Headless Over Heels ch 2.40 - Beautiful, Horrible World (Patreon)

“Oh, it’s endless.” Alice tugged book after book from the tombstone stacks. Her hands trembled with eager delight. “They’re using the Dostang system for organizing these? That’s so perfect! Niama tried so hard to get her monastery switched over to Dostang.” Her gasped echoed off the cavernous coffered ceiling, in whose grid were housed shelves as tall as towers that punched through the three balconied tiers of the College library. “This binding on Grona’s Seraphic Sciences. Is it…” She flipped to the title page. “It’s custom on a third edition. Merciful Saint Myria, this is so amazing.”

“We are looking for your donor’s notes, Madam Verdugo.” Magra’s brass leg clicked on the black-and-white tile as she stepped around the book-laden cart. She couldn’t help but say it through a smile. “A modicum of focus, please.”

“Right! Right right right.” Alice hesitated with the book in her hand, dithering between shelf and rolling cart. She placed it on the latter, sandwiched between a slim tome on Kari-Kine water clocks and the memoirs of Sorceress Comandant Lara al Montali. “You said, er, dragonflies?”

Magra pointed. “Right down this—”

“No need to direct me!” Alice strode off through the towering stacks, tugging the cart squeakily beside her. “It’s all Donstang! It’s perfect!”

Seth grinned as he followed. The existential crisis he ought to be having—shadow wars in the Legion, seraph evolution, et al—had been put on pause by the freckly delight across his girlfriend’s new face.

Alice squealed the cart round an overstuffed corner and parked it before a musty shelf whose oak crossbeams bowed under the weight of entomological ponderance. “And here we are. Dragonflies. Drrragonflies.” She rolled the R as she felt along the uneven spines.

“On Gossamer Wings,” Magra called, tap-tap-tapping to catch up with them. “The red one.”

“Mmhmm.” Alice plucked the book from its place and tipped it open. “Fabulously bound, Madam Sorceress. What’d you do with the actual text?”

“Burned it,” Magra said. “I had to cover the tracks.”

Alice looked as though Magra had just bragged about all the puppies she’d got done drowning. “You didn’t have to—” Her jaw clenched. “Oh, dear.”

“Are you remembering what Ofelia does to her books?” Seth asked.

“Oh, all the memories are recontextualizing.” Alice put a hand to her forehead. “I think I created a monster, Seth.”

“The code,” Magra said. “Did it work? Can you read it?”

Alice laid the book flat on her library cart and smoothed its transplanted pages. She chewed her lip. “There are… connections in my cerebellum. As if dendrites are flailing to catch one another. I’m not… sure.” She turned it sideways. “This is—it’s doing something. But not enough to understand it right away.” Her head cocked quick and straightened again, like a bird’s. “I’ll need time for this, I think. Time to catch this skull up with the brain that once occupied it. She must have left clues for me. I’ll find them. I theorize that Niama based this at least in part on a book cipher, so I’ll need to know what was in her personal library—can you find that out from the saintspeaker for me?”

“I’ll get a message skywired,” Magra said. “Though if I were making up an excuse to get unrestricted and unsupervised access to the College’s library, that would be an excellent lie.”

“It’s not automatically a lie just because it’s also everything I want.” Alice sighed happily as she took up one of her books and rested her hand on its engraved cover. “It’s simple serendipity.”

Magra’s wide mouth widened further at the edges. “I’ll go see what can be done. Perhaps one of the rectors is about and I can badger them into signing over your dispensation.”

“Thank you, Magra.” Alice knelt and clasped the sorceress in a hug. “Thank you so much for this. We’re making it real. Everything we’d talked about.”

“Uh-huh. Indeed.” Magra squirmed in Alice’s embrace. “Madam Verdugo—you’re squeezing a bit too hard—”

“Oh, shoot.” Alice released Magra and allowed breath back into her friend’s lungs. “I suppose I need to get used to being so, um. Big. Sorry.”

Magra straightened her tunic. “Quite all right,” she said. “We have time.” She departed along the shoals of shelf. She hesitated at the corner. “Not too much time,” she added, and left Alice and Seth there adrift in the ocean of reading material.

“This place is so amazing.” Alice opened the book she held and breathed deep. “I mean I’m sure I’d think so as Annalise but she’s no bibliophile. But with this head, I’m just—” She pivoted to take in the three-tiered cathedral to the written word. “St. Makine’s mercy. Just lock me in here for the night.”

Seth’s grin halfway melted. “Weren’t we, uh—Never mind.”

“Huh?” Alice turned and blinked through her thick spectacles. “Beg pardon, Mr. il Gutierre?”

“It’s only… you mentioned dinner,” he said. “When you were Annalise.”

