The rest of the journey to drop off the vegetables is thankfully less packed, as Saila opts to lead them through side streets after that last hard turn.
They find the tent, a shock of colors with a teal sign advertising the current prices of some staples like riverweed and silt apples. There are brilliant blue and red sheets of fine gauze billowing in the breeze, making the place look like the entrance to some kind of mythical dreamworld rather than a vegetable stall. Bastion minds his heels, unwilling to get tangled in the fabric as they pass through.
Once inside, he finally releases Saila’s hand: she might be small, but it’d be hard to lose her in the wide-open, sun-dappled interior of the vegetable seller’s stall. Everything is piled on the ground, and though the crowds around the products are dense, Saila has no interest in anything but their goal: the lady Terabeth. Bastion follows at a more relaxed pace, inspecting the stock and the space.
Terabeth is a busty, serious-looking woman with a perpetual furrow to her brow that indicates either nearsightedness or a suspicious nature. Her hair is a long, luxurious sweep of blue, with a line of horns coming up through in a flashy shade of copper. Bastion can’t decide if it’s natural, or if she’s got a laquer on over her normal shade. Based on her attire, it could be go either way: she’s wearing a gauzy, revealing outfit in colors that match the motif of her tent. Not exactly the uniform Bastion expected for a vegetable seller, but what does he know? He’s never bought vegetables.
As Saila sidles up to the weighing table, though, Bastion notices that there are other employees about. It seems that Terabeth has people in actual smocks and aprons to help handle the muddy vegetables when needed. There are even a few post master platforms behind the weighing table, and a pile of glistening, lushly juicy berries waiting to be used for summoning.
Saila greets Terabeth with a smile and tip of her head, a widening to her eyes and a flicker of her lashes that Bastion is coming to understand to be her working face. She looks cuter like that, more like the fluffy pillowed dog he’d mistaken her for originally. He reckons a guess that she bites just as hard as he’d originally thought, if in an entirely different context than he’d assumed.
“Go away and look at something,” Saila tells him in a low voice, slinging the pack off her shoulders onto the weighing table. The weights hanging above start to clink and dip as they balance out. Saila pushes Bastion away toward one of the gauze-lined exits with an elbow when he continues to watch the weights, fascinated: the ones in use start to light up. They must be glass too. “Come back in a little. Don’t get lost. Can you find your way back here in about a chime?”
“I can find my way back,” he confirms, trying not to feel talked down to, and though he’s morbidly curious to see how she negotiates given the brutal way she slices through a crowd, he knows better than to push his luck, not with Saila’s elbow up and digging into his thigh. Terabeth doesn’t look like she’s ready to give any ground, not with the way she’s looking back at Saila, her eyes squinched tight and combative above a mouth stretched into a smile.
Bastion doesn’t know any other merchants personally, but he’s starting to wonder if they universally share a certain caginess, if a life spent holding their cards to their chests naturally encourages them to do the same with other parts of themselves.
Maybe that’s just Saila, though.
Bastion starts to walk toward the exit, carefully looking down to avoid stepping on anybody or anything.
Behind him, he hears a woman laugh. Based on the pitch of her voice, it sounds like Terabeth.
Saila doesn’t join in. Bastion feels a certain measure of fondness as he notices that, and then he’s outside.
Bastion blinks into the sun, looking around blankly. He’s never really been inclined to go streetside, doesn’t go shopping on his off days like Shell or Bousillage do. Even the tasteless romance books he reads on high-up rooftops are fifth-hand from Brace or Oriel. He doesn’t have any civilian clothes, spends most of his free time either maintaining his equipment or reading on rooftops, listening for trouble in the streets below.
It’s not as if this is a new revelation to him, that the entire structure of his life is centered around the Guard. But Saila’s words have struck more forcefully, perhaps, than she intended. Or, actually…. Knowing her, knowing what little he does of her, perhaps they struck with the exact amount of force she had intended to use.
He feels uneasy thinking about what she’d said to him. He’s been, for a long time, exactly what was needed, exactly what was asked for, and nothing more. He’s felt a measure of pride, of contentment, in knowing that his life was set. He flourished in the care of the guard, learned with his peers, integrated with them better than could be expected considering they’d been together since infancy and he got thrown in later like a rabbit in a den of winged snakes. He’d done what he was told, worked on what he was assigned, slept and ate and breathed when the roster told him was appropriate.
