Sea Breeze, the Waterfront
But by the time she came to live in the Rose, she had known Aremu for more than a year – she had flown alongside him, and fought alongside him, and he had saved Uzoji’s life and her own, and she had saved his – in the way that one did, over and over – and, to her surprise, Niccolette had found she did not think much of it, that there were passives in the Rose. She had still thought of them as dangerous, then.
Niccolette realized, rather uneasily, that she was not quite sure when she had stopped.
She would have to be very careful indeed, the Bastian thought tiredly, in Vienda. It was something of a wonder she had survived the rainy season. She did not like to think of that either, and so she did not.
“Yes,” Niccolette said, and she fixed her gaze solidly on Lars, because she wished him to understand. “He is my friend too.” Niccolette said, but her voice was more than a little cold, and there was a warning in it, curling somewhere beneath the heavy Bastian accent. She did not look at the bodies behind them on the wall ot the man with the broken leg, and she did not look at Lars’s ears, but she thought he would remember. She thought he would understand.
The silence between them was broken by Lars’s next question, ever bolder. Niccolette sat back against the bar, uncurling her right hand slowly from her side, resting her elbows against the wood. “We worked with him,” Niccolette said, and she looked back away from Lars once more, off to the side, and let the conversation end there.
After some time, without ever looking back at the passive, the Bastian drained the last of her whiskey, set the empty cup back down, and rose from her stool. She walked around the man mopping the blood off the floor, even now, and crouched down beside the only man to survive the attack on her, tilting her head slightly to the side. She held her fingers beneath his nose to check his breathing – touched them to his neck, and counted, silently, the rhythm of his pulse, then nodded to herself and eased back. His leg was still bleeding, sluggishly; someone had wrapped cloth around it, Niccolette noticed – filthy cloth. It was not as if it mattered, not really, keeping the wound clean.
Niccolette rose back up to her feet, and shook her skirts out, and held there against the far wall. She made no effort to wave Lars over. She would not object, not precisely, if he followed her once more, but neither would she begin to speak to him again; if he dared to ask any more questions of her, or even to apologize for the ones he had already asked, he would find Niccolette entirely capable of ignoring him.
It was not that long before Niccolette’s note had the desired effect, and the large men who shoved their way into the bar did so purposefully; almost like they had for Niccolette, the crowds parted lightly for him, with no one needing to speak or comment on it, the rhythms of the Rose resuming as usual.
“Finally,” Niccolette said aloud, although it was not exactly to Lars so much as in front of him. But she turned to him, then, quite deliberately, and raised her eyebrows, and gestured with a flick of one wrist to the door. There was a large carriage outside, and as the humans bundled up the man with the broken leg, Niccolette climbed into it and took a seat at the far end of the bench. She rested back against the wall, and sighed, once, softly, pushing her hair back up off her face. And then it was gone, whatever flicker that had been, and she was set and still and serious once more.
Lars, too, was welcome in the carriage; and the humans would follow behind, the prisoner bound, now, and curled up on the floor between them. They held him steady, or at least steady enough, and one reached out and banged on the wall, and they began to move, the horses stamping and snorting, the wheels turning over the cobblestone streets – carrying them, steadily, onwards towards the King. Niccolette sat with her hands in her lap, her face turned to the window, and let the light play over her face, although she saw very little of what passed outside, and knew even less.