my skin but not piercing, and he turns me to face forward again, our goal the wagon and only the wagon, clearly.
And I must be too slow in spitting out the story because Bash’s mighty scowl does not sound like it’s eased when he orders, “Tell me of your doctor and this other male.” He stabs his pitchfork into the pile of dead greenery.
“Oh I am so going to.” I hitch my pitchfork up and move to stab it into the vines too. It’s a little tricky at this angle. The wagon is a little too tall for me to reach comfortably, but I can make this work—
No warning, Bash turns, lifts me by the hips, and tosses me on top of the tailgate.
“Whoa!” I shriek—and the Narwari in front startle, letting out super-unsettling cries of their own. The wagon under my feet rocks forward and shakes with their jostling.
Bash’s hand covers just about all of the flesh of my upper thigh as he sort of pinches a handful of my leg to steady me. “Settle,” he warns the Narari—or me, or both, I can’t tell.
“What if the horses freak out and take off?” I whisper-holler. “This wagon could get pulled right out from under my feet!” The Narwari aren’t tied to anything if they decide to stampede.
“I suggest you don’t make a noise like that twice then,” Bash returns, his voice raised slightly. In disbelief, I think, not anger. His royal court-green eyes look very calm. Then again, it’s not him up here facing the possibility of winging off. “They were fine until you panicked. Settle yourself—and let’s fork.”
A chuckling cough has me glancing to the Rakhii leaning against the kiln’s doorway. He folds his arms over his chest and sends me a shit-eating grin. “Sorry. That word still sounded like something else to me.”
Bash’s hand tightens on my thigh before he lets me go with a grunted, “Isla. Chatter.”
I start talking. And we fork. We fork for a long time. There’s a lot of vines. Because I’m not to get near the kiln house at all, the extent of my job is to push them to the tailgate, where Bash stabs a chunk and walks his speared vines to the kiln opening. Because the fire travels around on its own, eating up burnables and moving to the next section of track, the other Rakhii gives a bellow of warning when the fire is close and Bash shuts the door and we all wait until the fire passes. And you can hear the fire eating its way past. Despite the thick brick sides of the building, the fire’s roars can’t be missed.
Once the fire passes, and the guys deem it safe to open the door again, heat shimmers dance through the air, making me super glad I’ve been vetoed from working inside of the chamber.
The sun is beating down on us. I feel like the top of my head is cooking, but I keep forking dutifully. I expect Bash to bitch and be a grump, what with him doing the harder work and it being so hot while he has to do it, but he doesn’t. He listens intently to the story of Jekyll and Hyde. Then he shocks me by asking me to keep ‘chattering’ to him.
“What do you want to hear? What do you even like?” I ask.
“Tell me about you. About your world,” he amends.
“Hmm. When I was growing up, I lived in a town that got so cold, the lake froze until the ice was four feet thick. They took draft horses—think Narwari, but with thicker legs, and feathers on their feet—”
“Feathers?” Bash asks, like this is the pinnacle of alienness.
“Silky hairs,” I correct. “They just call them feathers.”
His horns tilt as he looks at his alien horses. “Hairs? On their feet?”
“On their legs, on their legs—not sprouting from their toes. These are horses; not hobbits. Keep up. And good lord, don’t judge. Anyway, they’d hitch the horses to sleighs and drive them across the frozen lake. Which seemed crazy! I mean, every year, ice shanties would fall into the lake, because some fishermen didn’t pull theirs off of the ice before it got too warm and melted to the cracking point. One year, someone lost their truck. Crashed right through. So a team of draft horses and a sleigh? Crazy dangerous! Or so it looked like.”
“It wasn’t a danger?”
“No, that ice was rock solid. The horses and sleigh were fine. Pulled loads of people