Chapter 6: Of Raffertys and Rats 1 |
They made their way to the cave on Seventh Down through tunnels only a Twokins rat could control. The marquise led them, and the marquis brought up the rear perched in Aaron’s hair, and he was still trying to figure out if that was the marquise sitting on Rose’s shoulder as a black-spotted pup or if some young rat had taken advantage of the situation to go for a joyride on humanity’s princess. They weren’t very restrictive of their children’s follies, were the rats: the boldest survived. Or they didn’t.
“How is this even working,” Rose asked, as part of a continued one-sided interrogation. She was on Aaron’s back again, so the pup she was talking to was doubly removed from the ground, and likely feeling about as tall as it had ever been. “Is it not keyed to your blood? Even if you are a rat king, your bodies aren’t related, unless you’re--”
She did not finish that impolite thought. Though it did not stop the rest of her thoughts. “And it’s not as if you could have keyed it to your whole species,that’s too ill-defined, this doesn’t make any sense--”
Squeak, said the pup.
Just ahead, a black-haired, black-earred, black-tailed scribe--probably not the marquise--was carrying a half-shuttered lantern for them. And a book bag, slung across her chest where thieving hands couldn’t easily nick it. She’d had pups with her, when the marquise had first called her over to their little party. One of them had even managed to come with, by digging its teeth into the bag’s flap and refusing to let go. The others had been left behind, nursing with a surrogate dam. Rat mothers rarely lacked for child care. In her other hand she was, of course, carrying the marquise. And holding her up at intervals, like a particularly sentient key. The marquise herself seemed entirely used to this usage of her personage.
“How?” demanded Rose, grabbing the edge of this newest doorway with both hands to stop Aaron from simply walking through. This left her with zero hands for which to hold on to him. Her rat gave an alarmed squeak, and tried to climb up Aaron’s ponytail to safety; the gray marquise on his head put a nipping stop to that. Aaron tightened his grip around the princess’ legs and hunched forwards, just managing to save them all from the perils of scholarly pursuits. The princess was squinting at the stone, trying to trace out the script the marquise’s blood had revealed. Alas, the scribe was already carrying the lantern onward, and Rose hadn’t a rat’s practice for feeling out letters in the dark.
Speaking of dark.
Lochlann bumped into him again, because Lochlann was walking right on Aaron’s heels, seemingly tethered to that light. Aaron was trying very hard to be understanding. The good lieutenant hadn’t been this bad before Aaron had left him tucked safely away in the dark. But what Aaron was actually understanding was how annoying it was to have someone always a step away from stepping on him. How maybe after a year or two of that, he might swear off carrying a light at all.
“I am sorry we had to leave you there,” Aaron said, because he’d not gotten many apologies of his own in these tunnels.
“This seems a thing we should talk about,” Aaron said. “Before it festers.”
“Won’t this just be another dead end?” asked Lochlann, rather more opinionated about dead-end caves than he’d been that morning.
“Everywhere in Twokins is a dead end, if you follow it long enough,” Aaron said. “This one has fresh water and fish, and a minnow.”
“A minnow.”
“She was too small to eat them, the last the dragons got in here,” the gray rat answered, from Aaron’s hair. “Just a little minnow jumping up for nibbles. Hopefully she’s still got the taste for them. ...Though that may have been her great-grandmother. I admit to never having had a conversation with Our Lady of the Gaping Maw.”
“She’s more a listener than a talker,” Aaron said.
“I can never tell if you are joking,” said the rat.
Lochlann set his lips thin, putting clear effort into not agreeing.
“How?” Rose repeated, and Aaron had to shift so she wouldn’t go face-first into that wall she was studying. She was addressing the gray rat now rather that the pup on her shoulder, likely because the gray rat was actually talking.
“Squeak,” the marquise deadpanned. The word, not the sound.
“...So that’s where you get it from,” the good lieutenant said.
“Get what?” Aaron asked, as ahead of them, the scribe and her own marquise had turned to rather pointedly wait.
And then they were all walking again, and none of them had really answered the others.
They entered the cave on Seventh Down from above, squeezing in through a crag near the ceiling. It was a dead end on every day except those when the marquise came to call. Aaron had half-wondered if it would have been blocked off by now, but apparently no one had told the Raffertys about it.
“I’m going to set you down,” Aaron told Rose, who slid down in the doorway without protest. Likely because it was a doorway.
Aaron stood a moment, staring into the opening. There were the usual pinpoints of lantern light along the walls, from those that wanted it, and could get their paws on enough oil for wasting. The same reflected below, like the cave was starlight all the way down. Only the occasional ripple broke the illusion, and marked the boundary past which the Minnow’s hospitality took hold. And in-between, throughout the great black center of it all, was the cave on Seventh Down. People and Minnows were a presence; caves, an absence.
