“What do you know about nine-tail foxes?” asked Misty Peak.

Sen gave her a smirk and started to count on his fingers. The fox looked like she might actually lose a bit of her sanity when he did that, so Sen took a little pity on her.

“Let’s assume that I know nothing about your people, or at least not enough to matter for this conversation.”

She frowned a little. “It would be easier if you did know something. If you didn’t know, foxes aren’t like other spirit beasts in a lot of ways. We’re born with more, well, I guess you’d call it self-awareness. We develop more like humans than beasts. We don’t have to evolve out of being feral is what I mean. We also interact more with humans, which probably reinforces all of that. Because we’re more like humans, we’re a lot more fractured than most kinds of spirit beasts. It’s more like loosely associated clans than a society. But there is a hierarchy based on how many tails you have and how much power you hold.”

“Wait,” said Sen. “Aren’t those the same things for you? Number of tails and amount of power, I mean.”

“It’s about as true as the relationship between your cultivation advancement and power. Generally speaking, more tails does equal more power. Much like having a higher advancement means having more power. As you well know, though, it’s not anything like an absolute. Some people are more naturally gifted and can get more out of what they have, which lets them bridge the gap. Some people,” she said, giving him a look, “are freakish anomalies who just ignore pesky things like the differences between levels of advancement and do whatever the hells they want anyway.”

Sen rolled his eyes. “It’s not as simple and carefree as I make it look.”

“If you say so. At any rate, those same kinds of discrepancies exist among foxes just like they do among human cultivators. Some foxes are just better at being foxes. They advance faster, hold more power, and exert more authority. Once you get to be a true nine-tail fox, you’re in a position to order around pretty much any other fox you meet. I’ll give you one guess about the identity of the most powerful nine-tailed fox.”

“Laughing River?” asked Sen in a tired voice.

“Oh, good. You can draw straight lines when someone holds your hand.”

A piece of Sen felt like he ought to be surprised, but he really wasn’t. He’d been running around with stupidly powerful beings for a long time now. What was one more? Still, it wasn’t good news. If he was just some random fox, the whole betrayal thing seemed far-fetched. If he was something with a lot of authority among the foxes, it became more plausible. Not necessarily likely but plausible.

“Yeah, I can sip tea all by myself, too,” said Sen. “So, grandpa nine tails is a big mover and shaker among your fox clans.”

“More like the big mover and shaker. He was, at any rate.”

“So, this is where we come to the big betrayal?”

Misty Peak nodded. “There are only a handful of foxes who have the power to call a gathering of all the foxes. He was one of them. And that’s exactly what he did.”

“All of them? Like every single one in the world?”

She hesitated at that. “I suppose he could have, but it would have taken years for it to happen. He called for a gathering of all the foxes in this part of the world.”

“The whole continent?”

“For all intents and purposes, yes. We were to gather at a place near the Mountains of Sorrow.”

Sen nodded. “A midpoint for everyone. Makes sense. Go on.”

“It wasn’t a popular decision, as you might imagine. We’re independent by nature, but most of the foxes went. The older and more powerful ones in particular. Laughing River had issued the summons, and you don’t defy the most powerful fox alive. After they arrived, they were slaughtered to the last man and woman. Yet, somehow, he survived a mass execution that killed every other true nine-tailed fox. All of our elders. You don’t just walk away from something like that unless you’re involved.”

Sen let all that information roll around in his head. There were holes in her reasoning, big ones, but he could understand why she thought what she did. All other things being equal, the person who survived when no one else did was usually either absurdly lucky or profoundly guilty. In her shoes, he’d probably make the same assumptions. That didn’t change the fact that they were still assumptions. He also got the impression that this wasn’t especially recent. It had the feeling of a story that Misty Peak had heard from someone, rather than events she remembered herself. If it had happened in her lifetime, Sen suspected that it had happened very, very early in her lifetime. Sen knew better than anyone that stories had a way of mutating over time.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

There was also something eerily familiar about the story. The details weren’t exactly the same, but it was close enough to what had happened to the ghost panthers to make Sen wonder. Had Laughing River summoned them all there to decide if they were going to bow down to some kind of spirit beast king? Still, it didn’t sound like the foxes had been hunted to near-total extinction. Had they been too spread out or was it just a betrayal? Sen didn’t have enough information, and he didn’t think Misty Peak had the information to give him. He was going to have to talk Laughing River. That thought raised a pertinent question.

