Ofelia knew the statue before breakfast was cold.
They’d tossed a few solitars to the miller to borrow his wagon, and brought the cracked woman in halves back down the ridge. It stood upright now against the rain barrel outside Karla’s, its halves married at the hip with a wrapping of waxed cord, so that the marble lady leaned drunken and ersatz to one side.
Feeli sat cross-legged in front of her, shadow shortened by the noonday. A half-eaten heel of bread sat forgotten atop a pewter plate in her lap. One of her interminable collection of mutilated books lay before her on the cobbles. Its front cover had been soaked and dried and torn halfway off sometime on its journey; it proclaimed itself a PANTH OF TH SOUT SAI.
“The stone tart is St. Sahune,” Ofelia said. “The Calm of the Waters.”
Seth gnawed his own chunk of bread. It had a complicated chew to it and a thick crumb; maybe the elevation at play. Baking had neve been his thing. “St. Sahune strips like that?”
“In Kanjir she does,” Ofelia said. “They have a more liberated attitude toward the nipple. They keep her in the prow-niches of the river barges. You carry one so the lanes stay quiet under your keel and the water brings you back to your family.” She turned a page. “Her gown is nephrite because the floodplain runs green at the spring melt. The bared breast is the milk of safe arrival. It isn’t meant to be looked at the way Tiago looked at it.”
“With respect, you mean,” Tiago said, from the bench where he was oiling his saber.
“You whistled.”
“I whistle at fine craftsmanship,” Tiago said.
Seth settled beside Ofelia and studied the tranquil marble face. Up close, the chisel-and-polish craft was so fine it seemed more dreamed than carved. “So a southern vessel carried her.”
“A southern vessel up a very long way from the south.” Ofelia closed the lexicon and a piece of its cardboard cover flaked off. “And a long way from grace. No Kanjir sailor would drop a Sahune. You’d sooner pitch your own mother.”
“You wouldn’t.” Annalise tsked. “See you try.”
“Whoever has her now doesn’t believe she’s listening anymore.” Ofelia picked her bread back up and considered it. “I agree with Tiago, is what I’m saying. Rather annoying to admit it, but I do.”
“Sounds like I’ve got the votes.” Tiago pointed the curviform edge of his steel toward Seth. “Unless he of little faith still objects.”
Seth stuck his hands in the air. “I surrender. Let’s go get your bird.”
Annalise retrieved Ofelia’s set-aside plate as the retinue packed up. “Bring your food, love.”
“That’s quite all right,” Ofelia said. “I’d rather save my stomach for whatever Seth’s cooking at the carriage.”
“I’m cooking?” Seth shouldered his satchel. “When is it someone else’s turn?”
“Never,” Ofelia said. “Your food is too good. Dinner is your forever job now.”
“All right, fine.” Seth tried to hide the purring enjoyment he got from the rare Ofelia compliment. “I’ll break open that butternut and figure something out.”
They trooped from the cluster of houses out across the limestone bluffs and higher into the mist. Tiago and Ofelia bickered idly about the pitiful starling they’d caught and whether to fly it out or use it as bait for a falcon.
“Starlings are perfectly serviceable birds. You just think the name is too frilly.”
“Your standard starling is fine by me. That little runt you fished out of a rain barrel is not.”
Annalise and Seth lagged behind, hands interlaced. Now and then as they crossed a switchback or cliff, Annalise gently, wordlessly shifted Seth from one side to another. It took three of those adjustments for him to realize that she was placing herself between Seth and the fall, walking always at the outer edge.
He caught her eye and saw himself reflected in the round lenses of her sunglasses. Below their mirrored abysses perched atop her long pointed nose, she smiled. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, and, because it had to be noted, “You’re beautiful.”
She squeezed his hand tight, her thumb twisting up to run along the rough twill cuff of his work jacket.
Tiago had won his way by the time they reached the carriage, and they brought the starling, in its iridescent panic, to serve as bait for his hopeful falcon. They pitched a mist net near an outcrop of stone capped by scrub and bearing the deep-time striations of the primeval ocean.
Seth sat, and waited, and found new ways to sit, and eventually looked up at the spread-out net and the jittery little passerine that strained against its string on the other side. “How long does this take?”
A fleet brown shape answered the question before Tiago could by fastballing into the net. “Holy St. Mansell,” Tiago crowed, and leapt to his feet. “A fucking Merlin.”
