by Jaida Jones
Once again, I tried opening my mouth to defend myself, but all I could manage was a kind of grunt in protest.
“I’ll just show you to your room then, shall I?” Hands free once again, the innkeeper’s daughter brushed her skirts out and eyed Rook in a way that suggested hope sprang eternal in the hearts of some women.
“Sure,” Rook said, starting off like he knew the way better than she did. “Come on, Thom. You can finish inhaling that bird when we get there.”
I followed in his wake, careful not to choke myself with the dual purpose of eating and walking.
It was strange to be addressed—in that voice—by a proper name after Rook had put so much time and energy into thinking up the most caustic, personal insults. Stranger still were the times when we forgot ourselves and slipped into John and Hilary—though this happened rarely, after a mutual decision on both our parts.
“It’s just too fucking weird,” Rook had said, which meant that it was too fucking weird when other people called us by names we had long since put aside.
I’d agreed. It was one of the few instances I could recall that we’d been on the same page regarding even the simplest of issues.
“We’re crowded tonight,” the innkeeper’s daughter explained, skirts swishing as she followed Rook up the stairs.
I hadn’t seen many other guests about, but then we’d arrived at the inn rather earlier than I’d expected, on account of Rook’s little shortcut. Inn traffic, as I’d made note of in my travel log, seemed to pick up most at night after the sun had set and travelers realized they hadn’t planned ahead to where they’d be staying. One had to strike first in order to secure the best accommodations, and if one was lax in his preparations, one found himself sleeping under the stars.
It was an unsettling way to go about things, but it seemed to have worked out well so far.
Rook, of course, thrived on it, as he thrived on all things where there was a chance of being eaten or drowned or falling off a cliffside.
The innkeeper’s daughter unlocked the door to our room and stood back to let us survey the surroundings. I tucked the tray of food a little closer against my chest, following Rook inside. It was a fairly standard room, bare but well tended to. Clean. No bugs that I could see, and therefore superior to most of the lodgings I’d taken in Thremedon.
“Bathroom’s just through there,” she said, still behaving as though Rook were the only guest for the night. “I’ll be showing guests in for the rest of the evening, but if you need anything at all, my room’s second from the left on the first floor, and local people know not to bother me much past eleven.”
I couldn’t help but wish that Rook’s particular charisma worked half as well on the innkeepers as it did on their daughters. We might have had extra gravy, or perhaps a discount.
Rook surveyed the premises with the same bored, slightly derisive air he’d had for almost everything we’d seen up until this point. The innkeeper’s daughter twisted that stray lock of hair in her fingers again, anxious to know whether he’d heard her and not entirely willing to ask.
“I’m gonna take a bath,” he said, nodding when he’d decided that the room was suitable. “Bring me up some dinner when you get a minute, will you? He doesn’t really know when to stop, and I don’t think there’ll be much left when he’s through.”
“You poor thing,” the innkeeper’s daughter murmured, staring at Rook with such rapture that you’d have thought he’d up and announced he was joining the Brothers of Regina.
I’d been mentally compiling my update to our log, but this was enough to make me pause.
“I beg your pardon,” I began.
“That’s all,” Rook said to the innkeeper’s daughter, still hovering in the doorway.
“I’ll have it right up,” she promised, smiling as Rook disappeared into the bathroom.
We were left together, staring at one another, completely at odds. “Thank you,” I began, but my pleasantries were too late; she swung the door closed behind her without a second look at me.
“Am I invisible?” I demanded, going over to the bathroom door once she’d gone and there was no chance of her overhearing me. It was ironic, really, as there had been numerous times in my life when I’d wished for nothing but the power to be invisible. Now that I had it, such treatment was beginning to wear on me.
“Not the way you’ve been eating,” Rook snorted. “Get out, Cindy. You ate my dinner. I’m taking the first bath.”
“Please,” I said. “That language.”
“Look,” Rook said, not for the first and no doubt not for the last time. “I’m tired and I’ve been traveling just as much as you. You wanted to come along, so you play by my rules. Eat your fucking turkey and leave me be.”
Once again, a door was shut unceremoniously in my face, and I was left alone. The room smelled of gravy and horses, and the mud of travel but also of clean sheets. There was only one chair, and one of the legs was shorter than the others, so that when I sat the thing nearly went out beneath me.
To soothe my spirits, I took out my travel log and began to write of that day’s adventures. No matter how minor, I did wish to remember them.
ROOK
The only problem I had with the fucking Hanging Gardens of Eklesias was actually getting there.
I repeated the same thing over and over to myself, trying not to rip any throats out. You try traveling with someone who spends more time talking about what he’s seeing than actually seeing it and you ’ll know what I mean. It was like dragging a lame horse along behind me, helping it out because of sentimentality instead of shooting it like I should’ve done, and I never had too much patience for that shit in the first place.
Now he was tired, now he was hungry, now he was a bit fucking parched—there were any number of fucking problems that could make a good day’s traveling take three instead. Stopping to talk about a ruined wall or a pile of stones or an old farmhouse wasn’t my style. I didn’t care if this was the famous spot where Absalom the Gentleman had killed himself only to reappear months later in the Arlemagne countryside, and I definitely didn’t care that this was where some Ramanthine revolutionaries had made their last stand.
