Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(39)

21

“I need a drink,” Cat said once Raz’s sailors moored Dream and Bounty both and reefed the sails and jagged the mainmast and scuppered the jibjaw or whatever it was they’d been up to while she packed Dream’s crew into Blacksuit wagons. “And before you get clever, I don’t mean the kind where I’m the beverage. Care to chaperone?”

Raz signed a few forms and handed them to his ship’s clerk. “You want me to come along and make sure you have no fun? Happy to oblige.”

“More like play designated hitter.”

“Is that a sports thing?”

“It’s like a designated driver, only if I’m too drunk to hit someone, you do it.”

“Sounds fun,” he said. “My Alt Coulumb nightlife’s a half century out of date, and the last time I chose a bar in this city I ended up brainwashed. You know a place?”

She bared her teeth at him, though hers were somewhat less pointy. “I can think of a few.”

*

Tara stood beside Shale on the skyscraper’s roof. Aev had left them—flitted off to brood on the abyss. They watched the horizon and the water, neither wanting to speak first.

Shale gave up the contest. “You can’t fly.”

“I can,” she said. “Just not in Alt Coulumb, thanks to your ever-so-progressive local interdict.”

“The skies belong to the Lady,” Shale said. “It would be a perversion for you to fly through them.”

“That’s what counts as perversion for a gargoyle? You must have a boring sex life.”

“Reproduction works differently for us.”

“I bet.”

Shale shifted uncomfortably. “Our poetry can only be read from the air. How will you read it if you cannot fly?”

“I was hoping you’d carry me.”

“You trust me to do that?”

“No,” she said, with more nonchalance than she felt. “But I figure dropping me would cause more trouble than it’s worth. And after all you’ve done tonight, you owe me.”

A calculating silence ensued.

“I have apologized for the face thing,” she said. “Every time I’ve seen you. Except for this afternoon, when you were on too high a dudgeon for me to get a word in edgewise.”

“You’ve seen me maybe three times in the last year.”

“I thought you needed space to heal.”

“After you cut off my face.”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s not even a scar.”

“Where should I hold you?”

Tara had not given much thought to that question. “Around the waist, probably.”

“Very well.” He grabbed her about the waist and jumped off the building.

Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight’s also short on funny faces. But there’s a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being’s first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.

It had been a long while since Tara last flew.

At first the sensations blurred together: rush of wind, lurch in stomach, pull of gravity, talons pressed against her ribs, terror of the monkey brain realizing its body has jumped from an impossibly tall tree toward a branch it can never, ever catch— And then the quaking of her obliques, because she hadn’t thought through the consequences of her entire weight resting against Shale’s hands. The gargoyle’s claws pressed into her diaphragm. Far below, streetlights bounced and circled, and streets wove together. “This isn’t comfortable,” she wheezed. “Maybe if I were to lie on your back?”

“It wouldn’t be steady. There are wings there.”

“Hm.” She puzzled through the issue as well as she could while hanging doubled over from a gargoyle’s claws.

“How did you find me?” Shale asked.

She’d hoped he wouldn’t ponder that particular detail. “I left a tracking glyph under your skin last year.”

He dropped her.

She screamed at first, no denying that. Best get the scream over with and turn one’s attention to the inciting issue, to wit: falling. Not quite enough altitude for the soul-parachute trick, too far from neighboring buildings for magnetism to help. She spun as she fell, which made things harder, the world by turns sky and walls and rapidly approaching road and walls and sky again—she spread her limbs, twisted to counter the spin and control her horizon line—she could lasso the buildings, or else Shale, if she could get a bead on him when she spun skyward again— She hit stone far too soon, which was an unpleasant surprise, but she wasn’t dead, which she found more agreeable. The stone she’d struck was moving, and warm to the touch. When her senses righted themselves, she realized she lay on Shale’s back. His wings beat three, four times—the ripple of his shoulder blades’ muscle reminded her of lying on an inflatable raft in surf on her spring break trip to the Fangs back in school—and they rose again. She swore in five languages, then started to slip; panicked, she caught his hold of his wing, which veered them abruptly left until she let go. At last she locked her arms around his neck, and her knees at his flanks. He was taller than her, which helped. His wings pressed against her sides on the updraft, but not tight enough to hurt.