67 Ymiden 719
When the letter arrived, I was walking down a corridor between some fine stone houses, nibbling at the damp end of a dying cigarette and watching Hazel run ahead. Wild how some couriers can just find you. How this one caught sight of me amid all the ghostly spirits of the dead and thought that’s the man I’m looking for, maybe I’ll never figure it out. Maybe I’d gotten more distinctive than I thought, even without the flagrant blemishes of magic hovering over my head or sticking out my back. Those damnable wings. Maybe they wouldn’t come back, maybe I’d get away with looking like a plain ordinary biqaj again, or maybe they’d come back eventually. I didn’t know what the wings were waiting for, though. Ether storms, some of the mages outside the city had mentioned, as if that meant something to me. Maybe it did.Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Too many maybes for my taste. Hazel continued down the way, her steps light – too light for a girl with true gravity in her weight. I stopped to look the lanky woman in the eyes. She stared at me like I had something to give her. I didn’t. I took the bundle of letters, then tapped the last embers into ash between us. One glance at the seal which kept them bound and I knew who’d sent them.
“You headed back south?” I asked.
“Haven't planned on it,” she said in a simple professional tone. “Headed east next.”
“How’d you know it was me?”
She arched a sculpted brow, then tapped at the center of her forehead. Right. The scar. The Theocratum’s persistent mark. I glanced aside, thought to call to Hazel who’d gone out of sight but… what point would there be in that? Instead, a sigh escaped me, and I said, “Would you care to share a drink then? Before you head out again.”
The courier considered the offer as if I’d ask something a lot more scandalous than I had. Just a drink, honest. Though I couldn’t ignore that she was close to my height with the sort of eyes that made me wonder what sort of things she’d seen in her life, paired with a set of chapped lips that deserved to be made soft. Sun-kissed skin and a foreign look about her that reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place my thumb on the reminder. Ah, but that was neither here nor there. What was it with me and getting so distracted by carnality? It made no good sense and I liked to think myself above that sort of nonsense… even if I didn’t find myself keeping to that thought much.
Suppose I just didn’t have a lot of good sense in me.
She accepted the offer, easy enough, and we made good time from wherever the fuck I’d been - to a place she was staying known as Inn for Dinner. It wasn’t too far off and I’d set up a couple rooms there myself upon arrival. I was getting the hang of this loop of a city, or least I wanted to believe I was.
She swapped a name for herself once we sat down: Gigi, the sort of name that made me cough to mask a laugh.
Gigi said, “It’s short for something.”
I waited, but she never said what something was. Instead, we got a bottle of wine to share and I took to opening the bundle of letters that’d come from Ashvane Estate. There were a great number of them: all from various dates, left behind to pile up when the fall of Emea had taken away my previous courier: Mister Kiwi.
The momentary reminder of the dead dreamwalker caused me to feel a greater need to drink something stronger than wine. I wouldn’t though. Wine would do fine, more than fine. It would do. I tapped my fingers against one of the envelopes. Around us, the inn was mostly quiet. People were drinking, eating, trying to forget about what lurked outside the city and inside their own undreaming minds. No one seemed keen to bother each other, keeping to themselves, and leaving once done with whatever had brought them to the main area. A few wore masks over their faces, as if that would do the job of keeping the illnesses away – or maybe they just didn’t want anyone identifying them.
“Were you going to open one of those?” asked Gigi. She sipped from the goblet with a casual sideways lean to her posture.
“Later,” I said. I set it on the stack, then looked her over. “How’d you come to be the one sent this way? You don’t look like most couriers.”
“Tia did say you had sharp eyes,” said the woman.
“Tia?”
“Lucretia,” she clarified. “She’s my aunt.”
“Oh!” The mention of the mage who’d remained in Quacia offered a certain happiness. Out of all the people in the southern city, it was Lucretia and Watcher I missed the most. “You’re related. No wonder you look so familiar.”
Taller though, I thought to myself. I couldn’t help but compare the totem I had of Lucretia, the petite thing that wasn’t anywhere near the height of her niece, but they had similar copper to the tone of their skin. Now I saw features here and there, recognizable in a vague sense of familial blood. Now, it was obvious.
We talked of Quacia, and I set the letters aside for later – like I’d said – and we talked about Lucretia, we talked of Rynmere of which Gigi was from, of the plague that’d torn through her home. She’d gotten stuck on the outside of the quarantine, or so she said, there was a glimmer in her eyes that suggested otherwise but I didn’t bother to delve into whatever was left unsaid.
The bottle of wine had gone dry fast enough. I gathered the letters and asked if she wanted to join in a space away from… well, I couldn’t say crowds with a straight face, so I went with out of the way. She was generous and accepted anyway.