“Perhaps some of Ghislain’s relatives,” Thom’d said, in that hesitant way he had that made me want to smack him.
“Sure,” I’d said. “Whatever.”
I didn’t want to think about Ghislain’s relatives—or Ghislain himself, to be perfectly honest, since then Thom’d wonder why I wasn’t “keeping in touch” or whatever the fuck it was he thought he was doing with that cindy Balfour. I couldn’t see much point in thinking too long on things that’d already passed, and everything that I’d had in common with the other members of the corps had gone out with our girls.
What I really missed these days—what was really getting under my skin—was how quick things used to go. How quick you could get from one place to the next when you weren’t stuck to the ground. When you were flying.
Horses were fucking slow, and they felt all wrong beneath you. The sounds they made were animal sounds—the kind of noise you had to tune out just to hear yourself think. Horses never asked you for an opinion and they never told you where to fucking shove it when you were going the wrong way. Fuck that. I was so tired of looking at horses, buying horses, trading horses, putting horses down for the night, shucking fucking pebbles out of horseshoes and making sure horses didn’t see snakes on the road that I was this close to leaving and doing things by myself, trusting my own legs and no one else’s. The only fucking problem was sitting outside the bath, eating the local gravy and writing about it in some idiot book he thought about more than he did about real people. That fucking problem couldn’t move like I could, and wouldn’t ever if he kept eating the way he did.
Yeah, I’d made a big mistake. And now I was suffering for it.
That made it even fucking worse—knowing it was my fault and not knowing how to get rid of it. Sure, I could just fucking leave him whe
re he was. He’d probably find his way back to Thremedon, eventually, where all the walkways were paved and you couldn’t spit without hitting a building, and there were as many books in the libraries as there were people in the city. He’d be in his element again, talking to professors and experts, coughing up theories, and never going to any of the places he was chattering about.
I closed my eyes. The water was starting to get cold and I was starting to get pruny. The fucking braids in my hair took forever to dry, especially in the countryside, and especially at night, when everything got damp as—well, as fucking horses.
But I didn’t want to go outside and deal with the gravy, and I certainly didn’t want to go downstairs and deal with the bitch who’d made the gravy. I had an itch that fucking couldn’t fix and fucking would only aggravate it. And it wasn’t thinking of Thom getting in my way, or thinking of the problems it’d cause, or thinking of anybody’s feelings that was stopping me, either.
Point was, I just didn’t fucking want to. And that’d never happened before.
“Don’t expect you to believe me, but one day, Airman Rook, you’ll appreciate things beyond rutting with the loudest girls Our Lady has to offer,” Chief Sergeant Adamo’d said once, back when he was still Chief Sergeant and before he turned into some kind of fucking professor on us. Or so Thom’s letters said; I hadn’t wanted to stick around long enough to see what the boys did with themselves after the war, and Chief Sergeant Adamo turning professor on us was one of the reasons. At least it didn’t bother me to think about Adamo the way it did some of the others, and anyway I had bigger fucking problems right now than feeling squirrelly over the guys who were long past feeling anything at all. Anyway, I didn’t see as how what Adamo had said could be it at all, since I wasn’t even halfway toward appreciating any of the things we’d seen so far. We were moving too damn slow.
In fact, I didn’t remember any of our journey, excepting that time we’d taken the shortcut and the horse’d spooked and sent Thom straight into the blueberry bushes. Wasn’t the same as a handprint on his face and he sure as shit didn’t appreciate the memories as much as I did, but it’d kept me laughing all the way to that night’s inn.
But that “incident”—which was what he called it—had all been a couple of weeks back. After trading horses—what kind of an idiot could keep his hold on a dragon and not a horse, I wanted to know—I was getting mighty sick of traveling with the forgotten thirteenth wonder of the world: my fucking brother, the talking blueberry.
I twisted the braids back from my face—only thing more fucking annoying than damp hair was that same hair hanging in my eyes—and braced myself for whatever barrage of questions lay waiting for me on the other side of the door.
On a full stomach, Thom’s brain was more daunting than the entire bastion-damned Ke-Han capital laid out bare and blue. I opened the door.
“She bring the food up yet?” I asked. Talking first was the only way to get the drop on him and it was near on fucking impossible to get a word in edgewise unless you came out swinging.
Fortunately, I had a lot of experience there.
He was writing, so of course he didn’t answer me right away, which was just another layer of icing on the fucking cake. We’d been through this before and he said it broke the flow of whatever he was writing and that he had to get his sentences down first before he forgot them, or the point he was making. Damn waste of my time is what I called it, and he was the one who got mad when I started throwing things to get his attention.
“Whatever,” I said, tucking in my shirt, then untucking it again, which pissed me off because I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place. “Fine. Don’t let up on chronicling your fucking eating tour of Volstov’s piss-poorest inns. Guess you won’t miss me when I drop dead of starvation.”
The gobbler made a funny sound, almost like a snore, and his head drooped lower to the desk. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been writing at all. He’d fucking fallen asleep.
