Headless over Heels ch 2.34 - Riccabit (Patreon)

The boot-flattened center of the hill upon which Tiago and Leonane had dueled was now filled with people—monochrome soldiers crouching to examine or comfort their wounded friend, lit citoyens in work boots avoiding their return to the daytime drudgery, officers displaying somewhat-forced frowns and shakes of their head as if they hadn’t been riveted to the sporting swordplay a minute ago.

The judge clambered to the knoll’s highest point and craned his neck to call out across the mobilization. “What says the challenger?”

“I am satisfied, sir.” Tiago had grumbled his way out of his mother’s enthused hug and now straightened his jacket. “You well acquitted yourself and took your wound with martial grace. Our disagreement ends.”

“What says the challenged?”

“I…” Leonane shifted and hissed with pain. The saintspeaker sister tending him clucked her tongue and gently pushed him supine again. “I agree. Our disagreement ends.” He winced at the tutting application of a compress across his stomach. “But Tiago, she—never mind.”

Tiago’s scowl returned. “She what?”

“It isn’t for me to say any longer.” Leonane shrugged. “I am chastened.”

“You began it, whatever it was,” Tiago said. “Kindly conclude.”

“She does not belong here, Teniyant. Even she sees that. It was kind to bring her to the reception if that was what she desired. But a farmer has no place in a room of officers and Exarks.” Leonane shrank from Tiago’s glare. “Ask her, and I’m sure she’d tell you as much.”

“If I valued your counsel, Leonane, I wouldn’t have stabbed you,” Tiago said.

“I suppose your honor is now assuaged, young goodwoman?” Teniyant Chondra was circling Riccana, looking like Tiago had when he’d sized Leonane up for the striking. “And the honor of your hamlet?”

Riccana’s arms were tight across her midsection. She looked stubbornly into the middle distance. “If you say it is, madam, I suppose it is.”

“How many more duels will be fought for the ingratitude of these bored women? Will you not cheer the bravo who bared his blade for you?” Chondra turned her oilslick grin on Tiago. The crowd jostled out from its path. Suddenly another duelist’s strait was opening. “Here’s a pretty reward indeed, al Ydris. Perhaps your thief will favor you with a kiss if your fieldmouse won’t.”

“You think I’m all used up, Teniyant?” Tiago’s saber dripped black blood into the tall grass. “Come and test me, like your friend did. I’ll give you a scar to match.”

“Don’t let her goad you, Tiago,” Ofelia murmured. “She wants the challenge.” Tiago flapped a hand at her, goadedly.

Chondra’s handsome face twisted into a sneer. “Is that a challenge, al Ydris? Shall we make it a formal one?”

“Tiago, please,” Riccana said. “She’s not worth it.”

“Yes, Tiago, please.” The legionnaire did a piss-poor, breathy imitation. “How ridiculous you look, waggling your sword around for such rustic fare. If you think—”

Riccana slapped Chondra in the face. A hauled-off, heavy slap, thrown to sting.

“Ah, shit,” Ofelia muttered, and dashed from Seth’s side toward the incandescently furious legionnaire who now seized Riccana’s arm.

“You ungrateful little trollop,” Chondra snarled. A darkened handprint was showing on her cheek. “I could have you flogged for that. For a start.”

“Ungrateful? What do I have to be grateful to the Legion for? You wind-up soldiers.” Angry tears sprang from Riccana’s unlit eyes. “Where were you?”

“It’s a felony, what you’ve just done,” Chondra said. “Did your heartthrob there tell you that?”

“Let me go.” Riccana tugged on her arm.

“Striking an officer in front of all these witnesses? You really are out of your depth, aren’t—”

“Let me go,” Riccana shrieked, and she vanished. For a split second her clothes held the form she’d had. Then they fell to the ground.

Chondra’s eyes widened. “What in—” The sentence ended in a bellow of pain. She clutched her hand to her chest. Blood had been drawn there, in a tiny crescent. Like an animal’s bite.

