. Aaron took it, and left a few coins and a loaf of bread in its place.

When he’d still been the castle’s errand boy, the Lady had used to add various concoctions to his shopping lists; things he’d bought from the old raccoon, with Clever Hands as intermediary. The stoat doppel would be less than pleased to catch him down in Twokins now, Aaron supposed. And made his way rather quickly back to sunlit streets before reading.

Those things he’d bought, the old raccoon wrote, would have been good for easing someone with the late king’s symptoms. Some treated pain, some increased the appetite, some brought sound sleep or easier breathing or leveled the beating of a heart. They ranged from common to increasingly obscure. Each could be used as poison, as well, as all strong medicines could.

So. Probably the Lady hadn’t been the cause for the king’s illness. She already had so many outright poisons in her rooms, why would she send him to purchase more? Anything rare would only be easier to trace, should the truth come out. King Liam, may his soul not wander, had been wasting without her help. It was only that final night’s responsibility that lay at her feet.

Some of the things she’d sent him to buy could have been cures, if matched to the right illness. Had she actually tried to heal His Majesty? Or only kept him alive until his death served a use?

The Lady had a bezoar in her room. Just a little thing, but he didn’t think their potency in negating poisons was much dependent on their size. It had been secured rather unsubtly to the underside of her table, in the seat she preferred when having guests. Subtly was not likely to be a priority should she come to need it. There wasn’t much to tell the marble-sized thing from a particularly well-rounded river stone. Only that it was lighter when held. Which likely wasn’t a thing she did often.

She also had a letter to the current king, written by the last. The late King Liam clearly hadn’t known whether it would be Orin or Connor to succeed him, when all was settled.

It wasn’t a pardon. A pardon was a piece of paper, easily lost or ignored or claimed as false. Aaron’s own pardon wasn’t the paper it was written on, nor the words: it was the conversations with Orin and Connor and Rose that gave him hope they’d uphold it. The former king had not pardoned the Lady. Perhaps she hadn’t asked to be. But Laim had sat, one evening or day, near his death or months before, and made to explain a thing that his children might not want explained.

A lingering death was never man’s choice, he’d written, in defense of why a dying man might choose the time of his end. The words were familiar, though Aaron couldn’t place them. He’d a feeling he should.

* * *

The old woman in the forester village—the one who’d once presided over the birth of twins and given Aaron advice on how to enter a forest if he must—she was dead, the next he passed through. Passed in her sleep, which was as good a way to go as any. He’d missed the vigil, but he stayed for the pyre.

Her Death wasn’t there any longer. Presumably, neither was she. But it was a pretty enough flame, and it kept warm the living.

The bear twins cried all night long.