Headless Over Heels ch 2.35 - Nice and Normal (Patreon)

The painted cows watched from their door with the gormless serenity of the genuine article as Seth and the al Ydrises bundled the sleeping Riccana il Teremi into her borrowed bed.

Lisa drew the room’s heavy black curtains against the afternoon. “Stay with her, Sunshine. When she wakes up she’s sure to be frightened, confused, and hungry. Feed her and answer what questions you can.”

“What will we do about the slap?” Tiago asked.

“Just focus on keeping her comfortable,” Lisa said. “The slap we hop when we reach its hurdle. The Legionnaires will give their little tantrums, but… oh, I don’t know. We’ll figure something out.”

“But she’s from one of our villages, no?” Seth said.

Lisa sucked air through her teeth. “Now, Seth, I know I aired that on the knoll, but I was mostly bullshitting for time. We’ll have a devil of a time claiming jurisdiction when we snuffed her wick and brought her to the Necropolis. There might be a more ironclad way to keep her safe. I’ll think on it.”

“One of our villages, he says.” Ofelia’s eyebrow quirked. “I think you might be growing a sense of responsibility, Mr. il Gutierre.”

“Early stages yet,” Seth said. “Bet there’s a surgeon in this town who can extract it.”

Lisa gave their nattering a distracted chuckle. There was a pinch in her face, a furrow in that spotless forehead of hers. “Stay with her, Sunshine, all right?”

Tiago nodded from his fretful spot at one of his mother’s overburdened bookshelves. He slid out a book without visible rhyme or reason and returned to the sleeping Riccana’s bedside.

Ofelia pulled her bicorne off, unpinned her bun, and shook out her long waterfall of silky black hair. “What shall I do?”

“Whatever you like, my dear.” Lisa favored her daughter with a scritch on the head. “By some miracle, you’re the one al Ydris who’s managed to keep her nose clean today.”

“I suppose I’ll go find some trouble, then,” Ofelia said.

“Don’t you start, now.” Lisa abandoned the scratch for a light tap on Ofelia’s bang-shrouded forehead. “Go be nice and normal somewhere.”

“I’m an Exark’s daughter.” Ofelia underhand tossed her hat halfway into an open cupboard’s drawer and made for the exit. “Nice and normal are mutually exclusive.”

“Go be nice, then,” Lisa called after her. She sighed and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I have to switch heads, I think. Would you stay with Sunshine and his lady for a spell, please, Seth? I’d rather you not see my face melt off.”

“She’s not my lady,” Tiago said, but he sounded less and less enthusiastic about these defenses every time he mounted one.

“You going Annalise again?” Seth asked.

“Indeed, unless you’ve seen seraphs gallivanting about in the City of Souls.” Lisa bent at the waist to get herself face-to-face with her man. “I’m sorry, my love,” she whispered. “I thought we’d have a little more time for Lisa-esque antics.”

He kissed her cheek. “Nothing to apologize for. She is you and you are her, right?”

“Yes, but I’m the fun Annalise.”

“Annalise is so fun,” he said. “And she’s got the best nose.”

“The best nose if you need a bleeding sundial, maybe.” Again the contours of an Orwinese accent trickled into the edges of Lisa’s voice.

“Nice bleeding,” he said.

“That’s what I should have told you last night,” she cooed, and danced away from his respondent brush-off bonk. “Be right back, Sunshine!”

Tiago hummed absentmindedly. The book was open in his lap, but his attention was clearly on the sleeping girl he was guarding.

The silence was brittle. Seth felt a pressing requirement to crack it open. “We’ll take care of her, Tiago.”

“Hmm.”

“She’s a tough one. If the seraph couldn’t break her, they can’t.”

“It did break her,” Tiago said. “We just picked up her pieces and glued her partway back.”

Seth flapped a hand as if it might waft away the unwelcome whiff of Tiago’s logic. “Any crash you can walk away from, right? That’s what I learned flying the stormship.”

“Leonane was right.” Tiago’s grim bedside manner stubbornly resisted Seth’s effort at lightening the mood. “She doesn’t belong with these people.”

“Don’t say that.”

