For once Acton made no effort to be seen. He could be surprisingly discreet, when he wanted, though never so well as Raum. He would never be invisible, but he could be less, and that is what he was now: no swagger, no flash of teeth or wild laughter. Just a man who walked thoughtfully alone, a man enjoying the night.
And he was enjoying it. Not only because he would always love the markets, would never grow tired of them, but because he was doing Crow work.
It had been some time since he’d had a mark he’d watched so carefully as this one. Raum’s mention of him had been offhand, but Acton thought the Ghost was letting himself be distracted by fatherhood. He’d seen the stranger wander the streets, watched him vanish and return again days or weeks later.
He had no idea where it was he went, but there was only one place Acton expected revenge from. He had never been one to see assassins in each shadow, but Davke or not, Seraphina had not seemed the sort to let an insult slide.
How boring it would be, if he were wrong.
There were a dozen times tonight he might have intercepted the black but each time he waited. Part of it was the game: would the stranger catch him first? Did he know he was being watched? But there was something else; Acton could see that the stallion was genuinely enjoying himself, his pleasure careful but clear. The markets were splendid; why not let him enjoy them a little longer?
Eventually his impatience caught up with him.
They had wound through many of the stalls by now, past dancers and fire-drinkers and those infernal balladeers. The night was a synesthesia of senses: music and laughter and the leap and snap of flames, scents sweet and bitter and endlessly beguiling, a thousand colors and patterns and textures of fabric, of food, of citizens. Never did Acton let the black slip out of his sight, until finally he settled beside the taller stallion as he stood at a stall of delicate chains and hammered cuffs and smooth round earrings, gold as rich as the night, silver as cold as the stranger’s eyes.
At first Acton kept his own amber-eyed gaze on the wares, but he made sure he bumped a shoulder into one of the blacks’ folded wings.
“Those extras help you move any faster, or are they just for looks?” His voice was low and even, but his eyes, when they lifted to the stranger’s, were fire-bright and far too keen.
A
heavy, obsidian-hilted dagger slides as cool and menacing as a viper along the sleek ridges of Caine’s wings. It is a lovely thing, entirely too fine and delicate to fit the role of a reaper’s scythe; yet that is precisely why Caine treasures it so, because it is beautiful and in that beauty, so much more terrible.
A tragedy indeed that it is seldom seen and rarely admired. Tucked securely between the Raven’s first pair of feathery appendages and the second, the glinting blade only makes an appearance when its silver-eyed owner slides it like rippling silk across the velvet of a whimpering throat.
Tonight, Caine is searching for a companion to his starlight scythe.
Despite the countless times he’d traveled from the ruins of Day to the shadows of Night, the onyx-pelted Taeryn had never lingered for more than a week in either court. With a scathing smile, Caine thinks that his endless back-and-forth is akin to what Helios must suffer as he drags his golden chariot from one sunrise to the next.
The smile he wears like a gilded mask is doing little, if anything, to hide the blackness of the boy’s dour expression. His knife itches against his wings like a scab, out of commission for weeks now as Caine had relegated himself to pure reconnaissance in lieu of the Prince’s wishes, stealing secrets from wine-loosened tongues and rosy-cheeked maids alike.
And he is as familiar with Reichenbach’s castle (despite never meeting the man face-to-face, Caine knows entirely too much about the Night King — notably Isorath’s affections for him) as he is with Seraphina’s, and finds the entire affair between the enemy courts pitifully tedious.
Coming to Denocte’s famed markets, then, is an attempt at relieving the droll prospect of yet another night lurking in the alleys like a scorned dog.
Perhaps the only good that’s come of his deployment hence far, is how much of the world he is finally able to see. Pale eyes follow the flashing silks of the performers leaping and twirling and singing under the light of a thousand torches. A black muzzle lifts to inhale the smells of cinnamon and perfume that waft from the stalls he passes. Finely hewn cheekbones angle down to peer at the wares shimmering like stars upon a velvet sky.
Caine aches for his lost magic, grieves for the illusions he could’ve spun like fairytales days and weeks and months after he awakens from this night spent in the Court of Dreams.
“Those extras help you move any faster, or are they just for looks?”
To think, that the gold-mottled stranger would actually approach him — Caine had not thought him to possess the guts — his pale eyes betray nothing as he shifts to appraise the man, his smile stretching ever wider. How interesting.
“I like to think that my speed comes from natural-born agility, more than from extra appendages,” he replies airily, voice as smooth and glinting as his dagger. “Though they are rather theatrical.”
He turns his gaze back to the stall and its jewelry, staring thoughtfully at the delicate chains that he can snap with a flick of a wing. "I doubt, however, that they are marvelous enough to hold your interest so steadfastly amongst all this finery."
@Acton | "speech" | notes: caine would like acton to show him where the best knives are sold
If anything the dark man looked almost expectant when his gaze settled on Acton’s, and while the buckskin was not surprised he did feel a pang of disappointment. This he hid behind his grin; he’d known from the beginning that this was no pigeon to be plucked or spitted, but a falcon. The question was where those agile wings carried him, and why.
Of course, Acton could never just ask.
