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

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

“I spent the whole ride dreading what I’d come back to.” Seth plucked petals from his new marigolds as they passed Shaheill’s square, where jade-laden saintspeakers were unfolding cots and raising white canvas triage tents. “Coming back and seeing you there, you and Feeli and Tiago—the world took a boot off my chest. So if you’re getting ready to chew me out, I’ll bear it, but I need you to know that I’ll never regret it.”

Anna’s ears flared straight outward. “Chew you out for killing a blackfeather? That’s what you think of me?”

“I’m just going off prior experience here,” Seth said.

“Shut up.”

“But if you wanted to give me a slap on the back instead—”

“Shut up,” Anna hissed. “Miyalakam niap kei.”

Is that Murani for shut up?

He grinned. “Is that Murani for shut up? Because it’s a lot of extra syllables.”

“It’s telling you where I want to slap you.”

His smile did not shrink. “Oh yeah? Where’s that?”

Anna stopped in place. Seth nearly bumped into her, as did a lady in an apron toting a whole roasted pig. She mumbled a “yer pardon, Madam Verdugo,” as she skittered away.

“I am not for this,” Anna said.

Seth stepped back to give her space. “Pork?”

“I am not for banter,” she said. “I am not for confessions, or flirtations. I am not for any of the things you try on me. I am a vessel for horrible things, and I want to go away now, because I don’t know how to—”

She’d run out of road. She dithered.

Seth rolled a marigold between his smudged fingers, and Anna hated it, how insufferably sympathetic he was trying to be. “We don’t have to speak. We can just… I can wait for you. Or we can just sit.”

“I don’t want to just sit.” She was resolute in her refusal to look at him. “I want to… be good to you. And thank you. And I don’t know how, and Annalise does. So shut up until I’m her again.”

“I reckon that’s about the most beautiful thank you I’ve ever gotten, Anna,” he said, with that awful softness and that smarmy little smile, and she hated the traitorous lungs in her chest for how labored their air became.

Whatever venom Anna was doubtlessly about to spill all over her petulant little thief refluxed down her throat.

Someone screamed. The pressure-shifting snap-whumph of a fireball, cast and blooming. A bright flash threw across the siding of the roadhouse a street away.

In the carriage’s direction.

Whatever venom Anna was doubtlessly about to spill all over her petulant little thief refluxed down her throat. She sprinted.

A fresh-faced hermandati boy came clanking toward her as she rounded the block. “It was Robert. He—”

Anna bowled past the would-be helper. The roadhouse’s side had been blown open. Crumpled in its cracked masonry was Robert il Magnard, the drunkard sorcerer. Before him, scattered across a dozen paces, chunks of blackened carapace and sizzling flesh.

A seraph?

Demetrius released an enraged neigh, and Anna rubbernecked toward the stable. A squat, three-legged yellowfeather was clattering away from the carriage, half-singed, with a heavy crack in its carapace from the vicious kick Anna’s warhorse had just given it. It looked at Anna with its ugly jellyfish eyes and squealed aquatically, like a drowning pig.

Anna did not waste time in thought. The executioner sword was still in the carriage; her pike was in pieces somewhere on the field behind her. She seized the fancy little saber at Seth’s waist and drew it from his scabbard before he had a moment to protest; with her stolen sword she dove for the miserable little seraph. It chittered and screeched and bared misshapen fangs, but it was nothing but a yellowfeather, and this was the perfect opportunity to vent the awful weightless feeling by chopping it to pieces, which Anna did.

When the saber stuck in its neck—bastard thief doesn’t sharpen it enough—she plunged her boot into its scrawny chestpiece to shove it from the edge. It stumbled backward, fountaining blackened blood, and exsanguinated into a foaming, twitching mess before her.

She cleaned the blade’s edge on her muddy black breeches and shoved it back into Seth’s limp hands. “What the fuck,” he said. “Is he dead?”

“Your saber cuts like a butter knife,” Anna said. “Sharpen it. Is who dead?”

Seth hurried to Robert il Magnard’s side and fumbled at the man’s neck for a pulse. “Alive. And smelling profoundly pickled.”

“That’s the man as I understand him.”

“I reckon this is another seraph he killed right here.” Seth prodded the charred carapace with the tip of his returned saber. “Guess even a soused sorcerer can be useful for something.”

The toe of Anna’s trench boot turned the newly dead seraph over and found, in the pool of blood, the object it had sought in the carriage.

The severed head of Sister Niama al Tars.

“What’s that—ah, Saints.” Seth looked away from the rotting head and its frayed yellow hair. “That thing? Again?”

Anna patted Demetrius calm again, shushing his croaking equine protests. “Get someone for the drunkard,” she said. “I’m changing.”

“We should tell someone.”

“So fucking tell someone,” she snapped, and before he could bid her stay longer (with that voice, that fucking voice, why won’t he shut up), she summited the black grille steps into the carriage.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...or-shut-up
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