From the black pool of discarded clothing, a white rabbit bounded and took off across the hill toward the forest.

“Oh, fuck,” Ofelia said, mildly. “I suppose we know Riccy’s Darkness.”

“She bit me,” Chondra snarled to the gawking crowd. “That civilian slapped me and bit me and now she’s fled.” When nobody jumped into action, she raised her voice further: “Who’s going to catch the bitch?”

Tiago was off. Sprinting down the hill, his intense eyes shaded by his bicorne, the tails of his broadcloth uniform trailing.

Ofelia took one lunging step after him and tarried, looking with panicky uncertainty to her mother.

“I have to stay here, love.” Lisa indicated the consternation the hill had dissolved into. “I’m sorry. Poor Riccy’s stepped in it.”

“Stepped in it, hell.” Leonane’s Exark shoved his way into their conversation. “That girl has made herself a fugitive. Teniyant il Aphaz is correct. If I was her Exark—”

“Then your student would not have lost to mine.” Lisa cut him down with the same precise viciousness her son had displayed. “I am the Verdugo of Shaheill. If there is to be punishment meted out, mine is the authority.”

The walrus-mustached man sniffed with injured disdain. “What in Saint Makine’s blessed book is Shaheill?”

“Exactly my point.” Lisa turned to her retinue. “Go. Both of you.” As they started off: “Oh—and her clothes, the poor thing.”

Seth doubled back and gathered Riccana’s dress, folding it to avoid touching her shift. “We’ll find them.”

Lisa caught him lightly by the arm. “When you do, tell Tiago it’s in hand. And tell them both it’s not their fault. Bring them back here first. It won’t do to scamper away.”

“Of course.”

“I love you. Be safe.”

Seth stole a quick kiss from his giant girlfriend and also a bookmark, which he resolved to return later. It was the stress.

Ofelia tarried on the hill’s edge. As soon as he joined her, she broke into a determined run. “We can’t let them find her first, Seth.”

“What’ll they do to her?”

“Arrest her,” Ofelia said. “Then Mother has to spend valuable currency getting her out, in the best case scenario. In the worst, they make an example of the poor girl because they think it’ll hurt us.”

“The Legion will do this?” Seth frowned. “For a slap?”

“Parts of it,” Ofelia said, as they broke into the forest. It was a stroller’s wood, with stone-marked walking paths and carefully cut roots. “Perhaps I’m just catastrophizing, but if I’m catastrophizing, Tiago is, too, and he’s got a sword. Can you get into the canopy here?”

By answer, Seth darted from the path and to the closest tree—a broody yew, its bark gnarled like wizened hands. He flitted into its branches, letting the climber’s instinct take him higher to the yellow-pricked new growth on its upper boughs.

“I’ll take the low road,” Ofelia called, from the trod leaves below. “Holler if you spot him. Or if you see a sleeping nude redhead.”

“Understood.”

“Or a rabbit.”

“I reckon if I holler at every rabbit I’ll lose my voice, Teniyant Ofelia.”

“Be that way,” she said. He saluted and climbed.

Ofelia and the hill fell out of sight through the gathering woods as he moved from tree to tree. This far north, autumn had already slashed its crimson way through the canopy, and stick season was beginning in its wake. The boughs had grown for pleasure strolls, not hardy harvests; it was all old growth, thick and sure beneath his hands.

Movement drew his eye downward. A pair of legionnaires in unadorned field coats crunched through the desiccating carpet below him, their blades bared. One glanced skyward; Seth flattened himself into a y-junction hollow between two heavy branches and watched them continue on.

He tried to stick to the foliage that remained, the blotchy brown patches and evergreen mats. If Ofelia wanted a holler, being seen surely wasn’t such a hazard, was it? But something kept him secreted away. He was here on orders from the Verdugo Superior, yes. But Seth was beginning to understand that the absolute authority that the Legion projected out to the rest of the continent refracted into many strange and jagged facets the closer you got to its black-and-emerald heart.

