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

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

Annalise retrieved Ofelia’s set-aside plate as the retinue packed up. “Bring your food, love.”

“That’s quite all right,” Ofelia said. “I’d rather save my stomach for whatever Seth’s cooking at the carriage.”

“I’m cooking?” Seth shouldered his satchel. “When is it someone else’s turn?”

“Never,” Ofelia said. “Your food is too good. Dinner is your forever job now.”

“All right, fine.” Seth tried to hide the purring enjoyment he got from the rare Ofelia compliment. “I’ll break open that butternut and figure something out.”

Starlings are perfectly serviceable birds.

They trooped from the cluster of houses out across the limestone bluffs and higher into the mist. Tiago and Ofelia bickered idly about the pitiful starling they’d caught and whether to fly it out or use it as bait for a falcon.

“Starlings are perfectly serviceable birds. You just think the name is too frilly.”

“Your standard starling is fine by me. That little runt you fished out of a rain barrel is not.”

Annalise and Seth lagged behind, hands interlaced. Now and then as they crossed a switchback or cliff, Annalise gently, wordlessly shifted Seth from one side to another. It took three of those adjustments for him to realize that she was placing herself between Seth and the fall, walking always at the outer edge.

He caught her eye and saw himself reflected in the round lenses of her sunglasses. Below their mirrored abysses perched atop her long pointed nose, she smiled. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and, because it had to be noted, “You’re beautiful.”

She squeezed his hand tight, her thumb twisting up to run along the rough twill cuff of his work jacket.

Tiago had won his way by the time they reached the carriage, and they brought the starling, in its iridescent panic, to serve as bait for his hopeful falcon. They pitched a mist net near an outcrop of stone, capped by scrub and bearing the deep-time striations of the primeval ocean.

Seth sat, and waited, and found new ways to sit, and eventually looked up at the spread-out net and the jittery little passerine that strained against its string on the other side. “How long does this take?”

A fleet brown shape answered the question before Tiago could by fastballing into the net. “Holy St. Mansell,” Tiago crowed, and leapt to his feet. “A fucking Merlin!”

“Switch with it switch with it!” Ofelia held the net as the raptor screeched and clawed in its mesh.

“Hold it for a second,” Tiago said. “I have to get ready.”

“If getting ready means hitting the jakes then just switch,” Ofelia snapped. A claw raked across her padded tunic and stuck in the stitching.

“Fine,” Tiago said. “But tie me up so I don’t jump the fucking cli—”

His eyes snapped wide. His mouth quivered. “GRAWK,” he cried. He took an ungainly lunge toward the ridge side and fell on his face. Annalise and Seth piled atop him.

The merlin with Tiago inside it ceased its struggle and chirruped indignantly at the net around it. Ofelia unpacked her brother and set him on the outcropping.

Annalise tied the final knot in the complicated trussing of her son’s possessed body, and rubbed the falcon’s downy head. “Have fun hunting the pirates, Sunshine. You spot ‘em, you come right back and lead us there. Aye?”

The falcon’s beak clattered, and then with a pair of readying hops it was aloft, streaking back into the fog.

Ofelia untied the starling that would have served as its lunch; they watched it flutter away. “Well,” she said, and took hold of the lead they’d tied to the near-catatonic Bird Tiago. “I’m off to the carriage before the two of you start the heavy petting.”

Annalise blew a raspberry at her. “Ah, g’way outta that.”

Ofelia scraped a patch of earth from her charcoal breeches. “It’s fine. It’s young love. Someone should watch bird Tiago, anyway. Perhaps he’ll pee, and I’ll have another instance to catalogue.” She tugged the jute cord and set Tiago’s vacated body stumbling down the hill. “Remember how magnanimous I’m being when I’m out past curfew at the Necropolis.”

“I’m magnanimous, ya dose. I’m magnanimous as the day is green.” Annalise rolled her blackened eyes at Ofelia’s departing back. “The way that girleen talks, she must think we’re sucking each other’s faces off the second we get alone.”

“Wanna suck each other’s faces off?” Seth inquired. “I’ve got the blanket.”

“Well, now that we’re alone, yeah,” Annalise said, and undid the laces of her tunic.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313.../23-merlin