The Demon and the Fox

by Tim Susman

  Holding the red journal, he sagged back against the wall. So Windsor did bring Coppy to his office, at least some of the time. He could go back now…

  But he wanted to know.

  Ears and nose alert, he climbed three more flights of stairs and reached the flowery relief on the sixth floor: roses with a tangle of thorny vines around them. And—he bent to the flowers again—yes, Coppy had rested his paw here, or more likely leaned his whole body against this wall.

  There was Jaeger’s door, and beyond it two more doors in the hallway. Kip padded past Jaeger’s to the second one and sniffed it, getting a nose full of dust and a little bit of Coppy’s scent. He might have gone on to the third door? But no, there Kip caught only the scent of a human he didn’t know. One of the masters he hadn’t met; perhaps Barrett, if the spiritual sorcerers here followed Gugin’s habit of living as high and far from everyone else as possible.

  He returned to the second door. The paneling was covered in dust so thick he could barely see the painting on it of a knight in silver armor atop a white horse. But when his finger dropped to the brass door handle, he found it clean.

  His heart sped up. He put his ear close to the door and heard nothing, and no scents came to him through the crevices that seemed strange in any way. When he tried the door, he found it locked, of course, probably magically as well as mechanically. But when he bent to the handle, there he caught a human scent, and it was one he knew well, because its owner had visited their basement often.

  Emily and Malcolm didn’t notice him when he slipped back in through the basement door. Malcolm had her hand in his and was talking in a voice too low for Kip to hear if he folded his ears back, which he did as he padded over to replace the journal in the bookshelf. Then he stepped out into the open and cleared his throat.

  The two of them jumped apart. “Strewth,” Malcolm said. “Where did you pop up from?”

  “Magic,” Kip said. “Not mine. I can’t explain it, but—Windsor and Coppy were both definitely on the sixth floor.”

  Emily glanced up and then back down at Kip. “Are they there now?”

  “No. But…” He stopped as she shook her head.

  “We can’t go and tell anyone that you smelled a couple things on the floor. Remember all the times Farley left his odor around? And that’s powerful enough that even I can smell it sometimes.”

  Kip’s tail lashed behind him. “Yes, but—we have to. Coppy could be in danger. He is in danger. I’m sure of it.”

  “Look.” Malcolm stepped forward and clasped Kip’s forearm. “If he’s survived this long, he’ll survive another day or week. But Emily’s right. We need to find them in that room and find out what they’re doing.”

  Kip bared his teeth. “My friend is being used up there—”

  “He’s our friend too,” Emily said just as heatedly. “And he’s being used in a way that a lot of people are used without it endangering their lives. I’m not happy about it by any means, but if we act before we’re sure, we might make things worse.”

  In that moment, he wanted to be as tall and imposing as Grinda, to growl his urgency to them. But the moment passed; Kip stepped back and breathed in, forcing himself to relax. He needed Emily and Malcolm’s help, and as much as he wanted to rush upstairs and save Coppy now, they were right. The otter probably wasn’t going to die today, and if they wanted to be sure of what they were doing… “Yes,” he said. “Fine. All right. But as soon as possible.”

  “Of course,” Malcolm said. “But measure twice, cut once, you know?”

  “Aye.” Kip sat tiredly and looked up at them. He remembered then that they’d been holding hands, and pushed himself back to his feet. Likely they wanted to be alone.

  “You didn’t let me tell you the rest of what happened with Mr. Adamson,” Emily said.

  Kip sat again, ears perked, and Malcolm and Emily sat across from him. “He read the letter,” Emily said, “and when he got to the part about the newspaper, he got very cold. You remember him,” she said to Kip. “I thought he might turn red. Thomas said they did sometimes. But he merely pursed his lips and lowered those neatly trimmed eyebrows and then he asked me if I personally had witnessed any of this. I thought it would be better to be honest, so I told him that a person I trusted greatly had witnessed it and would swear to it.