“Guess you weren’t that eager for a bath after all,” I said, taking the liberty of moving the tray so he wouldn’t wake up with his face in it.
It took a special kind of witless moron to fall asleep with his head on a plateful of turkey, but that was my brother for you. At least he hadn’t gotten any gravy in his hair, except that saving grace was only because he’d taken the liberty of eating it all first.
I cracked my neck and pulled a jacket on over my shirt. Looked like I was gonna have to brave the wilderness of downstairs without him. What a fucking shame. With any luck the bitch’d stay in her room, waiting for my grand appearance—her getting ready for it was probably why she hadn’t brought us our second dinner—and meanwhile I could have myself a real night off.
She’d gone and told me where she’d be, after all, so I knew just what to avoid.
Of course, helpful little priss hadn’t told me anything useful, like where the kitchens might be, but unlike some people, I was resourceful. I followed my nose.
The common area was about as crowded as I’d been expecting, full of bearded men and their wives—who were less noticeably bearded, but not exactly picks of the litter, either. The conversation died down a little when I showed up, which was just fucking peachy by me since the last thing I wanted was someone striking up a conversation about my hair while I was trying to choke down a late fucking dinner.
I sat down on my lonesome, pretty set on avoiding anything that had both turkey and gravy since I’d seen and smelled enough of that for one night. I was far enough away from people that they’d know to keep their distance, but the whole place was small enough that I’d still have to listen to them talking.
That was fine. I’d tuned out raid sirens to sleep, so I could tune these bastards out.
“Let me see it, just once. I’ve always been so curious,” said one of the travelers’ wives. She was wearing some sort of bonnet over her hair, which was—according to the walking encyclopedia peacefully making drool stains on his travel log upstairs—a sign of chastity out here in the southern country. Her husband had a bored, red-faced look about him, and there were bits of turkey caught in his beard.
Not that I was interested, but after looking over it was pretty clear that most of the inn’s patrons were gathered together in a group, chattering among themselves like hens and roosters, and about that much brainpower among them, too. At the center of the group was some poor pockmarked bastard with milky-white eyes and drooping ginger hair. It made me laugh, since he looked about the same as if someone’d taken th’Esar and run him through a printing press. He moved like he’d had one bad fever too many as a kid and never quite bounced back, and every now and then his fingers twitched. A gruesome fucking sight if ever I’d seen one, but these country folk couldn’t seem to get enough of whatever story he was serving up. He was holding something in his hands, but I couldn’t see it over the top of somebody’s bonnet.
After that woman’d spoken up, asking to see “it,” a murmur of excitement rippled through the crowd—whispered comments and the creak of chairs being pulled forward as people jockeyed for a better position.
Take the bonnet off, bitch, I thought, and—despite how much I hated them all—I leaned a little closer myself. That was mob mentality for you, and even I couldn’t resist it all the time, even when I saw it coming. The trick to avoiding it was sticking to what was important. In this case, what mattered more than country gossip about people I’d never met was eating my dinner and getting out of here.
Turkey Beard muttered something and rolled his eyes. I was with him, particularly since the serving girl’d brought me a proper plate of food and I had something else to turn my attention toward.
Ginger Hair clearly felt differently. The more he was pressed by the squabblers around him, the more important he became to himself, making a big to-do of going through his pack, drawing out a smallish metal box, and unlocking it with a key he was keeping—like it even mattered, like anybody fucking cared what he was hidin
g—around his neck.
Someone gasped. I took an extralarge bite off of whatever poor animal they’d served me up instead of fucking turkey and let out a belch. Just to even things out.
“Only eyes, please, no hands,” Ginger rasped in a reedy voice, like straw breaking. “Not that I don’t trust your company, but I paid good money for this, so don’t muck it up.”
“From one of th’Esar’s dragons,” murmured one of the bonnets, only I didn’t really catch her face. It was what she’d said that mattered.
“I don’t believe it,” sniffed a little man, who wasn’t quite man enough to have sprouted his own beard yet. “Why would it be here? In the hands of someone like you, to boot? It ain’t real.”
“Jealousy’s disgusting in a child,” Ginger replied. “I’ll tell you what the peddler told me: Even if history doesn’t appear in the books yet, one should still be mindful of it.”
“Everyone knows the dragons went down in the middle of the battlefield,” the little man said, but he was just as interested as the rest of them. My teeth were so tight my jaw was about to crack.
“And then they were destroyed,” said a woman. “Everyone knows that, too.”
“Destroyed, or merely disposed of?” Ginger asked. These weren’t his lines; he was too gormless for that. Someone’d fed him a story—a story they were all eating up. Someone was out there selling bits of shit and telling country suckers they were off my fucking girl. All of a sudden, I could hardly hear anything over the roar of my pulse thumping away in my ears.
I stood up, leaving my half-finished dinner on the table, since I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling an appetite anymore.
“I’d like to fucking see that,” I said.
Everybody stopped talking, which had been the fucking point. The bonnets and the beards alike all looked at me like I was a barnyard animal suddenly asking them to please pass the fucking potatoes, their jaws hanging open and their eyes glazed over.
