Chapter 11
We walked through the city in search of millet bean porridge. It was like an adventure. Most of the bigger streets were the ruler-straight kind, and those were the ones with a lot of foot traffic and stalls lined up for the honk roar week, doing slow morning business.
Inkiri clicked at me near constantly, always stealing glances at me as if he thought I’d curl up in a ball out of fear if it got too noisy. His concern made him lead me down one of the narrower side streets.
At first, the streets continued in straight lines, but after a while, straight lines turned to curves, and the houses huddled even closer.
“Whoa, it’s really quiet here.” I kept my voice low.
Inkiri looked around. “This must be a residential area. I’m sorry, Sadir. We should head back. I don’t know Esaka as well as I thought I did.”
I spotted tiny birds, three of them, sitting on a roof that almost reached to the road. They were little green things and making noises like small pebbles dropping into a lake.
“No, this is nice. This is how people live, right?”
A bagu with a large bag on his back passed us and bobbed his head in greeting. He was walking so fast that I was pretty sure he was either a delivery person or a postal worker.
“Yes. This looks like an older part of the city, I think. The houses here will be small. Very narrow too.” He pointed at one of them, and he was right. It was about as wide as a car, and that was it.
“Do you know how old Esaka is?”
“Hmm. No. I read it somewhere probably, but I don’t remember. Old, of course, especially with the koto-sa-ko, the magic school.”
Magic. The big M-word I didn’t want in my life. But talking about magic schools… Well, it got me curious. I was trying to play it off as casual while continuing to work toward my newfound goal of being the bestest trophy mate.
“Magic school, huh? What was that like?”
We briefly had to walk in single file when a group of bagua passed us, chatting as they went. They looked at me, but didn’t act like they didn’t want me here. Good to know. If we did move here, my neighbors probably wouldn’t want to kill me, at least.
“I don’t know. Perhaps… I don’t know if Vergis would know more. I think his hangu father might. Koto-sa-ko could do things for Houses, like jobs you could hire them for. You heard how Hove hired Vergis?”
We’d arrived at a set of low stairs that went up. It seemed we’d been wandering downhill.
“Yup. Something about the magic wall.”
Inkiri hummed. “Yes. Back then, you could go to the koto-sa-ko, and you could hire them too. There were many things they could do for a House, but if you were a very rich House, you’d try to get a mage to come and stay for as long as possible.
The idea was always that the mage would like it so much that he’d settle down, maybe join the senfesmen of the head of the House.
That would’ve been considered ideal. In that way, many mages joined my hangu father’s House, but that was a long time ago, of course. ”
We’d arrived at the top of the stairs, and the area was getting busier again. The houses were larger and more uniform, and the streets no longer wound around them like rivers.
“That’s so cool. Magic schools were really powerful.” I hadn’t meant to say “cool” and the M-word at the same time. What I needed was to change the topic.
“Yes, once. Or, no, I think it was always the mages who were powerful, and the smart thing for them was to band together. You’ve had this on Earth. You had guilds.”
I nodded. “Yeah, weavers and that sort of thing. Not as cool as mages though.” Oh, fudge me. I’d not meant to say that. “So, uhm. Millet beans?”
Inkiri clicked. “Billet beans, sweet thing. I think we’re almost back where we started. We’ll find some here.”
Inkiri, with his hand around my wrist, found his way through the narrow streets until we were back at a wider thoroughfare that I recognized on account of the honk roar stalls.
It was more crowded now, especially around the stalls that sold food, but we didn’t go for those.
I kept stealing glances at all the street food though.
One place was dipping leaves in batter and then frying them, though to be fair, it could’ve been something like spinach rather than leaves from trees.
When we reached a rectangular square, Inkiri eventually zeroed in on a place.
“Do you want to sit outside?” He glanced inside the restaurant, which wasn’t huge. It looked like one of those tiny places you only knew as a local. “Or if the sun is too bright—”
“How about there?” I pointed at one of the small tables set up close to the restaurant’s door. Well, small for Inkiri. For me, it was pretty spacious.
He nodded. “Yes, but you have to let me know if the sun is too much for you, Sadir.”
