FSE

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Chapter One

[Danilo has been chased down to the river near his school in the European city of Tigue by a couple bullies, teasing him about the suspicion that he's gay. The bullies made a scene in the student center, so Danilo's friends are now texting him, concerned.]

His phone buzzed with a text message. Taye, and the first word was "Tiguey," which was the mouse's pet name for him. He'd only known Taye a month and already he had a pet name.

Danilo put the phone back in his pocket, but felt as though the message were pulsing against his hip. He sighed and took it out again, and read the whole thing.

Tiguey, I heard about stupid elk. Hugs. I am sorry but you cannot let him define your life.

What could he say to that? "Yeah, I'm sorry too." And hugs weren't going to make things any better. Anyway, it wasn't like he and Taye were even dating, and they certainly weren't boyfriends. Danilo had met Taye at a gay bar he hadn't even had the courage to walk into--a fox who'd approached him outside had gone to fetch Taye upon learning Danilo was a student at the Université Catholique. They'd gotten along, and Taye hadn't even pressed him about being gay, had just let their relationship grow in its own time. It was still at the 'friend' stage, but definitely 'friends with interest.' Taye had a way of making Danilo feel like he didn't have to worry about the world outside, like he could be brave and do things he'd dreamed of without worrying about what it would mean.

Danilo's crush on Anita, by contrast, was clearly going nowhere. The zorro's exotic beauty and colorful, quirky fashion sense put her in another league from him, and if they hadn't been assigned to be study partners in their Continental history class, Danilo doubted she would even have spoken to him. But she was smart as a whip, and kind to boot, and she reminded him of a fox from his prep school who had deserved far better than the louts she dated.

Taye had felt naturally close to Danilo in a way nobody else had, not in prep school, not at Université. Taye's family, a Romany clan, had lived in three different countries during his childhood; he had seen the toppling of one autocratic regime from his bedroom window and had fled one city, his family pursued as thieves. Danilo's quiet life in Chellingham felt as dull as the Saône's placid blue water compared to the quick, lively mouse's tales, but Taye kept asking him questions about boarding school, about cricket, about Anglic pop music and the wonders of Londinium, and it wasn't just that first night, when they'd talked in a small café until well past midnight. The comfort, the closeness had only grown stronger.

And now, thanks to a cousin he hadn't seen in years and an elk he wished he'd never see again, he was going to have to stop hanging out with Taye. He couldn't just be friends because, to be perfectly honest, Danilo was intensely curious about what would come next if he did decide to act on his urges. Partly, he rationalized, it was the comfortable feeling he had with Taye. Partly it was just that someone was interested in him that way for the first time in three years.

Partly, too, it was that Taye's warm, lively manner made Danilo want to be near him. No; he was happy when he was near Taye, or at least happier, and had spent so much time with him that Orwin had commented just two days ago that he felt like he had a single room. But that world with Taye, that was separate from his real life, and Cobb had just nastily reminded him of that.

Danilo looked down at his phone again and sighed. He texted back: I'll be fine. Thanks.

The phone was growing slick with the moisture in the air. He lowered his paw to his pocket, but before he could slide the damp phone into it, it buzzed in his paw.

Taye's name again, and the words "Come over after..."

The tiger sighed, his sense of peace fading. He extended a claw and read the whole message: Come over after class, we'll talk about it.

The words shone in the dim twilight under the bridge, with the rain dancing over stone and crackling into water, all around him. He stabbed at the button to reply and typed out: I don't think I should see you for a while.

They looked like words someone else had written. He paced forward to the edge of the shelter, back again, forward to where stray drops sprinkled his phone screen. His thumb hesitated over Send, and then stabbed down with grim resolve.

His paw slipped. He fumbled, clutched at the phone, but it shot out of his paw as though yanked by a wire. There was a sharp crack as it hit the stones, and that was bad enough, but it kept going, sliding toward the river.

"Oh, no." Danilo's feet felt rooted to the ground. He pulled them forward in slow motion as the phone slid ahead of him across slick grey slate. He leapt as it slowed, lunged with fingers outstretched...

His fingers closed over the phone. A brief flash of triumph warmed him, even as the warm metal and rain slid against his pads and the phone squirted free.

Lying prone on the bank, he watched it hop once, twice, and then vanish over the edge. He didn't even hear the splash as it was swallowed by the water.

His elbow and hip ached where he'd fallen on them, and he'd banged his jaw, too. But the shame and anger overwhelmed all of that. On top of everything else, he'd lost his mobile and he would have to get a new one. He might have enough money. Probably he would have to ask his parents for help.

Balefully, he stared at the river. If only it had been a little farther, or if he hadn't taken one more step. If only the surface of the water were rubber, so that the phone would bounce...

