It’s a long walk, up from the docks to the city of night, and for a moment Sterling almost—almost—feels a flicker of doubt. He is half a world away from everyone and everything he knows, his debts a swift, grasping shadow at his heels. He has never had to run from anything before. He has never had to question his sense of certainty, of purpose.
Can he really start over? Can he really reinvent himself, and become someone new?
But the evening is warm, the night full of possibility. The moon gleams like a silver coin overhead, and Sterling is seized by a sudden impulse to pluck it out of the sky.
Of course he can. He shakes himself, feeling coltish in the midsummer air, and his hesitation slips away like so much spray on the ocean breeze. Up ahead, he can see the bonfires and fairy lights of Denocte’s markets, dancing cheerfully against the deep blue darkness. The shale of the seaside path turns to cobblestones beneath his hooves, and all at once he is swept up in the smoke, the music, the freedom of it.
Sterling’s mouth eases into a grin. He strolls along the streets and alleys of the market, his flanks flashing black and white through the crowd.
A pretty gray mare with yellow roses in her mane cajoles him into buying a horn of ale, and he sips gladly from it as he walks, the amber liquid rolling thick and malty on his tongue. Sterling has been to market towns the world over, from the snowed-in vodka caverns of the Barapha Range to the dizzyingly colorful silk bazaars of the great Austellan Desert—but he knows that these, the Night Markets of Denocte, are the jewel to crown them all.
But he is not here to indulge, not really. Reluctantly, Sterling turns away from a pearl-encrusted dagger sheath (as if he needs one; he has never bothered to carry a blade) which had caught his eye, and casts about instead for the woodworkers’ stalls. He had met a cabinetmaker, on the passage over from Austellus, who had offered him work selling wares, and it had seemed as good a job as any for his fresh start.
But the cabinetmaker is nowhere to be found, tonight. Perhaps he is still settling his affairs down at the docks; perhaps he has decided to take the night off, and enjoy the pleasures of the markets for a change. Sterling could hardly blame him. Up ahead, a small square is beginning to fill with dancers, and he finds himself drawing closer, the music whispering along his veins.
Then he sees the girl, and his grin widens. She moves as if she were a part of the night itself, the moonlight gliding like silk over her dark curves, glimmering off the prongs of her antlers and the little jewels nestled in her extravagant fuchsia hair.
The dance ends, and Sterling waits until she’s brushing past him, an anonymous body in the crowd. “Not bad,” he murmurs, falling into step beside her. “Though, between you and me, I think you lost the tempo for a bit there, during the second movement.”
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
Night after night Minya dances upon a stage or the cobbles of the street. Night after night she turns herself into liquid and moves as if the music was the tide for her sea.
Her skin, like that frothing ocean, is salt-slick with sweat when she finishes this night. She gleams like a pearl as she steps out from her spot within the clearing. Silk sighs from her skin, caught in the midnight breeze and her lungs fill with the sweet smoke. When she inhales and all of her anxieties make way for her striving breath and the smoke of the night fires, only then does she turn numb and free beneath the music.
Her soul aches within her chest, her eyes gleam as they look out and wonder at a glimpse of gold. Would the Day girl be there? Bexley who told her all the truths she already knew and made them sting like a vesper’s bite.
Minya still stings - but she has learned to live with the pain. She has learned to dance out her agony and paint it on the walls and press it upon others. It was easy to deal out what she was dealt, it was easy to repay unkindness with unkindness. It was easy to forget what came first for her - her own rudeness or her own hurt.
She is slipping through the crowd, she is desperate to loave - though her trinkets chime their presence and make her leaving a tune for all to hear. She pushes past a man, but he turns and falls into step with her. There is a moment, a moment when his presence sends a shiver of awareness rocking through her torso. She can feel is proximity as well as if he were touching her, flesh to flesh.
Then he speaks and her glittering lips become a line as sharp as an arrow. And as swiftly as an arrow is loosed so they turn into a cool smile. Everything about the smile she turns upon him is beautiful. Even her most cruelest of gestures and expressions are gilded with a beauty that is so utterly devastating. Her smile is no different. Its cool is ice to match her eyes that bite like Jack Frost where they trail along his teasing lips.
“And what would a traveller know of dance?” Minya questions, her voice as soft as silk. Her fuschia hair gleams wickedly in the moonlight.
As she registers his presence, the mare seems almost to flinch, and for a moment Sterling wonders if he’s made a mistake: if he’s startled her, coming up so suddenly, or made her uncomfortable, drawing in so close. It occurs to him belatedly that he cannot be the first man to approach her after a dance (far from it, he is sure), and though he makes no move to touch her, though they stand in a public, crowded space, he knows the same cannot be said of all men. The image makes him tense—the thought of her, alone, in some dark alleyway, with a stranger leaning in—and he takes a careful step back, wanting to clarify that he means her no harm.
