Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [56]
She peered at his face. “You’re full of surprises, Lord Bill. I thought you were Adrianglian.”
“I am.”
“Your Gaulish has no accent.”
He overlaid a thick coastal drawl over the Gaulish words. “Is that better, mademoiselle?”
She blinked those huge eyes, and he switched to a harsher Northern dialect. “I can do a fur trapper, too.”
“How do you do that?”
“I have a really good memory,” he told her in refined upper-class Gaulish.
She matched his accent. “I have no doubt of that.”
Her grandfather must’ve been a noble and from the East, too. She stretched her a’s. William filed it away for further consideration.
“That’s really impressive,” she said.
Ha! He’d broken bones, killed an altered human, carried her rhino of a cousin, and she didn’t blink an eye. But the moment he said two words in another language, she decided to be impressed.
Cerise dropped into Adrianglian again. “People like Clara don’t like it. She thinks we ‘put on airs,’ as she says, as if what we can do somehow makes her less. She is right, you know. You’re heading straight into the den of cut-throats. You should’ve taken her up on her offer and gone back to town.”
She’d heard their conversation. William shook his head. He had a mission to complete, and if he walked away now, he would never see her again. “I said I would come with you. If I don’t, who’ll protect you?”
Her lips curved a little. “You saw me fight. Do you think I need protection, Lord Bill?”
“You’re good. But the Hand is dangerous, and they have numbers on their side.” He waited for her to bristle, but she didn’t. “Besides, you’re my ride to a safe, warm house, where it’s dry and I might be given hot food. I have to take care of you, or I might never have a decent meal again.”
Cerise tossed her head back and laughed softly. “I’ll make an Edger of you yet, before this is over.”
He liked the way she laughed, when her hair fell to the side and her eyes lit up. William looked away, before he did something stupid. “You have a plan about the sniper?”
She nodded at the corpse. “I think we should let the dead man do the work.”
William glanced at the hunter and bared his teeth at the corpse.
TEN
THE door opened silently under pressure from Spider’s hand, admitting him into the hothouse. Fifty feet of glass sheltered a narrow strip of soil divided by a path in two. During the day sunlight flooded the hothouse, but now only the weak orange radiance of the magic lamps nourished the greenery. The previous owner of the mansion had used the hothouse to coax cucumbers out of the Mire’s soil; he would’ve been shocked to discover the oddities that filled it now.
Spider surveyed the twin lines of plants and saw Posad’s misshapen form, hunched over by the roots of a vernik midway down the path. A large bucket and a wheelbarrow sat next to him.
Spider strode toward the gardener, the gravel crunching under his feet. Posad dipped his small, almost feminine left hand into a bucket and administered a handful of black oily mud to the soil around the roots of a young tree. Translucent blue, it stood seven feet tall, spreading perfectly formed leafless branches.
The blue branches leaned toward Spider. Tentatively, like a shy child, one touched his shoulder. He offered his hand and the branches nuzzled his palm.
He plucked a bag of feed from the wheelbarrow and offered a handful of grainy gray powder to the tree. A small branch brushed it, scooping the powder up with tiny slits in its bark. Its fellows reached to his palm, and the entire tree bent closer to the food.
Posad continued working the mud into the soil with a three-pronged garden fork. “You spoil him,” he said.
“I can’t help it. He is so polite.” Spider fed the last of the feed to the tree and shook his hands to the remaining branches. “Sorry, fellows. All gone.”
The branches brushed his shoulders as if in gratitude, and the tree righted itself. Spider watched the grains of feed float down the trunk, opaque and glowing like snow-flakes turned into tiny stars by light.
The tree was vital to fusion. Only with it could