Saila and he chat lightly as they walk. By the time the faint, humming murmur of the market reaches Bastion’s ears, the tension between them has mostly eased.
Truth be told, he’s a little self-conscious about falling into the patter of interrogation with her. Certainly he hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of what she was saying, and still doesn’t really relish giving much thought to the idea of forming himself into an individual instead of a member of the Guard. It’s in his name, it’s in his body, it’s in his head. He doesn’t have any room for anything else in him but Bastion Captain of the Leaping Guard, whether or not Saila says he should. The idea that some unknown part of himself has been carving out the space anyway had, frankly, alarmed him.
Probably because she was right.
The more he interacts with her, the more Bastion gets the sense that Saila is somebody with a multitude of things roiling under her skin. The way she looks at people when they aren’t looking back, the way she uses her daintiness like a particularly efficient crowbar when she wants something, even the things she pays attention to around her, remind him of nothing so much as a spy. But the shop has been registered under her name since the day the registry started (he’d checked) and she never travels out of the city (he’d checked), and she always has her goods sent in (he’d checked that too). She’s friendly with the postmasters, who, anybody could say, are a universally good judge of character, or at least can sniff out malicious agents with the greatest of ease.
And…
as he slouches alongside her in slow, desultory taps contrasting her quick light steps, his eye finds the pin stabbed into the top of her bun.
And there’s that.
It, like the old city flag on her front door, is so obscure that it’s easy to miss, easy to dismiss as some simple form of decoration. But he recognizes the symbol from his younger days, the ones spent in trash and cold and wet on the southern shores of the City, before the Guard had picked him up by the scruff of his neck and shaken him so hard everything else but what they wanted fell out.
A y-shaped tine stabs into her bun. The black glass is rolled thin and light, tipped with a circle with lines crossing from in to out: the symbol of the Kings, unified in purpose and tied in fealty to the city. The mark was a plea to be seen and a promise to look in return. In the old days, it had been worn with utter sobriety: the Two Kings still walked the streets then, and attracting their attention was no small matter.
In his childhood, old women had drawn that symbol on their doors with charcoal and old men had embroidered it at the edges of their long pants. He’d eaten the food offerings chalked with the sign from small driftwood shrines on the shoreline late at night. The stars had been bright and the lights inside houses had been dark, and he had been so stomach-sore that even the fear of godly retribution hadn’t kept him in line.
He suspects that if he went into Saila’s home, he’d find a shrine there too. He wonders what she’d use for offerings. Flowers, or cloth perhaps, or whatever else it is she values enough to devote it to the gods of the city.
“Please mind yourself,” Saila says with her mouth flattened out like a rolled oat, and the woman who had been about to walk between Saila and Bastion, likely a pickpocket, veers off abruptly. Saila shakes her skirts out like an offended river serpent would its fins. “Some people are just shameless.”
She’s also, he reminds himself with something very similar to fondness, a little too cranky to be a spy for another city.
“I hope Customs Agent Thomm takes care with ChoCho,” she says, nibbling at her lip. Her eyes are working this way and that, keeping tabs on the birds overhead, the snakes lounging in their aerial perches, the faint beep of a post master’s horn from a distance behind them.
Bastion is used to watching locations from above, used to springing down to resolve trouble and then swooping back out. He’s not sure how he feels about legging it through the city, aside from that it feels a lot bigger above his head and a lot smaller around his shoulders.
They’re starting to encounter more traffic the closer they grow to the Western sky market. Bastion is finding it harder and harder to keep track of her tiny frame in the growing waves of people and carts. Her path often abruptly cuts mercilessly through the increased current of bodies, though with a peculiar grace that keeps her from actually shoving anybody.
Bastion, loathe to operate with the same degree of mercenary self-interest, keeps drifting further and further away from her and struggling to get close again. Saila can fit into small spaces and seems to have a sharp eye for the smallest of openings, but Bastion is keenly aware that, if he knocks somebody over, that will be a reflection of the Guard as a whole. He can see the news now: ‘New Captain of Leaping Guard Destroys Local Woman’s Hard-Won Herringbean Crop!’
“What if somebody tries to steal him from Thomm?” Bastion calls out, mostly for the sake of making Saila turn back and look at him with those flickering eyes of hers. He hasn’t decided yet if, when she blinks, the flame in her eyes goes out and comes back, or if it’s just an optical illusion.
“What if somebody tries to steal your rapier from you?” Saila asks back, planting her feet and putting her fists on her hips. Bastion makes his way through the crowd to stand over her, which he can see that she hates. He doesn’t really have any other easier way of keeping track of her, so he’ll simply have to endure her displeasure. Besides, she’s much better at holding her position against the flow than he is.