  “He made me wait while he dictated a response to his secretary. I wasn’t meant to hear any of it—or maybe I was.” She smiled. “He wrote two letters and I was to deliver them both to his son. One was to Victor, telling him that there had been reports of his friend’s behavior made and that if they were true, Victor was to give the second letter to the headmaster. If they were not, Victor was to write back immediately and Mr. Adamson would engage an investigator to determine the truth of them. He stressed that this would be a great expense which he implied Victor might be responsible for.”

  Kip’s tail thumped a pile of papers. “It worked? I hoped, but…”

  “It was a good plan.”

  “Your idea about the newspaper was good too. It sounded like that made a difference.”

  She nodded. “In any event, the second letter was to Patris and was very short, simply telling him that no more tuition would be paid for our Mr. Broadside.”

  Kip squeezed his paws together. “Did you give the letters to Adamson? What did he do?”

  “Of course I did.” She drew her knees up. “He looked uncannily like his father when reading the letter. But at the end of it, he merely nodded and didn’t look me in the eye at all. He took the letter that was meant to go to Patris and said, ‘Thank you.’”

  “So he took it to Patris?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I believe so.”

  Malcolm shook his head and whistled. “You two cooked up a better plan than I did.”

  Kip flicked his ears. “What was yours?”

  “Ah.” Malcolm waved a hand. “There’s naught will come of it now, so it’s best left back in my head where it started. Truth be told, I was thinking better of it today and wondering whether I could—aye, but if Broadside’s given the boot, that’ll take care of it as well or better than I could have hoped.”

  Emily frowned. “What did you do last night?” But Malcolm wouldn’t tell her, though color rose in his cheeks and Kip wondered what he could possibly have done that would be so embarrassing he wouldn’t tell the two of them.

  Emily didn’t want to send Kip back to the barn, but he insisted. “I can’t stay in the basement,” he said, though he was tempted to keep Peter’s journal on him and see how long he could evade notice.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You should go to Boston and see our friends there.”

  He understood what she meant, though he was amused at her sudden shift to talking obscurely after they had been discussing the possibility that a master was involved in treason, not to mention that he wasn’t supposed to be on the College grounds at all. “I think I can do more good here,” he said.

  “I’d bring you there and then back.” Her eyes brightened.

  He shook his head. “I’m less convinced than before that our current friends are as good as I thought. I’ve talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of arguments. But I’m not ready to run to Boston yet.”

  “They could teach you magic. You can’t stay here, and you probably can’t go to King’s.”

  He nodded. “But I don’t want to make that choice just because that’s the only place I can learn magic.”

  Emily folded her arms. “That’s how you were choosing sides a month ago.”

  “No,” he said, and then stopped. “Well, maybe yes. But—I want to talk to Abel again. I want to think about the things we’re fighting for, come up with a list of concrete ideas to implement, and then talk to your Boston friends and sound them out on it.”

  She frowned. “You want to prepare a list of demands?”

  Malcolm put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “You can lead a fox to water, but the decision to drink re
sts with him.”

  Kip snorted, and Emily glared, though she didn’t remove Malcolm’s hand. “So the cause is all about what they can do for you?”

  “Yes.” He tilted his head. “Isn’t that what it’s about for you?”

  “No!”

  “The right to own property, the right to vote? You’d support them even if they weren’t advocating those things for women?”

  Her lips tightened until Malcolm squeezed her shoulder. “He’s got a fair point,” the Irishman said. “And it’s naught to be ashamed of. People might claim the noblest of causes, but often when it comes down to it, they’re fighting for their own gain. And aye,” he went on as she turned her glare on him, “freedom from mistreatment is a gain just as surely as the right to vote.”

  “All right, you two.” Emily pushed Malcolm’s hand off her shoulder.

  “Anyway,” Kip said. “I want Coppy safe before we go do anything else.”

  “They might help with that.”

