He lowered himself over the edge and hung beside her in the calm of the wind.
“I have risked us all,” he said after a while.
“No,” she said. “And yes. You’re right. Last night I tried to let her suffer. I thought: this reporter tempts fate and tests Seril. Let her save herself. I made myself watch her suffering, because I owed that much at least. But in the end I only hurt the ones who hurt her. I am angry at you because I am angry at myself, and I am angry at myself because I cannot fault my actions—or yours, though they send us teetering across a narrow bridge.”
“I was proud,” he said. “And I did not want to disappoint her.”
The ledge crumbled beneath Aev’s grip. Concrete dust rained down sixty stories. She caught a chunk large enough to cause damage when it reached ground level, crushed it to sand, and let the sand drift. “Humans would not find this calming,” she said.
“Fear is different for each being that fears.”
“And stone fears change,” she said. “Change for us is a permanent unmaking. But our Lady is of the moon, and change is Hers: new life from death, waxing from waning. She waxes now, and we tremble. This may be blasphemy, but it is also right, for though She is Herself, we are still stone.” With her free hand she indicated Kos’s black tower. “Great Kos stands alone and strong. He has power, and privilege by virtue of his power. But His power comes, as ever, from mortal fuel—and so mortal strictures bind him. We are free, and poor, and dangerous—to our enemies, but also to ourselves. In my anger and fear, I might have hurt you. I am sorry.”
Shale did not answer.
Aev heard a scraping sound, and smelled the sharp tang of spent lightning.
She looked down. A cold blue blade jutted from a window beneath them. She watched it slice a circle in the glass. A human head emerged from the hole, black curls bobbing. Then the head disappeared, only to pop back through the glass facing up. Tara Abernathy looked frustrated. Then again, she often did, at least when Aev saw her. “Aev! Didn’t expect to find you here.”
“Ms. Abernathy. Good evening.”
Beside her, Shale tensed.
“Shale,” she said. “I’m sure Ms. Abernathy means well.”
“Her good intentions rarely come with deeds to match.”
“Cut off a guy’s face once,” Tara said, “and he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”
“It left an impression.”
“And you’ve thrown us all into the fire tonight. We’re even, maybe. I hoped we could start fresh.”
“What do you want?”
“Poetry lessons.”
21
“I need a drink,” Cat said once Raz’s sailors moored Dream and Bounty both and reefed the sails and jagged the mainmast and scuppered the jibjaw or whatever it was they’d been up to while she packed Dream’s crew into Blacksuit wagons. “And before you get clever, I don’t mean the kind where I’m the beverage. Care to chaperone?”
Raz signed a few forms and handed them to his ship’s clerk. “You want me to come along and make sure you have no fun? Happy to oblige.”
“More like play designated hitter.”
“Is that a sports thing?”
“It’s like a designated driver, only if I’m too drunk to hit someone, you do it.”
“Sounds fun,” he said. “My Alt Coulumb nightlife’s a half century out of date, and the last time I chose a bar in this city I ended up brainwashed. You know a place?”
She bared her teeth at him, though hers were somewhat less pointy. “I can think of a few.”
*
Tara stood beside Shale on the skyscraper’s roof. Aev had left them—flitted off to brood on the abyss. They watched the horizon and the water, neither wanting to speak first.
Shale gave up the contest. “You can’t fly.”
“I can,” she said. “Just not in Alt Coulumb, thanks to your ever-so-progressive local interdict.”
“The skies belong to the Lady,” Shale said. “It would be a perversion for you to fly through them.”
“That’s what counts as perversion for a gargoyle? You must have a boring sex life.”
“Reproduction works differently for us.”
“I bet.”
Shale shifted uncomfortably. “Our poetry can only be read from the air. How will you read it if you cannot fly?”
“I was hoping you’d carry me.”
“You trust me to do that?”
“No,” she said, with more nonchalance than she felt. “But I figure dropping me would cause more trouble than it’s worth. And after all you’ve done tonight, you owe me.”
A calculating silence ensued.
“I have apologized for the face thing,” she said. “Every time I’ve seen you. Except for this afternoon, when you were on too high a dudgeon for me to get a word in edgewise.”
“You’ve seen me maybe three times in the last year.”
“I thought you needed space to heal.”
“After you cut off my face.”
She rolled her eyes. “There’s not even a scar.”
“Where should I hold you?”
Tara had not given much thought to that question. “Around the waist, probably.”