I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved
I don't need to be saved
August, in a nice change from recent events, can’t believe his good fortune.
He is sure the stallion some twenty meters ahead of him in the thick throng is the bastard who’d attacked Aghavni; the color and the stature are etched in his memory. Casually he follows, keeping his distance, feigning interest in this rug or that brooch while keeping an eye on his target, willing him to turn his head and betray those tiger’s eyes.
When it happens, it nearly backfires; a merchant just to his right shrieks (August finds their voices unmelodic, their calls rude compared to the musicality and humor of Denocte’s dealers) and many heads swivel their direction, including the one he’s trailing. Unwilling to be discovered, August turns his face away, stepping ungracefully to the side - and almost into the velvet-dark hindquarters of a black mare.
She whirls cat-quick and August draws back, his eyes lifting from the collar that winks like diamonds under the sunlight to a gaze like and not-like the silver of his own. There is something about the way she stands that makes him think of a hunter, crouched and tensed to spring, though she is taller than him and this is no forest but a midday marketplace.
Still, it’s a new enough place to him to feel dangerous, and the tension between her shoulders lies coiled in himself.
“Easy there,” he says, the same gentle tone he’d use on one of the wilder dragons that roved the streets of Denocte. “I’m sorry if I startled you, I was just looking for someone-“
Someone long gone by now, if it had been them at all. August’s gaze shifts to rake the narrow market, seeing no sign of the chestnut stallion with kohl-rimmed eyes. Shit. Caligo knew he’d probably never see the man again, but if he did it’d be at the point of his sword.
He swallows his sigh and summons a smile when he turns back to the stranger. Her color alone, like midsummer midnight, makes him miss the Night Court, but he’s mostly impervious to homesickness by now. “This place is an ordeal,” he mutters, raising a brow at her like they are co-conspirators, strangers bound by circumstance.
More likely he is only further offending some born-and-bred Solterran, and (given what he liked to assume about the culture) the next thing she’ll do is pull out a dagger of ornate beauty and important origin and make him pay for his insult.
@Warset
