Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 11 of 42

Kevintor crouched behind a low wall at the edge of town and looked at the open ground between him and Lady Astella's walls. An hour of flat fields. One road. No cover. A red tile roof rose halfway across, a ramen shop with a painted sign propped on the road shoulder, two bowls and bold black letters offering a sale. Past the shop, on a knoll, stood a wooden watchtower with a peaked roof and a railed platform. A man in a wide hat and dark glasses leaned on the rail. A long lens hung at his chest. The tower covered every step of the road. He could not walk it as himself. His face was the contract. He needed a shape the lens would skip. He went in the back of the ramen shop. Ronda Nayoodle was at the stove with her sleeves rolled. She looked at him once and turned the burner down. "Six nights of pork," she said. "Now you come in the back." "There's a man on that tower with a glass," Kevintor said. "He's looking for me. I need to cross the field and not be me while I do it." She wiped her hands and went to a chest by the wall. She lifted out a folded kimono, blue silk with red and yellow flowers across the sleeves, a sash already tied. "My brother left it. He was tall." She set it on the table. "Wig in the drawer. Sandals by the door. You walk like a fighter. Don't." He changed in her back room. The sleeves hung past his hands. The wig was black and pinned tight. He stooped his shoulders and shortened his stride in front of her until she nodded once. She handed him a paper parasol and a covered tray. "You're delivering. Keep the parasol low on the tower side. Don't look up. If he calls, I called you back for a missed bowl." He stepped onto the road in the kimono with the parasol tipped at his shoulder and the tray held out front. The sun was high. He walked slow. He passed the painted sign and felt the lens find him and slide off. The man on the platform shifted, watched the road behind, watched the road ahead, did not whistle, did not lift a horn. Kevintor kept the parasol where it needed to be and counted his steps to the gate. The guards at Lady Astella's wall opened for the tray without a word. Inside the yard she stood on the stones in a red kimono with a pipe at her mouth, the blade under her sash. She looked at the wig, at the sleeves, at his face under the paint of the parasol's shadow. She took the pipe out. "You came in dressed as dinner," she said. "Burn it in the stove before someone sees you in my house. Then sit. We talk about who is selling your road."