The Fox and the Hound

Synopsis

The smell had turned up in three places now, and did not behave like a smell. There is no bog near Loshev (wetlands only form by the region’s water-plane gate when the planes stir), and a toad, however foul, does not follow a man across town. With Martyr’s Day five days off, the company split to finish its errands.

Koa and Aldo went to Hinta, who agreed to carry Gemsmith’s finished stone to Harad rather than travel with them now, and fitted Aldo’s crossbow with a flint-strike attachment for igniting bolts, a case of ten and an oil-reserve bolt. His battle aspergillum she refused to copy, setting an apprentice to better it instead.

Mikhail went to Cleven, and found the fireplace clean of the smell and the boy badly frightened. He had seen something move. He knew the raiders had been asking after him and claimed not to know why; he lied about where he had gone before the raid, was caught in it, and admitted a friend had warned him to leave town. He spoke of hard decisions and the greater good and change; then a wolf howled past the walls and he stopped altogether and said they were not alone. Mikhail played a street tune with a message hidden in it, so that they could speak without being overheard, and Cleven said the listeners could not hear his thoughts right now, and left. Back at the manor Mikhail put another evening into his sleeping-spell for Gwen. The three added it up: a toad, a wolf, sulfur, something reading a man’s wants. Aldo went to watch Cleven’s window overnight.

Nathan Fox’s vineyard is an hour west of town, and its main pressing-house is a burnt shell. Natalia Fox, who runs the family’s wine and was in the ruins when they arrived, pointed out that the fire was weeks old and that bandits burning one random building on a vineyard made no sense. Her sister Amanda was dressed for the evening and wished to be elsewhere; their brother Merrigan is making his name on Loshev’s Mól bridge. At dinner the Valiant Few were the guests of honor: Fox thanked them before the whole room and announced the council’s vote of relief for those hurt in the raid, crediting their appeal for it. Aldo sold the wine on charm rather than knowledge and won Natalia over anyway; they played Dan, and Mikhail played it better than he has played anything in that town. They stayed late to build the goodwill, which cost them Rook’s audience.

They reached Gemsmith’s late. Koa apologized for having sat on what they knew about Beltran and the Ten Lashes, and Yullen (given how the day had gone) allowed it had not been the wrong call. Aldo, who had refused his drink to keep his nose clear, noticed the sulfur back and traced it to the fireplace, where the smoke was curling around something. He put two blunt bolts up the flue and then holy water over what came down, so it could not knit itself together. It reeked, spoke a tongue nobody knew, and boiled apart: a quasit, a shapeshifting demon that whispers a man’s own wants back at him and grants them crookedly, which Aldo knew from the puppet shows of his Galderian childhood. A scream went up across the house, and Koa found himself holding a hysterical Cleven saying I need him.

The boy’s room told the rest. Honeysuckle oil to cover the smell, every scrap of iron hidden under a floorboard, Mól coin stashed in a bed-leg, antique Mól pieces skimmed from auctions he had overseen, a ledger of their worth, his journal, and a manifesto: a patient scheme to bribe, discredit and replace the Council of Loshev, Fox marked a possible ally, his own father blocked, address later, and Kurvroc marked for death. About a third of it was done, and the demon had burned Fox’s pressing-house to lean on him. Over cold blueberry pie Cleven insisted the arson was not his doing and asked to tell his father himself. The demon, he admitted, had promised change and offered the plan and only ever helped him do what he already wanted. It took a long time to shake his belief that it had been his friend. What to do with him ran longer still: not a cell, and not exposure, which would cost Yullen his seat and Loshev its steadiest councilman, but removal to Harad, to spend his appetite for change on honest work with Elliot and Ashanti. Koa argued that the people the boy robbed get nothing out of that, and lost, and said so.