2. The Foxen
The Foxen
General Xilsatra closed his eyes for one moment, then inclined his head towards me. “Yes. I want you to be the bait.”
“Tell me what I need to know,” I said, dropping all pretense at formality. If I was going to walk into a soul-eater’s lair, I wanted to know everything I could in advance.
The general drummed his fingers on the table.
“Things like foxen almost never spawn in the Western Continent these days. It’s too well-populated.
Too…civilized.” He shook his head, a curl falling down onto his forehead.
“Perhaps that’s why this one has been so successful at hiding its presence.
As best I can determine, it’s been in Stag Court for nine years, and before that, it was feeding in the Court of Mercy.
Presumably, it spawned in the eastern wilds, and has been moving west as it hunts. ”
“Any thoughts as to why?” I asked, searching his face.
He gave me a wry expression. “Plenty, though I’m not sure they’re particularly useful. Like any other hunter, foxen are territorial. Perhaps this one thought to find easy prey away from competitors.” General Xilsatra paused, then added, “It’s young. The reputable sightings have it at three tails.”
“Not that young,” I said before I could help myself.
Standard wisdom held that foxen tended to gain a tail every millennium or so.
I had no idea how true that was. Tail count did line up with ability, though.
Foxen with one or two tails often couldn’t hide their tails when they shapeshifted, and sometimes they had other vulpine traits, such as claws, sharp teeth, or fox-like ears.
By the time they had three or four tails, they’d generally mastered their shape, and most had developed the hypnotic empathy that allowed them to control people’s emotions.
Only when a foxen had five or six tails did that empathy bloom into a full allure geas—but a three-tailed foxen was still a terrifying foe.
Their radiant empathic aura meant that anyone in range would feel whatever the foxen wanted them to feel.
People under a foxen’s empathy geas couldn’t feel fear or disgust. They would eat horse dung presented to them like apples, bathe in sewage, and laugh as they were eaten alive.
People under an allure geas? They wouldn’t simply allow terrible things to be done to them.
They would do them on their own, desperate to win your affection.
It was easier to get people to do pleasurable things, things they already wanted to do, but with a strong enough caster behind the geas, it didn’t matter what the geased person wanted.
More than anything, they wanted to please you.
The general’s gaze sharpened with curiosity. One ear cocked towards me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I swallowed nervously, feeling my cheeks heating.
“Well…if it’s been in the Western Continent for decades, it’s surely been hunted before.
Why would it even engage with an obvious trap?
And, besides, my allure magic makes me resistant to empathy and allure, but not immune.
If it’s stronger than you expect, all I’m likely to do is warn it that you’re coming before I die horribly. ”
“Hm.” He settled back, giving me a measured look. “Are you aware of how beautiful you are?”
I went crimson. “I, um. I’m… I suppose?” I got out, sounding entirely flustered.
One corner of General Xilsatra’s mouth quirked up before his expression smoothed.
“Foxen aren’t men, Lieutenant,” he said in a level tone.
“They’re greedy in the way of dragons and as arrogant as sphynxes.
As bait, you’re practically irresistible to a foxen.
It will surely want to lure and consume you for your beauty alone, and the knowledge that you’re there to help kill it is likely to make it want you even more. ”
Maybe I didn’t look convinced, because General Xilsatra gave a slight shake of his head, looking off into the middle distance.
“I can’t guarantee it will show itself to you, nor that it will get close enough for you to touch and geas it if it does.
If it does, though, you may save many lives.
” He looked back over at me, his hazel daze direct.
“I’ve been hunting this foxen for three years.
In Stag Court alone, it has mutilated and eaten seventy-four people that I know of, and likely many, many more. ”
Surely thousands of people through many Courts, I thought, my stomach twisting.
If a three-tailed foxen was truly three thousand years old, it must have left many, many once-living husks behind.
Bodies with their souls torn out, as thoroughly erased from the world as a fae torn apart by lies and oathbreaking.
General Xilsatra’s jaw clenched for a moment.