I almost protested, but then I thought, No, that’s not what a trophy mate would do. As a trophy mate, I really should lean into being frail and delicate.
I looked up at Inkiri, doing my best to act as if a strong breeze could knock me over. “I promise I will.”
He nodded and moved us to the table. “I’ll go inside and order for us. Is that okay?”
I tugged on my scarf, noticing how his eyes followed that movement. “Yes. I don’t know what’s good anyway, but I’m ready to explore those billet beans.”
He nodded. “I’ll be right back.”
Inkiri vanished through the restaurant’s sliding door.
The windows were too high for me to see inside, so I looked out over the square instead.
Now that I knew about Raikengana, I managed to spot a group of them, four bagua dressed all in black, and sure enough, their horns didn’t have any kind of makeup on them.
They seemed to be arguing about where to go, two of them intently looking at a booklet while the two others pointed.
A kid’s higher voice drew my attention to a family—or a sentenmen.
Senfesmen? I had to ask which word included kids.
In any case, the kid had a lantern in their small blue hands and was excitedly dancing around the square with it.
That reminded me of the stuffed unicorn Gran had brought me from one of her trips once.
Just like the kid was doing, I’d danced around the house with it.
Unlike me, the kid had a group of three grown-ups—possibly parents—keeping pace and joining in the excitement while also making sure they didn’t bump into anyone else.
That was nice. Realistically, I knew there were probably bagu parents who were as minimally involved with their kids as my human parents had been with me, but so far, I hadn’t seen that.
I looked away—and straight at one of the two bagua I’d seen staring before. He looked away again as if he hadn’t meant to be caught looking. Huh. Maybe not everyone here was used to humans.
The door of the restaurant slid open, and Inkiri came out with a tray in his hands. He beamed at me over the rims of several small bowls. “Sorry for making you wait, sweet thing.”
I chuckled. “You better be. I was about to get bored and run off.”
He cocked a brow and folded his taller frame onto the chair next to mine. “Where did you want to run off to?”
I huffed. “I was going to figure that out then.” I looked at the tray. There were five bowls, and there was something red in all of them, some of it looking like creamy porridge, though two bowls had the bean texture visible. They looked like small red peas. “What’s all this?”
For the next half hour, Inkiri explained about billet bean preparation.
The longer you cooked the beans, the sweeter they got.
There were things that were typically added too, and I could taste that in the porridge.
There was some kind of root that tasted like orange, mint, and ginger all at the same time, and combined with the sweet millet beans, I’d found my new favorite dessert.
After we were done tasting our way through the billet bean dishes, I stretched and looked up at the bright sky.
“Where next?” I asked, turning to Inkiri.
“Wherever you want to go, sweet thing. Is there anything you want to see?”
I was about to tell him I didn’t know what sights there were when I realized this was basically our honeymoon. My cheeks turned bean colored.
“Well…I know there are moors here, and there’s the wall Vergis is working on. Can we go there? Nokim said the moors are haunted.”
Inkiri leaned forward, the small chair creaking as he moved. “We can do that, but you don’t have to worry about ghosts in the moors.”
I grinned. “Ghosts don’t scare me. Anything that doesn’t want to eat me doesn’t scare me.”
He clicked. “Nothing’s going to eat you, Sadir. I’ll make sure of that.”
Inkiri took our dishes inside while I reveled in him being so protective and probably determined to protect me from ghosts, demons, and zombie ligua, if such things existed in bagu stories.
Before long, we were making our way toward the wall, and I liked the thought of this being our honeymoon more with each step I took.
It was almost like I was getting right back into the vacation mood the apocalypse had so rudely interrupted, except this was better.
I was no longer alone and never would be again.
We spotted another couple of the car thingies, which Inkiri informed me were called kodesh and steam powered.
“The nicer ones use magic for power rather than any other kind of fuel,” he said as we walked along a street that looked much more like home, with sidewalks on either side and other traffic in the center. Still, everything was very walkable.
“Which means if you have less people who are doing magic, you have a problem, because you won’t be able to make any more co-dashes.”