Roiben nodded slowly. He’d forgotten they were talking about Corny and Luis.
“So how do you do it?” Corny demanded. “How do you love someone when you don’t know if it’s forever or not? When he might just leave you?”
“Kaye is the only thing that saves me from myself,” Roiben said.
Corny turned at that and narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
Roiben shook his head, unsure of how to express any of his tangled thoughts. “I hadn’t recalled her in a long time—Clara. When I was a child, I had a human nurse enchanted to serve me. She couldn’t love me,” Roiben hesitated. “She couldn’t love me, because she had no choices. She wasn’t free to love me. She never had a chance. I too have been enchanted to serve. I understand her better now.”
He felt a familiar revulsion thinking of his past, thinking of captivity with Nicnevin, but he pushed past it to speak. “After all the humiliations I have suffered, all the things I have done for my mistresses at their commands, here I am in a dirty human restaurant, serving coffee to fools. For Kaye. Because I am free to. Because I think it would please her. Because I think it would make her laugh.”
“It’s definitely going to make her laugh,” Corny said.
“Thus I am saved from my own grim self,” Roiben said, shrugging his shoulders, a small smile lifting his mouth.
Corny laughed. “So you’re saying the world is cold and bleak, but infinitesimally less bleak with Kaye around? Could you be any more depressing?”
Roiben tilted his head. “And yet, here you are, more miserable than I.”
“Funny.” Corny made a face.
“Look, you can make someone appear to love you,” Roiben said as carefully as he had put the jagged piece of broken china on the counter. “By enchantment or more subtle cruelties. You could cripple him such that he would forget that he had other choices.”
“That’s not what I want,” Corny said.
Roiben smiled. “Are you sure?”
“Are you? Yes, I’m sure,” Corny said hotly. “I just don’t want to keep anticipating the worst. If it’s going to be over tomorrow, then let it be over right now so I can get on with the pain and disappointment.”
“If there is nothing but this,” Roiben said. “If we are to be shadows, changeless and forgotten, we will have to dine on these memories for the rest of our days. Don’t you want a few more moments to chew over?”
Corny shivered. “That’s horrible. You’re supposed to say that I’m wrong.”
“I’m only repeating your words.” Roiben brushed silver hair back from his face.
“But you believe them,” said Corny. “You actually think that’s what’s going to happen with you and Kaye.”
Roiben smiled gently. “And you’re not the fatalist you pretend. What was it you said? More afraid equals more of a jerk. You’re afraid, nothing more.”
Corny snorted a little when Roiben said jerk.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, looking down at the asphalt and the strewn garbage. “But I can’t stop being afraid.”
“Perhaps, then, you could address the jerk part,” Roiben said. “Or perhaps you could tell Luis, so he could at least try to reassure you.”
Corny tilted his head, as if he was seeing Roiben for the first time. “You’re afraid, too.”
“Am I?” Roiben asked, but there was something in Cornelius’s face that he found unnerving. He wondered what Corny thought he was looking at.
“I bet you’re afraid you’ll start hoping, despite your best intentions,” Corny said. “You’re okay with doom and gloom, but I bet it’s really scary to think things might work out. I bet it’s fucking terrifying to think she might love you the way you love her.”
“Mayhaps.” Roiben tried not to let anything show on his face. “Either way, before we go back inside I have a geas to place on you. Something to remind you of why you ought keep secrets secret.”
“Oh come on,” said Corny with a groan. “What about our meaningful talk? Aren’t we friends now? Don’t we get to do each other’s nails and overlook each other’s small, amusing betrayals?”
Roiben reached out one cold hand. “Afraid not.”
Kaye was sitting on the counter of Moon in a Cup, looking annoyed, when Corny and Roiben walked back through the doors. Catching sight of them, her expression went slack with astonishment.
Luis, beside her, choked on a mouthful of hot chocolate and needed to be slapped several times on the back by Val before he recovered himself.
Cornelius’s punishment was simple. Roiben had glamoured him to have small bone-pale horns jutting from his temples and had given his skin a light blue sheen. His ears tapered to delicate points. The glamour would last a single month from one fat, full moon to the next. And when he made coffee, he would have to face all those hopeful faerie seekers.
“I guess I deserve this,” Corny said to no one in particular.
“Why did I even try to save you?” Luis said. Though his friends had gone, he was still there, still patiently waiting. Roiben hoped that Corny noticed that before all else.
Kaye walked toward Roiben. “I bet I know what you’ve been thinking,” she said, shaking her head. “Bad things.”
“Never when you’re here,” he told her, but he wasn’t sure she heard as her arm wrapped around his waist so she could smother her helpless giggling against his chest. He drank in the warmth of her and tried, for once, to believe this could all last.
Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here, either!
THE CITY BORN GREAT
N. K. JEMISIN
Ising the city.
Fucking city. I stand on the rooftop of a building I don’t live in and spread my arms and tighten my middle and yell nonsense ululations at the construction site that blocks my view. I’m really singing to the cityscape beyond. The city’ll figure it out.
It’s dawn. The damp of it makes my jeans feel slimy, or maybe that’s ’cause they haven’t been washed in weeks. Got change for a wash-and-dry, just not another pair of pants to wear till they’re done. Maybe I’ll spend it on more pants at the Goodwill down the street instead … but not yet. Not till I’ve finished going AAAAaaaaAAAAaaaa (breath) aaaaAAAAaaaaaaa and listening to the syllable echo back at me from every nearby building face. In my head, there’s an orchestra playing “Ode to Joy” with a Busta Rhymes backbeat. My voice is just tying it all together.
Shut your fucking mouth! someone yells, so I take a bow and exit the stage.
But with my hand on the knob of the rooftop door, I stop and turn back and frown and listen, ’cause for a moment I hear something both distant and intimate singing back at me, basso-deep. Sort of coy.
And from even farther, I hear something else: a dissonant, gathering growl. Or maybe those are the rumblers of police sirens? Nothing I like the sound of, either way. I leave.