And then he noticed another raft of debris, two sticks and a sodden mass of paper floating just beyond the stone edge he could see. Heart beating, he crawled forward. The floating garbage island revealed itself to him: more paper, a cardboard box lid, three crushed cans. And as his head slid over the side, there, incredibly, rested his phone. Half-submerged, probably ruined, but--but no, it was still glowing.

Danilo stretched a paw out, but the phone was a good foot beyond where he could reach. He stared at it, willing it closer even as the slow swirl of the current carried it away, not closer. There was nothing he could reach to pull it to him, and he worried that it was so delicately balanced that if he disturbed the mass, his phone would sink into the Saône, gone forever as he'd feared just seconds before.

Without taking his eyes from the glow, he rose to his feet. No sticks or branches lay on the bank--curse Tigue's effective public cleanliness. He eyed the murky water again. Well, he was already somewhat damp. Getting a little more wet to get his phone back wouldn't be such a tragedy.

He dropped his book bag and stepped back to jump in, and then his eye caught the cuff of his lilac shirt. He wouldn't want to get that dirty in the water. And there was nobody watching, nobody above or below. Even in a teeming city like Tigue, the rain had driven everyone to shelter. So he stripped off the shirt, tried not to think about how his scrawny frame would look when wet, and then paused again. He took out his wallet and then thought about sprinting thieves, black-furred and hiding in the shadows, waiting for the moment he dove to snatch his valuables and run off. He growled and put his wallet back in his pocket. He could just take off his pants. He wore boxers that were close enough to swim trunks, and besides, he would be in and out of the water in a minute.

Taking one more long look to either side, he slid his pants down and bundled them with his shirt and bag in a pile at the base of the old stone pylon he'd been leaning against. They almost disappeared into the shadows themselves.

Danilo looked down at his white fur, black-striped, and the white boxers with the pink-stitched fox icon on them, now the only bit of color on his body. He brushed it and then glanced back at his clothes, and around the river bank again. A shadow flickered in his peripheral vision, but when he focused on that part of the bridge support, all remained still. He crossed his arms over his chest and walked to the edge, looking down at his phone. He would have to jump in beside it and grab it--no, maybe just diving in headfirst, paw outstretched, because if he dove beside it, the swell would take the phone elsewhere. But then what if he pushed the phone under the water? No, maybe he should lower himself into the water gently and then come up under the phone.

His clothes were still there. The shadow wasn't moving. The rain slackened, and the small island of debris rotated slowly before him. He took a breath and rubbed the fur along his arms, and then crouched down at the edge.

It would be easy, just like the swimming pool back at Chellingham Academy. He pressed his paws to the stone and was distracted for a moment by a worn groove in the large stone under his fingers: a number three. Beside it, three more numbers, so faint he could only see them from this angle and up close, the sheen of water accenting the lines of the numbers: 1503. A year? The stones could be that old, for sure.

He sighed. Stop procrastinating, he told himself. He lowered one foot to the water, lower and lower, waiting for the chill lap at his toes. It didn't come. He stretched his foot down farther and still didn't feel the water.

Maybe the air was chill enough that it was the same temperature. But he ought to have felt the water before now. He tried to turn his head to look while extending his leg to its full length.

The water rippled an inch below his toe. He slid his other foot off the stone, but one of his claws snagged on the edge of the stone. Muscles pulled against unexpected resistance, overcompensated, and Danilo scrabbled at the lichen-slick surface. His claws scored ridges in the grey and green patterns but found no purchase solid enough to stop his body toppling backwards. He twisted, trying to catch sight of his phone as he sucked in a quick, desperate breath. A flash of glowing blue, and then the water hit him, closed over him, and he shut his eyes and fell into cold darkness.

Chapter Two

His arms and legs thrashed, trying to bring himself back to balance, and for a moment he swam disoriented, unsure which way was up. Relax, he reminded himself. You know gravity and buoyancy.

After a moment of calming his limbs, he opened his eyes. The darkness to his right seemed deeper than to his left, so he rotated his body until the dark was down and the light was up, and indeed, when he let his body float, it moved toward the light. His breath was running out. Water rushed past him, pressure on his ears eased, and then he burst up into the air again.

His phone had been--over there? He turned around and around. The water looked different from this angle, the choppy rain churning its brown surface into foam. The little raft of debris was nowhere to be seen.

Brilliant. Just splendid. He'd no doubt sunk it when he fell gracelessly into the water, and the paper and sticks and cardboard and phone were all drifting to the bottom of the Saône. Danilo treaded water and stared through the murky brown. There was no glow of blue, no matter where he looked, and he couldn't see past his waist, much less track a small clump of garbage. The surface of the river hid currents he could not track, and though the phone had most likely gone directly to the bottom, it could have drifted in any direction. The battery had probably shorted out, and there was no way he would find it. He was lost. He was lost, and now he was soaked on top of it all.

