A Fox in the House of Badgers

Richard claimed that the guardians of the Trase manor were wolves, sharp-muzzled with cold blank eyes and teeth like whetted blades, they stood ten feet up on two pillars that framed the gate. Rust ate at the metal, but the thickets of iron gorse remained, swiss-holed but sturdy.

Alicia did not want to touch it. Those wolves towered over her like massive birds, and where the rain wore their faces scared her the most. She could not place why.

“You’ve been here once, aye?” Richard asked. Two massive hands curled around a bar on either gate door as he shoved the thing open with a horrible squeal. A shard of gravel launched from beneath his feet, bouncing off the car bumper with a tink.

“Once,” she said, her elbow rested on the passenger window. She could not help him if she tried, removing herself from the car would be a feat in and of itself; the baby had grown like a weed in the last month. Sometimes she could scarcely breathe, let alone open a rickety old gate to a - she had to be honest with herself - terrifying manor.

“Lovely to be back. No offense to England, of course,” Richard said with a swipe of his hands. Flecks of rust flew from his fingers, almost as red as his hair. “But there’s always something about home, isn’t there? I want our boy to grow up here. To know where he’s from.”

“Here as in-”

“Northern Ireland,” he said. “Not the home. Though I love the home.”

He clambered back into the car, the top of his head grazing the roof of the car. Alicia fought the urge to smooth back a rogue tuft of fox-red hair.

“It’s no place for a child,” she said. “As much as you may love it. The sooner the cottage is built, the better.”

“I grew up here,” Richard noted, ice-chip eyes flitting over her face. She had never seen a man with eyes so blue, they had captivated her the moment he blinked - and that was not hyperbole. She had fallen in love so easily. 

“I don’t want to be dependent on your father,” she said carefully. Richard seemed to weigh this truth for a moment too long before shrugging his broad shoulders and starting the car back up. Perhaps he recognized the overbearing nature of his father and the bitter oppression the man forced into every syllable. Alicia had feared him from the beginning, and that would not change because he had allowed them into his home.

The car lurched forward, and she shot a final glance at the wolves, thinking that they looked remarkably more vulpine than lupine.

If the manor had ever been new, the great stone walls had forgotten it, and with those memories had gone the fountain at its fore, the figure at its peak weathered past recognition. Moss crept up the sides, little hands reaching for stagnant green water.

A faint gravel road encircled the fountain, small posts with horse heads and a single heavy ring lining either side. How they retained their shape but the fountainhead had not was beyond Alicia’s understanding.

The house itself was a towering thing, the faux-turret behind the front door evoking an almost castle-like appearance. Beneath a sculpted archway stood Cadmus Trase.

Richard’s father was a big man - as were most Trases - with hands the size of dinner plates, a jaw so sharp it could cut glass, and eyes somewhere between the grey of wildfire smoke and the deep blue of the sea. Alicia looked at him and she could not imagine him being a father to two boys, let alone a good one.

He smiled his politician’s smile and opened his arms.

“My boy,” Cadmus said, beckoning Richard forth. His long-legged form slipped out of the car with surprising ease, leaving Alicia to stumble out on her own ticket. Father and son embraced for a scant moment before Cadmus held Richard at arm’s length, eyed him up and down like a cut of meat.

“When does construction start?” Cadmus asked with the distant interest of an acquaintance. 

The pair turned toward the house, towering frames matched as they passed through the front doors, and yet Alicia could not shake the illusion that Richard looked smaller. Boyish.

She wondered what her father would think of this place. Likely he’d worry about the acoustics, could one play a piano in a place like this? A guitar? A violin? Trombone? But only after he was certain of his family’s comfort. Beautiful as Ireland was, it was not her home, and her heart ached for her parents.

Everybody feels this way when they move out, she told herself. Everybody.

“Alicia,” Cadmus said, turning suddenly to face her. She came to a halt, lurching momentarily when the weight of her belly did not want to stop so swiftly. He steadied her with a firm, unyielding hand. “Have you had a tour of the place? A proper tour of the place, not whatever my eldest offered you last year. He won’t spoil your stay this time.”

Irritation buzzed in her throat. Rhesus, or Rhys, as he wrote, had been nothing but kind. Set to the background of this house he was outright gallant, sweet and accommodating in every way. And yet they spoke so lowly of him, Richard and Cadmus, as if he were the dirt on their boot.

Richard was nineteen. He could not know better. What was Cadmus’s excuse?

“No,” she replied softly. “I haven’t seen very much of it.”

Nor did she care to, but she would not say that in front of Richard, and she knew that this bitterness was just hormones, was just the rapid-fire pulse of emotion following her first move. So she followed Cadmus through the house, passing old paintings of men with square jaws and chestnut hair and piercing blue eyes, rooms entirely too plentiful for any reasonable family, windows with beautiful views of the woods surrounding the manor. He regaled her with tales of the Trase family history, how this house had belonged to the Starks before Conlan Trase had won it on a bet, how Conlan’s father had replaced every instance of the Stark badger - a statue of which she was shown, and mistook for a bear at first - with the Trase wolf.

She did not know whether to believe the tales or not. Pirates and gamblers, America and Rome and Greece, magic so powerful and well-preserved that it could raze the land for miles. The stories fled her as soon as they had arrived. Her attention was on the paintings.

“Who is he?” She asked once, pointing at a man that reminded her of Richard as much as it did of Cadmus, a middle ground that roiled in her gut.

“My father,” Cadmus said. “He’s the man who traveled to Greece. An explorer of sorts. He died in this house.”

