At once Darcy brought up her sword, moving to place herself between Beatrice and their antagonists. Tibalt edged back until he stood behind the knight, too—eyes darting from the blade at Beatrice’s pack to the way from which they’d come. Struggling with its strappings, Beatrice managed to draw the weapon, hands trembling as she brandished it before her. She glared at the fox man, giving a minute shake of her head. He swallowed.  

“Come to feed our swords, Metzger?” taunted Darcy. 

The inquisitor ignored her, lambent eyes fixing upon Beatrice. She backed away still further, that she might keep both Fox and Jaguar spirits in her view. For that, she realized, was what they both were. The one that hulked behind the inquisitor may have been four times the size of any great cat and had twice the usual amount of legs and teeth. But still it had the general form of the jaguar, and the lashing tail of one, and the spotted fur. And like Metzger’s it was two shades of black—one warm, almost brown, the other nearly blue. 

The beast growled, but Inquisitor Metzger took up an expression that, although clearly troubled, was otherwise unreadable. Her brows furrowed together, the shine of her eyes flashing and fluid almost as though she had been sobbing, the circles beneath them dark. Her lips opened, moved nonsensically…but no words came out. Her hands flew up, and it looked as though she were trying to sign-speak to them, but her fingers clenched and spasmed strangely, and she could form no words. 

Tibalt laughed uproariously, a strange, yipping bark of a sound. 

“Ah,” breathed Darcy. 

“Beastly in life, beastly in death. I do not think our dear inquisitors like what they see in the mirror,” quipped Tibalt. 

“Your sins have cost you much, Metzger. Lord High Inquisitor,” observed the knight. “Be gone, and do not haunt us again, or my sword shall take you.” 

But Metzger the younger jerked her head to the right, and Beatrice supposed she was trying to shake it, to say “no.” 

“Think I their spirit bodies have only just formed,” observed Tibalt. “And bet my shiniest fork-watch, I would, that they’ve been eavesdropping. Alas, to be trapped in the realm of the wrong Great Spirit must be a hard pill to swallow.” 

“I don’t care,” said Darcy.

“So too I’d bet my very best teapot top hat that they intend to follow.”

“You know,” replied the knight. “I think I hate you already.” 

But at Tibalt’s words, the spirit of Inquisitor Metzger jerked her head up and then downward in what was most likely a nod, and a fervent one at that.  

“Are…are spirits able to leave through that mirror portal as well?” Beatrice wondered, not particularly sure whether she was asking Darcy or Tibalt.

“Perhaps,” replied the fox man. 

“I…don’t know,” hedged Darcy, hand still tight about the grip of her sword as she eyed the pair. “And again, I do not care. Be gone.” 

But Inquisitor Metzger fell to her knees before her, hands clasped together and raised in supplication. Darcy took a hasty step backward, her expression—now that Beatrice could see it—was conflicted. 

Does she see some of herself in them, perhaps?

“It would do them no good to harm us any longer, would it?” Beatrice’s voice shook a bit as she spoke, for she could hardly believe what she was suggesting. “They cannot commune with their spirit or reincarnate, cannot ever redeem themselves unless they leave this place, can they, madame?”

Darcy did not meet her gaze, eyes still fixed upon the spirits. 

“No. They cannot.”

“So long as Fox is trapped, so too are all who come here—save those who pass the door at the Heart, and they but few,” said Tibalt. 

“Does not almost everyone deserve that chance?” Beatrice asked of her wife. “The chance to change?” 

The Hyena mage snarled, but her eyes remained fixed on the pleading woman, and she said nothing. 

“And they could help us keep Mr. Tibalt in line, too. Ensure he doesn’t try to run off early with rewards unearned.”  

“That’s Lord Tibalt, if we’re to use titles,” corrected the fox man, crossing his arms.

“That is what you want?” said Darcy, turning her face to look upon her at last. “Are you certain?”

Beatrice gazed upon the supplicant spirits, the partly-human woman and the beast who’d once been a man. What did they really deserve, and what didn’t they? And how could she ever be certain she’d made the right choice? 

I can’t be, she realized as she studied them. But I can be sure that they didn’t. They chose cruelty, and look at what it got them. Trapped in form and place. Robbed of their voices. 

“Yes, I’m certain,” said Beatrice. “Let them follow.” 

This may just be the worst decision I shall ever make. 

 

~*~

 

The presence of the Jaguar spirits made Beatrice deeply uncomfortable. The right thing isn’t always the easy one, she reminded herself. After all, she’d done what any of the kind-hearted ladies of her fairy tales would have done. Yet still, she couldn’t help but regret her decision a little more by the moment. She kept the sword in hand, now, rather than strapping it back to her pack. 

Resuming their route, Tibalt guided them through the twisting path up the hill until at last they spilled out into a hedgerow-enclosed garden at the front of a rather odd house. It was part woodlog cabin, and partly a small tower of cobbled stone, ringed up and down in open windows. As they approached, creatures flew from the openings and into them. By their feathers and the dark sheen of their wings, Beatrice might have guessed them ravens, and what was there of the tower certainly had the look of a rookery. But the birds were all different and all strange, though in ways that were hard to decipher at a distance. 

