Chương 3: 1.2. What's the Craic?

There were far better lodgehouses than the Sidewinder, but not in Prossimo.

Any traveler with money and sense to know how it spent would come in from the packed-earth road, by hobby horse or land schooner or hex-engine, if they were really fancy, and follow that road into the middle of town, waiting for it to turn paved or cobbled, and keep waiting for that happy transformation all the way through the sad little charter town and out the other side, back into the vast barley fields and mite silos that employed most of its citizenry.

Whereupon they'd either keep going, relieved to see the back of the place and shake its dust from their coats, or they'd sigh to themselves, return the way they came, and ask some heads-down local where the least Prossimesque lodgings in Prossimo might be found.

Perhaps they'd hope that the only solid stone construction in town could house them; perhaps a frustrated exhale when they learned that the three-story manor in question was the summer home of Patre Rohan il Agante, and housed only the goodman's illustrious guests. And so off to the cheap-and-cheerful painted clapboards of the Sidewinder Lodge they would go. And so went the woman Seth was to rob.

Seth watched his mark halt, dismount from her cremello drayhorse, and lead the great pale beast into the open stable gate. As she approached, she evinced a curious optical illusion: she kept getting bigger, past the point you'd think perspective would give up on resizing her. By the time she reached the stable, she was the tallest woman Seth had met. North of six feet, surely. A head taller than him, easily (though that was easy enough). He was the only man there to meet her.

The real stable boy was in the lodge, dealing with a small grease fire, Seth knew, because Seth had set the small fire, and Seth had come striding and strident to send the boy off to help. With the right tone and the right urgency, a bored kid'll be moving to obey you before he even asks who you are, and nobody in the sweltering kitchen would refuse the help. She was in black, the tall rider, from head to foot. Not the rich black of a Necropolis officer-of-leisure, but a workaday hodgepodge of trail-dusted black.

Ruddy black on her riding coat and her wide-brimmed roadwarden hat. Matte black on her tall munition boots. Pale, threadbare black on her stand-collar blouse. Pitch black on her riding breeches, which looked newer than the rest but which already had a hole in the knee. Black leather loops along her black baldrick with black knife handles sticking out from them. Black belt cinched around her muscular waist, with a basket-hilted side sword hanging off it.

A black wheelgun holster at her wide hips, a black pistol grip curving out from it. Perhaps it was all the black that made her face and the crescents of skin between sleeve and glove look so pale. Almost as pale as an unlit, Seth thought, but what would an unlit be doing in Prossimo? Probably she was just Sektoric; they tended to come pale and strapping.

She was too tall and too musclebound in the shoulders and hips to be a classical beauty; and classical beauties, as a rule, don't walk around with more than two bladed weapons strapped to them. But striking, absolutely. Something about her pale face had the head-turning effect of a finely crafted and razor-sharp broadsword, drawn suddenly at a dinner party. The nose, maybe. Long and straight and pointed. On most faces, that'd be a defect. On hers— Focus up, il Gutierre.

You're here to rob her, not ask her to a barn dance. Seth sighed out his reluctance—he didn't like to rob women, especially not good-looking women, especially not well-armed, good-looking women a head taller than him—and approached the rider. She turned to his footsteps and tipped the brim of her hat with her thick black riding glove, so that its massive shadow receded from her face.

"Evening," she said, in a low, tuneful alto.

"What's the craic?" There was a burr in her vowels. Orwinese, maybe?

"Not much." Seth saw his thin, clean-shaven face reflected back to him in the black tint of her circle-frame sunglasses. He looked drawn-in, like a hand slapped away from the world.

"Living the dream."

"I hear that. You work here, young fella?"

"Yep." Seth's posture micro-adjusted to a working stiff's, shoulder slipped lower on the right from feedbag hauling. It wasn't exactly a lie, though it wasn't exactly exact, either. He'd done a cup of coffee now and then on the line in the Sidewinder's kitchens, when the less honest work dried up or the hermandati got to sniffing around too close to his business.

"You folks got any sort of grooming for hire?" The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"We sure do."

"Grand." She dropped a ten-brace coin into his hand.

"Can you get him fed and watered and groomed for me, then?" Seth rubbed the pad of his thumb across the coin's cupronickel edge to the stamped jade at its center. It'd do nicely.

"You got it, ma'am."

"Appreciate it. And what's your name?" Tell her, kid. Seth blinked. No alias. Tell her your real name. The Fox's passive effect was its voice, scrabbling and tittering in his brain.

"Seth," said Seth, because he was some kind of fucking idiot, apparently, because why else would he trust this stupid hexentatua with its stupid bum advice that was driving him further and further into trouble every time its whisper invaded his ear?

"Well, Seth." She held her hand out.