Alicia did not ask again.

Cadmus left them outside of the library, with a glance at the clock and a rough swear. Richard stood opposite Alicia, a small smile on his face, expression hopeful as a child. It was a surprisingly sweet expression for him; he was usually so stoic.

“Well?” He asked.

She smiled. “I can live here until you’ve finished the cottage.”

Richard returned her smile twofold. “Thank you. The size grants you all the freedom in the world, I assure you. Now, would you like for me to show you what I think will be your favorite room in the place?”

Alicia laughed, “I’m actually quite partial to the room with the piano.”

“Nonsense,” he said, his hand swallowing hers. “Come now.”

The doors creaked as they opened, a sound so near a crow’s call that she jumped, the hardness of Richard’s chest preventing her from toppling like a pin. 

He flicked a switch, then another, and the room lit up. 

There were at least eight bookshelves, more counting the ones built into the wall, and they framed the room with every color of the rainbow. Many of the spines had faded, their gold-inlaid titles barely legible, but the ones that had not were beautiful. She spotted classics. She spotted books that had been released in the past decade. One shelf was labelled with names, members of the Trase family forever engraved into fine, aging leather. 

A hearth covered the wall near the door, furthest from the books, and while she could not help but to think that it was amusingly ill-advised, she could not deny the appeal of sitting in one of those two cushy armchairs, a stack of books on the little table between them, fire roaring in front of her.

She imagined herself months down the line, a sleeping baby in one arm and a book in the other. Yes, she thought. This would do.

Alicia explored the nooks and crannies, spun a globe wedged in the corner, sneezed when a layer of dust puffed from its surface. 

And she laughed. High and gleeful, she laughed and she laughed and she laughed, until Richard approached her from behind and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“I’ll assume that’s a yes?” He purred, deep voice rumbling down her spine. She reached back to pat his freckled cheek.

“What’s under the curtain?” She asked, gesturing at the wall opposite the hearth. She had missed it in her delight, but now she faced it, a thick red cloth covering… something. A gold-trimmed line of wood peeked from beneath the fabric, a broken phrase in a language she did not speak glinting up at her.

Richard tensed at her back.

“It’s a painting,” he said. “I… I’ve never liked it.”

“What’s it of? Why not?”

“It’s of a man. An ancestor, my father claims, and I believe it, but he… I don’t know. It doesn’t fit. And it doesn’t come down.”

“It doesn’t come down?” She asked, reaching for it. Richard grabbed her wrist.

“Some sort of magic holds it there. I don’t know why. And I don’t know what all of that says. It’s nonsense, I think. Something in Gaeilge.”

“May I see it?” Alicia said, humor fleeing so that curiosity could settle properly. And it did, deep-seated and burning like an ember to kindling. Richard inhaled sharply, but she felt him nod, his chin bumping the top of her head.

He held her for a moment longer, until she squirmed hard enough that he had no choice but to let go. Alicia had never seen this part of him, this terrified young man, and it baffled her that this fear went unadmitted, that it stemmed from an old painting.

She yanked the cloth, expecting it to flutter elegantly to the floor. It landed with a thud like a dead body.

Alicia gasped.

It was a life-size painting of a man, a Trase judging by his height and stature alone; he wore a loose, flowy tunic with a leather breastplate, his trousers something like doeskin. At a glance she thought he clutched a knife, and upon further inspection she determined that it was a broken jawbone.

Splotches of blood blackened his torn clothing from head to toe, weighed his dark hair to his forehead, leaked from his nostril and a cut in his lip. He was injured, wounds of all sorts littering his body in various stages of healing, but even the old ones were surrounded by blood and angry red flesh.

“What- Why-”

“My father tells me its cursed,” Richard said softly. “That each wound represents a Trase lost in some unnatural way, and that each blood spatter is an injury that shouldn’t have happened. He, um… he says that the scars are deaths that have been avenged, and the open wounds are… they haven’t…”

Alicia stared the painted man in his ocean-blue eyes. He looked at something in the far distance, his handsome, battered face twisted in unimaginable rage. Fear thrummed through her, and the charm the Trase manor had accumulated in Cadmus’ absence faded in an instant.

“Is it true?” She asked.

“I never believed it,” Richard responded. “But the painting scared me even as a kid. We don’t have to stay in here if you-”

“Please finish the cottage,” she said, tearing her gaze from the painting and burying her face in Richard’s chest. “As fast as you can. Please. I don’t- I can’t raise a baby here, Richard. I can’t.”

“Al, I-”

“I can’t, Richard! Not with your father and your mother and all of this history and- and-”

This painting.

She was being irrational, but it had all come at once, her grief and her fear and her desire to go home, to go anywhere that she knew. She was not even twenty, and the weight of her future crushed her. 

“It’s okay,” Richard said quickly, squeezing her tightly, turning their united form toward the door. “I’ll work as fast as I can, right? I’ll hire all the help we can get and it’ll be grand, okay? There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to be afraid of. I’m right here.”

His heart beat steadily in her ear. You are. You are. The heave of her breath eased, and with it went the pain of the emotional break. It would return later, again and again. They’d have to lie to Cadmus at some point, tell him that they had married. She would snap after that. Her baby would have to come sometime. She would snap then, too.

There was nothing she could do about it. Alicia pulled carefully away from Richard, her hands braced against his chest, and she sniffled.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m stressed.”

“Yeah,” Richard replied. “There’s nothing to worry about though, right?”

“Right,” she answered with a wan smile. Her eyes flitted over his shoulder. The painted man stared back.