“And there they are,” Aaron said, staring far along the wall and just a little ways down, to where the lights where lit and tents set on the most comfortable ledge in the place. The Raffertys had moved their people straight into the man’s old camp. Probably because it was his old camp, instead of any better reason, like it being the widest ledge, or the best view, or the way it wasn’t far off from a tunnel that let one scarper off to parts largely unmapped. Aaron would bet they didn’t know about that one, either.
“Who?” asked Lochlann.
“Ready?” the gray rat asked, her whiskers tickling against his forehead.
“Almost.” He unclasped the argent cloak from his neck. The one his sister had given him, when she wasn’t an absence.
The white would help cover the good lieutenant’s red coat. Might even help with that shiver he’d developed. Aaron still had his deer cloak, and a face many here would recognize. Whether that made them more or less inclined to stab him would have very little to do with his own red coat.
“Would you mind carrying her, from here?” he asked.
Lochlann did not.
Aaron took in a breath. Let it out. Readjusted the wilted dandelions in his ponytail. Then he stepped back into the cave as if they owned the place. They had until the Raffertys caught up with them to make that true.
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“And why have you got a camp set up on the main path?” Aaron demanded, kicking at the first blanket they came to. Not one with someone in it, which was best for everyone.
“...Aaron?”
“Last I checked,” Aaron said, and, “get this moved, you know better. And pass the word to tidy up; we’ll have refugees in here soon, more than we’ve ever had. Might be they’ll even fill up to here.”
“It’s true, about the dragons?” the man asked, eyeing the marquise in his hair, the redcoat who clearly wasn’t wearing the color ironically, and the apparent fey longing after a door that had already closed behind them.
“Seems they’re settling in,” Aaron said. “We’ll need to, too.”
The scribe let him take point, now they were out of the rats’ tunnels. So point he took, all down the outer path, which made that wooden scaffold they’d built up at Helland to bypass the forest look like a sturdy stone bridge by comparison. There was stone here, sure. And it certainly bridged some gaps. The others were mostly boards, and the boards mostly filched from the uptown when their grandparents had been young. And some had clearly been filched again since the last he’d been down here.
“Give that back,” shouted a man, through the blanket he was fighting. The blanket had been his wall, and the board propping it up, and Aaron walking away with it.
“No,” Aaron said, and dragged it back over to the rocks it was supposed to be bridging.
Whatever the Raffertys had been doing with their supposed kingship, they hadn’t been concerning themselves with infrastructure. Had they even recognized Seventh Down as having any?
“I’ll—”
“Will you?” Aaron asked, and met the man’s oh-so-angry stomping with a knife tip to his gut. He had to press it in a bit just so the man even noticed. Would have been awkward for everyone if the fellow had finished the punch he was winding up for. “Leave the crossing boards alone. Or next time, we’ll see if the Minnow can take better care of your camp than you can.”
She was pretty good with people, too, but there was no need to escalate things. Especially not with Lochlann and Rose looking at him like that. At least Rose probably understood about the infrastructure part.
There weren’t any other tents on this ledge, despite there being room for a fair few. Likely because of that self-same missing board, and the sort of person who’d steal one. The people on the ledge below were watching, in a way very far from intervening.
“Thought you were dead,” one called up.
“You’ve got to kill someone at least twice to make it stick,” Aaron called back. A Twokins truism.
“They’ve noticed us,” the marquise on the scribe’s shoulder said, staring out over the cavern’s great dark center.
“He noticed,” said the one in Aaron’s hair.
Aaron kept moving down. They were below the Raffertys’ camp, now. He didn’t have to look up to see it them on the move: their lights rippled along the Minnow’s waters, closing in from below as the real lights did above.
The scribe watched behind them a moment. Then she lifted up their own lamp, and blew it out. Aaron smirked.
Smirked less, the next three times Lochlann tread on his heels.
They reached the bottom with only a few more pauses for bullying.
“Help me move this,” Aaron said, to those already there. They were the largest group they’d yet met, and the least well equipped: refugees, not residents. No one was directing them, so here they stood.
They all sort of looked at each other, in that way people did when they were trying to pass around responsibility with their eyes instead of actually doing something. One man had a little girl at his side, holding onto his shirt, while an adult-sized backpack dragged at her shoulders. Likely he’d carried her, and she’d carried it.
“The Raffertys closed it,” he said.
“And who let them do that?” Aaron asked, which left more than a few of the refugees staring. “You,” he said, pointing at the biggest of their bunch, “Help me move this. You,” he said, pointing to one who’d pushed forward the most, “Help the marquise’s scribe organize the rest of this lot. She needs to get her tallies started if we’re to know what we’re working with.”
