The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

Thank you to my beloved reviewers Juan Miguel Carvajal and WolfBrother, who wrote the most deranged yet beautifully touching review I think I've ever gotten.

Every so often, we'll see perspectives from the other half of this story's unlikely duo (if a multiheaded woman counts as half, anyway). Here's the first.

Blackened Heart

“When I was a young wan,” she said, “running barefoot around the Haldwoeiy highlands, I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d imagine myself a Lady Knight of the Pladuriya, adventuring up and down the Territories. Slaying seraphs and stealing kisses.”

“What’s that? A Pladuriya?”

“Old Orwiny legend. Warrior women. It’s not important. And I got older, and the waiting only got more keen. And those old Orwinese legends got brittle. I couldn’t understand why my family and my village were so old-fashioned, still acting like relics of the first emergence. And I met a man, coming back from a tour on the Iron Artery, and he was from so far away, and I thought he was so handsome, and he told me tales of travel, and called me beautiful, even though girls like me… well. You ever hear people talk about Orwinese Drays?”

“It’s a kind of horse, right?”

She shook her head. “There’s no such thing. Orwiny’s never bred dray horses. An Orwinese Dray is an Orwinese girl. They’re big and strong and not very bright, they don’t complain, they’re not much to look at, but they’re fit for a good hard plowing. And you ride ‘em till they’re worn out, then get yourself a new one.”

“Oh.” Seth found something interesting to look at in the webbing of his hands. “I thought it was a kind of horse.”

“That’s on account of you’re a gentleman.”

The way he perked up when she called him that brought a chuckle to her traitorous lips. Fucking hell, why did he have to be so cute.

“Dunno why I thought this fella was, too,” she continued. “I was such a Dray. Stupid, stupid girl. Chased a dream right into a nightmare.” She ran a hand along her seraph-bleached forearm. “And now there’s no going home anymore. Never again.”

“It seems to me like you’re home wherever you are,” he said. “Got your kids, Ofelia’s got her books, Tiago’s got a big collection of wooden training-sticks he can hit me with…”

“The point I’m trying for is that you can’t go throwing your future away for a roll in the hay with me. It’s unfair. It’d be irreversible for you. A big fuckin’ dividing line in your life. For me, it wouldn’t—”

Wouldn’t mean anything? That would be a lie. And lying to Seth il Gutierre was proving harder than lying to her lie-detecting daughter.

“I mean saints’ sake. It’s been, what? A week?” That got through to him, she could tell. She pressed the advantage. “If it was just a tumble to get it out of our—your system, that’d be one thing. I’d still be too old for you, but we could leave it where it laid. But this.” She pointed at her shadowed eye. “This means it can’t be casual.”

“Annalise, I’m not trying to get in your pants today. And going unlit is… it’s a lot to consider, yeah. I hear what you’re saying, really I do, I just…” His plate was mostly empty. He fidgeted with his spoon around the last few gray lumps. “I don’t know if I can go backwards from this.”

Of course he couldn’t. She couldn’t either. How could she pass judgment? But you learn how to be a hypocrite when you’re a mother. “We don’t have to go all the way back. I’m greedy when I’m Lisa, and I’m covetous, but I do like you, Seth. I mean… you’re the first real friend I’ve made in the new territory. And we’re closer now after all that guff. Closer friends, yeah?”

For a moment his face looked as if she’d kneed him in the gut. He recovered quickly. “Okay. Uh, okay.”

They started walking again, now in a brittle silence. Annalise watched her big lumbering boots crunch the drying grass.

“You’re right,” Seth said, eventually.

“What about? Friends?”

He shook his head. “A week is too short. But I’m… I’m interested, okay? I can’t bullshit you.”

Annalise groaned and halted again. There was a stone ripe for the sitting nearby; she sat. “Sure look. There’s someone out there who deserves the interest of a boy like you. And it’s not a chewed-up, spat-out professional killer who’s old enough to be your mam and'll rip your soul out on the ride.”

“That’s not how I think of you, Annalise.” There wasn’t a rock for Seth; he just shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I think you’re pretty fucking amazing, actually.”

“Fine,” she said, as her chest tightened with a cruel, unwanted joy. “Okay. Just don’t think of me like… that. Just think of me as a friend. Right? It’s—it’s been a heightened few days, that’s all.”

“It’s been a heightened week,” he said.

“Exactly.” She set her empty cutlery aside and leaned her elbows onto her knees. “When we come back to Fontana, we’ll have a week off, for me to send some mail and get some back. Long enough for a silvertongue like you to find some leggy spring chicken who can warm you up at night and clear your mind, and you’ll see you don’t need an old biddy like me. I saw you dancing with that pretty blonde lass. She had bedroom eyes all up and down you.”

“You saw her?”

“Sure I did. She was done up like a dust devil hit a dress shop.”

“Aren’t you trying to get me to date this girl?”

“I’m sure she’s a peach besides,” Annalise said. “And plenty peachy under those ridiculous feathers.”

“She said my suit looked like a rental.”

“Well, it was.”

He gestured to the rags that remained of it after the seraph’d had its say. “Not anymore.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Stick around for a season, or longer if you fancy, get a big ol’ rake of cash, and then pick your favorite place we’ve traveled to and get yourself a gorgeous Plainfolk nymph who’ll give you a half dozen adorable little brown-eyed moppets.”

He gazed into his plate. Looking at his reflection through the grease, maybe. “You really think that’s the life I’m headed for out there?”

“I’ll make sure it is,” she said, softly. “I’ll get you trained and paid and we’ll find you the life you deserve, Seth. Not this one. Full of death and fear.”

Seth chewed his last spoonful of crud for longer than it deserved.

“I will stick around,” he said, eventually. “I’ll keep doing what I do for you, because one, the way you look at me after I steal something for you makes me feel like a fucking king.”

She scoffed. “I’m being a bad influence, then.”

“Sure, but I’ve always been a preening little shit. It’s nice to have an external reason. And two, you’ve promised me a big fat bonus.”

“And I re-promise it here.”

“And three. Because if I stay long enough, and see enough of this supposedly horrible life you say you live, and it doesn’t send me running to some Plainfolk nymph, eventually you’ll have to take this thing seriously.”

Annalise grunted in exasperation. “You are a pain in the seraph-fucking neck sometimes, il Gutierre.”

“You said don’t give up on me. You’re the one paying me, supposedly. So I’ll do what I’m told.” He folded his arms. “If you want to tell me different now, tell me. Say give up on me, and I will.”

“You don’t want my love, Seth. My love just hurts. My love’s an affliction.”

He didn’t reply. Just stared.

“What?” she prompted.

“I’m just waiting for give up on me,” Seth said. “Because that’s not what you just said.”

“I’d say it if I thought it’d do a damn thing.” She stood from her stone and tried to look aggravated as she stomped back toward the carriage. “You pure melter, you.”

He shrugged amicably and followed her, brisk to keep up with her longer legs. If he’d had a tail, it’d be wagging.

This wasn’t how she’d meant this conversation to go, not at all. Why couldn’t she just say it? Damn Lisa for putting her into this mess. Damn the blackened heart they shared, for keeping give up off her tongue. And thrice-damn it for how its beat quickened when Seth il Gutierre smiled at her.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ened-heart
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