until the ghostlight at the center broke free and back into the mist. The gears stopped spinning.
Good beastie.
Dagney wrestled with her bag. “I’m going to need your Charisma now, Ryo.”
He lowered his sword and crossed to her side. “What can I do?”
“The Mechani serve the royal family, so this thing is programmed to follow your instructions. If you can reset it, it’ll be worth a lot more with the peddler; maybe we could even get a better sword or two for it.”
“A battle-axe would be grand,” I said.
“I call dibs,” Dagney said. She gave us both a look. “Don’t destroy it.”
Once satisfied, she opened her bag. The Whirligig emerged, slightly frazzled, red tinted light dim inside its gears, gyroscope spinning slowly as it searched about for an attack.
I held my ghosties back, but ready.
Ryo placed his hand against the metal. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Nothing’s going to hurt you. I’m Prince Ryo. My mother is very proud of her Whirligigs. I know you’re simply doing your job.”
“Your mother is the head of the Mechani?” Dagney said.
Ryo shrugged. “All my secrets find their way out around you.”
The red light inside the Whirligig shifted ghostlight green, and then Ryo’s purple. His XP raised.
He tickled under the Whirligig’s base. “It’s kind of adorable. In a stabbing kind of way.”
I cocked a grin. “Your favorite kind of adorable, innit?”
Ryo cleared his throat and I snorted. Teasing these two was a particular joy.
“Well, I’m sufficiently rested.” Ryo retrieved his horse’s reins. “You want to come with us, Pumpkin?”
Dagney adjusted her dress. “No, we can’t keep it. That thing is a battle-axe with my name on it, and if you get attached, then I won’t get it.”
It fluttered its wings over to Dagney and spun its gyros prettily.
Ryo followed. “She doesn’t mean that, Pumpkin. You’re more than your value.”
I gestured the ghosties back into their forest. “Did you name it?”
“No. It is not a pet!” Dagney curled her fists. Ryo grinned at her and her hands uncurled. “Oh, you’re teasing me again.”
“Never.” He usually smiled at me after a teasing or a prank, but I might as well not have been there.
“You are just teasing, right?” she asked.
“Nothing I do is ever serious, Lady Dagney.” He climbed on his saddle. “This way, wasn’t it?”
“West!” Dagney collected her items back in her bag.
The Whirligig hovered over Ryo’s shoulder as he turned his horse into the afternoon woods.
I picked up a pair of boots and handed them to Dagney to repack in her bag. “I’d have named the thing Artoo.”
“It’s not a pet.” She shoved the rest of our items in her bag and huffed away. “Do not get attached!”
“Too late for that, innit?” I said with a pointed look at Ryo’s back.
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about you having the hots for—Ow!” I rubbed my arm. “I’m telling Da you punched me.” I grinned.
She shook her fist and stepped up into the stirrups and then kicked her leg over the plain brown horse. “Nothing is happening. You don’t have to worry about me.”
I pet the neck of the gentle horse I’d napped on earlier. She was black with a speckling of white spots on her hindquarters.
I mounted my horse and nudged her with my heels, following after Ryo. “I’m not worried about you; I’m worried about him. I don’t know how many of these memories are true, but I’m the same person I was before the game, and I think he is too. And I’ve never seen him like this before. You can’t see the way he looks at you, but his heart is not something you can sell, or stab—”
“You know nothing about me.”
“No?” I had so many memories of her. Memories I’d never lived. But somehow I remembered standing outside her door and knocking after some bastard from the court had made fun of her. I remembered her tears as she opened the door, her stubborn refusal to tell me who it was. I remembered the day she stopped crying, the day she stopped coming with me no matter how I’d asked. “So I don’t know that you’ve been bullied enough to grow spikes, but inside you have a gooey center?”
She scowled. “Nothing is happening, because he doesn’t even know me. This”—she pointed at her body—“isn’t the real me.”
I didn’t know what to say to help her here. “I’ve seen the real you, and you’re quite fetching.”