“I’m a bit more durable than an old man in a shack on the riverside,” Bastion objects.
“Ah, the arrogance of youth,” Saila sighs, crossing her arms and leaning way, way back to look at him. Somebody bumps into her from behind and she sends out an ornery elbow in return, which earns her a high-pitched yelping curse. Bastion feels a twinge of sympathy: her elbows are just about crotch height for the majority of the crowd. “He’s very strong. He made that greenhouse himself, you know.”
“The glass and everything?” Bastion asks, flinching forward when somebody bumps into his legs.
“He ordered the glass, obviously,” Saila sighs. “Come on, this isn’t a place to stop. We’re in the way.”
She starts walking again. Bastion almost loses her in the first five seconds, which is hair-raising to say the least. He tries to fix his eyes on her hairpin, then her red backpack stuffed with (ugh) zucchini, but the crowd around them is colorful too. He almost starts following a man with long hair painted in blocks of color before he sees Saila’s veil bobbing away through the current.
“What happened to making a space for yourself by any means necessary?” Bastion asks, prodding at the sore spot between them without even thinking about it as he tries urgently to keep track of her. Again she plants her feet and waits for him, ignoring with studied patience anybody who yells at her or tries to shove past her.
“Why don’t you show me the joy of embracing the collective good,” Saila shoots back dryly, her eyes sliding half-shut with an expression like a smug snapping turtle, “and get in line with everybody else in this whole damn city who’s decided to go shopping today.”
“It’s a rest day, it’s only natural,” Bastion says, and then almost gets bowled over by a grunting woman with fins in her hair and an enormous glass bowl of eels clutched in her webbed, fluorescent hands. When he stands up straight again, he realizes he has, finally, lost Saila.
“Shit.”
He tries to use his height to his advantage to catch sight of her, but Bastion has never really had to fight a crowd like this, and he starts to get swept away in a random direction. He looks frantically about: there’s a painted pony cart, perhaps the same one from this morning, slowly wheeling along, and there’s a small flock of harpies flying overhead with still-dripping fish nets full of morning catch clutched in their claws. A man with a backpack emitting the sound of mewling kitten-chicks walks by, then a string of identical women of smoothly-increasing height; the last one to walk by is a head taller than him.
“Did you just get lost in your own city?” Saila asks from behind him, which makes Bastion almost jump out of his skin.
“I didn’t get lost,” he bristles, swinging around to face her, “I lost you.”
“Hold on to the backpack, then,” she suggests, stepping up to lead him forward again. “Don’t you know where we’re going? Terabeth runs one of the larger stalls along the mid-lower iron walkway before it hits the bridge out to the Spires. If you get lost, just go there. She has a teal sign.”
“I’m not hanging on to your backpack!”
“Technically it’s Thomm’s,” she says innocently, as if she doesn’t have any idea what the fuss is about. They’re reaching the first few blankets laid out on the street, and she has to raise her voice suddenly in the middle of her sentence to be heard over the hawkers yelling. “What, do you want me to hang on to you by your sash? That’s indecent.” Saila sticks her finger up to jab at somebody else coming too close. They skitter away and she pivots to shake it at Bastion instead.
Bastion, feeling the crowd pulling him away again, makes the split-second decision: he snags her hand in his.
“It’s not like that,” he says, when she narrows her eyes at him and tries to pull back. He doesn’t let go, just lets her pull him along. “It’s this or the sash. The backpack doesn’t have a handle. I don’t know the market stalls from down here. If you lose me, I’ll have to go all the way back to the start of the Western islets, and you’ll have to find me, since I can’t see you under everybody else. It will take a long time.”
“What are you, five?” She asks, but, after a sideways-suspicious stare at him, she tightens her fingers around his and starts to walk again.
This is, Bastion concludes, the much better option. Saila works her way through the crowd with a viciousness and tenacity that belies her size. He feels like a model boat being tugged on a string, but with the other end tied to a shark, and one indignant at the very idea that anybody at all might infringe on her meagre personal space.
She tightens her grip on him just before abruptly turning on a hard left he definitely would have lost her on. Her skin is soft, her bones dainty, with just the edge of a callous here and there at the sides of her fingertips. Her hand is warm despite the slight chill from the lingering river-haze slowly being ushered away by the spring sun.
It occurs to Bastion that he can’t remember the last time he held somebody else’s hand that wasn’t actively dying.
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