The captaincy being cast at his feet has thrown that comfortable diligence out of whack, and if he’s honest, he feels like he’s been struggling a bit with the sudden boundlessness the position has afforded him.
He’d had his taste of ostensible freedom from his earliest years, and the cost for that supposedly refreshing draft had been pain, fear, cold, hunger, sickness. Uncertainty that he’d make it through the day, fear that he wouldn’t last the night. He’d drunk deeply of that well a long time ago and found it too bitter for his tastes, perhaps poisoned by something that had been tossed into its depths and turned rotten long before he was even born.
Bastion takes note of where he is, picks a random direction, and starts walking. It feels better to actually be moving as he paces a circle in his own head. He wants to practice navigating a crowd on his own, too.
He enjoys guard work, has pride in what he’s achieved and has hopes for what more he can do as the captain. He has a certain shamefully buoyant joy in the fact that the Kings somehow, for some reason, chose him to be the captain. He hopes he can be the kind of captain his peers can rely on, the kind of captain that one of the children in the guard cottages can aspire to be. He almost feels like his name is a little too on-the-nose these days, that Jack gave it to him as a benediction rather than the sarcastic commentary he’d long assumed it was when he was younger.
But Saila is right, isn’t she? If he abandons all sense of self and throws himself into the job even more, he wonders, will he even be the person the Kings have chosen? If he casts away all evidence of Bastion and becomes only Bastion, Captain of the Leaping Guard, will he have filled the role he so desperately wants to, or will he have simply become another captain with a portrait in the eyrie and a name in the books and not much else? His harshness to Hyphen when talking with Saila this morning had been a reflection of his own fears: that he’ll die before he manages anything, that he’s a stopgap captain before one of more note comes along, that he’s a ‘good enough’ pick instead of a ‘that one.’
That he’s a Hyphen instead of a Jack.
The Kings chose him, Bastion reminds himself, biting his lip. They chose him. They waited two summers and then ‘till current spring to pick him and he doesn’t know why or how. He can’t put a finger on what’s different about him now that wasn’t two summers ago, doesn’t know what has prompted the shift. But they waited, and they waited for him.
Looks like he’s back to that poisoned well after all, Bastion thinks, feeling bitterness and an emotion he can’t put a name to, something gnarled and complicated and stubbornly stuck that feels like it wants, very badly, to be clean and straight.
As he walks, he’s been trying to unite his mental map of the rooftops and gables and arches he knows so well with his newly terrestrial viewpoint.
The view from up above is beautiful, he muses. From up above, it’s impossible to see the mud puddles and the trash piled in corners, the cracked facades on shops run-down and dirty at the corners, the dust collecting on shoes and the bottoms of capes, of cloaks, of coats. There’s only the rivers, stretching long and artful infinitely into the sky, and the emerald of the deepest western forests and the gold of the eastern desert in sun, the silver of the eastern desert in moon. The scatter-shot of the stars at night, lively and clean and piercing, embroidered finely against the velvet cast of the sky in all her infinite shades. The swollen gray of rain clouds as they roll in, the menacing creep of snow clouds as they hunch over, and through it all, the sun, rising up and circling down like a mother’s hand smoothing over the head of her children, infinitely patient, infinitely reliable.
Down on the street it’s packed and difficult to navigate, and he has to dodge an unfair amount of elbows and hips and hands grasping searchingly at coin-purse level to get anywhere. Saila was definitely right about the bird: he’d have been snatched up or swept away more quickly than Bastion almost had been, and no amount of hand-holding might have been enough. There are almost too many sights to take in, just about too many smells, absolutely too many sounds. The squalling of the city has always been there, a steady background noise to his life. But it’s one thing to listen to it like a protective older sibling would, waiting for trouble. It’s another to find oneself, unexpectedly, part of that cry.
Bastion flexes his feet, wishes he could dart back up to the rooftops and be done with things. But they feel jammed, tight, like he’s got a berry seed stuck between his teeth but in his legs. A piece of floss might save him from a seed, but he’s missing the right kind of String to save him from the damage the Cat King has done him, and Saila is the only answer he has for that right now.
He certainly doesn’t want to raise the matter with her given the circumstances, but on the phone, he’d confirmed his suspicion: the eyrie is out of Strings. If he wants to get fixed anytime soon, he needs to get Saila’s wheel back and keep her alive.
Pretty dumb of him to drag her along to the Spires then, isn’t it?
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