A welcome distraction from those brooding thoughts presented itself in a clearing. Seth swung from the branches and landed before Tiago al Ydris, who leaned with performative casualness against a thick trunk.

“Tiago. They’re looking for her.”

Tiago nodded and pulled his gloves off, tucking them into his armpit. He raised his forefingers to his lips.

“Tiago—” Seth began, and was interrupted by the boy’s sharp, shrill whistle piercing through the forest. “Don’t, man.”

“Don’t what?”

Seth pointed to the sword. “That.”

“It’s sheathed.” Tiago threaded his fingers back through his heavy black gloves. “I never used the Harlequin, il Gutierre. Calm down.”

"You heard?"

“Uh huh.” Tiago let the ghost of a smile haunt the corners of his mouth. “Little peanut gallery. Talking about how much of a fuck-up I used to be.”

“Sorry,” Seth said.

“Your nosy ass would’ve found out sooner or later,” Tiago said. “And it’s like I said to her. You get it. You were a fuck-up too, before your Fox.”

“You said that? She said you just sighed.”

Tiago sighed.

The pair of legionnaires Seth had spotted from the treetop took that moment to crash through the brush in front of them. The thin strips of bared metal in their fists shone unevenly in the dappled forest light. The man in the lead, a man whose munition kettle helmet hugged tight to his thick head, gave a crisp salute with his offhand. “Verdugo Teniyant, sir. We’re sent to collect the fugitive.”

Tiago crossed his arms and surveyed them from beneath his bicorne’s brocade. “Fugitive.”

The man’s spine straightened. “That’s what she is, sir.”

“Return to whichever Exark sent you on this unfit errand, soldat,” Tiago said. “I have this in hand.”

The crunch of leaves and clatter of arms behind them. Seth jolted at the sound, but it was Ofelia, jogging to join her brother. “Don’t, Tiago,” she said.

Tiago made an annoyed noise in his throat. “You fight one honor duel, and all day everyone treats you like you’re made of flashpowder.”

“There are consequences for what that girl did, Verdugo Teniyant,” the legionnaire said. “Striking an officer, fleeing the scene.”

“There are likewise consequences to petty authoritarians stitching up slaps thrown by farmgirls with laws meant for rioters in the capillaries,” Tiago said. “And you, sir, or your Exark, would seem intent on levying such accusations at my family and my allies. To hurt them, if you can.”

He took a step forward and clicked his saber from its scabbard. Its fuller was still sticky with Leonane’s black blood.

“Will I take your insinuation on its face, sir,” he said, “or will you take it to your heels?”

The legionnaire’s rigid posture developed a hairline crack in its foundation. “We are here in capacity, sir.”

“Indeed so,” Tiago said. “This explains you; it does not excuse you.”

“Should the Legion decide that Riccana il Teremi requires correction, she comes from Verdugo al Ydris’s territory,” Ofelia said. “The al Ydrises will therefore take responsibility for her punishment. If you find fault in that, bring it to the Sorcerer General.”

The second legionnaire, a gangly woman, shot him an unfriendly smirk down her broad nose. “Does your mother know you’re invoking the Living Saint’s name for a peasant girl?”

“Leave this forest and bring your complaints to her.” Tiago took a step across the mat of dying autumn. Seth remained an amateur at best, but he could recognize the intent in that step, the way it pivoted the back foot and aligned the front. “Or stay, and I’ll show you the gravity with which I take them.”

“Tiago,” Ofelia whispered. But they were backing off, the soldiers, and murmuring to one another in low, defeated tones.

Tiago stood in stillness until their footsteps fell out of hearing, and decompressed with a heavy outbreath. “Fucking legionnaire corp,” he said. “What’d Riccy call them? Wind-up soldiers? Too right.”

“Seth’s been brachiating,” Ofelia said. “Looking for her from above. We could do a birdiago, if you like. I’m here to headlock you while you fly.”

“No need.” Tiago started into the forest, the opposite direction from the legionnaires his whistle had summoned. “This way.”

