Heron breathed out, only half-glancing at her. “Does that count as--’paying lip’?”
“Hmm. Perhaps not.” She inhaled her surprise, and the pause between them dragged out. Somehow, it hadn’t been expected—but then again, this man seemed all solid dependability, scarred knuckles and signs of work, not the lifetime of the idle rich. She should have known.
“Familiar with money being an issue,” Ofelia eventually said. It was an abrupt admission, something she never expected to find coming from her lips (even as it gave so little away, and yet everything away). She bit down on the astonishment. “You could have become a mercenary,” she said, thinking of another fighter, one who had mastered the art of being Ofelia Zhou’s quiet shadow, another blonde ghost by her side.
“Could have,” he said, not responding to her empathy save with a small dip of his head (it felt like a kindness, both ways). He was leaning on his elbows, forced to stoop fractionally to meet the rail, and his hands jutted out into the field, crossed at the wrist, thick forearms gone pigeontoed. Palms twisted up momentarily in something like a shrug. “Could have been a carpenter, too.”
They watched the banners over the field whip out their colors as the wind picked up, zipping in from the outlands and cracking the cloth like whips. A cheer went up from a ring some yards past his line of sight. The silences were expanding, but he wasn’t noticing.
“Age I was, resume I had--doubt I’d have gotten much business, frankly.” His exhalation was pragmatic, the brusque snort of a packhorse. “Bit how it would have gone building houses, too, expect.” And by the time he’d have made a fine blade for hire, of course, Heron had found God. Or vice-versa.
“Suppose you’ve moved on, yourself. From more meager days.” A by-product of her secrecy, perhaps, but to the silvered old commander, everything about Ofelia Zhou seemed self-made. She chuckled, a small sound in the back of her throat.
“You could say that.”
She was prepared to chase the carpentry tangent and add something about building oneself up from the foundations, brick and mortar and a family-run business—indulging in this delicate verbal repartee which had such a different atmosphere, when she knew her partner didn’t carry a knife strapped to his forearm ready to join the conversation. But the din of the crowd had risen again, spilling over its bounds and consuming their exchange, filling up those silences. Boards groaned beneath the weight of returning spectators, weighed down with candies, flags, and other ephemera to commemorate a day of ceremonial violence.
“Looks like it’s starting again,” Ofelia said, and it almost sounded apologetic. Heron tipped his eyes at the sky before looking down at her, as though taking measure of the weather. At this range, he took stock too of the spray of freckles across her nose and high cheekbones, her not-unwarm eyes, the unwavering set of her shoulders against the day. The peal of a trumpet sounded.
“And I ought to return to the box, suppose,” he said, and it sounded decidedly weary. “Best of betting luck to you, Ms. Zhou,” he said, breaking eye contact at last with one final cant of his head, and leaning to take his cane by the neck. “May those eggs in your basket live to see another battle.”
The faint parting smile he offered faded with a strange quickness over one broad shoulder, and for someone so tall with such an uneven step, he melted back into the crowd almost as if he’d never been.