“Switch with it switch with it!” Ofelia held the net as the raptor screeched and clawed in its mesh.
“Just hold it for a second,” Tiago said. “I have to get ready.”
“If getting ready means hitting the jakes then just switch,” Ofelia snapped. A claw raked across her padded tunic and stuck in the stitching.
“Fine,” Tiago said. “Just tie me up so I don’t jump the fucking cli—”
His eyes snapped wide. His mouth quivered. “GRAWK,” he cried. He took an ungainly lunge toward the ridge side and fell on his face. Annalise and Seth piled atop him.
The merlin with Tiago inside it ceased its struggle and chirruped indignantly at the net around it. Ofelia unpacked her brother and set him on the outcropping.
Annalise rubbed the falcon’s downy head. “Have fun hunting the pirates, Sunshine. You spot ‘em, you come right back and lead us there. Aye?”
The falcon’s beak clattered, and then with a pair of readying hops it was aloft, streaking back into the fog.
Ofelia untied the starling that would have served as its lunch; they watched it flutter away. “Well,” she said, and took hold of the lead they’d tied to the near-catatonic Bird Tiago. “I’m off to the carriage before the two of you start the heavy petting.”
Annalise blew a raspberry at her. “Ah, g’way outta that.”
Ofelia scraped a patch of earth from her charcoal breeches. “It’s fine. It’s young love. Someone should watch bird Tiago, anyway. Perhaps he’ll pee, and I’ll have another instance to catalogue.” She tugged the jute cord and set Tiago’s vacated body stumbling down the hill. “Just remember how magnanimous I’m being when I’m out past curfew at the Necropolis.”
“I’m magnanimous to you, ya dose. I’m magnanimous as the day is green.” Annalise rolled her blackened eyes at Ofelia’s departing back. “The way that girleen talks, she must think we’re sucking each other’s faces off the second we get alone.”
“Wanna suck each other’s faces off?” Seth inquired. “I’ve got the blanket.”
“Well, now that we’re alone, yeah,” Annalise said, and undid the laces of her tunic.
“Okay,” Seth said, lying on a bed of chiseled muscle and cloud-white cushion. “This is not to be understood as any kind of discontent, okay?” He raised his face from its cozy place on Annalise’s sternum. “Because this is a dream come true, and you’re flawless, and I love you.”
“I love you too, my little fast-talker.” Annalise shifted him further up her body. He glided on their post-lovemaking sweat. “Out with it now.”
“So the other heads,” he said.
“Mmhmm?”
“What’s the, uh… the rules?”
She chuckled. “Whaddya mean?”
“I just notice I haven’t seen Lisa in a moment,” he said. “And she was the one who was the most…”
Her heavy tattooed hands cupped his butt. “Feral for the ride.”
“Yeah. And look, it’s not—I’m not—”
Her stomach jostled him as she laughed. “The stuttering state of you. It’s all right, love. It’s all me. I keep telling ya.”
“Okay. So… yes? It’s okay?”
“It will be,” Annalise said. “Eventually. Lisa’s lost privileges awhile for being a bleeding pest.”
“You just said she’s you.”
“She is me. I’m just being arbitrary cause I like how your voice gets when I act the maggot around you. All squeaky.”
“Squeaky,” he said, with squeaky sanctimony.
“And anyway, I’m saving her.”
“For what?”
“I don’t wanna fuck in a tent the first time I’m Lisa with you, or under a tree.” Annalise shifted; dry leaves crinkled beneath the blanket they’d put out. “I want to find somewhere luxurious.”
“We’ve found some really luxurious trees, you and me,” Seth said.
She laughed and slid her palm beneath his upper arm, gently groping his chest. “We have, at that.”
He returned the favor. His fingers sank to the knuckle in the squeeze of her. “This is a middling one.”
“Wasn’t gonna say anything, but you’re dead on.” She plucked a leaf from his hair. “What’s this, a beech?”
“I always mix them up with birch. Beech, birch.” He gathered a plump handful of springy softness, raised it, and admired its bounce back into place. “Remember that willow down by Vanta?”
“There was a tree,” she said, as he played with her breasts. “Fierce romantic.”
“What I’m saying is Annalise is a tall pint,” she said. “And Lisa’s a fancy foofy bubbly red.”