A few dozen paces from the clearing, an ancient oak leaned forward like a drunk, supported by a copse of its offspring. Tiago stooped in the hollow its droop formed, and lifted a waifish, pale sleeper from her barky bower.

Riccana was wrapped in his jacket to cover her slender nakedness. Her head tipped back as Tiago gently gathered her, and the coils of her thundercloud hair slipped back, burdened by tangled leaves and twigs.

“Oh, shit,” Seth said. “Those are new.”

Riccana’s ears were a rabbit’s, long and lopped.

“Perhaps they’ll shrink back down,” Ofelia said. “Eventually.”

Tiago nodded grimly. “If they’re like this when she wakes up, nobody say a fucking word, right?”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“And they’re not so bad. Right?”

“Not at all,” Seth said. “I mean, you look at a muran and their ears are, uh…” He tilted his head. “Not that long, I guess, but…”

“They’re rather cute, really,” Ofelia said. “If they stick around, she’ll make them work. We could call her Riccabit.”

“That’s the sort of thing we won’t say.” Tiago wrapped the coat tighter around Riccana and stalked the way they’d all come, back toward the knoll.

Seth followed, holding up the bundle of clothes. “I brought her stuff.”

“Thank you,” Tiago said, absently.

“You think we should dress her?”

“I think we should get her the hell away from these people,” Tiago said.

Ofelia picked leaves one-by-one from Riccana’s trailing hair. “Mother said we come back to the knoll first. She’s back there defusing things.”

“I’ve made her life so fucking difficult,” Tiago muttered. Seth wasn’t positive who he was referring to.

Out from the treeline they came, and up the knoll to a hilltop still swollen with bystanders and rubberneckers.

“A pattern emerges, Verdugo al Ydris.” A potbellied woman officer with the biggest hat Seth had yet seen was stabbing a stubby digit into the air before Lisa’s unbothered smile. “Your boy is tempestuous. You cannot deny it.”

“Why ever would I, Madam Coronat?” Lisa tapped her chin as if genuinely pondering. “Yes, Tiago al Ydris is a man of strong conviction. Such a man as makes the finest warriors of the Legion.” She turned to the sound of their approach. Seth caught a flicker of exhausted relief before the masquerade returned. “And here they are.”

Tiago carefully shifted Riccana to free a saluting hand. “Madam Verdugo.”

Lisa swept a presentational hand across her retinue. “It might have behooved you to imagine my son as some rash ruffian scapegrace off to hide in the forest like an outlaw,” she announced to the assembly. “Well, keep imagining. The girl is apprehended. We will take it from here.”

Chondra il Aphaz glowered from the crowd’s edge. Despite her rank, and the soldiers dispatched at her word, she stood apart. “You put yourself at deep risk for this provincial pup, Teniyant.”

“Hardly,” Tiago said. “You saw Leonane’s swordwork.”

“I’m not talking about Leo,” Chondra said. “And I’m not using put in past tense. You do yourself a disservice taking up her part in this way.”

“She’s a warrior,” Tiago said. “One who can’t defend her own honor thanks to this Legion’s laws. Perhaps you’re right, and it wasn’t my place to do so in her stead, but I’m not sorry that someone did.”

“You’re surrounded by warriors. And you chase that twiggy little farmgirl. What could you possibly see in someone like her?”

For all that her mother’s current head wasn’t related to her by blood, Ofelia’s smile carried the same icicle edge that Lisa’s did. “As opposed to someone like you, Teniyant?”

The way Chondra reacted reminded Seth of the first person he’d ever killed. Prichard the prick, in the woods of Prossimo. Those same widening eyes, that disbelieving frown.

“Enough,” Lisa said, with cool finality. “My subordinate is returned, with the young lady in custody. The matter between him and Lanzcapitan al Proiet is concluded, and we are away. I will look forward to our reunion at the next Verdugo’s reception this weekend.”

She turned gracefully from the mob to her children, a serene smile plastered on her face.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here before they eat us,” she whispered.