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

[Mamorien]

A chapter that puts the "over" in Headless Over Heels.

Seth plonked the thick iron tureen down on its ring stand and lifted its lid. So uncovered, the mutton stew billowed a pale aromatic cloud into the air. Annalise inhaled deep and sighed gratefully. Her hand found his waist and stilled him before he could cross to his seat.

“That smells deadly, il Gutierre,” she said, and pulled him into her lap.

“I gotta get the plates,” he protested.

“My man can cook,” she said. “He’s got a tight little arse and he can cook.”

She kissed him, and he barely recognized himself in the noise he made when she nipped his lower lip. He eased away from her as the kiss entered its fifth second. “I really gotta—”

She hummed her lack of care and curled her fist into the collar of his shirt to keep him still.

He laughed and shifted his face, but that only made her kisses start raining down on his nose and jaw. “The kids are coming.”

“Let ‘em,” she murmured against his skin, but she released him. Seth made his narrow escape; Annalise’s hand landed a solid slap on his ass as he left her lap. He sat next to her, and swatted lightly back at her, and his butt tingled in an unfamiliar but lovely way.

You fail fouf.

The kids are coming. There was a sentence he’d never have thought he’d say.

Tiago and Ofelia approached from the nearby carriage, lugging the folding table between them. “Tiago says Sheepfuck is the staging ground for a cloud pirate.” Ofelia kicked the legs into place and set the table down. “Do I have that right?”

“We’re on a ragged edge of dome here.” Tiago dug into his pack and removed a rolled-up cloth map. He unfurled it across the table, keeping it halfway off the side to avoid the drippings as the al Ydris ladies served themselves. “You have yourself a stormship, you skirt out on the Eastern Deadwater. They’re made to sail on the water as well as the sky. So you let the wind carry you south—call that a solid three weeks over sea.”

Ofelia carefully avoided the meat, and dolloped a scoopful of broth and caramelized onion into her bowl. “Long trip.”

“Uh huh. Sort of thing that needs full larders. Might help explain our missing sheep.” As if this tangent had reminded him of his slowly cooling dinner, Tiago took up his spoon. “So you sail down the Deadwater, hugging the shore, mostly—”

He took a distracted bite of Seth’s stew and paused.

“What’s this?”

“Mutton,” Seth said.

“Mutton doesn’t taste this good.”

“Low and slow, my friend,” Seth said. “And a lot of onions, and acid. Some of that red wine Feeli forgot to cork last week.”

“Thus doth time gild the mystic’s mistake,” Ofelia said. “And solecism is made sacred.”

Annalise chuckled around her fork. “Who wrote that, love?”

“Inathi il Sarpai’s Second Apologetics.” Ofelia went back into the tureen for a meatier portion. “I’d check, but I shredded it for kindling last month.”

“How do you remember this stuff so well?” Seth asked.

“My third-ring passive.” Ofelia touched her stomach. “The Drooping Eye. The active rips memories out of heads to show them to me.”

“Why have we never used that?”

“It gives severe brain damage on the way out,” Ofelia said. “Not the sort of side effect that makes for light usage. Mostly I took it for the passive eideticism, to be honest, and because I like how it looks.”

She lifted the hem of her shirt to reveal a psychedelically-patterned downcast eye blazoned across her navel.

“It seeees you,” she intoned.

“You sail south,” Tiago reminded them, around another mouthful of mutton. “You fill your envelope past the Plainland with one of the outlaw reefs. or an onboard magician if you’ve got one. And now you’re latched right into the sky artery coming up from the Kanjir floodplain and the Sarkani Territory. Right on time for the Summer season.” His black-nailed finger re-enacted the fanciful voyage in a wide loop-de-loop along the map. “You suck the legion’s blood all along the mountain belts, all through the summer, then you catch a tributary wind back up the western corridor, and cut back across overland.”

Ofelia tilted her head owlishly. “You’d be seen, surely.”

“Not if you took yourself up through the craglands. And what’s one of the last cragland spots before you’re too far north, and you’re spotted by Legion air scouts with their eyes peeled for advancing seraphs?” Tiago stabbed a finger triumphantly into the map. “Sheepfuck.”

Askance silence followed this pronouncement, as they digested their mutton and misapprehension.

“I mean…” Annalise scratched her pointed nose. “The geography makes sense. Give you that. And the statue.”

“Ballast,” Tiago said. “Permissible loot to loosen, and you might need to if you’re bringing on a man and three head of sheep.”

“And a dog,” Ofelia said.

“I’d throw the dog off a cliff, if I was a pirate,” Tiago said.

“You are a nasty little person,” Ofelia said.

“Anyway, I’m looking for another explanation about the statue,” Tiago said. “But how else would you carry that cracked-in-half broad up a mountainside?”

“A broad like me could manage it,” Annalise said.

“There is no such thing as a broad like you,” Tiago said.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-stormship
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