They take a little time to collect themselves. There’s a water fountain that still runs clear near the edge of the barren outer courtyard area. Saila uses that to wash her hands and skirts of the blood as best she can. By the time she’s satisfied, her skirts are wet and wrinkled, but the purple stains have mostly been wrung out. Her hands are pink with scrubbing and the cold of the water, but at least they aren’t purple anymore.

Bastion leans against the wall furthest from her shop with his arms crossed. His brilliant blue eyes dart back and forth, snapping to her, the door, to all the windows above the shop too, up and up and then down again to start over. Looking for a cute snub muzzle in brilliant striped green, she would bet.

Saila doesn’t know how often Bastion almost gets eaten, but she suspects the answer is along the lines of ‘less often than this.’

She’s not so used to it herself these days.

After years, decades, a couple of centuries of watching the city grow and progress, seeing the unchanging face of a King was a shock to the system. Adding in a murder, break-in, and theft all together… whatever the reason for it all, it leaves a bad taste in her mouth, a jitter in her hands that she hides by burying them in her shawl.

“Let’s head off,” Saila suggests, and Bastion peels himself away from his lean to stalk alongside her.

As they pass over the small bridge that connects Saila’s islet to the main street for the central edge, she looks it over. There are worn, empty holes filled with stagnant water along the carved stone railings of the bridge. Flowers and plants used to flourish there, tended to by the neighborhood together.

She used to spend a lot of time upstairs perched on the long window bench, peeking out from behind curtains at the people below. The rumor was that the River Trade building was haunted. Her predecessor would never answer, just give a sly smile, when asked directly. Saila had kept candles lit on the sills back then to hide the glow of her eyes in the dark. She hadn’t wanted any trouble. She hadn’t wanted any attention.

When it was hot, she would sit on the roof garden and watch children play while their grandparents fanned themselves and slowly worked on drinking down cups of chilled baas. Natte would join them sometimes, and when she was in it for the long haul she’d take out her cards and light her gold-tipped pipe. Saila would watch the slow curve of her smoke looping up into the sky until it vanished, evaporated, dissipated at some point that she could never quite pinpoint. She wondered, in those days, if she too might lose shape and vanish up into the air in some unexpected moment.

But baas is out of fashion now, along with smoking pipes and the central edge, and so over time, Saila’s nighttime vigils have grown more and more lonely. No families, no pets, no life but that of the animals that live in the skies and the plants rooted heavily in dirt. Now everything is warehouses and the occasional heavy bang from shipping crates being dropped the next islet over. There’s no need to light candles on the sills anymore. Even Natte is gone now, having left the business safely clutched in Saila’s ink-stained fingers. Saila still lights the candles. It’s just for a different reason these days. 

For better or for worse, the city has changed, and Saila can’t bring herself to feel nostalgic for much. Those summer nights when Natte would stumble back up the stairs in the late hours of the night, her golden hair trailing the woody, sweet scent of pipe smoke and her voice gone tender and rough with drink, though….

Well.

“What do you want for breakfast?” Bastion asks suddenly, turning to look at Saila as he walks. He seems to be adjusting to his suddenly-grounded status reasonably well. She admires his equilibrium, but has a niggling worry that he might just not realize the trouble he’s in yet.

“Whatever’s up on the tail of the docks is fine,” she says, looking up into his face and feeling a little tinge of resigned irritation at how far back she has to crane her neck to do it.

That’s one thing that has definitely changed: everybody in the city is a lot taller, and buildings have changed to accommodate. Nutrition is better, she supposes. The mix of ancestries nowadays also seems to have impacted average heights a bit, at least here in the city where it’s common. Full-blooded humans are rare on these shores, and Bastion is clearly no exception.

He’s built like a river serpent, all lean muscle and coiled strength constricted into a trim package. His skin is warm brown with the particular hint of other colors playing at his edges that suggest some elf in him. Of course, Saila notes to herself dryly, watching him turn again to look back at her, those extravagant pointed ears are sort of the giveaway for that, aren’t they? 

Interestingly, he’s got steel-gray hair rolled into locks and further secured into an updo. It’s a style Saila has been noticing more and more lately on young people. Posh young people. His goatee is interestingly manicured too—it’s the kind of scruff fancy men spend hours on, she thinks, while pretending that they didn’t even notice it was there. The bird fluffing on his shoulder just looks like something else a young dandy would carry about.