  “And what if they’re the ones behind it?”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Get him some food,” she told Malcolm.

  With a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese, Kip walked back from where Emily had left him outside the Founders Rest to the old barn, which in the daylight looked even more decrepit. Many of the timbers had rotted through, and others had been scavenged for buildings. Kip didn’t know who owned this barn, though he thought the land belonged to the Oswald family, whom he knew from their occasional forays into his father’s perfume shop. This was not a part of town where many Calatians lived, and the Oswalds did not hire any to work their land, as they had three families who each had multiple children. Perhaps they had once owned horses and given them up for the more lucrative farming of sheep, who did not need shelter in a barn.

  The hay in the barn snapped rather than bent and smelled dusty and ancient, with a little bit of mold. But the inside roof remained surprisingly sound, so several of the stalls had not gotten wet at all this winter.

  He didn’t mind the hay and the dirt, not today. Farley would be expelled from the college when Patris learned there was no more tuition for him, and over the next few days they would make some plan to catch Windsor and save Coppy.

  The bread and cheese tasted wonderful to his ravenous appetite, and even though he’d intended to keep some for dinner, he ended up eating all of it. There wasn’t really a place he could have stored it or set it down anyway, he told himself, licking his fingers. And he would meet his friends tomorrow and hopefully they would bring him more food. He didn’t like being dependent on them, but it wouldn’t be for much longer.

  To keep his mind busy, he worked on small, precise bits of fire magic that Cott had been teaching him: igniting dust particles (which would be good for a quick, low light and also for cleaning, if he were so inclined), and creating a small intense flame in the middle of one piece of hay. It wasn’t that he was afraid of setting the barn on fire; he had never been less afraid of fire in his life. But a large fire or a large amount of smoke might attract attention if someone from New Cambridge was looking in the right direction at the right time, and Kip didn’t know how long he was going to have to stay here.

  The idea of going to Boston continued to occupy his mind. The treatment of Calatians on the Isle of Dogs was terrible; he had thought New Cambridge the norm and was now forced to acknowledge that it might be an exception. In that light, the promises of the revolutionaries sounded at the same time both more fanciful and more important. Their promises for Calatians had felt unattainable to New Cambridge-raised Kip; when presented to Coppy or Abel, they would seem ludicrous. And yet, they were addressing the problem, which the Empire showed no signs of doing that Kip could see. Even if all Calatians were only raised to the life that the New Cantabrigians had, that would be a vast improvement in the world.

  Likewise, the idea of starting something new appealed to Kip, who had already broken barriers, but at the same time the difficulty in taking the one large step of becoming the first—second— Calatian sorcerer made him aware of how great the challenges would be to smash the entire system and start over. He had been making progress, and all hope was not yet lost, but if the government he was impressing was done away with, what proof did he have that he could duplicate that process in a new Colonial government? One day of promises from men who desperately needed someone to set fire to opposing armies? Emily believed in the goodness of those men and had faith in their promises, but to Kip they were still merely men.

  These were the thoughts he turned over in his head as he cleared his stall of dust, burned hay stalks into smaller and smaller halves, and wished he’d saved some of the food Malcolm had given him. As night fell and he had no word from his friends, he began to reconsider his decision not to go to Boston, because he felt sure that at least there he would have had a warm bed.

  The sun had fully set when movement outside brought his ears perked to full alertness. He cursed the smoke and still cold air that stopped him from smelling who was approaching, but the person was small, to judge by their footsteps. Kip had magic gathered and ready when Alice Cartwright’s voice called out his name.

  He relaxed, sagging back into the hay, then scrambled to his feet and dispelled the magic just as she came around the corner. She was humming a tune he didn’t recognize, wearing a wooden necklace of beads and a plain tunic cinched around her waist so that it almost looked like a dress. “Hallo, Kip,” she said, her tail wagging.

  “Hello,” he said. “How did you know where I was?”

