Rating: Teen
Warnings: Moderate Violence
Summary: A deal goes wrong on the yellow tier. We are introduced to a kitsune prince and his terrifying lover.
Short Tail tried to stand a little straighter as she entered the conference room at the end of the line. She did not want to make any mistakes on her first day of duty, particularly not as a guard of the illustrious Leopard family. She was still unsure as to how she, Short Tail, the runt of the parade, had made it this far, and she damn well didn’t want to disappoint, even if she was only serving as the guard for the youngest son, Leopard Paw, and according to all her squad mates, today’s meeting barely counted as guard work at all.
“Final meeting with the kitsune prince?” Sharp Fangs had smirked. “I think you’ll be fine.”
All the same, Short Tail was curious. There weren’t many kitsune on the yellow tier, and Bee of the Wolf family was one of the only ones coming from princely blood.
When they entered, he didn’t look like anything special. Seated at the head of the table and sprawling a little, feet up, he looked like any other troll prince, his dark hair gathered in small, beaded braids close to his head. There was something strange about the wide set of his eyes and the glitter of yellow in the depths of his irises, but Short Tail would never have noticed if she hadn’t already known. Far more striking—and simultaneously surprising—was his companion.
“Who’s that?” Short Tail whispered to Tall Spine, who had been more sympathetic than the others to her tendency to ask incessant questions.
“They say Bee of the house of Wolf has a foreign secretary. I guess that must be him,” Tall Spine hissed back.
A foreign secretary. Short Tail wondered whether that was code for the prince’s lover. Certainly his companion was handsome enough, in an extremely non-trollish way. Despite his slenderness and rather sallow, dull complexion, his high cheekbones and flashing black eyes were striking, though the kerchief he wore, covered in complex, glimmering runes, was an unusual sight on the yellow tier. Short Tail thought, a little contemptuously, that if you must use magic, surely you could at least do so without such an obvious device to bolster your power?
She was still looking at him when he glanced up at her, with a prim, sour expression that made him look as if he’d swallowed a lemon. If he was the prince’s lover, she thought, the prince either had terrible taste in men, or was suffering badly from being a kitsune on the troll tier.
Tall Spine elbowed her, and she realized she’d been gawking a little too obviously. Flushing, she backed hurriedly into the wall and pulled herself to attention. You could listen to such meetings—though it was better to at least pretend you weren’t—but you shouldn’t be seen to be looking too closely.
The meeting dragged on; most of it seemed to be a debate over whether a certain region was owned by the house of Wolf or the house of Leopard. Short Tail didn’t understand the intricacies of the diplomacy, but she was sure that the house of Leopard ought to be allowed to expand its borders—they had the superior military force, after all, and even in the imperial era, that still mattered. Some part of her wondered why they were bothering to negotiate, when they could simply have taken what was theirs, but she supposed her patron knew best.
“…and so, as you can see, the land was sold by your grandfather,” Leopard Paw was saying in a triumphant voice when Short Tail next bothered to tune in.
The secretary cleared his throat rudely.
Leopard Paw opened his mouth to speak again, but to Short Tail’s surprise, Bee looked up, hooded eyes glittering. “What is it, Just Mind?” he asked.
“They’re trying to cheat you, my lord,” said the naga, his monotone intent and steady, his eyes down on the table.
“Preposterous!” Leopard Paw exclaimed, and Short Tail scoffed quietly under her breath.
“I can walk you through the trail of hand-offs. I imagine a child could.”
“Is that so?” The kitsune prince leaned back, using his heel against the table to tilt his chair back and forth. “That isn’t very honest of you, Leopard Paw.”
“You’d really listen to this…snake over one of your own tier?” Leopard Paw asked, voice dripping with scorn.
Both Bee’s eyebrows went up. To Short Tail’s surprise, he smiled faintly. “They understand paperwork on the seventh tier, you know,” he said. “I had him go through this whole thing with me in advance, just to make sure we were all on the same page. Do you know what he found?”
“How would I know that?”
“The public records don’t match the ones you had sent,” Bee said. “Someone seems to have been doing some really inventive tampering.”
“Are you accusing me of cowardice?” snarled Leopard Paw, slamming both his hands onto the table.
“Yeah,” said Bee, with an affable nod.
There was a short, shocked silence. A muscle twitched in Leopard Paw’s jaw. “Kill the snake,” he growled.
“My lord?” Short Tail glanced sideways at Tall Spine, who—to her surprise—had nocked an arrow to her bow and was raising it.
“We’ll see if the fox is willing to accept what’s in his best interests once that meddling snake is dead.”
“He’s—not a warrior,” Short Tail pointed out. “He’s unarmed?”
“Are you sworn to me or not?”
“My lord?” said the secretary, sounding remarkably calm for someone whose life was currently under threat. One hand went up to that runic kerchief he wore.
“Don’t!” ordered Tall Spine. “Take off the artifact.”
A delicate eyebrow lifted. “If you’re sure.” Calmly, the naga undid it with one hand and removed it. The glow of the runes faded as it fluttered toward the ground.
“I don’t think they’re going to be reasonable,” said Bee matter-of-factly, as if no one else were in the room. “Am I right in thinking you’d rather take care of this?”
“KILL HIM!” roared Leopard Paw. The naga said something at the same time; all that Short Tail caught was, “—my lord,” again.
