Chapter Eleven. In Which the Pair Does Not Make a Good First Impression
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In Which the Pair Does Not Make a Good First Impression
The barman pointed a finger at Brunie. “Three.”
Javi winked. “Indeed.”
The man did not react. He led them to a table that had deep gouges in the wood and was littered with broken pieces of what might have been a teacup.
Next to it was a pillar covered in wanted posters that did not liven up the ambience.
Several of them had large red Xs over the faces, which meant they had been captured or were dead.
Before the man left, Javi swept a hand over the broken ceramic. “Would you mind clearing this?”
“It’s decor.”
“Ah.” Javi nodded, as if he could suddenly understand the vision. “What do you recommend?”
“The soup.”
“Great. We will take two soups.”
The man grunted. “It’s salted bacalao.”
Javi frowned, a line forming between his brows. “Do you mean to say you salted an already salty fish?”
“Delicacy around here.”
“Do you have anything else? Bread? Cheese? A salt brick I could shove down my throat to save you the trouble?”
“Nope. Just the bacalao.” From out of nowhere, the barman set down two pints of pale ale, then walked away.
The bar returned to life. The fight continued, the lady in the red dress beat her opponent, and the man with the knife-pistol jammed the end of it into the table to carve out a game of tic-tac-toe that he played with himself.
“I’ve never had that fish before,” Risa shared absentmindedly, then scowled at her slip of the tongue.
Now he would know she was from a landlocked area of the kingdom, since bacalao came from the ocean and wouldn’t last on a merchant cart through the Bosque, cursed or not.
She’d grown up with lake fish or the mysterious fish that would sometimes appear in the fountain, which were declared bad luck simply for their strangeness.
Surprisingly, that didn’t stop anyone in Barrow from eating them.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers and all that.
Javi made a face. “You’re better off with the salt brick.” Then, folding his hands primly on the table beside the wreckage, he declared, “I have an idea.”
“I wasn’t aware you could have those,” she sighed. She was weak from exertion, and the words held little bite in her current state.
“Be still, my heart,” Javi shot back with a wink.
“Stop flirting and concentrate.”
He turned serious as he removed his gold rings. “We won’t get far with just us two—three,” he corrected when Brunie growled. “I think we should bribe someone here to accompany us.”
Oh.
“That’s—” She cleared her throat. “That’s a great idea. I … thought the same.”
He was clearly pleased with himself, if his little smile was anything to go by. “I figured with your good luck, my charm, and the promise of gold, we’ll get there with time to spare.”
“I don’t believe we should rely on all that to get you to—”
She froze. The word she was about to say fell right out of her head, as if it had never existed. What the—
“Risa?”
Risa shook her head. She stared at the broken bits of cup, trying to piece it together in her mind along with the word she was looking for.
But it stubbornly refused to make itself known, slipping from her grasp each time she reached for it.
“No. I was trying to say—” The word floated away again. “Curses, what is happening?”
They were trying to find a way to get the prince to his wedding in—again, the kingdom refused to name itself.
She listed all the cities she knew in Kheadon, which happened to be an alarming few and would disappoint her parents greatly if they found out that the revolving door of tutors had done little to forward her education.
Then she moved on to neighboring nations like Itra, Burgal, Niestes, and the last one that was separated from Kheadon by an entire desert and—
It came to her suddenly, like a magical storm at midnight.
“Madros!” she nearly shouted, rocking the table with the sheer force of her voice.
It melted back into the recesses of her mind almost immediately, a flare in the dark sputtering out. Something about the name falling out of her head made her insides churn.
Javi nodded slowly. “Right. We are going to—” And then he stopped, brow furrowed. “Shit. It’s happening again.”
“What is?”
But the prince was too busy muttering to himself to answer.
The overworked barman returned with two bowls of soup, which were steaming red and very pungent. He placed the chipped earthenware bowls on the table, eyes briefly alighting on Javi’s collection of rings, then turned around without another word.
The soup looked fresh, but the smell nearly made her gag. Javi, at least, didn’t seem bothered by it, though he didn’t immediately tuck in.
