Piperamitt

Rabbit's Howl

When I rode the Head Pixie’s cloudship, wind ruffling my hair as fiercely as a winter storm, he asked me why I attended a Fairy high school. I could not fault his curiosity. Proper Anti-Fairy schooling is entirely different: an intricate system of self-guided study, personal projects, traveling the cloudlands, and well-researched presentations. Strictly speaking, I would have been a shoo-in. Believing my future lay at the Anti-Fairy Academy, I’d read books, taken notes, and even outlined papers on the nature spirits before I turned half a decade old. By nine, I considered myself at least marginally informed about my own anatomy and the basics of reproduction. I could have taught a lecture hall. Anti-Elina had wanted me to once or twice, despite the dissenting voices of my mother and the High Count.

Evidently, the Head Pixie knew his way around a share-hall campus. He mentioned off-hand that he’d attended a few on business and one on early education. Said some begrudging thing about admiring our style of citation that quirked my mouth up at one end. Maybe you know the way he leaned against the rail: his chin on one hand, avoiding my eyes the moment pride in his own culture fractured in the face of careful Anti-Fairy academia. I think I proved myself attentive, even if I would have preferred leaning so far over the cloudship’s edge, we had to put that elastic cord he’d tied to me to unexpected test.

“I want to give you some advice,” he told me way back then (not so long ago). Even in the whipping wind, my ears pivoted to catch his every word. I even tore my eyes from the blues and greens and browns of the planet far below us. I’d seen Earth in paintings, of course, but even then, I had not realised it would be so green. It didn’t look half so pretty in the old textbooks of my youth.

“I’ll gladly take it, sir.”

The old chap motioned me away from the rail. He sat me down at a table and two chairs that had been sculpted directly from the wood, which I politely floated above and did not lay my seat upon. With hands folded in front of him, the sky shrieking as our ship flew on, he looked me in the eye and had this simple thing to say: that when a rabbit cries out in pain, the fox is first to come running to its side.

“What?” I asked, unsure I had heard him right at first. He was not a man who often spoke in metaphor. At least, not when I had crossed his path before.

“Reason through it. It’s straightforward; you’re not some Fairywood chump.”

All right. “‘When the rabbit cries out,’” I repeated, “‘it’s the fox who first replies.’” Yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have startled when he dropped those words upon me. “True artistry and painfully sensible. You imply Fairy World does not look kindly upon a Hy-Brasilian such as I.” I did know that. I did not think that he did not know I knew that. Pretty words, but hardly new information.

He made a Speak further motion with the very tips of his fingers. The movement may be slight, but to him (I think), it must have felt as though he painted a target on his head and ran across a saucerbee field. Sometimes I think he would have rather lived and died a mere concept than a person. He said nothing; his pale eye did not so much as twitch. I considered a few wingbeats more.

“The rabbit which survives with twisted leg is the rabbit that silenced its own tongue.”

“The answer I had in mind was ‘flicked off back to its own kind,’ but yes. Accurate. To be clear, you’re getting a decent letter of rec out of me. Dust- If I had the gaskets at your age to ask a multiregional business owner to vouch for me on the blitzing godparent track, I’d be living quite a different life. There’s good magic in godparenting.” Vague gesture. “Helps get it up.”

I concurred. He stood then, bidding me space even though I think he meant to bid good riddance. He went to speak to the captain of the cloudship, and I spent the rest of our flight pressed up against the rail. Still, even when we landed, I turned those words like a feather in my hand. When the rabbit cries, the fox is first to answer.

I threaded that cryptically straightforward statement across my teeth and kept it at my breast. It did not help me anyhow.

… I blitzed a Fairy last night.