By the time the Raffertys’ lights reached the last stretch down, they’d already rolled back the boulder on the main entrance, and broken a few fingers until people stopped trying to shove their way through the narrow entrance. Aaron’s presence added familiarity to the process, for those who’d sheltered here before; of all the hunts over the past years, it was only last winter’s he’d missed. The only difference was that the doppel checks would be happening outside of the cave this time, thanks much; he’d picked the biggest gossip he recognized to lead that effort, since the man already knew most every face there was to know. Anyone whose form was known could come on in; everyone else, they’d sort as they came. Already there were a few who’d brought the strict-kept members of their families down with them. Aaron wished it was his sister’s sword he still had of her, rather than her cloak; asking Are you a dragon, or have since become one’s doppel would have made things a great deal more simple.
While he prodded a few more people out to deal with that, the rat scribe and her deputized helper were working their way through those who’d already come inside--tallying their numbers, asking what they needed, taking names of those still missing. Scared people liked to be listened to. Liked someone nodding, and writing down all they’d said.
And so the Raffertys arrived, but only after they were already letting people inside; never a good look, to be sent scrambling to meet guests already in one’s home.
“Aaron,” said Kieran, because he was the one looking like he needed to be held back.
“What took you so long?” Aaron asked, because if someone already had a reason to stab you, it didn’t hurt to give them two.
Kieran gave a rather un-ratty growl. Lochlann stepped between him and them, which wasn’t a thing Aaron was used to people doing for him, in Twokins. Huh. At least he’d the sense to set Rose down first. Not that it helped much, with her wobbling just behind him, doing very little to hide her fancy-hilted dagger. Likely the only reason Lochlann’s own blade was still in its sheath was to hide its lack of edge.
It was possible he’d given them the wrong impression about how to approach politics down here. One had to know who it was safe to stab.
“Pieran. Kieran,” Aaron said, stepping up besides the good lieutenant. “Is this lot your welcoming committee? We’re going to need at least six out there, to guard the tunnel while we do checks. Can’t exactly do them on this side, when someone failing means dragon instead of militia. On that note: did you bring your kirin’s bone? I’ve a better use for it than loyalty checks.”
“Aaron,” said Pieran, because he was the one looking like he was smiling past biting a rock, “what, exactly, are you trying to accomplish here?”
Well that was a broad question.
“Currently?” Aaron replied. “Stopping you from getting half the plateau turned into hostages. The marquise has bad memories, of dragons taking hostages. You wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings, would you?”
“Would you?” repeated the marquise, so sweetly, from every mouth she currently had available. Which was only the two—turned out the one on Rose’s shoulder was just a random pup, though he still wasn’t sure if she knew that—but since they’d not noticed the rat on the scribe’s shoulder, he got to watch half their people jump at the little voice behind them. The Raffertys never had gotten around to talking with the marquise.
“We can’t let them in,” Kieran said. “Anyone could be a dragon, that’s what got the upper levels into this in the first place—”
“We’re not letting the militia in,” Pieran said. “Not until they’ve agreed to talk terms.”
And that was why he was the more dangerous brother.
“Agreed,” Aaron said, knifing that argument in the crib. “But it’s not militia out there now. They’ve holed up just below Third, last I’d eyes on them. The ones out there now are our people. Your people. Though if we’re talking what got the uptowners in trouble,” he turned to Kieran, “that would be not checking for weeks ahead of this. What about you? Are you able to vouch for everyone behind you?”
He’d a way with swears, their Kieran did.
“Aaron,” Pieran said. “You’re not in charge here.”
“Of course I’m not,” said Aaron, still standing between them and those squeezing in. “Why would I want to be?”
Each of those in was one more likely to fight to keep the way open; one more against the Raffertys, who were already outnumbered. Rulers always were. A good show of violence could make up for numbers, but Aaron doubted that would be their first inclination. They were still too much the domesticated uptowners: too used to talking things out, when the one before them was human.
“We can’t let them in,” Pieran said. “We’ve neither supplies nor plan.”
“Valid concerns,” Aaron acknowledged, with an agreeable sort of nod. “Any others?”
He chose to interpret the marquise’s noise as a sneeze rather than a laugh. By the look on Pieran’s face, he was doing the opposite. But he bit the bait, regardless.
“Those are the primary ones,” he said, with narrowed eyes.
“Excellent; so we’re in agreement, then.” Aaron gestured to the gray rat on his head, and the scribe, nodding very seriously as she pressed marks into the wax tablet under her claws. “We’ve a plan and we’ve supplies. As you’ve no further objections, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing, shall we?”
The “we” was non-inclusive.
“Or are you going to explain to all these people why you really don’t want them in here? Afraid of being trapped in another cave without enough supplies for your own family, Rafferty?”
Pieran’s smile was that of a corpse gone stiff. “Welcome back, Aaron.”
“Good to be back,” he said, and hated that he was starting to mean it.