the salt is on the briar rose,
the fog is in the fir trees.
the fog is in the fir trees.
Caspian doesn’t expect an apology at all, much less one as formal as what he receives. At first he thinks it’s sarcasm, but it didn’t sound that clipped or brittle, and he doesn’t get a good glance at her face as he helps gather up her belongings. He does catch a glimpse of sketched lines that seemed very familiar before they were both straightening again. Already the pace of the street has returned to normal around them, a constant stream in which they are only two new stones.
When his eyes do meet hers, there is something strangely familiar in the stormy gray. But moving on from there, the paint is certain he’s never seen her before; there is nothing he recognizes in her soft-stark color, or her dark mouth, or the shape her vowels take when she questions him. What he can already tell is she is money.
That might mean opportunity, if he hasn’t bungled it too badly already.
“Almost always,” he answers cheerily, then examines himself as best he can, glancing over his shoulder to check his rump, the point of the collision. His hindquarters are mottled and flecked, but only with the pale gray and deep blue they always are. “I think I escaped unscathed,” he says, glancing back at her. Caspian is about to tell her she has a spattering of ink at her throat, a shape reminiscent of petals, but she speaks again before he gets the chance.
He arches a brow at her. To him, names were cheap currency. He himself went by half a dozen, depending on who he was speaking to. But when she finishes with Bella Foster, the other brow rises too.
Foster is a name that does drip its weight in gold. Even if he hadn’t known it just from being Terrastellan, he would from the low conversations of the smugglers and traders, who liked to guess at the treasures the grand estate might hold.
“A pleasure,” he says, as though they are meeting in a ballroom and not a crooked alley with soot darkening stone walls. His gaze falls again to the rolled papers, to a hint of lines that could be roads and buildings. “I’m Caspian. Are you, ah, lost?”
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