“I love a pint. Everyone loves a pint.”
“I know,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. I actually like myself these days, I promise. But Lisa’s a special occasion. You drink it all the time, it’ll lose its mystique.”
He kissed his favorite spot, where the mole sat. “As long as there’s no way the pint would get jealous.”
“With how good you are at knocking her back?” Her legs wrapped around his and anchored them in place. “Never.”
She kissed him, light and probing for more. He tarried briefly at the edges of her lips, a cheeky little peck here and a nuzzle there. Acting hesitant, like he had a choice in this massive warrior’s arms, or wanted one.
“What about Anna?” he remembered to ask, in the heavy-lidded moment before he gave up and let her tongue in.
“Anna’s…” Annalise hesitated. “Anna is Anna. She’s vinegar.”
“Sure, but she’s the last head of yours I haven’t won over.”
“Anna’s not for winning over. She’s just a big arsehole cudgel I bash seraphs with. She’s the bits of me I don’t enjoy being. Don’t worry about Anna. She isn’t good for us.”
“Okay. Just…” He wriggled, and she obediently loosened her grip. “Maybe it’d be different, now?”
“Maybe. With any luck she’ll behave better around you and stop being such a bleedin’ geebag. But for romancing…” Her sigh tingled the hairs on his forehead.
“I get it,” he said. “I’ve always been curious what a muran’s whiskers feel like, but I get it.”
She grinned slyly. “Oh is that what this is about.”
“I mean, you get to feel mine,” he said, and she laughed, and rubbed the bristles along his jaw, and in short order they were kissing again, deep and unhurried.
“Please don’t see this as me keeping any of myself from you, mie’Lynnokíen,” she whispered between kisses, and at the sweet slipping syllables of Orwinese, in her bedroom whisper, the final dregs of his meager resentment melted away. “I just want to make sure you know beyond doubt how I feel about you. And how I care for you. And I don’t want a splintery slag like Anna to come in and threaten what we’ve found. I’d bloody hate her for that, and she’s myself, and I’ve only just stopped hating myself.”
“I don’t want you to be afraid.” He traced the unbelievable line of her oblique further into its place on her elegant symmetrical abdominals. “This weirdness is what I signed up for. I won’t stop loving you when you’re her. I swear.”
“Neither will I,” she said, “and I swear it right back. Anna just doesn’t have the wiring to show it right. That’s all.”
He exhaled slow through his nose. “Okay. If that’s the boundary, that’s okay.”
“My lovely man. Thank you.” She nuzzled him. “And the next head is wholly on the menu, by the way. Alice came from a total sweetheart.”
“You knew her?”
“She’s a donation from a woman of letters who died of the weeping fever. Part of my old route, so I only ever saw her once a year, but I always looked forward. Cute as a button, sweet as can be, about your age. We’ll be adorable together, I reckon. But on the way…” She wiggled her eyebrows. “You know what I wanna try.”
He scoffed. “I’ll consider it.”
“Seth il Gutierre. You have a lover with a detachable head and you don’t wanna try it?”
“It’s, uh… a little odd to think about,” he said. “That’s all. And I’d be the one doing the work, if I’m holding it.”
“You only think that way cause you’ve never sucked a dick.”
“Guilty as charged,” Seth said. “You’re right it’s a waste not to at least try it. I just have to get my mind around it.”
“So do I,” she said.
He snorted and feigned an attempt at escaping her arms. She caught him at the waist and gleefully tugged him into little-spoon position. He caught a glimpse of the sky as they tussled. “Is that Tiago up there?”
Annalise squinted at the spiraling dot. “Ah, shite. Maybe.” She sat up and hastily restrung her tunic. “Trousers on.”
Seth shouldered his shirt on and hopped into his pants. “Wait, that’s not him. That’s a songbird, he’s a—”
A falcon tore through the sky and swatted into the songbird like a quarrel from a crossbow, sending it arrowing to the ground.
“That’s him,” Annalise said.
The falcon hopped across the yellowing grass. Annalise crouched down and rubbed its ruff with the tip of her finger. “Hello hello, Sunshine,” she said. “Find us a stormship?”
The falcon’s head quirked up and down.
Annalise got to her feet, her son/falcon on her shoulder. “Button your fly, lover of mine,” she said. “Sheepfuck’s got sky pirates, and I reckon you’re going climbing.”