ow can you look forward to somewhere you’ve never been?
He grunted after a moment, as if to say, That’s fair. A cursory bow and some awkward maneuvering took them round a gaggle of trussed-up ladies who wouldn’t, for some reason, walk single file; when they fell back into step, he’d thought about it more, and Cerise was speaking again.
A carriage skidded by, tossing a spray of water on them. It was one of those flooding days, he thought admiringly, resisting the urge to grin and laugh again. On heavy days like this, you couldn’t help getting wet; it didn’t matter if you were a queen in a covered litter, swathed in curtains, something would get wet.
He wished, suddenly, he could fold up the umbrella and leave it behind. It was cold rain, he reckoned, nothing like the warmer rains of Hamis; he still missed when the tilting of the weather didn’t ache in all his joints, when he didn’t feel – and look – like a drenched weasel for taking a walk in the rain. It wasn’t the walks in the rain he missed the most, and he thought he’d’ve given them up, just to have some of the rest back. But he missed when the rain had made him feel clean; nothing made him feel clean, now. It was just one step after another deeper into the mire.
He smiled anyway when Cerise turned to scowl after the coach, though he hid it well as she turned back. He dared another sideways glance when she said, We haven’t traveled much, though he didn’t linger for long, and he couldn’t see her face with the tilt of her umbrella and the cloud of her hair.
You spent some time in Bastia, didn’t you? When you were a boch. He didn’t want to ask; the bundle in her cloak already toed the line named Mama, and he didn’t know what else that question could unfold into. He was supposed to have spent time in Bastia, too, for all she knew. He wondered, his eyes on the rain-slick stones, how much she did know.
The back of his neck prickled. As if in tentative answer to his wondering, the physical mona drifted deeper in their mingling. He felt the sharp edge of her curiosity; he might’ve cut himself on that blade – might still.
It was nothing like the comfortable mingling with Ezre or with Nkemi. He wondered for the first time what it’d been like to caprise Anatole. If Dr. Arushi and all the careful-hid smiles behind hands – at balls, at teas, in the halls of the Council – if all the polite comments about his returning field, not-quite-right, spoke true, he thought it must’ve been nothing like this. He wondered if Cerise had ever had a comfortable caprise with her father after she’d gone off to Brunnhold, or if he’d held his strong perceptive field separate.
The back of his neck still prickled, but he smiled over at her. “Nothing’s old hat to me, these days,” he said with a crooked-wry smile, aching with the honesty of it.
His smile twitched, and he looked back down at the sidewalk.
“I want to see something different, too. I think.” He shrugged, frowning. “A month or more in such a different kingdom is going to be damned strange. I’ll be occupied well enough, and so will you” – a tiny grin – “but I already half feel as if I’ve stepped into a strange kingdom, this last…”
They paused at a street corner; he looked either way, through the rain slanting steadily down, then over at Cerise as they stepped over the stream of water along the curb and into the street. “Not that I’m in the least bit apprehensive,” he pronounced with all his politician’s dignity, lifting his chin and setting his jaw.
He let his own caprise drift deeper. He let go some of the hold on his field, let it loosen at the edges, blend and blur; like an exhale, a little shiver of worry and sadness went through it, and he let them.
He got the funniest urge to apologize for it, for all of it, which didn’t make any sense. She’d hated her father; she didn’t give a damn about him, either, or where he went, or what he did, or how he felt. This was all, he knew still at his heart, a ploy in one way or another. And he was a thing that had done what it could to survive; he couldn’t apologize for that, ever.
With his jaw still stubborn-set and his face a professional frown, his field gave a little pulse against hers, just as curious.