Foxwife
Beside the tracks, poisoned plants and starving trees struggle fitfully for meagre supplies of tainted water and soured light. There is a way through the wire into the wasteland.
There is always a way through for a sure-footed, four-footed Fox-wife and a nimble-fingered Fiddlehawk. There are always paths for such as we. Running as fox, soaring on hawk wings we move through the land. Fiddler and … what? He calls me wife but he doesn’t own me. Still it’s safer this way. Fewer questions. When we feast on chicken and the wolf is at the door, he stands forth in my defence.
Who sees the fox or marks the hawk’s flight? Few, so few in this land of millions. Are we so common a sight that none remark it? Or perhaps we are not really here at all. Haunters of wasteland, our secrets are our own.
There is a calling in the North. Woods awaking. Sap rising, the old spirits stir with the turning year. A growing promise pulls us and we journey. Four in two, two in one we journey alone.
By night we rest. He rests, I hunt. Hawks can’t fly in the dark. Rabbit odour from across the tracks as I set off. Pause. Listen. Move. The tracks hum and I wait for the roaring, bright-lit carriages to thunder by. Blur and flicker of humanity as I poise before crossing. To get it wrong could be fatal. There are sodden remains littering this devastation that lie as a warning. Quick-stepping the metal rails I reach the cover of brambles. Shortly I have my prize and return.
Fiddlehawk has found a place out of sight and risked a fire. The night is colder and darker in human form but I have a taste for cooked meat and it is easier to manage thus. When needs must he will take hawk and eat but he is fastidious and prefers not. He does not change form as easily as I, slipping in and out, human to fox, fox to human as simply as moving through shadows. Hawk is much smaller. Perhaps there is pain in that. We do not speak of it but he rarely eats as hawk even by day and I hunt for both. Needs must.
In our journey North we need to pass through towns and I must move with even more care. There are native foxes here with spaces to defend and they take unkindly to strangers. Mostly then I must go human, but the dogs still know me.
In the streets of day, Fiddlehawk plays and sometimes I dance. The people are often indifferent but some give money. Some give only abuse. Sometimes, unknowing Kindred will be drawn to the bright notes as I was once. There is a yearning in such encounters but I have never known another to change. No other joins us.
Fiddlehawk says I am only the second Kindred he has known to follow the Dance and he has been playing the land for so long.
On good days, when we have money enough we find ourselves a pub and eat and drink till it’s all gone. Sometimes we play for the people and then others will join us for a time. Some are Kindred and once or twice I have felt a contact but none join the Dance.