“She doesn’t,” Tiago insisted. “She’s too good for them. These Exarks and officers. These high-horse dipshits. Acting like they’re the great bulwark of the continent because one or two months out of the year they all go on a camping trip outside the dome to frown over a big map in a carpeted tent and decide which seraph gullet they’ll send all the peasants and prisoners down. They don’t deserve to look down on her. They barely fucking deserve to look up at her.”

“Oh,” Seth said. He wondered if he sounded this besotted when he talked about Annalise. Who are you kidding? Of course you do. “Well—fair play there.”

“Mom’s good at making nice with them, as long as she’s wearing her sommelier head. And Feeli is perfectly happy to ignore ninety percent of them and have sex with the last ten. Me, I can’t talk to any of them too long, or I get sick to my stomach.” Tiago stopped pretending to read and put the book aside. “I don’t like this saintdamned city. The idleness, the puffery, the pretense. I’m not good at it.”

“Tell that to the guy you sliced open.”

“That was a fuck-up,” Tiago said. “For a decade I kept it frosty. Made sure the only way they could get to me was with a challenge. Things have changed. I don’t…” He sighed. “It’s your fault.”

“How’s it my fault?”

“It was the al Ydrises against the world, and fuck whatever else. Now I have…” Tiago sized Seth up, trying to fit a descriptor around his neck.

“A friend?” Seth offered.

Tiago scoffed. “Friend. Juvenile fuckin’ word.”

“Friend is not a juvenile word, man.”

“Whatever.”

“I’d say you still came off as un-fuck-withable,” Seth said. “You had some pretty great lines during that whole crisis. Some ice-cold stuff. I wish Riccy’d been conscious for them.”

“Half the time I’ve known her she’s been unconscious,” Tiago said. “And half the time she’s unconscious it’s my fault.”

“How do you figure that? Chondra was the one who—”

“Not her,” Tiago said. “Not then. I mean Shaheill. If I’m better with those flankers, if I’m faster and braver and we get a few more licks in on Enna-Belum’s legs, that charge doesn’t happen the same way. More live. She lives, maybe.”

“She did live, Tiago,” Seth said. “She’s alive and she’s gonna be alive for a very long time. Long enough that at some point she’ll stop feeling terrible about everything and start working out what that life looks like. And there wasn’t room for you in it when she was lit, and now there might be, and you need to stop feeling guilty and beating yourself up that a piece of you is glad.”

“Fuck you, man.”

Seth held up his hands. “I am the last person in the world who’d judge you. And probably I’m a total idiot and I’m way off base. I’m only saying that once she’s ready to be happy, it’d be a shame if you were still out here wallowing. And her ears are cute.”

Tiago released a sullen sigh. “They’re extremely cute,” he muttered. “You’re doing the dad thing again.”

“Now, see, you’re not gonna get me with that anymore.” A knock at the door; Seth rose to answer. “No more element of surprise.”

“Any craic?” Annalise poked her head into the room. “I’m not interrupting father/son time, am I?”

“I hate this family,” Seth said.

“You all right by your lonesome, there, Sunshine?” Annalise rested a hand on Tiago’s shoulder. “We’re off to the city. Reckon you should keep the head down with your one here.”

Tiago nodded. Annalise gave him a quick peck on the forehead. He didn’t try to avoid it this time.

“Why the swap?” Seth asked, as they broke from the shade of the manor’s gables into the emerald of early evening.

“Cause Annalise recognizes this poor thing’s been through a bleeding rock tumbler these past days,” Annalise said. “And nobody’s heard of Shaheill yet enough to give her the respect she earned from it, and even if they have, some’ll be absolute shitehawks about it anyway on account of she’s a wee farmer’s daughter and not a chest-thumping soldat. And with all that in mind, it’s not her fault that she threw a paddy on the knoll.”

“What about Lisa?”

“Lisa thinks she’s a fecking idiot,” Annalise said. “And anger’s not helpful at the moment. A bit sudden, this switch, I know. Didn’t mean to just up and cut anything off you had with Lisa. If there’s anything you need to talk about with me, love…”

Seth shook his head. “We talked about it already, right?”

She smiled, relieved. “We did, didn’t we?”

