“I’m hoping for exactly the opposite,” she smiled, shaking it.
“We’ll make our repairs, then head around the cape. I’m guessing we’ll still beat you to Amai, but we’ll wait for you there. Watch your step once you’re inside the city, stay the fuck out of the way of other salts. Keep your head well down and yourself to yourself. Head straight to the Pub, we’ll be waiting.”
“I know a nice little chapel to Trelene on the foreshore, Dona Mia,” said BigJon with a silver grin. “That offer of marriage is still open.”
“Thank you both,” she smiled. “Blue above and below.”
“Above and below,” Corleone smiled.
“Bartolomeo?” Mia raised a finger in thought. “No, no … Brittanius?”
The privateer only grinned in reply. “See you in Amai, Mi Dona. Walk carefully.”
The captain and his first mate set about their business. Mia’s comrades marched down the gangplank one by one. Pulling her hood low, the Blade stood and looked out at the Cityport of Churches. Galante was home to a Red Church chapel—they were at risk as long as they stayed in the city. Mia was eager to get moving, thinking of Mercurio at the Ministry’s mercies and praying to the Mother he was somehow well.
She felt a small shiver in her spine. A shadow-thin shape materialized on the railing beside her, licking at a translucent paw.
Mia kept her eyes on the harbor.
“Coming with me, are you?”
“… always…,” Mister Kindly replied.
The wind howled in the space between them, hungry as wolves.
“… are you still angry…?”
She hung her head. Thinking about who and what she was, and why. The things that drove her and the things that made her and the ones who loved her.
Despite everything.
She scowled, reached out, and ran her fingers through his not-fur.
“Always,” she whispered.
* * *
Mia hated horses almost as much as horses hated her.
She’d named the only stallion she’d ever been remotely fond of “Bastard,” and even though the beast had saved her life, she couldn’t say she truly liked him. Horses had always struck her as ungainly, stupid things, and her feelings weren’t helped by the fact that every horse she’d met had taken an instant dislike to her.
She’d often wondered if they could simply sense her innate disdain. But watching the horses at the Galante stable react to her brother with the same skittish nervousness they’d always displayed around her, Mia supposed it must be the touch of darkness in her veins. She was more conscious of it now than ever before. The depth of the shadow at her feet. The burn of the three suns overhead, beating on her like hateful fists even through the blanket of storm clouds. The lingering feeling of emptiness, of something missing when she looked at her brother.
She wondered if he felt the same. If that was perhaps why, ever so slow, he seemed to be warming to her.
More than this Liisian prick was warming to Bryn, anyways …
“I’ll give you a hundred silver for the seven,” the Vaanian girl was saying. “Plus the wagon and feed.”
“Piss on you, girl,” the stableman scoffed. “A hundred? Try three.”
They were stood in a muddy stable on Galante’s east side, as far from the Red Church chapel as could be managed. They’d picked up supplies in the marketplace, food and drink, and a good bow of stout ash and three quivers of arrows for Bryn. She stood with feet planted in mud and shit now, fingertips running over the bow at her back and obviously itching to use it.
The stableman stood a foot taller than Bryn. He was clad in dirty grays and a grubby leather apron hung with horseshoes and hammers. He had the lingering stare of a fellow who saw breasts as an obvious yet fascinating impediment to intelligence.
“A hundred,” Bryn insisted, crossing her arms over her chest. “That’s all they’re worth.”
“O, an expert, are we? These are Liisian purebreds, girl.”
The former equillai of the Remus Collegium, and one of the greatest flagillae ever to grace the sands of the arena, rolled her eyes.
“That’s a purebred,” Bryn said, pointing to the largest gelding. “But he’s Itreyan, not Liisian. She’s a purebred,” Bryn said, pointing to a mare, “but she’s at least twenty-five and looks like she’s had a bout of shinwithers in the last two years. The rest of them are racers past their prime or nags barely fit for the knackery. So hammer that purebred nonsense where the Everseeing won’t shine.”