“Oh shoot. Of course.” Alice hugged her third edition of whoever-it-was to her chest so that it halfway hid her face. “I’ll just—I’ll get some of these put on hold, and I’ll borrow a few.” She drummed her fingers on the book’s spine. “Not this one. This one probably has to stay where it lives, but I’m sure I could bring out Sybelle’s Analyses of the Emergence. I’ve seen that on scads of shelves.”

Seth watched her shovel through the cart and pile half her trove of books onto the closest sorting table. “If you’d rather we stay here, I’d stay with you,” he said.

“No. No, I… well…” Alice’s returns slowed. “Perhaps we could get something delivered. No. Sorry.” She tittered nervously. “I’m sorry. I’m still, er, arranging things up here.”

“I’m guessing a saintspeaker akathist with chronic illness didn’t love late taphouse nights,” Seth said.

A blush darkened the freckles on Alice’s cheeks. “Niama was a bit of a homebody. I seem to have inherited a few… misgivings about being around a bunch of noisy drinking people. Whereas a few minutes ago I had, in fact, every intention of becoming one of said noisy drinking people.” Her blush grew. “And still do! Honest. I just, uh…”

“We don’t have to, Alice,” he said. “Really.”

“We do so have to.” Alice’s voice went up a determined half-octave. She sounded so much younger with this head on. “I have no intention of succumbing to this head’s silly introversion. Anna hated the saddle when she stated her senescence, and now she loves riding horses. I’m sure I will come to love riding, uh..” She waved an uncertain hand.

“Foxes?”

“Fox—” Alice blinked confusedly, then gasped a scandalized giggle. “Seth. You scoundrel.”

He held up his hands. “That’s what I thought you were going for.”

“It wasn’t, um…” She bit her lip onto her smile and cast her eyes to the floor. “It wasn’t not what I was going for.”

Seth stepped around to her side of the cart. “So Alice likes what she sees?”

Her flighty eyes found his. “I may be looking through a fingerspan of corrective lens, but I haven’t forgotten how handsome you are. You’re being so beautifully patient. But there’s really no need. You don’t have to worry.”

“It’s been a worrisome day, I have to admit.”

“About me, I mean.” Her hands bunched in her pockets. “About, um. Us.”

She took a step in. Her pouty little lips parted. He tilted his head to meet them. They were warm, and velvety. And they tasted like cherries.

Seth really loved cherries. His tongue—

Alice made a timid little humming sound. Seth paused.

His tongue peeked into the kiss again, like an uncertain houseguest. A sudden tension in her back and another nervous sound nudged it back into chaste departure.

“Um. I don’t, um—I’m sorry.” Alice rocked back on her heels. “It’s—I’m not very good at this, am I?”

“Don’t worry.” He gave a gentler peck to the edge of her mouth, which turned upward in shy satisfaction. “You taste like cherries.”

“It’s my lip balm, I think,” she said. “Every head forms with whatever the donor liked to wear best on it. That’s why Lisa wears her fancy lids and Annalise has her gloss and I have… well, none of that.”

“You have your lipbalm.”

“I like to stay moist,” she said. “Uh—that is, Niama did. And I do, too. Not in an off-color way, just—well, also in an off-color way, I suppose, since it’s you, because, I, um, like being—you make me, uh—my lips have balm on them.”

He ran a finger across the residue on his lower lip. “I noticed.”

She buried her face in her hands. “Seth, let’s please get this choir-girl drunk enough to get over these ridiculous jitters, please.”

“Oh.” Seth chuckled uncertainly. “I, uh… I don’t know about that.”

“I do,” Alice said, with vehemence. “I am still quite old and worldly and that doesn’t change just because the lips I happen to be wearing happened to never touch alcohol. If this head wants to sit on Annalise al Ydris’s stump it is bleeding well going to learn how to handle its liquor.”

The bleeding was forced out rather than slipped, but Seth let it remind him of the woman Alice was. “She’s… she was old enough to drink, though, right?”

“Of course she was,” Alice said. “She was your age. She just never did anything because she was a saintspeaker. But I’m not.” She rubbed her palms together. “And I am gonna be fun.”

Alice took a sip and grimaced. “Let me—” She raised her dormouse voice over the raucous taberna brass band that was bopping in the corner. “Let me try some of yours.”

“You sure?” Seth slid the stein across the pitted bartop. He was on his second pint. She was on her third swallow. “Cause yours is a lambic and this is a lager.”

“Maybe I like lagers. I like bread. Maybe—” She sniffed the amber foam, visibly braced herself, and drank. “Oh, no,” she sighed. “It’s so gross.”

“It looks like you have a taste to reacquire, Ms. al Ydris.”

Alice groaned. “I don’t wanna have to reacquire it. I went through the this tastes like piss bit already. It’s not effing fair.” She gathered her mop of ringlets behind her head and let her forehead fall to the bartop. “I am mortified to report, Mr. il Gutierre, that this head appears to be a nerd.”

