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In the wake of the storm that had felled the guardtower, the heat had returned in full force, growing the day of the Dragon trial. The night had offered no solace in this as in anything else and now, the sun beating down on their little boat, the only respite was to be found beneath the canvas, where Neema sat beside Sol's fitful little form, watching the back of Cain's head.
He'd been seated with an almost unnatural poise between several stacks of cages, the chickens squawking and the full brunt of the day on him. One of the chickens had somehow found itself free of its cage, almost certainly due to his intervention, but it remained at his side, Cain's hand gently petting its plumage. Perhaps the fowl had wandered to the edge of the boat and discovered there was nowhere else to roam before returning; perhaps the boat's rocking had kept it from any exploration, too unsure of its footing to roam. Neema knew a lot about chickens in theory, but virtually nothing in practice, so she couldn't say if her hypotheses were right or not.
Regardless, it was unsettling to see the both of them, man and bird, so still.
It wasn't that Cain couldn't sit still—he'd always been good at that when he needed to be, or he wouldn't have been good enough among the Foxes to have become their contender. He could blend into any shadow, any setting, when he needed to, and he did blend into the view before her, so still he could've been yet another piece of cargo, if she hadn't been focused on him and him alone.
But there was no objective here. The emperor's contingent had sailed upstream this morning, away from their evasive route skirting the edge of the coast, and they were biding their time and keeping out of sight of any stragglers before deciding on their next steps.
A low but surprisingly strong snore smashed through her thoughts, a bird through a broken window. Sol turned over, his little feet sticking straight up in the air, somehow charmingly akin to a dead chicken waiting to be plucked. Wow. Trying to butter and baste me already?
She wasn't sure if the image had pushed through to him enough to wake or if the snore itself had roused him. "We've got plenty of real chickens, if it comes to that."
Oh, so I'm not worth eating now? Hmph!
"Do you even have meat? Aren't you still made of spirit goo?"
How dare you. My form is all-powerful! Magnificent! Beyond mortal comprehension! I have escaped the bindings that imprisoned my most powerful of brethren and—
"I think you're delirious. Go back to sleep."
She muffled any further outrage by tossing the feed sack he'd been using as a bedroll over him and stood to move toward Cain.
The chicken at his side waddled several steps away as she neared. Cain looked up at her as she took a seat beside him in the place it had been, ignoring the way stepping into the sun felt like stepping into an oven. "You're very pink."
It was not only his skin. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed in red. But his voice was mostly even as he retorted, "Well, you're very…" his eyes flitted to her hair, "purple."
"Oh good," she said, "we complement each other then."
Wordlessly, he bowed his head to rest it on her shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the rise and fall of his shoulders as he gave a deep sigh, then settled into an easier cycle of breath again. There was something almost hollow to him, some look in his eye, as though he was gazing past her every time she looked. It was almost certainly the wake of the Fox temple, she knew, but there were other questions she kept returning to, threads she couldn't help trying to untangle.
The Raven in full had only been a part of her for a moment before she had ejected it again, but even the absence of Sol, cut off from her in his weakness, too fragile to claw back into her ribcage, felt like something was missing. Not as though a part of her had been pulled away, Sol had always felt distinct from her, but as though she'd had a book in her hand, as she was wont to do, and misplaced it without knowing when or where she had put it down.
The Fox had been with Cain for as long as he had known himself to be what he was. Whatever pieces of Cain had been the Fox's doing, wherever Cain ended and the Fox began, he had never experienced anything else.
"Spit it out," Cain mumbled. It wasn't mean but it was definitive. She stammered.
"What? I didn't say anything—"
"Your back is like a board. Your posture's never this good."
She exhaled, letting her shoulders drop. Cain sat up again, watching her expectantly. Had he been sitting here stoically so she wouldn't see him crying? She didn't think he'd be so unconcerned about her seeing the state of his face if he had. She chewed over the questions she could ask, each one feeling less sensitive than the next. "I know everything is really bad, but…" she started finally, then trailed off again, wincing at the understatement.