“Hmm,” was the only answer he gave, at first, quelching the urge to roll his eyes at talk of natural-born agility. Acton was a prime example of red-blooded male, and his arrogance was as provocable as a cat’s. He, too, turned his attention back to the wares, all the things that Denocte citizens – his king included – seemed so fond of. Never himself, though; Acton could never bear to be constrained, even by a braid, and a decorative chain was still a chain. He would not be caught in one again.
So he laughed, just a chuckle under his breath, when the silver-eyed stallion spoke again, all smooth vowels and clipped syllables that Acton knew were bred nowhere in Novus. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, so lazily it was almost a drawl. “I have a real weakness for theatrics. Far more than finery.” Almost, almost, he makes one of the little ear-cuffs vanish – but again he restrained himself. This was not about him.
It was why, all things accounted for, Raum probably made a better Crow – while the Ghost had his own brand of vanity, it was far from one of his vices.
Instead, Acton stepped back from the stall, tossing his cloud of black mane as a group of market-goers were forced to scatter around him, muttering. When he spoke again, airy and bright as a magician’s scarf, there no hint of a threat in the words. “But if you’re looking for something – a gift, perhaps? – let me offer my help. I know these markets very well.”
Better than you could ever dream of, promised the glint in his eye.
@Caine well I think I found out why Acton has no non-Crow male friends xD
D
espite it all, Caine does not mind the stranger’s presence as much as he thought he would. He will never admit it, but loneliness has always eaten at him more than it should.
“I have a real weakness for theatrics. Far more than finery.”
The ache for his illusion magic comes to a point as sharp as a rose’s thorns — how he misses the flames that blaze from eyes gone gold, the dragon of fire that twists like a soaring kite across the midnight sky — he had been so close to perfecting it. There is nothing else Caine would like more than to show the smiling man just how much he agrees. But then he sees the glint in those amber eyes, the teeth beneath those pulled lips, and is reminded that he is the one that should be wary.
A strange reversal of roles, he thinks with a smirk.
“Then we are more similar than both of us realize,” he replies with a shrug, silver eyes shifting away from the jewelry to stare curiously at the man in front of him. Perhaps he should be wary — perhaps it had been a mistake to visit the markets, where all sorts of trouble could simply waltz up to him like this one had.
Perhaps, perhaps. A word that only matters, when there is something to lose.
“But if you’re looking for something…”
“A gift?” Caine laughs, then, all music and boyishness, his silver eyes flaring in youthful amusement. “I have never given a gift to anyone before, and I don’t think now is the time to start.” There is no one for me to gift. They are all either dead, or bastards.
“However, I am looking for something. If left to my own devices, I would’ve wandered the markets until dawn — the plight of a foreigner.” The confession rolls smoothly past his tongue, though his words are not without their edge; he isn’t from here, and there is no point pretending otherwise. If this man wanted to play a game of words, then Caine will gladly give it to him.
Black wings fold behind him like a trailing cloak as he moves from the shadows of the booth to the light of the streets, onyx feathers gleaming under the glow of a thousand torches. “A weapons booth, then. Of the cutting kind, specifically.” His smile, when he gives it, is feral; all teeth and sin and starlight.
A dangerous game he plays, but Caine never dabbles in anything less.
@Acton | "speech" | notes: caine doesn't know what the word 'subtle' means
“How flattering for you,” he said, and met those silver eyes over a close-lipped smile. He’d thought, at first, that the stranger was trying to be subtle – slipping through the market like a shadow, wings tucked to sides. But even clothed in black, how subtle could such a tall, striking man be? He seemed designed to warn danger, even with the kind of elegance Acton was not built to manage.
Maybe he was right. The buckskin could feel his own curiosity sharpening, a knife on a whetstone.
Acton flicked an ear at the man’s laughter, but he rolled a burnished shoulder in a shrug, too. He had no reason to think the stranger was lying, except that he knew a lot of liars.
Also, it was disappointing to think there was nothing more to the man’s perusal of the marketplace than a simple shopping trip. It would be a shame to think he was wrong in this, that he’d set his hopes for the evening too high.
He didn’t blink at the foreigner comment; that was a given. While not a native himself, Acton had been baptized into Denoctian life, and it was part of his business to note the presence of notable strangers. “They’re very good at getting what they want from outsiders, here,” he agreed, and followed the man out into the street.
Once they did, the buckskin cast his glance away, over the sea of figures, glimmering fish on a cobblestone river. He tried to guess what the stranger might be after – a new cloak, or one of the gypsy’s medicine-pouches that were supposed to bring luck or ward away evil.
But at the word weapons, his gaze swung around to meet that grin, those eyes, and Acton could feel something in him spark back to life. His answering smile is more like a secret.
“I have several friends who would caution me against arming a foreigner. Luckily for you, those friends can be insufferably boring.” He thought, once, of Raum, and wondered what the Ghost was doing tonight. Probably he was tailing Acton the same way the buckskin had this stranger. The thought made his smile grow to a grin, and he licked his teeth and started off, though he was quick to glance over his shoulder. “Give me your name, and they’ll be less inclined to worry. Mine’s Acton.”
