Two Foxes

Dewclaw

 After a good sleep on a bed that was still eight times better than anything at the side of the road, Harry found himself attended by a young woman with the most striking red hair he’d ever seen—even redder than they young man the night before, and redder than the fox that now followed the woman instead of the man. The woman offered him a meagre loaf of black bread for breakfast. Remembering the red-headed man of the night before, he wondered it the two were related.

“Good morning! May I introduce myself as Harry, the minstrel from a great and far off land! I speak seven languages fluently, and am well versed in the harp, flute, and all of the required material to be memorized in the studies of epics, romances and drinking music.” Harry nudged the girl with his elbow. “And I make a hell of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, if you were wondering.”

“I was not,” said the girl, with her brown eyes to the floor. She broke the loaf in half and Harry was dismayed to realize they were to share it.

“May I ask your name?”

“Dewclaw.”

Harry continued to entice her into conversation. “Are you a lady in waiting here?”

“There is no lady to wait on,” the girl answered. Harry sensed that she didn’t have a full grasp of the language, which explained her shyness.

“You’re a maid then?”

“Slave. I am slave.”

“Oh, sorry. I just thought no one as beautiful as you could be a slave,” Harry said.

“Is punishment.”

“Oh.”

“Stealing. I steal chickens.”

Harry wondered that he wasn’t choking on his foot, he’d shoved it so far in his mouth, but he was excited to have found the suffering he had been waiting for.

“I can’t imagine the king keeping you as a slave and not offering you some kind of… arrangement.”

Dewclaw looked away. “King offers arrangement. He want me in his bed, yes, and he will free Fastfoot. But no.”

“Who’s Fastfoot? Is he the red-haired man I saw last night?”

“Yes.”

“Is he your brother?”

“He is husband. He say he rather be slave.”

“Have you never tried to run away?”

Dewclaw put down her half of the loaf, and a russet form slunk through the stall door to sit beside her. “You cannot understand.” She rose to her feet, taking the loaf again. “Must go, have work.”

“I hope to see you again.” Harry watched her leave. He was fascinated, and he wasn’t sure if it was her hair or her story. Or perhaps it was the fox. Not every slave keeps a pet fox.

Harry knew this was the tale that would make him famous. “Two star-crossed lovers, doomed to slavery for thieving chickens.” He thought about that for a moment. It didn’t sound as romantic when he said it aloud. “I must stay as long as it takes to get this song down, whatever nightly singing and playing I must to do.”

Every night the red-haired Fastfoot escorted him to bed in the stables before taking up his own bed in the loft above. And every morning, Dewclaw brought him his breakfast. Harry liked to think he had befriended them, but it was so hard to tell from their short answers and broken language. He tried all the languages he knew with them, but it didn’t help.

And sing and play he did, every night, the same thing. It must have amused the king to see a person suffer. Harry concluded that he needed to learn and appreciate what it was teaching him. “Suffering is the key to becoming a great minstrel, my boy,” said Harry’s master over and over in his mind as he played.