“Though I am missing the tattoo now. The one that was meant to remind me of my place.”

Annalise scoffed. A silvery blush tinged her face. “I’ll keep that kinda craic to Lisa, thank you very much. Don’t reckon I could keep a straight face on for it. I am so bleeding ridiculous when I wear that long-haired trollop.”

“I had fun.”

“That’s on account of how bleeding ridiculous you are.”

“You’re trying to tell me you didn’t? Cause I got a nosebleed that says otherw—”

She kissed him—the classic Annalise takeover-kiss, her plump lips molding against his, her tongue cheerfully letting itself in. The sheer weight of his good fortune thumped into his stomach like a velvet cannonball, as it did sometimes when he tasted Annalise al Ydris.

“You’re the most fun I’ve ever fucking had, Seth il Gutierre,” she murmured, her long, lovely nose nestled along his. “Y’know that?”

“Uhm,” he said, trying to think of something more clever to say as the honey she’d poured over his brain drizzled into his stomach. “I like to think I beat chopping heads, at least.”

She snorted. “Aye, that’s the two things in my life. Chopping heads and kissing Seths.”

“I’ve seen you eat now and then, too,” he allowed.

“Speaking of which.” She led them toward the stable, where Draco and Draka pawed the gravel. “After we get our business squared away, I reckon it’s time I took you out somewhere. Not anywhere like that Lisa jobby. Somewhere sweet and simple where you order off a chalkboard, like.”

“Ooh. Date night?”

“Not our usual sorta lash, I know,” she said. “But if I’mma keep throwing monsters and madmen at you, I could buy you a pint for it.”

“Maybe we can ask the waiter if there’s any murderous seraphs on the dessert menu,” he said. “We taking the carriage?”

“Nah.” Annalise patted Draka’s big black nose. “Reckon we’ll ride Meaty into town and take the trolley. Keep things incognito.”

“You, incognito?”

She retrieved her roadwarden hat from the carriage. “As close as a stout old broad like me can get, anyway. One reason I’m Lisa at all the guff and to-do is so’s when I’m Annalise, I can just be Annalise. Get my business done without the scraping and lick-arsing.”

Seth observed her cinch her gun belt around her hips and buckle her scabbard to her waist and wondered how Annalise could be just anything. He supposed an armed unlit wandering the Necropolitan streets wasn’t such a remarkable thing, but she was so patently herself. “What is our business, anyway?” he remembered to ask.

“Few things.” Annalise held her arms open; he stepped into them and she boosted him onto Demetrius. “Firstly, boyo, it’s time that we saw to that bonus of yours.”

“An excellent start.”

“So I reckon I steer us to the bank, get you some additional braces in your belt, and then we shop us some windows.”

“If memory serves, you were gonna buy some clothes to tear off me.”

She laughs. “I was, at that. But that’s barely gonna dent your pocketbook. I wonder if you might like to meet a few scribers I know, too. Most of my hexentat work I got done in this city, y’know. They know their business. And we’ve both earned ourselves some additional ink.”

Seth perked up. “A second-ringer for me, maybe?”

“Ah, sure, why not? You’ve got the first-ring bolsters for it now.” She climbed atop Demetrius behind him and reached both arms around him for her drayhorse’s reins. “Or a Tortoise, maybe. Classic yoke, that.”

“Which one are you thinking of getting?”

“Dunno. Hadn’t put too much thought into it. But I’ve heard the Fox gets better results than I’d given it credit for.” Her finger poked his back, at the approximate spot where his Fox sat, surely snickering. “We’ll get us some broadsheets and make some plans for the morning. But the business I’ve got in the main’ll take us back to the Bastion.”

“Really? Back so soon?”

“Really,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment there I’ve been real anxious to keep.”

“It’s not… Charlie, is it? The Sorcerer General?”

“Nah. Though it’d be nice to drop in on him, long as you don’t try and call him Charlie to his face.” She clicked her tongue and Demetrius began his measured trot toward the Necropolis. “It’s been a while since you first saw her swinging skull, Seth. Wait’s over, I reckon. Time for you and me to meet Alice al Ydris in the flesh.”