"I'm not going to be offended if you ask about the Fox," he sighed. "But I don't have an answer for you."
This was enough of an opening to release the floodgates. "But how do you feel? Is it any different? Can you tell something's missing, or were you never even aware enough—"
"Do you want to take notes?" he teased, cutting off the wave of questions.
"I don't think I have anything to write on," she admitted. "Or with."
He smacked a hand to his temple. "Neema Kraa, without a brush? Or ink? The world really has gone to the Hound."
"Technically it went to the Tiger, this time," she pointed out.
He rubbed his eyes with ferver. "Don't remind me." When he looked at her again, the intensity of his gaze caught her. "It should've been you."
She stuttered for an entirely other reason. Her visions swam to the front of her mind, caught on the tip of her tongue.
"You would've been so much prettier in a crown than Ruko," he added, returning to his ribbing tone. Her mind strayed to the diadem, its form rearranged, in her pack. The Raven Empress's crown, hidden in plain sight, the same way Sol had hidden among her things for long enough to worm his way into her head. So many things she couldn't say—and the Dragon no better off for it, stuck in that mural like all the rest of them.
Well, not quite all the rest. She almost pitied Vabras. Almost.
"I don't know if there's really a difference," he admitted, his gaze fixed on the horizon, its sharp line wavering in the heat. His voice was so low the cacophany of chickens almost drowned it out. The one freed meandered back to him, strutting back and forth in front of his far knee and clucking with every step.
One hand returned idly to its head. The other strayed to Neema's hand without looking down, gripping it firmly like he needed the strength.
"Maybe, when everything is less…" the hand on the chicken rose to wave idly, "you know, less, maybe sleep will be different, different dreams or something." He had slept hard, curled up with Neema in the cabin, but not for long, exhaustion and grief warring for his body's attention. She'd hazily registered him rising, then woke again when the sun had crested nearly to its zenith to find him in the same place he was now. "But it was only… only right before it took over that I could tell. Once I knew, it knew. So I don't think there was anything to notice, before it woke up." He shrugged helplessly. "That's all I can tell you."
Her thumb rubbed against the back of his hand.
"Maybe," he started again, though she had expected nothing more, "maybe I won't be as quiet, or as dextrous—maybe most of why I was a good Fox was because I was the Fox, and without it…"
"I think you're still a good Fox," she said quickly. "We wouldn't have gotten out of there without you."
He shook his head and gave a sharp grin, almost vulpine, and for a single moment she feared his guardian had returned, had taken Cain's body again and put his mind away. But his eyes remained as she'd always known them to be. Even when she'd seen him in the course of waking, years ago, they'd never changed like they had this week. "We wouldn't have gotten out of there at all if the mural had really gotten it."
She unfortunately couldn't deny that. No matter how many times she thought through a fight with the Hounds, just the two of them, she couldn't come up with any odds in their favor. "I don't think we'd even have made it that far."
Almost absent, his hand brought hers to his lips. "If anything… the jokes aren't coming like they usually do."
She stared at him. The events of the night were heavy on his face, even below the sunburn. "I don't think that's necessarily the Fox's doing, one way or another."
Finally he met her eye again, with a hollow echo of that grin. All of his good humor seemed stuck on the far side of the temple, unreachable through the flames. "You see why I don't have an answer for you."
From the back of the boat, Fort's good-humored voice sniped at Tala, picking some kind of fault with her knot-tying even though Neema had to imagine it was impeccable, and Tala's indignant retort answered. It was possible that the last two Foxes in Armas were on this boat, drowned out by chicken cries.
"What are you naming her?" she asked.
"Who?"
"The chicken," she said, gesturing with the hand still in his toward his other side. His gaze followed, seeming to see the fowl for the first time, though his fingers were still combing through her feathers.
"Cluck Cluck Goose," he said finally, without question. The hen stuck out its head as it strutted again, in some kind of approval.
Neema laughed, and glancing toward Cain, she thought she caught a hint of a smile.