The stone bank seemed higher than he remembered, but by bobbing in the water and wedging his fingers into cracks in the stone, he was able to throw a paw over the top. Then he had to pull himself up.

He had assumed that would be the easy part, but even with the water's buoyancy helping, he struggled to pull himself up. His paw slipped, and he stayed plastered to the wall, fur sticking to the stone, breathing hard and fast. This was going to be okay. He was not going to be stuck in the river. He could always float downstream; there were places where the river wall wasn't quite as high. But not being able to pull himself out felt like a justification of everything Cobb and Georg would tease him about: weakling, wimp.

(homo)

He growled inwardly, and lunged upward again, fingers clawing at the stone. And then he heard a voice, the first sound he'd heard over the rain (which had stopped, though the air still smelled of it) in a quarter of an hour.

"There's someone in the Saône!"

Footsteps, and then a face appeared over the edge, an otter's whiskered muzzle. He extended a thick paw down, fingers wiggling. "Can you take hold of my paw?"

Danilo nodded and grasped it gratefully, using the otter's strength and his other paw's grip on the stone to pull him up. He sat on the stone, wrapped his arms around himself, and shivered. His fur was not only soaked, it was filthy. Even in the half-light under the rainstorm, he could tell that the water had stained him a light brown.

Water pooled on the stone beneath him, running into the 1503 he remembered. The numbers were clearer now, much clearer. The light must have improved, or the angle.

"However did you manage to fall into the river?"

The otter crouched beside him, smiling. He wore a loose white shirt, fastened with a leather tie around the collar, and both the shirt and his slick brown fur were damp with rain. Just inside the collar of the shirt, he wore a tan scarf of some sort.

"I...jumped in." Danilo paused, not sure how to tell the rest of the story in a way that would not make him sound like an idiot.

"Luc," a high voice said from behind the otter, "we haven't time for this. He's out of the water; send him on his way."

The voice rang familiar in Danilo's ears. He looked up and saw a grey figure in a similar white shirt, with a similar touch of beige beneath the collar, but where the otter wore dirty grey pants with ragged cuffs, this figure's pants were the same color and oddly loose fit as his shirt. They looked like costumes from some medieval recreation society. He stepped forward, out of the deeper shadow, and Danilo gasped.

"Taye? What are you doing here?"

The otter's eyes widened. He jumped backwards and to his feet as the mouse brought up his arms. It was only as Danilo stood that he saw the thin silvery blade the mouse's paw was clasping. He took a step back and then felt the edge of the stone below his heel. "Whoa," he said. "Hold on. Let's not get crazy."

The otter remained guarded. "What is this?"

The mouse's eyes, too, were wide, his ears back. "Sir, how come you to know my name?"

Danilo stared. "Taye, it's me, Danilo. From the Université? You just sent me a message..."

Taye--if it was him--shook his head slowly. "You are mistaken."

"But--your name is Taye."

"Théodore, yes. But I do not know any 'Danilo.' Are you Etruscan?"

"No, I'm Anglic--look, I just talked to you..." Danilo trailed off, for the first time taking in the clothes they were wearing. "Are you doing some kind of costume thing?"

"An Anglic tiger?" Théodore laughed sharply. "I have seen tigers in Etrusca, yes, even in the south of our own country, but none from so far north as Anglia."

"You do not speak with the harshness of an Anglian." The otter's voice was gentler, but still wary.

"With the sound of--" Danilo shook his head. "What do you think we're speaking...now?"

Both otter and mouse stared at him, and he became aware that the words he was speaking were not English words. He understood them as though they were, but his mouth was forming other words and speaking them fluently.

"The water's addled his mind." Théodore waved a pink, hairless paw. Danilo remembered the touch of those fingers on his arm, his side. "We'd best leave him for the garde. Anyway, if he's from Etrusca, and alone, he's probably diseased."

"What the hell is going on?" Danilo demanded.

"He shows no signs of disease," Luc countered. "Look at him. He's frightened, he's cold; that is all. Would you want to be left to the garde?"

"That is a different matter," the mouse snapped. "And yet...he recognized me, somehow. Perhaps he's one of LeSevre's spies."

"He would hardly let your name slip so easily if that were the case. But it might be best to make sure."

"I don't know who LeSevre is." Danilo stepped forward. "I came down here to get away from Cobb. Taye, I just talked to you..." He still had no idea what was going on, how this language was spilling from his lips, and any thread of familiarity had to be seized as though he were still flailing in the water.