“Up to the top of the tower we go,” said Tibalt in a sing-song voice as he opened the front door and stepped through. “Unless you should all like to wait here for me as I fetch my things?” 

“I think not,” replied Darcy, holding the door open for Beatrice. Then, following her in, she let it swing shut in Inquisitor Metzger’s face. Shoving it back open, the Jaguar woman followed them through. But her father could not fit, and so outside he stayed…much to Beatrice’s relief. 

“Up and up and up,” sang the fox man as they climbed the bizarre and deeply questionable spiral stair that curled its way up the center of the tower. Upon fixtures jutting from the walls of the open space all around them, creatures that were almost corvid perched. Some had tinkling porcelain plumage, painted in fine patterns, with eyes glazed in gold. Others possessed the features of different beasts entirely—the antlers of deer, the ears of rabbits, the tails of rats. And one of them, gearwork ticking along in the open cavity of its chest, called out in the deep, ringing tones of a grandfather clock.  

Then finally they stepped up through the tower’s one other floor, the stairs creaking and trembling beneath them. There, the circular form of the room was almost entirely concealed by the heaps of furnishings and possessions which occupied it. At once the fox snatched up a pack from a pile of bags of every possible kind, darting about the room as he filled it. 

Wandering over to one of the windows, Beatrice leaned out a bit into the cool, minty open air, drinking in the view and promising herself that, if she ever made it back home, she’d remember and draw it, perhaps even paint it. From here she could see the valley and its river far below, the lights of windows glowing through the mists. The sky was a flat, pinkish gray…washing all in its hazy, sourceless illumination. And on the far mountainface, the pillar of smoke had moved again. But the faint wind blew it away from them, its scent no longer tinging the air. 

As Tibalt packed on and on, Darcy began to tap her foot aggressively. By the time his sack was filled and he snatched up another, she’d lost her patience. 

“Enough!” she barked. “We’ll not be carrying any of that for you.” 

Scowling, the fox tossed the empty bag back upon the pile. 

“You’ll regret your censure, cur,” he said, plucking an item that resembled a cross between a coffee bean grinder and a crystal duck and trying to force it into his already overstuffed bag. “I mean to bring only the greatest of essentials, and I’ve hardly room for half of them.”

But Darcy disregarded his grumbling, her eyes following the Jaguar mage as she paced near the door.

Giving up on the duck, the fox man traipsed over to another of the few windows not crowded from view by possessions, hanging halfway out of it as he peered about. 

“The way looks clear enough,” he declared, pulling back in and turning about to haul up his pack. “Let us be off on our horrid way.” 

“What did you mean, my lord, when you called it the Heart?” wondered Beatrice, following directly behind the fox man as they started back down the stairs. 

“Hm? What now?”

“The Heart. You called Doverwick castle the Heart.” 

“Yes, of course. For that place is the Heart of this realm, and forever has been.” 

Find me through the looking glass, at the heart of the hedge of roses. 

“And what makes it the Heart?” 

Tibalt scoffed. “It is the home and essence of Fox herself, of course. And now, too, it is the gateway to her prison.” 

Beatrice quite nearly stopped short.

“What is it, my lady?” Darcy asked over her shoulder, her breath brushing Beatrice’s ear. She shivered, though not of cold. 

“The note I found in my room, that came with the key I gave to Gray. That’s what it said…to find “A” at the heart of the hedge of roses. Perhaps that’s where Gray is now, too.” 

“I pray it’s so,” said Darcy. They had called out to Gray as they’d went—by voice in human form, and thought-speak in the others. And though the latter method had far greater reach than the former, neither had received any response.

“What will happen, when we reach the Heart, Lord Tibalt?” pressed Beatrice as they spilled out the font door, rejoining the spirit-beast of the former Lord High Inquisitor. “If so few go through…”

The Fox slowed. 

“Oh, my rudely unnamed lady, You are very lucky I’ve the fancy to travel that way for my own and other reasons, for the likelihood of you stepping so much as a single tiny toe past the castle doorstep is even tinier still.” 

“Why?” Darcy’s voice had a growling edge to it. Tibalt’s ear twitched, and his tone lost some of its taunting edge.

“Because no place in this realm is so well-guarded as that,” he replied. “The only way you should ever cross that threshold is if the tyrant wills it so. But there is a chance, however small.” He shrugged. “And so, we cast our dice.”  

“The…the tyrant?” Beatrice’s throat clenched up a bit. 

“The foulest of the foul,” said Tibalt. “The wretch who locked away our divine lady Fox. Lord of the Leeches, Breaker of Ways. The blackguard Daimond-tooth.” 

Darcy slowed, and she and Beatrice exchanged a look. 

“Does this blackguard have the ability to open portals to places in the living realm which he does not occupy in this one?”

Coming to a full stop, Tibalt gave her a keen glance over his shoulder. 

“Oh aye,” he answered. “To his palace prison the Thief King is bound, but there is nowhere in the living world he might not look upon, be it sea, sky or ground.”