Instead, he collected his rings from the table, methodical in the way he slipped them back onto his fingers, turning them each once. The last was his signet ring with the ruby, and he held it between his fingers like he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He didn’t speak for a long moment.
“It’s been plaguing us for years. An inability to …
mention my future home.” He swallowed as he returned the ring to his pinky, where it caught the dingy light that streamed in through grimy windows.
“The wedding has been in the works for nearly as long as the general has been in power, simply because of how impossible it is to get letters and missives. Father will agree to a term, then forget it by the time the letter is sent off.”
It sounded like—
“Magic,” she said aloud.
Javi gave her a half-hearted shrug. “You’d think so, but General”—his eyes fluttered closed for a moment, voice strained as he continued—“Sur is so anti-magic that he started the Anti-Airship Federation.”
She knew that, but there was no other possible reason for how the name of a kingdom simply vanished from memory. It smelled an awful lot like magic.
“So you’re meant to get married to someone and live in a place that your family and your friends and your people can barely remember the name of.”
“My family won’t miss me, and I don’t have any friends.” His shrug was nonchalant, but his face remained stony.
Her chest flared in the spot behind her ribs where she usually felt the resentment she reserved for Barrow—but that resentment wasn’t aimed at Javi.
She couldn’t be angry at him when the words rang true.
He believed it, and that made her heart twinge where Brunhilda’s curse had taken root, because unfortunately she believed something very similar.
My family won’t miss me, and I don’t have any friends.
Clearing her throat, she reached for a wooden spoon and took a sip of her soup.
Flavor exploded on her tongue—and not in a good way.
The soup was so salty, she drank half her ale down in one go.
Risa might never have seen the ocean, but she was convinced the fish in her stew had actually swallowed it whole.
“I’d leave some for later,” Javi suggested, seemingly unbothered by the saltiness as he took his own bite.
She resisted the urge to finish the ale and placed the glass as far from reach as she could to stave off temptation. “Surely you have some royal contacts who could help you get to”—she growled at her spoon and amended what she was trying to say—“your wedding.”
He thought for a moment, then said, “The Regent of San Cirilo.”
San Cirilo—the airship city. An autonomous region that circled over a great swath of plains, far from Kheadon’s capital and close to the desert border.
What began as a passion project by ambitious airshipologists—scientists who believed they could make flying machines with a combination of magic and steam—now thrived as a sprawling, hovering city nestled in the clouds.
Despite the success of the airships, the monstrous things were rare.
Their scientific secrets were guarded closely by the Regent, who would be able to get Risa and Javi across the border and desert without breaking a sweat.
There was but one tiny hiccup with Javi’s suggestion.
“The Regent is a known recluse. Why would they help you?”
Javi’s nose flared. “They’re my father’s sibling.” Then, a second later: “Or cousin. Or aunt?”
“The Regent’s your family?”
A nod. “Yes. My uncle. Or my niece. I haven’t the slightest clue. We’ve never met. Or—” Once again, his brows formed a single beautiful line as he attempted to recall something that slipped right through his fingers. After a moment, he gave up. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Risa could think of plenty of bad things. And the first was getting shot out of the sky by the Anti-Airship Federation.
Instead, she observed, “You don’t really think through anything you say, do you?”
“Then it’s decided. We’ll pay an outlaw to get us to the airship city, I’ll get married, and you can go back to doing whatever it is witches who have secret business they ‘must see through’ do.”
She rolled her eyes and shoveled another bite of oversalted soup into her mouth.
While Risa struggled to keep it down, Javi seemed to relish it, draining his bowl down to the last drop before he turned to his own pint of ale, which Risa had been eyeing greedily for a long while.
As he took his first swig, a man with an impressive mustache and thick sideburns bumped into their wobbly table.
Soup sloshed over the sides of Risa’s bowl, broken ceramic pieces careened off the table, and Brunie scurried from Risa’s lap.
“Yer chair was in the way,” the man barked, eyes like chipped jade.
Javi stared up at him, confused. Neither Risa nor Brunie could react in time to stop him as he said, quite stupidly, “You’re the one who bumped into me.”