“Did anyone actually talk to Laughing River after it happened?” asked Sen.

“Why would we? You don’t let a traitor justify themselves to you.”

Sen was tempted to challenge that entire line of thought, but he could see from her face that it wouldn’t do any good. No argument based on pure logic was going to sway her thinking.

“Thank you for telling me,” said Sen.

“You don’t believe me,” Misty Peaks almost snarled.

“I don’t think you’re trying to mislead me if that’s what you mean. I believe that you believe what you said.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Sen. “You’ve been living with this your entire life. This happened to your people. I’ve been living with it for about two minutes. It happened to a people I’m not going to pretend that I understand. I have to believe that there are nuances here that I’m not getting. Most importantly, I’ve only heard your side.”

“What more do you need to hear? He betrayed us. Most of our people died. It’ll be centuries before we recover if we ever do.”

“And what if someone accused you of something like this?”

Fury lit Misty Peak’s eyes. “I would never betray my people like that! How dare you even suggest it!”

Sen held up his hands in what he hoped would be seen as a placating gesture. “I believe you. But what if someone did? Wouldn’t you want somebody to come and ask you about it before they signed your death warrant?”

She wanted to say no. It was written all over her face that she wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t go and ask, but he’d backed her into a corner. No one would want to be accused of such a heinous crime and then be declared guilty without ever getting to defend themselves. He could also tell that she hated him a little bit for making her confront that basic truth. Sen understood. She’d set out on what she saw as a righteous mission of well-deserved vengeance. He had made her put herself into her grandfather’s place, if only for a moment or two. He suspected that had taken some of the glow of righteousness off what she’d been doing. He knew he wouldn’t thank someone for doing that to him. And it wasn’t as though he had a real opinion about it one way or the other.

Laughing River might be guilty. He may well have sold out his people to ensure his own survival. He didn’t seem quite that ruthless to Sen, but dying could change a person. He might have been more callous a few hundred years back. He might also be the sole survivor of something that Sen wouldn’t wish on anyone. That was the kind of experience that would scar someone forever. The only way to find out was to do what Sen had suggested and talk to the elder fox. Sen hoped that it wasn’t true because that would put him in a tough spot. Misty Peak had remained in a seething silence while Sen thought things over. When she finally did speak, it came out as a hoarse whisper.

“Yes. I would want someone to talk to me.”

Sen offered a single inclination of his head as a response. He didn’t rub in his victory. It wasn’t the kind of victory you celebrate if your brain was working properly. He was also distracted by a random thought that seemed to spring out of nowhere. A thought that made him want to start banging his head very hard against something very solid.

“If Laughing River was or is the most powerful nine-tail fox, and you’re his granddaughter,” Sen said almost against his will, “does that make you some kind of nine-tail fox princess?”

The question seemed to leave Misty Peak a little flummoxed.

“What? I mean, we don’t really have that sort of thing, but I guess you humans might think of it that way. Why?”

“Gods damn it,” said Sen as he directed a baleful glare toward the sky. “Not. Funny.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked the fox.

“The universe,” muttered Sen. “The big, stupid, not funny universe.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Politics. Never get involved in politics. You’d think it would be easy, right? But, no! Apparently, it’s not easy at all if you’re me.”

“Politics? What’s political?”

“Oh, come on! You’re brighter than that. Whatever your personal feelings about all this are, he’s a king or the next best thing to it. You aren’t talking about killing your grandfather. You’re talking about deposing a monarch. It doesn’t get any more political than that. And, since you’re basically a princess, it’s not just deposing a king. It’s a coup.”

Misty Peak just stared at him with her mouth hanging open a little. Shaking his head, Sen decided that he’d had enough formation building for one day. He just turned and started trudging away in the direction of the galehouse. Maybe some spirit beast will choose today to be monumentally stupid and pick a fight with me on the way back, thought Sen. I could use something to take out my frustrations on.

“Wait,” shouted the fox. “Where are you going?”

“To have an incredibly awkward conversation with a king,” answered Sen. “Again.”