"I'm Annalise. That's Demetrius." Demetrius gazed dolefully at Seth as he shook the rider's hand, eyes stark blue in his pinkish cremello face. Seth couldn't decide if the beast was gorgeous or off-putting. He patted Demetrius' cream-colored flank.

"Heya, Demetrius." Demetrius issued a grumble of complaint.

"Now don't let him bully you, Seth." Annalise raised a finger at her dray.

"He's a big soft marshmallow what pretends otherwise." A full score of solitars for a stable service was a massive overpayment; this woman was either far less worldly or far more kind than she looked. Seth decided on the former to make himself feel less rotten about robbing her. She pulled her hat from her head and shook out her sleek black hair, bobbed short and razor-cut. The hat, she hung from a hook on Demetrius' billet strap. The sword, she kept at her waist.

"Don't know what the lodge's cut of that is," she said.

"But how about you and me tell 'em that coin was a five-brace, and you make sure you give Meaty here the fancy-prancy treatment. Wink."

"Wink?" She pointed at her sunglasses.

"Winking at you."

"Ah," he said.

"Wink back."

"Now, see, that doesn't work when I can see 'em." She folded her distractingly large arms.

"Let's have a real one." He winked. Her glossy lips (painted—what else? —black) drew into a grin, showing a tiny gap between her two front teeth. Maybe the sweetness of that smile, so at odds with the warrior body upon which it sat, was what emboldened him: "Ask you something, madam?"

"Anything you please, Seth." She tugged her saddlebags off Demetrius' back.

"Can't guarantee an answer."

"Sunglasses in the evening?"

"Whazzat?" Her grin widened. Dimples on its edges, pointed canines studding its span.

"Don't think they're cool?"

"Don't go putting words in my mouth, now," he said. She laughed and hoisted her bags over her broad shoulder. A pair of big, lumpy duffels. Likely the box was somewhere inside one of them.

"See you around then, Seth. Cheers for the labor." That was no kind of answer, but she'd warned him, after all. He tapped two fingers to his forehead.

"Ma'am." He watched her move from the stable to the vestibule that connected it to the lodge. She didn't move like she'd just spent hours on bumpy horseback. She moved strong and sure. She moved like— Seth was not going to come up with a flowery metaphor to describe how she moved, because he was robbing her. He did his best to blank her face out in his mind. She's rich. Probably she's very rich. She's friendly because she can afford to be friendly in a place like this, in times like these. No guilt.

He waited until the door to the lodge was shut. This'll shut you up for a while, he thought, and he invoked the Fox hex on his back. The unsettling feeling of skin shifting, like a muscle tweak, as beneath his chore jacket the tattoo on his back went from passive to active, hunkering down and raising its ears. The magic took hold; the cold cut through him like a winter gale, and his hand went numb and tingly.

He took the thumb he'd rubbed on the coin she gave him—the coin he'd given back, a few seconds later, as he shook her hand—and stuck it in his ear. The shuffling sound of fabric and the squeak of leather. His hexed microphone rode with the rider into the lodge. Her cheerful voice again: "I'd like a room, please. Nice, if you have it, but mean's fine."

"For you, mistress, nice it is." That was Esza behind the desk, in simpering servant mode.

"Two score and I can put you in the west side corner suite with a king bed and a lovely view."

"There you go." A muffled clatter of coinage.

"Keep the change."

"Oh, thank you, mistress. That is just so kind of you." Something in Seth had wished his generous tip was some kind of special circumstance. Apparently not.

"Can I ask your name?"

"Esza, mistress."

"All right, Esza. So I'm traveling with some stuff that's important doesn't grow legs and stroll. I don't mean to suggest a thing about Prossimo, but this corner room—how is it for security, if you don't mind?"

"Oh, not at all, mistress." A touch of pride entered Esza's explanation.

"We have an infused lock on the door, and another in the strongbox." Seth flinched. An infused lock on the door, that was new. No quick-picking that. Window it is, then. Thank St. Procas for nice views.

"Infused locks. Well, well. And imagine me telling you your business. That'll do nicely, Esza."

"Here's your key, and I'll get someone to help you with your bags. And your ride? Did you come in on horseback?"

"Yep. Came in through the stable. Fella in there has me fixed up with a berth."

"You pay him?"

"Yessir. Five brace."

"He didn't quote you at that, did he?" A laugh from Annalise.

"Nah. Just lightening my pockets myself for the next leg of the trip." She was on the move again, shifting her weight.

"Thanks kindly for the offer, but I can carry these myself." The clomp of boots on the stairs. And the clomp of another pair, coming into the stable. Seth tugged his thumb from his ear and turned around just in time for Grigori, the grizzled lead hand, to enter the stable with an annoyed, quizzical look.

"What are you doing here, Seth il Gutierre?" he demanded.