“A… a cabbage?”
“Yes! Cabbage!” she confirmed, slapping my knee. My eyes found Maxius, who grinned into his milk.
“Men like cabbage,” she said, her glance pitying. “Not flower.”
Blood God damn me,I flexed.Flower.
“Big flower,” she reassured, deepening her cadence and tapping my arm. “Big, big flower. But still flower. I need hard and rough, to survive wind and snow.”
“Now, now, Esioul. I think you’ll find I can weather much more than a frost,” I protested.
She retracted, resting her head against the stone beside my shoulder.
“Grey laurel can have you.”
My entire body went taut.
“Trade.” She leaned in closer, her tone conspiratorial, too low for the others. “This apple, for milk. It meant for you.”
I glanced down at the half-eaten, bruised apple, its once-green skin mottled with purple, much like the fading marks upon her skin. She winked.
“For me?”
“Yes.” She grinned, the smile all teeth. She mimed nibbling something, pinching her fingers to her mouth. “Has lots of juicy maggots. Make you strong like cabbage.”
I was more than cabbage enough, though not for long if I surrendered the bowl. I studied her arms, the thin length of them…the prominence of her collarbone protruding from her chest.
“Just this once.”
She nodded, eyes wide.
With a huff, I relinquished my meal, trading it for the fucking apple.
“Half-wit,” someone, probably Iagor, muttered from the corner.
She hauled herself back towards the mattress, intent on devouring every last bite.
I bit into my poor excuse for a meal, the flesh soft and mealy, wind-knocked and fit only for cider.
On the second bite, my tooth struck something coarse, unyielding beneath the apple’s give.
I paused.
Inside the bruised flesh, a thin strip pierced through its middle. I nudged it with a fingertip, my stomach cartwheeling.
With a fugitive glance, I scanned the room, the laurels lost to their eating. Sipping the last of the bowl’s last dregs, Esioul’s black eyes flickered between me and the apple, her eyebrows wiggling. “Maggots,” she mouthed, milk dribbling down her chin.
Only it was no maggot, but a small roll of parchment.
I curved my body away from the others, shifting the apple to my left hand and sandwiching it between my legs and the wall. In the shadow of the corner, hidden by my body, I pulled the scrap free and flattened it against the Ovidian floor.
Its edges were soft and damp, sticky with apple flesh.
Inside, scrawled in rust-brown, was a message. Letters clumsy, strokes crude, it mattered not, for I knew the hand behind it as well as my own. Not just in the loops of the f’s and the dotting of the i’s, but by the way something hot flared in my chest as I read it, a hearthfire from home.
Find me. We fly together.
Fuck.
