Laika Belle's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

They rode three days east. Laika sat behind Felicette on the staghound's broad back and said almost nothing. She practiced sentences in her head instead. Hello. My name is Laika. I came from the west. Every version sounded wrong before it left her mouth. Felicette hummed and pointed out streams and rested the staghound at noon. On the third afternoon, the trees thinned and Laika heard the market before she saw it: bells, hoofbeats, a fiddle, voices layered like laundry on a line. Felicette slid down and tied the staghound to a post. "Stalls run till dusk," she said. "I have parcels to drop. Find me at the red awning when the lamps come on." She looked at Laika a moment longer. "Don't stand at the edge. People think edge-standers are thieves." Laika stepped into the aisle. Tieflings everywhere. Horned, tailed, some with skin the color of plums, some pale as her. A man with a lute laughed at something a woman said. A boy juggled apples. Laika smelled roasting nuts and hot iron. She had rehearsed a hello but her tongue had gone flat. She walked with her hands tight on the satchel strap and her eyes down, and people moved around her the way water moves around a stone. She stopped at a stall that sold small carved animals. The seller was a tiefling about her age, black horns curling back, a scar on his lip. He looked up and smiled. "See anything you like?" Laika opened her mouth. "I," she said. Her voice cracked. She tried again. "I have never." She could not finish it. Her tail lashed once behind her, hard, and knocked a carved fox off the table. It clattered on the stones. The seller's smile thinned. He bent to pick up the fox. Laika bent too. Their hands almost touched and she jerked back and stepped on a woman's foot behind her. The woman swore. Laika turned to apologize and her horn caught the edge of a hanging scarf and pulled the whole line down. She ran. She ran until the noise of the market was behind her and she was pressed against a fence at the edge of the stalls, breathing like she'd been held underwater. Her face was hot. Her hands shook worse than they had at dawn three days ago. Felicette found her there when the lamps came on. She did not ask what happened. She looked at Laika's wet eyes and the torn strap on the satchel and sighed through her fangs. "You can't do it cold," she said. "I know a place. Half a day north. It's falling down and it's full of animals that need hands. You learn to talk to a thing by feeding it first." She untied the staghound. "Come on. The market will still be here next week." Laika climbed up behind her and did not look back.