The other guards raised their bows. Short Tail looked down at hers, suddenly doubtful. When she looked back up, there was light pouring from the naga’s eyes like tears, twin glittering stripes of iridescence, and there were runes again—runes everywhere—flickering and writhing beneath his skin. None of the other guards had loosed their arrows. The naga raised one hand, the flesh rippling beneath it, pulsing with intricate, repeated patterns like nothing Short Tail had ever seen. Her vision filled with static, and the last thing she heard was the naga’s voice, saying, “I wasn’t bolstering my power, Short Tail. I was dampening it.”
The room blurred as Short Tail’s vision splintered away from Just Mind’s mental grasp. With streaming eyes, he let his coils collapse to the ground, feeling around him for his kerchief.
“I’ve got it. Hold still.” The cloth settled over his head, and the splintering, feverish pain behind his eyes eased slightly. His lord’s thumbs rubbed slowly across his cheeks, collecting the tears that had spilled from his eyes. “You overdid it again.”
Just Mind jerked away, huddling in the kerchief. “I did not.”
“I think they’re all dead.”
“They’re not.” Just Mind waved a hand impatiently. “That would hardly be a reasonable response to the guard who was trying to hew to her code of honor. And the others were simply trying to execute their lord’s orders, much as I was.”
“They were trying to execute you.”
“I didn’t say they were unharmed, my lord.”
“They could be more harmed.” His form moved blurrily in Just Mind’s slowly-recovering vision, surrounded by a shining halo, and his lips brushed across Just Mind’s forehead.
“Leopard Paw is dead. At least I imagine so, I sent most of the arrows in his direction. Not someone whose mind I wanted near my own.”
“I’ll go check on that,” Bee said shortly. “My responsibility, anyway.”
“If you say so, my lord.” Still, Just Mind gratefully mopped his streaming eyes and leaned his aching head against the nearby table leg. At least he understood the words. Occasionally, using the powers that had been inculcated in him robbed him of his power of speech as well as of sight.
After a moment, Bee was back. “Come on, love,” he said gently. “Your aim was impeccable.”
“Where are we going?” Just Mind asked, trying not to wince at the pounding in his head. He was too tired to tell Bee to avoid such affection, and it wasn’t as if any of the guards were in a condition to process it anyway.
“Got to get the titles for my land.” Bee patted him, hand sliding down his back to rest just above his waist. “And you need to rest.”
“I’ll be fine,” mumbled Just Mind, using the table leg to lever himself into a standing position. He was dizzy, vision still haloed and not yet improving, and he swayed, spine shaky and infirm.
“You’ll be fine faster if I carry you,” Bee pointed out.
“My lord, I assure you, I am capable of moving under my own power,” Just Mind said, acerbically. He started to move forward and his lower spine collapsed instantly beneath his weight; he would have fallen if Bee hadn’t caught him.
“You sure are,” Bee agreed cheerfully. “Humor me? My poor secretary, who was vilely attacked and whom I nobly defended.”
Just Mind snorted. It was useful to downplay his capabilities, and it only irked him a little. “All right,” he said, after a long moment.
“Thanks. Wasn’t looking forward to having to move at your pace.”
Just Mind woke from an uneasy sleep, teeth chattering.
“Hush,” said Bee’s voice, as he moaned softly. “You’re safe. We’re home. You really overdid it.”
Though his eyes were watering, he could see again, at least, vision a little blurred but no longer filled with static. As Bee said, they were home, really home, in a way that had only recently started to feel real for Just Mind. The cozy bedroom with its lush mahogany paneling, its warm wine-red wallpaper, and a fire burning brightly in the grate. Not very similar to the austere white-walled room in which he had grown up, nor to most of the open, pillared, luxurious rooms of the yellow tier—it echoed the Red Tier, a little, perhaps, where he and Bee had first become lovers, but it was uniquely his own.
A small whining noise sounded from the door. “My daughter has been worried about you,” Bee told him, with a lopsided grin. “I told her she couldn’t come in unless you said it was all right, and she’s trying to annoy one of us into making that happen.”
Just Mind chuckled weakly and waved a hand. “Oh, let her in,” he said softly.
“You’re still feverish,” Bee said, rubbing a hand along Just Mind’s cheekbone.
“It’s hardly contagious.”
“That wasn’t my concern.” But he got up and went over to open the door. Firefly, his eldest daughter and heir, was sitting outside on her tail, whining. When her father opened the door, she brightened up and trotted inside, whipping her tail back and forth in excitement as she hurried over to the bed.
“Firefly,” Bee chided. “Ask poor Just Mind if you can get onto the bed.”
The little kitsune made a soft grumbling noise. She had been caught trying to pretend to Just Mind that she couldn’t speak or change her shape yet, fearful that it would deprive her of her preferred cuddles from a man she perceived—rightly, Just Mind had to confess—as obsessed with politeness and propriety. But Firefly had always been an exception, as close as if Just Mind had had a daughter of his own. “Please may I get on the bed?” she said, her muscles tensing as if to spring up anyway.
“Yes, you may.” Just Mind patted the pillow beside him.
With a little squeak of joy, Firefly bounced up and immediately curled up next to his face. “Can I sleep in your hair?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not, little fox, I imagine your father will eat my liver if I even loosen the kerchief right now.”
“Awwww.”
“Damn straight,” muttered Bee. A callused hand stroked Just Mind’s forehead gently. “Everything’s taken care of, for the time being, at least. You just get your rest.”
Every muscle in his body was hurting, and his head was pounding, but there was a soft pop of displaced air and then Bee’s fox form landed on his chest and curled up there, a comfortable, reassuring weight. Firefly poked at his cheek with a small cold nose and then curled up next to him on the pillow. Just Mind heaved a heavy sigh and let himself slip back into a sleep much easier than the one he had woken from.
Mertiya Writes (and Draws) 