“If we have to try to drive it out of its lair with flame and arrow, I am willing to do so for the slim chance of killing it. In all likelihood, it will simply escape in the chaos, and we will have to begin again. If it chooses to fight…” His ears pinned back, eyes going hard.
“Well. I’ll leave it to your imagination what a foxen could do with and to soldiers caught in an empathy geas.
All it would have to do would be to panic my men to break free, and it could surely do much worse.
But if we may capture it with less risk of failure and bloodshed—”
“Am I the only one?” I asked, cutting him off. My heart pounded at the horrific rudeness to a man who far out-ranked me, but this was my life we were talking about. My soul.
He didn’t look angry, or even surprised. The general huffed out a breath and got to his feet, offering me his hand. I took it; he towed me up without any effort.
“I dispatched four riders when I realized we had a chance to pin it in its lair,” General Xilsatra said levelly.
“Of those four mages, fate had it that you were both the closest and the best-suited. You’re a touch-range caster and your radiant allure is so weak that it’s negligible, so it’s unlikely that you’ll be identified as a mage by the foxen until it’s too late.
You’re effectively not dangerous until you’re touching it, so it’s much more likely to assume you’re not dangerous at all. ”
Part of me bristled at that description of my abilities, but it wasn’t as if the general was wrong.
I’d never been able to cast radiant allure, so it was unclear if I even had it; if I did, it wasn’t anything to write home about, on par or below what attraction I had from my natural physical beauty and charismatic personality.
I needed skin-to-skin contact to do anything to anyone. I couldn’t even cast through cloth.
I took a careful breath. “How long until it rains?” I asked quietly.
General Xilsatra wet his lips. “Perhaps as few as three hours,” he said, his voice just as soft.
He met my gaze unflinchingly. He knew exactly what he was asking of me—the existential horror of dissolution he wanted me to face. He always knew, I thought, every time he sent soldiers to die for the greater cause.
Something about that knowledge soothed me.
I was as much under his protection as any other citizen of Stag Court.
If he was asking me to face a foxen, it was because he’d weighed all the options, and this one would save the most lives.
Even if I hadn’t been a soldier—even if I’d been merely a man with the convenient curse of an allure geas—I wouldn’t have been able to deny General Xilsatra what he needed.
Someone had to do it. That someone was me.
“Alright,” I said. My heartbeat thudded painfully against my sternum and the slickness of fear prickled down my spine.
Something unplaceable flickered across his expression. “Alright?” he asked.
“I’ll do this if you ask it of me,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m at your command, sir.”
After a long moment, General Xilsatra clasped it, his hand warm in mine. “Very well,” he said gravely, sealing my fate.
The foxen had taken refuge in an old temple nestled in the hills.
Two acolytes and a priest had lived there, but no one expected them to be alive.
Most foxen with fewer than five tails weren’t capable of feeding without killing their prey.
Like a wolf eating the viscera of a still-living fawn, a foxen’s victim would metaphysically bleed out, leaving nothing but a husk behind.
What five-tailed foxen did to their victims didn’t bear speaking aloud.
I walked towards doom carrying only a dagger.
The foxen knew it was being hunted and surely knew that I’d been sent to find it for the squads that followed in my wake, but without steel as a defense against its glamor and claws, I would be easy prey.
That was the goal, after all: get the foxen to touch me for long enough that I could catch it with my allure geas and either kill it or hold it for the specially-trained soldiers of the First Army.
The air grew cooler as I followed the overgrown path up to the temple.
Small spirit-houses dotted the ground between the trees, little stone buildings shrouded in moss and inhabited by mice and fennets that blinked up at me with dark round eyes.
The birdsong fell away when I got close to the temple.
Adrenaline made the day brighten and the back of neck prickle with warning as I stepped out of the forest onto the mossy stone of the temple courtyard.
A young woman was sweeping the flat slates.
Her brown hair was in a rumpled braid, as if she’d slept in it for days, and her working dress looked muddy and discolored.
Perhaps today was the day for heavy cleaning, taking care of everything before the storm rolled in.
The twig broom she held in her hands moved back and forth, back and forth, scratching across the same patch of stone over and over as she hummed tunelessly, alternating the same two notes.