  “I went to the College to look for you and the nice young man at the gate brought out a sorcerer who went and fetched Emily, and she told me.” She scratched her whiskers. “I think the young man was a demon,” she said. “He wasn’t wearing shoes.”

  “What do you know about demons?” Kip asked with some surprise.

  “Pearl Cooper at school told me. She said that I’m engaged to a sorcerer and that means I’ll have to lie with a demon as well, and I didn’t know what a demon was, so she said they’re spirits brought to this world to do the bedding of sorcerers. And I said it didn’t sound very logical that a sorcerer would make a demon do his bedding for him, but she said sorcerers were strange.” Her bright golden eyes met Kip’s. “But of course we couldn’t have cubs if you did that.”

  “No,” Kip said. “She may have meant that they do the bidding of sorcerers. But no, you would not have cubs from a demon, if such a thing is even possible.”

  “And that’s the reason we were engaged. All of that ‘Will of Calatus’ they say at the Festival.” She looked away from him, around at the stable. “This can’t be very comfortable.”

  “It’s fine.” He smiled. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I wanted to thank you for rescuing me.”

  “You were very brave,” he said.

  She leaned against the wall, her tail still swishing. “I don’t know about that. I wasn’t really afraid.” Now she turned his way, and his astonishment must have shown, because she smiled. “I wasn’t. Not until he said he was going to try to kill you, and then I was worried for you, but I also know you’re very clever, and I felt sure you wouldn’t just walk into his trap. I thought at first that he was going to force himself on me, and I didn’t want that, but I knew I would survive it. Pearl did.”

  Kip sucked in a breath and nodded. The thought of Farley forcing himself on Alice made his fists tighten. If he’d witnessed anything like that, there might well have been a murder to answer for. A moment later he took in the rest of what she said. “Pearl was…?”

  “Yes. Three of my friends have been this year.” Alice said it matter-of-factly. “Never by him, but it happens if we don’t go around in a big group or with our parents. But I didn’t come here to talk about the horrible things we have to endure. You certainly have to endure things as well.”

  Maybe if he’d had his tail stolen, that violation would compare. But Kip made himself return her smile. “We’re hoping that in the fu
ture, we won’t have to endure as much. And our children even less.”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “I did come to tell you that Papa has called off our engagement. He’s writing to Boston again. There was a fox family there.”

  “Ah.” Kip leaned against the wall. “That’s probably for the best.”

  “I don’t think so.” Alice folded her arms and kept her ears up, tail swishing behind her. “I don’t think it’s for the best at all. I haven’t met many other foxes, but I can’t imagine one who’d be a better father for my cubs than you. And what’s more, I like you. You’re always kind to me and I think you’re very clever. I said that already. I asked Papa to change his mind, but I don’t think he will. Still, I thought you should know that I would still marry you.”

  “Thank you,” Kip said. His mind traveled to the Isle. Maybe Abel had a female relative who wouldn’t mind marrying a sorcerer.

  Now Alice kicked at the straw on the floor. “I thought that maybe you could come live with me and my husband, if I can’t marry you. Not all the time. I know you must stay up in the Tower. But when you wanted to get out of it, like when I want to get out of my house and take a walk, you could come stay with us. Like the Coopers, or the Ashers.”

  “David Cooper and Carrow Asher are different species from the other Coopers and Ashers, though,” Kip said. “Three foxes? People would wonder whose cubs yours were.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “Bloodlines and all. I do wish Papa would see that what matters is you and not his prestige or my standing or anything like that.”

  “What matters is our cubs. Your cubs.” Kip's tail uncurled, relaxing.

  “Yours, too.” Alice reached a paw out to him. “You’ll find someone, I know you will. Someone whose father appreciates you.”

  He took her paw and held it. In the cold barn, her warmth anchored Kip. He chuckled softly. “It’s funny. I never really knew you. I just knew we had to have a family, because that’s what we do. I pursued the engagement because it was important to my parents.”