1.29. No Refunds

“What do they taste like?” Seth asked as he and Ofelia departed the perimeter. “The lies.”

“Bull shit,” she said. “Appropriately enough.”

“How do you know what a bull’s shit tastes like?”

“One can extrapolate, I think, from the smell.”

Seth stepped around a street corner and indicated the Tower Wick, Sondam’s most reputable taphouse (as far as that went in a tinpot two-horse capillary town like Sondam). He’d negotiated for his hexentatua here, at one of its wax-dribbled tables. “It sounds like you might need a drink, then, Miss al Ydris.”

“I don’t imagine anyone will be—” Ofelia paused as Seth slid his diamond pick from his sleeve. “Ah.”

“Guess we could find some proprietor or another in the crowd.” Seth sent the pins clicking, one after another. “But I try not to make a nuisance of myself.” He swung the door in. “After you, madame.”

Ofelia strolled past him to park her black-clad butt on a barstool. “This would strike me as your idea of flirting, if I didn’t know you fancied my mother.”

Seth hopped the candle-crowded bar and rummaged in its splintery underside cabinet. More candles down here. The place really stuck to its gimmick. “I’m that obvious?”

“She is.”

“Okay.” Seth came up with two pewter-plated tankards. “Well, yes. I do. I hope that’s not an issue. What are you drinking?”

“A kiln ale, if they have one. Why would it be an issue?”

“It seems like a recipe for awkwardness.” Seth found the Redhead Select tap handle, a carved maiden with a blobby wink on her poorly painted face. “Hanging around a fellow who wants to sleep with your mother.”

Ofelia’s face turned distraught. “Sleep with her?” She put a hand to her chest. “As in you want to have sex? With my mom?”

Seth’s grip faltered on the tap handle. “Uh, I—yes?”

The distress dropped from her. She returned to her inexpressive baseline, with a touch of added bemusement. “I’m kidding. I don’t care.”

He decompressed and wiped the foamy rim of the tankard he’d overfilled. “This goddamn family.”

“I don’t think either of us would enjoy any sort of stepfather-esque arrangement,” Ofelia said. “But I’d be happy to consider you some kind of Fun Uncle.”

Seth slid the ale across the bar’s wax-flecked surface. “We’re nearly the same age.”

“That’s what would make you fun.” Ofelia craned her neck and took a sip from the sloshing mug. “Though you’d go unlit, you know.”

He nodded. “What’s it like to be unlit? Does it feel… different, somehow? Like your senses?”

Ofelia smacked her lips. “You’re weighing it, aren’t you?”

“Well, you went unlit because you love your mother, right?”

Ofelia leaned her elbows on the bar. “Life was difficult for us, with a dead father and a mother on the front. Then she came back turned and told us she had to leave, that she was to be a Verdugo and we couldn’t stay with her, and we refused. We’d only just gotten her back.”

“What did she say to that?”

“She said that it was a horrible curse and if we did it, we’d regret it forever. She said she wasn’t worth losing our souls over.”

“And have you regretted it?”

“Never once. Even if the moment it happened was rather existentially unpleasant.”

Seth frowned as he filled his own tankard. “Help me understand it. The disparity. Like, why does she consider it so thoroughly horrible and you don’t?”

“I see the biggest difference in how it happened,” Ofelia said. “When Tiago and I went unlit, it was by our choice, to stay with the last family we had, and she held us as our souls lifted away, and whispered that she loved us.”

Seth imagined what it would sound like—I love you, in Annalise’s cocoa-warm brogue.

“When Mother went unlit,” Ofelia continued, “it was in the jaws of a shrieking abomination as it dragged her into an ambush cave. She killed it with her bare hands, and then lay bleeding to death for an hour in pitch darkness before they got her out. She nearly lost a leg. It was the worst and most terrifying moment of her life, and she’s still healing. Up here.” She tapped her temple. “She’ll never heal all the way, I don’t think. But you’ve been good for her, so far.”

Seth hid his heart-flittering reaction to this behind a swig of Redhead Select, to maintain his Fun Uncle bona fides.

“Also, she’s quite gregarious. Loves meeting new people.” Ofelia shook her head. “Me, I was never an outgoing person. I had few friends in our town, and when what happened happened with our father, I had none. Now, I appreciate how much I am left alone. I have a general dislike for the uneducated, and the uneducated have a general dislike for the unlit. We have a compatible incompatibility.”

Seth chuckled. “I’m pretty uneducated, you know. Wouldn’t know how to read if I hadn’t taught myself.”

“But you taught yourself,” Ofelia said. “And you certainly don’t seem to mind the unlit.”

“The ones I’ve met so far have made an okay impression.”

“What else…” Ofelia drummed her fingers on the side of her tankard. “There’s the skin and the eyes, but that’s obvious. I’m sterile, but I’m not fond of penises, so no great loss there. I can only ever find sex when we’re back in the Necropolis and around our fellow unlit, of course, but that infrequency makes it more special, I find. And it’s the only place I can locate people my age who look as young as I look. The options are otherwise off-puttingly ephebophilic in either direction. Not that finding sex would be an issue for you, I suppose.”

“I’d actually rather not talk about this whole bit.”

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“Suit yourself,” she said. “You know I can’t really remember what her eyes looked like? Before they turned? They were green, I remember. But not the shade.”

Green. Seth tried to picture that and didn’t have much luck. Green eyes in Annalise’s face.

“It used to be that in my dreams we were human again, and I’m sure I must have dreamt her eyes the way they were.” Ofelia studied her own distorted reflection in the ale’s ruddy surface. “But these days, when I dream of my family, all our eyes are black. I suppose a dream could easily get the color wrong, anyway.” She raised the mug; the image boiled away into ripples as she drank. She wiped her lip. “Would you call this a normal conversation?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I rarely have them. Is this the sort of way people talk in the Plainlands?”

“Not exactly,” Seth said. “I mean, dreams, I suppose, that’s normal-ish territory.”

“What did you dream about last night?”

“Last night I had a dream I was picking a lock with no pants on and the Sorcerer General kept trying to put a leash on me.” It had been Annalise with the leash, actually, but Seth wasn’t about to tell her daughter that. He thought to change the subject: “What do you read all day up on that carriage roof?”

That brought some animation to her eyes. Ofelia liked when you asked her about her book, he was learning. Annalise and Tiago were rarely curious. “One can’t be picky when one lives nomadically,” she said. “At the moment it’s a book of Rinian fables.”

“Rinia. That’s in Tuthima, isn’t it?”

“Mmhmm. Their breadbasket. Or ricebasket, maybe.” Her pinky swirled on the sweating side panel of her mug. “It’s quite fascinating—every story ends with its protagonists dying in grisly ways. The Little Boy and the Pebble Man? Pulverized. The Little Girl who Talked to Crocodiles? An entrée. One wonders what their problem is with little individuals.”

“I danced with a Tuthimi girl over in Fontana,” Seth said. “She seemed not to mind my height.”

“Perhaps she was a crocodile in disguise,” Ofelia said. “A hungry one.”

“Perhaps.” Seth took the last gulp of his own stein with the cavalier haste of a man who hadn’t paid for it. “So you can get back to the carriage yourself, right?”

“Do you have some other place to be?”