A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
When Raum arrives, he is dressed as one of his daggers: sharp silver, dark blood, gleaming and narrow and treacherous.
But he is not alone.
Abel does not tremble to see the monster that dogs the man’s steps (less loyal than he, from the looks of it). But there is an infinitesimal narrowing of his eyes, a flaring of his nostrils, a quick flick of one dark ear. Something in him drops, like a stone skipping from one ledge to the next down and down into a black pit.
There is something like relief when he turns his gaze away from the man and the basilisk to instead watch the crowd. Raum gathers them up like a wave, like a handful of sand, hot and hateful. But not all - Abel sees shock, sees bright rage, sees grief. And he sees, too, faces that speak of interest, and detachment, and even pleasure. Oh, it is full of serpents, this city that has been broken to rubble again and again but still has pieces sharp enough to scour the world.
As Raum speaks the boy is moving, winding his way slowly through the thickening throng, whispering in ears and slipping money into a few palms. It is only when the beast cries out that Abel freezes, as surely as if he had met its stare instead of only heard his voice; he lifts his head sharply and his eyes are like empty wells as he listens then. He is too far back to smell the blood but oh, he remembers the scent of it, bitter and metallic, and how hot it felt at first.
One sharp-tongued mare speaks out, the bleak gleam of her collar evident across the crowd, and Abel cuts his glance to her as a shout sounds from behind them both.
“The queen is dead,” rises the high, clear voice of a girl - a yearling filly Abel paid with sun-warmed copper coins only a few minutes before. “Long live the king!” Around her, others - young and reckless, or bitter remnants from Solterra’s tarnished Houses, take up the cry too.
“Long live the king,” Abel answers softly, his voice less than a whisper well lost amid the sound now of the crowd. But it is not Raum he is watching but the monster at his side, and Seraphina is not the queen he thinks of.
x | x