Then she turns a smile on him, frosty and beautiful, and his concern eases slightly. Her finely dished face gleams in the torchlight, the steely-brown of autumn shadows, edged now in silver, now in gold. The bells and baubles strung between her antlers chime against one another with her every tiny movement. There is, Sterling thinks, something bewitching about her: she blazes like a flame, with those scarlet antlers and that magnificent hair, and yet everything about her breathes cold, cold, cold.
“And what would a traveller know of dance?” she asks him, her words slipping like music past her lips. Her smile is almost sly, half-polite and half-reproachful. His own turns playfully pensive as he considers.
“Perhaps more than one might expect,” he says lightly. “I have seen many, many dances.” His eyes glitter, pale blue in the light of the market fires. “Do you know the snake charmers of the Sa’anpe-Vash?” he asks, remembering the way those horses had swayed to the sound of their high, reedy flutes, the desert sunlight glittering off the scales that traced their necks, their backs, their limbs. “The ice dancers of Nvodje?” They had danced with thin blades strapped to their hooves, skating in enormous synchronized patterns over the frozen lake.
But he does not mean to boast, not really, only to share that he knows a little of her world. He can tell without having to ask, can tell simply by having watched her, that the need to dance courses through her blood like a promise. “You are a lovely dancer,” he says, his teasing tone gone. He does not speak to flatter—Sterling never flatters—but rather to state what is true, plain to anyone with eyes. “I've not seen anything quite like your style before. Did you train here, or abroad?”
As they’ve talked, they’ve woven deeper into the marketplace, away from the dance stages and in among the stalls hawking refreshments. Now, Sterling pauses before a cart of teas and wines. “Will you join me for a drink?” he asks her, motioning to the vendor. “You must be parched, after a night of dancing.”
AND MAYBE GOD IS JUST A COP
THAT WE CAN FAST TALK
@Minya blah I feel like this is crap lol sorryyyyy <3
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
All around them is the heartbeat of revelry. It resounds in the thumping of feet, the rush of laughter and the crack of kindling in the fires. The Night Markets are the core of Denocte, where she is most alive, where her darkness is split in light and love and colours of such multitude that Minya cannot name them all.
She stands in their midst like a jewel amidst Denocte’s crown. She is small and slim. She should be so easily lost, yet like mortals look for gods, so Denocteans look and see her and clear a path about her. Her eyes lower, their starlight silver spilling to the ground as his feet. Feet that are bone white and dusted with less dirt than she might have imagined. Even Minya is more dirt covered than he. This is what dancing barefoot will get you. Her feet throb with the dance, her blood still sings and she wants to laugh at him when he speaks to claim he knows more of dancing than she might think.
Her lips draw into a smile, they part to let laughter pour out like a peel of mocking bells. But, he stops her laughter like the press of a finger to her lips. Minya does not laugh. Not when this stranger is telling her of snake charmers and ice dancers. Oh ice, ice! Already she can feel the creep of winter along her spine and how it sinks deep into her weary warm muscles. She wonders if lie would be easier to be a statue, so cold she cannot feel or think. It would be a just end to a girl like she - made of steel and all things that do not yield.
Yet this stranger has her yielding. He has lifted her eyes up, up from the dust bowl at their feet. Up, up to where his lips curl with their mysterious tales. He has her gaze blown wide with longing, soft with desire, glittering with jealousy. Ah, to see a new dance, to learn a new way to move to music…
He compliments her, still smiling, still looking at her like a boy who has just rolled in from the sea. She thinks he still smells of salt-water, the pale parts of him is still the froth of waves that will not yet release him.
But Minya does. She loosens her gaze from where it holds him. She lowers her lashes, dusted with gold and diamonds. Her cheeks brushed with silver glitter make her radiant and sharp in the night. Her laughter is sweet as sugar, warm as the donuts her friend gave her. This stranger has the Scarab girl drunk on stories, drunk on the things she has never seen. They are now promises within her soul. They are vows that she will one day see them and hear the way foot-blades skim across ice with a keening hiss.
He offers her a drink, this boy of bone and earth - starlight and comets. Minya moves to say no but all she says is, “yes.” It tumbles from her lips, startled it was ever spoken. But it should not be, not when this girl aches for stories of worlds better than hers. “White wine,” She tells him and thinks how rich and sweet its flavour will be upon her tongue.
Beneath the sweep of her fuschia fringe she studies him, the dance finally receding from her heart, her limbs. She feels loose and light - a lantern released and rising into the night. “I trained here with the travelling fire dancers.” The yearning in her voice is as deep as a well. It aches in her soul and in her mind she remembers what it is to lie beneath the stars beside the fire in the middle of nothingness and count the stars that glow. They were so many, like dust.
Oh how Minya wants and wants.
“What brings you to, Denocte, traveller?” The girl asks when she tumbles at last from her memories.
