Kingfisher(27)

“Maybe nothing. Maybe not.” Wind blew her long black hair across her face; she pushed it away, laughing. “I’m starving, and my hair smells like Calluna’s cave. No respectable place will let me in. There’s the car.”

He grimaced as he folded his tall body, packed as it was with knightly virtues and muscles, into her tiny Greenwing. “Be easier to carry this under my arm,” he grumbled.

“I know, I know, but father says it’s good for the earth and sets an example. More likely he had Lord Skelton put a spell on the engine that makes it impossible to speed. What’s the greasiest, smokiest, darkest pub you know?”

He thought a moment, then guided her there.

They sat in a corner of the antique pub, surrounded by oak and smoke-stained stone, along with a mix of tourists and students from an equally archaic local college. Everything on the menu was fried, including modern versions of rustic dishes with weird names. They ate Straw Dogs and Fishwife’s Cobble, along with Wyvern Eggs, which turned out to be balls of deep-fried bread stuffed with golden, peppery cheese. Perdita watched people come and go, some fashionably dressed in black and metal, others who might have just gotten out of bed and tossed on some laundry in one of the aged flats down the streets. Gareth meandered absently through a tale about getting lost during his recent trip north and finding an invisible cape with an unusual name.

Perdita felt the name come alive in her head, possibly a portent, or a detail in some obscure scheme of things. “Mistbegotten?” She tucked it away for later scrutiny as Gareth nodded.

“We met a young man with a net full of crabs and a sorceress for a mother.”

“Really. What’s her name?”

“Heloise Oliver. She runs a restaurant there; she served us the most amazing crab chowder. Beautiful woman. Red-gold hair and eyes that glitter like bluebottle wings.” He bit into a Wyvern Egg, rendered himself speechless with hot cheese. Perdita eyed him speculatively. “Her son takes after her,” Gareth continued, when he could. “He seems to have something of her gifts, as well. I can’t imagine what the pair of them are doing up there in that forgotten little corner of—”

Somebody skidded across the floor and landed in Perdita’s lap.

Before she could move, Gareth mesmerized her, seeming to be sitting in his chair and standing in front of her in the same second, holding a strange, spiky fistful of metal she guessed was a weapon under the nose of the man on top of her.

He said, “Get. Up.”

The entire pub had frozen, along with the stranger, who smelled of piss, sweat, and the spilled beer that was soaking into Perdita’s skirt. She nudged him; he remembered how to move, gathering himself slowly, clumsily, while the peculiar weapon with its mysterious red light like a mad little eye glared an inch from his face. His long hair was a tangled mass of gold and silver; he tied his torn pants with rope, and there were no laces in his mismatched shoes. He lurched a little as he rose, causing the red light to roil suddenly amid a steam-kettle hiss of breath from the onlookers.

Perdita stood up, then, and edged around the man to see his aging, befuddled face. He had gone cross-eyed, staring at Gareth’s weapon.

“Are you hungry?” she guessed. “Can we treat you to lunch?”

His thin lips opened and closed a couple of times before he finally spoke. “That would be kind, miss. Ah. Will I be alive to eat it?”

She glanced at Gareth. The weapon was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Gareth stood with a quizzical look on his face, wondering, it seemed, why everyone was riveted in place and dead quiet in the middle of their drinks.

The bartender came to life, bringing a cloth to mop up the beer. The unfortunate who had sat on the princess cleared his throat.

“Sorry, miss. I’m a little unsteady at this particular juncture in time. Sorry, young sir. My fault absolutely. I believe the entire incident was occasioned by an olive.”

“An olive.”

“Under my heel. I slid on it.”

“Go and sit down, Henry,” the bartender sighed. “And thank your lucky stars. And thank you, Princess Perdita,” she added with a charming smile at Perdita, then at Gareth as he passed her a paper bill with Severen’s face on it. The god, his hair colored gold, his face masked in silver, looked not unlike the wild-haired, silver-stubbled man staring raptly at Perdita. “If you’ll come with me, Princess, I’ll unlock the private facilities, and you can wash off the beer.”

Perdita drove Gareth to the palace. He had a meeting; she had a ritual to attend. She turned out of the city traffic through the hoary, lichen-stained arch at the south end of the palace grounds. The broad, graveled drive ran through parklands and gardens toward a view of the vast expanse of wind-whipped blue that was Severluna Bay. It began to curve at the white-stone walls of the palace rising as high as the cliff it stood upon. At the deepest point of the drive’s horseshoe turn, the wide steps of the palace flowed down from the doors to meet it.

It was, on ordinary days, the most efficient way to get home. But the princess had barely cleared the archway before she found herself at the end of a long, slow line of official vehicles, private cars, motorbikes, electric bikes, blue-and-gold city cabs, and the sleek, dark, fast sedans favored by knights on duty. She felt, in the Greenwing, like a sprat that had wandered into a school of sharks.

She asked Gareth incredulously, “What is this? Is this your meeting?”