“Annalise knows five hundred words for sword,” Seth said. “I was already dating a nerd.”

“Nooo,” Alice wailed. “I’m hip! This head’s your age! It’s supposed to be hip!”

“Can this head even curse?”

“Of course it can.”

“Because you said effing earlier.”

“I did not! Did I?”

“This bears experimentation,” Seth said. “Can you say fuck?” At the seed of panic on Alice’s face, he retreated: “How about shit? Shit’s not so bad.”

“Shhh.” Alice took another sip of beer and made another face. “Shih.”

“Saint Borac’s balls,” Seth said. “You can’t say it.”

“I can say it,” she insisted. “And I can say Saint Borac’s balls, too. You heard me.”

“That’s not a curse.”

“That’s a blasphemy. It’s a subphylum.”

“I’m afraid I’ve yet to hear an s-word, Madam Verdugo.”

Her full lower lip poked out in an exaggerated frown. “I put on a flusterable head and you turn into such a bully.”

“All your heads are flusterable,” he said. “With the possible exception of Lisa, but I’mma find a way. And you bully me, you know. Lisa and Anna.”

“Okay. Okay.” She forced herself to the halfway point on her lambic. “I can do this.”

“Fully enunciated T at the end, please.”

“Shh.”

“That’s the first bit.”

“No, shush.” She giggled. “You’re so mean.”

He mimicked zipping his lips.

Alice knitted her brows. On her face was the painstaking care of a woman extracting an arrowhead. “Shhhhit,” she said. “There. See?”

Seth knocked his knuckles on the bar. “That’s me put in my place. Truly, you are all edge.”

Emboldened, she held up her lambic. “And I’m halfway through my thing, now. See? I can function here.”

“I know you can,” he said. “But I’d actually like for my girlfriend to enjoy herself while on a date. Oddly enough.”

She drooped. “It’s just… you’ve been waiting so long for Alice. And I was so excited to be a lovely young thing with you. This is not what I was expecting.”

“We don’t have to cut the night all the way short.” He held his hand out to her. “You wanna blow this joint and go for a walk in the moonlight, Ms. al Ydris?”

Out from the carnival lights of the taphouse they went, and into the cool air of the terraced street. They’d only gone a few blocks, to a College bar, and the spires and buttresses of the Bastion district framed the sky like a birdcage’s bars. Along the promenade, sorcerers in white mingled with the Necropolitan upper-crust, sending broad laughter and clinking glass out into the evening. Alice and Seth kept to the edge, where strange plants threaded their roots into the terrace’s artificial cliff edge.

“Kostera Kosatala.” Alice brushed a finger along the dark leaves of a trimmed hedge. She plucked one and handed it to Seth. “The shadow bushes of the Necropolis.”

Seth turned the black velvet leaf over and held it to the closest mitelamp. “Is it unlit?”

She shook her head. “This close to the Necropolis, the foliage adapts in odd ways. Something about the sky, I think. The spectra of light it feeds upon. We lost so many species during the Second Emergence. Much of the fauna went with the aquatic die-off and the ecosystems that collapsed when their keystones slid out. But the seraphs didn’t touch the flora. That die-off was because of us. The Deathspell. The trees were brighter when the sky was blue. You look at the old paintings and they’re so brilliantly colored.”

“Hmm.” Seth was looking at Alice in the moonlight, and was not thinking about old paintings.

“This whole world,” she said softly. “Annalise—I’ve always been so content to let it keep its mysteries. To leave the cloth over the magician’s card table.” Her glasses gleamed in the reflected streetlamps. “And Sister Niama was never healthy enough or wealthy enough to see much of it beyond the monastery’s walls. She lived dozens of lives in her books, but at the cost of her own. And now I get to honor her. To show her this beautiful, horrible world.”

She blinked.

“Uh, to be clear, that’s metaphorical. I don’t mean to literally imply that Niama is still present. Her soul’s moved on to its own freedom somewhere, I hope. I hope it’s found purchase in some bright, clear place. Where she was born lovely and beloved.”

His hand found hers where it sat tight against her side. “Part of her found its way there, anyway.”

“Do you—” Her fingers opened haltingly and wrapped around his. “I hope I’m not—you’re not disappointed?”

“Alice,” he said, with gentle reproof. “I don’t know how you haven’t realized yet how unfairly cute you are.”

She hid her blush and her smile with a downcast look to the cobblestones. “I… I’ve had a lot to think about. It’s been a long day, hasn’t it.”

“One of the longest,” he said.

“If you—what if—um.”

She took a long, purposeful breath and lifted his hand to her shoulder. With the hesitance of a doe lowering its head to crystal waters, her lips brushed his. No tongue this time—he’d learned. Just a still moment, and then a lingering warmth.

“Do you want to go to bed, Seth?” she whispered.