Confusion, laughter, celebration, and panic were my companions now as I walked the streets. The noise and rapture were jarring, but protective. I felt safe from what had befallen me within the high and guarded walls of Duir’s house.
“Home.” The word, now a mantra repeated over and over in my head until my feet found themselves before the gate. As I undid the latch and came close to the house, I found myself rooted before the door.
“Has it changed?” I wondered aloud.
I clutched my pack closer, secretly wishing the velvet inside would somehow empower me with the need for vengeance and rage I’d felt earlier. Now all I felt was weariness and the weight of the night upon me like a boulder.
How long had I been away? It seemed ages.
The clock is a cruel master…
Horace’s words rang in my ears. “So it is, Horace, so it is,” I muttered, and then forced myself to move to the door and push it open. The kitchen was silent. There were the remains of a meal, and the savory smells of stew coming from the glowing hearth.
Only this morning I left this place intact and now return torn asunder, I thought as I lay my pack on the table. I closed my eyes only to find Cale’s leering face spring up like some macabre toy of a devil’s spawn. Would I ever know peace in the blackness behind my eyes or had those fields been sewn with such horrors that only some ghastly mechanism could untangle their guilty roots?
“Sylvain?” I croaked into the silence and was rewarded not with a reply but with the sound of people raucously yelling from the street outside.
The kitchen offered nothing of my brother’s whereabouts. I sought the stairs and climbed two at a time until I found myself at his open door. Sylvain’s room was spacious and the brightest room in the house. Even now there were a few remaining streams of light coming from the room.
“Sylvain?”
As I entered, I heard rustling and a low growl. The sound was foreign, and stopped me in my tracks. It was not uncommon for Sylvain to harbor animals that had been abandoned by their mothers or those he found wounded in the woods or fields where he worked.
I was about to say his name but halted when I entered the room to find him asleep on his bed, clothed, laying on his back, one hand over his head the other hanging off the side of the bed.
The growling intensified. I went around to where the noise came from and found myself staring into the sharp, bright eyes of what I mistook as a cat.
“Hello,” I said, hoping my voice would soothe the small creature. I crouched and discovered it was not a cat but a small fox. Its ears were flattened and the growl didn’t lessen, but grew as I lowered myself on my knees. I could see my presence had disturbed it from a nest Sylvain must have set up for it out of old fabric scraps. “Did I wake you? I apologize most graciously, my little lord,” I cooed soothingly. “Saved from a hunt no doubt?” I offered my hand and was rewarded with a nip and more growling.
“Do you know nothing of animals?” Sylvain’s voice was sleepy.
I withdrew my hand and looked up to find him awake, a smile on his drowsy face.
“Apparently not,” I replied. “I wish I had your gifts of knowing animals.”
Sylvain rolled over onto his side so he could face me. “Offer your hand, but this time lower, and slower.”
I did as I was told and received a nip, but this time it felt gentler, as if curiosity had replaced fear.
“You see. It is not a gift, only the way you approach a beast. He is curious now and if foxes show love, it is through their need to explore their curiosity. Soon he will be crawling all over you like a puppy.” He yawned and stretched an arm over his head. “I apologize for not lighting the lamps. You must have been concerned coming into a dark house.”
I laughed weakly. “I barely noticed, is it dark?”
True to Sylvain’s prediction, the tiny fox ventured closer to me and was now sniffing curiously at my knees. I got a quick pat in on its tiny head before he spun on me and tried to nip my hand.
I continued to watch the fox. “You were right, Sylvain. But must you always be so?”
Sylvain lifted himself from the bed and soon the room was filled with the light of a lantern. He did this purely for my benefit.
“I often wish I wasn’t, if you’d like to know the truth. But I think it is not the fox of which you speak. What is it? What has happened?”
“Is he from a hunt?” I asked, unsure of how to answer Sylvain’s blunt question. I was hardly sure of what to reply as my mind worked furiously to piece together the hectic parts of the day. I was trapped somewhere between Seton’s kiss and Cale’s malicious act. It was a horrible place to land after the bliss I’d known with Seton.
“It is the time of the fox, the hunt, and the King. If only they’d hunt the man over the animal, how much more fun it would be!” Sylvain replied with derision. “I found the fox by its mother, which lay dead in a snare. Surely Duir will continue the tradition of a hunt once he is crowned and I