Again, otter and mouse turned to him with wide eyes. The mouse lowered his paw, and put his knife away. "Cobb? You mean Argile?" He turned to the otter. "I don't suppose one of LeSevre's would claim to be chased by him, personally."

"I'm not!" Danilo gestured down his body. "Just let me get my clothes, and I'll go. I won't bother you any longer."

"Where are your clothes, then?" Luc stepped back.

"They're right..." He walked between otter and mouse, to the stone pylon. It gleamed in the grey light, free of lichen, its edges sharp and fresh. Around its base, clean stone glistened, and nowhere did Danilo see a purple shirt and khaki pants. He rounded on the mouse and otter. "They were here. Did you take them?"

Théodore scoffed. "And put them where?" He showed both his empty paws. "We saw no clothes."

"Then why did you come down here?" The breeze was chilly. Danilo hugged himself, rubbing his arms again, and glared at the two.

They exchanged looks. "I tell you, we should leave him," the otter said.

"I don't think we should leave him." Théodore rubbed his whiskers. "Unless you mean 'in the Saône.'"

A chill breeze rose from the river, or perhaps the chill ran the other way, down Danilo's back. His tail curled around his legs, and the gulf of water behind him yawned like a bottomless pit. "Whatever you're playing," he began, and then stopped and looked, really looked, around him.

The stone pylon, free of lichen. The '1503' carved freshly in the stone on the river bank. The grey-white stone of the bridge that rose above him streaked with dark stains from water and moss but with no painted graffiti. No buildings scratched at the northern horizon, nothing but greenery and trees on the hill where the Université

(should have been)

was, and, as he turned slowly, only a row of brown-roofed buildings on the other side of the river surrounded the familiar cathedral where just a moment ago there had been big blocks of apartments and office buildings. And no more bridges lay between him and the curve of the Saône. Down the river, an unsteady-looking pile of wood extended half into the river: an otter community. They weren't allowed to build on the river like that, not in cities; it was unsanitary and blocked other people's access. Back in Chellingham, Danilo had learned about the dismantling of the great otter houses on the Thames, and that had been...well, after the Restoration, he thought. Sometime in the 1700s.

What's more, the air was different; he didn't have Anita's sense of smell, but there was a raw earthiness, damp from the rain, that permeated everything. No smell of automobile exhaust, no sewage--well, no processed sewage. He could smell some waste, but it was the smell of a backed-up toilet or a stable, not of a septic tank. A smoky tang hung in the air, too, like the trace of a fire that had been quenched by the rain.

The sensation he'd had in the river, of being trapped and never able to escape, returned with such force that he staggered back, his heel landing on the edge of the stone. "What's going on?" he whimpered. "Where am I?"

"Stay calm." Luc looked alarmed, and reached out to grasp Danilo's arm. "You're in Tigue."

"No," Danilo said. "This isn't Tigue--it's not the Tigue I know--it's--"

Pressure in his chest squeezed his heart like a vise. He sucked in a breath against it, and exhaled it in a loud sob. His legs buckled, but the otter caught him before he could fall. Don't cry, don't cry, he told himself, clamping his mouth shut and sealing his throat against the sobs that wanted to come out.

"City has changed." Luc sounded more patient now. "Maybe that's it, Théodore. He must have been here years ago. Maybe he knew you then."

The mouse hadn't sheathed his knife, but he didn't bring it back up either. "I'm not the same as I was years ago." He looked up and down the bank, away from Danilo.

Luc ignored that comment, and Danilo hung on his words. "If it's been ten years since you were here, well. This stonework all went in about five years ago, and the market's burned down and been rebuilt, too. I wouldn't recognize it."

"Five years ago?" Danilo looked down at the carved numbers in the stone. "What...what year is it?"

"Tis the year of our lord fifteen hundred and eight," the otter responded promptly.

"Fifteen...oh eight?" Danilo shook his head. "Oh, then I'm dreaming. That's what's happening."

Luc's grasp on his arm loosened. "He is delirious."

Théodore still didn't look at Danilo, but now looked mostly to his left. "It's no use staying here now. We can meet again tomorrow."

"Aye, but what of..." The otter turned to Danilo again. "Danilo, was it?"

Danilo nodded. For a dream, his fur was very cold and his boxers very wet, and he was aware of a fetid smell that was coming from him--or, more accurately, from the water soaking him.

Théodore waved a paw. "What do I care? I--" He stopped, and then sheathed the knife with a curse. "Run!"

Luc released Danilo and hurried after the mouse without a question. Danilo stared stupidly after them, then looked at what they were running from.

Two pairs of feet--no, three now--descended the far staircase. They had grey pants, but before Danilo could see more, a paw grabbed his arm and yanked him away. He looked down at Luc's whiskered muzzle. "Come on," the otter said. "It's no good if you're caught here."