Really, he does cut a figure, doesn’t he? She tips her head as he pauses, letting her catch up to his considerably longer stride. He’s got that poppy-red uniform and that pretty golden sash she’d dragged him up the damned stairs with, and golden piercings in a row up his ears, and even a handsome golden sword at his side that looks like a larger version of a postmaster’s rapier. He’s got big bright sky-blue eyes, too, which is a step too far in her opinion. And, of course, there are his legs: deceptively slender, in curves and arches and complicated-looking loops, and all of it wrought finely in jet black metal.

Well— not all. Now he has slashes and juts of meat-red where he was savaged by a King.

Saila isn’t sure what to make of Bastion. She had heard about the new captain of the Leaping Guard. Never prone to taking an interest in politics, though, the news of his selection, like so many other things, had simply sailed on past her as she fished for more information about her trade. And yet here he is in front of her now, strictly upright in some sort of undefinable fashion and determined to help. 

She can’t find it in her to peel off and vanish like she usually does when somebody comes precariously close to considering her interesting.

“Sorry,” Bastion says apropos of nothing that Saila can see.

“Sorry?” she repeats, pacing up to him where he’s taken the lead again. Her boots tap on the cobblestones. She’s never been able to tell if it just sounds loud to her, or if everybody hears it that way; either way, she usually tries to walk more cautiously, but she just can’t manage it this morning. Bastion’s clicking walk is much more attention-grabbing anyway. She’ll just let him stand in the spotlight if need be.

“I’ll try to walk a little slower,” he clarifies. “I don’t even know where we’re going really, so you should actually take the lead.”

“I’ve been dawdling,” she offers, looking about for any traffic coming to run them over flat. An old habit, and sort of useless here. They’re the only ones on the street aside from a sleepy-looking old pony attached to a caravan covered in bright paint. The pony definitely isn’t about to run them over. It looks like it’s barely able to keep its eyes open. “Sorry, I’ll try to keep up.”

“I was thinking,” Bastion says, shooting her a look, “about the thing that was taken. You said it was your wheel?”

“My spinning wheel,” she agrees as they set off again. To her surprise, Bastion does indeed seem to be working to slow his pace: this time they stay in matched step.

“Why do you keep your spinning wheel behind two locked- you make Strings.”

“Right,” Saila agrees, rummaging urgently in her inventory for the ‘papers, legal, high-risk’ classification. She comes up with the entire bundle and brandishes it at him sternly. “I have everything in order. Permits and license and confirmation of risk and—“

“I’m not your insurance company,” Bastion retorts with an annoyed snort, but he has to turn and fend off her papers in a clumsy, flailing wave of his hands when she bristles them up at him ferociously. The bird on his shoulder gives a surprised warble, hunkering down into a concerned orb of yellow. “I don’t- I don’t want those, I believe you.”

“They took a lot of work you know,” Saila says with a sniff, and looks down at them all. Stacked on each other like this, they’re the thickness of a good heavy trade book. “And anyway, of anybody, shouldn’t you care?”

“Look,” Bastion grumbles, shoving his hands into his pockets and leaning over into a slouch so extreme that he looks like some kind of juvenile delinquent skipping class, “I don’t have any doubts about you doing your due diligence for security, to put it lightly. Also, I hate paperwork.”

“That’s a shame,” Saila tuts, shoving her papers back to where they came from, “paperwork is very relaxing. It’s the majority of what I do.”

“Sure,” Bastion agrees, looking her over with blatant curiously, “that and make Strings. I wondered why you had one for a lantern. Seemed sort of like overkill.”

“It’s usually decorative,” Saila explains somewhat sheepishly. “The lantern, I mean.”

“I heard we only have two String suppliers in the city,” Bastion says slowly.

“One would be me,” Saila agrees, looking at the bird again. He’s grooming himself now, which is cute. Her finger still hurts a little from the bite, though. “The other one is off traveling right now.”

“And your wheel is missing,” Bastion continues on. His gaze drifts, almost naturally, to the sky. Saila suspects that he’s mostly talking to himself, but this part of the city is so boring and lifeless that she supposes there’s no harm in her listening anyway. She knows this stretch of road, overlooked by empty apartments now used as warehouse space, far too well to find any interest in it. “And I had better hope that we have some Strings in stock,” he says, those bright blue eyes widening, his spine going straight and his jaw tight, “or I’m stuck with my legs broken until we get your wheel back or get you a new one. Fuck.”

Then he inhales sharply and whips his head around to look at her over his shoulder.

Saila blinks rapidly at him.

“I’m sorry I said that in front of you,” he says stiffly.

Saila frowns.

“Is this a real thing you’re saying to me, this, right now?” she asks incredulously.

“Uh,” he says, then shrugs.

“You really are an idiot,” Saila says, sighing, and walks on past him to the steps down to the docks.