The healer glanced askance at the florist, who had taken the opportunity of her distraction to button his shirt. Etienne and a florist? Etienne with anyone at all clashed with her understanding of him, for no one person could possibly be as interesting as his studies. “But—”
“Jacques, would you like help pouring the wine?” Delyth cut in smoothly, saving Alphonse from further awkwardness as she stepped forward to take the bottle from the man’s grip. “You’ll have to show me where the glasses are, though.”
The shameless smile Jacques gave Delyth was enough to convince Alphonse of the nature of his relationship with her brother, and the healer felt herself keeping her eyes firmly averted from Etienne. “So… ah…” Alphonse struggled to find the right words.
“I know. He’s quite… symmetrical. But he keeps coming around, so I suppose he enjoys my company.”
“Yes, I noticed he was very developed.” Alphonse tried to keep her face straight as the words came out, but a breathless giggle escaped all the same. The tension broke, and Etienne’s brow arched sardonically.
“So I have found.”
They were both laughing as Delyth and Jacques returned, wine glasses in hand. With the initial shock over, the four spent the next hour in amicable conversation. It wasn’t long, though, before Delyth started to fade, yawns interrupting her speech. It had been quite a long flight. Eventually, she seemed to give up on staying awake. “Is it too early to sleep? We have a ways to go tomorrow.”
“It’s never too early to go to bed,” Jacques’s rich voice brought a smile over Etienne’s face.
Alphonse stood hastily. “Well, it was very nice meeting you, Jacques. Unless you’ll be here for breakfast?” The two men exchanged a look and the florist only gave a noncommittal shrug.
“Goodnight,” the warrior drawled, cutting off any more strained conversation, her hand at Alphonse’s elbow. Together, they turned to the spare bedroom to sleep.
⥣ ⥣ ⥣
Handing over the coins to the street vendor, Alphonse donned her newly purchased sun hat with a grateful sigh. She tied the strings about her jaw, looked out across the bay where several ships were coming into the harbor. La’ Cante had a wonderful sea breeze that smelled of brine and whipped her hair into a bird's nest bundle of curls. The sun kissed her cheeks until they glowed.
Alphonse knew she could have been happy in a place like this. La’ Cante was not so different from Port Carcarac, where her friends from Moxous had settled. Now she was all the more happy to be walking alongside Delyth as they headed for the docks, where Brande had written he worked.
“Brande wrote he worked on a ship called Dancer. I think that’s a pretty name for a ship, don’t you?” The healer turned to peer up from beneath her hat and smiled up at her paramour. “Have you ever traveled by boat?”
“By boat?” Delyth blinked and reached for Alphonse’s hand.“Um, no. I’ve never even been on a boat. Dancer is a pretty name, though not as pretty as Alphonse. They should have named their boat after you.” She bumped the smaller woman with their clasped hands. “It shouldn’t be hard to find if this is anything like Aberdwyr. We’ll just ask a few sea-types once we get to the docks—they’ll know all the different ships thatanchor here regularly.”
“Sea-types?” Alphonse’s cheeks warmed at the compliment. “What, precisely, is a sea type?” Of course, she knew what a sea-type was, but it seemed a silly thing to say, especially for Delyth, and so Alphonse giggled. “Are you a ‘sky-type’? What am I? A...A…” She couldn’t think of the type someone else would see her as. Besides, perhaps meek. Two years ago, that would have seemed like an insult. Now she was glad to be quiet and reserved. Soft. She had earned that softness. It wasn’t a title to wear with shame, but instead to embrace and embody. “A reading type?”
As they walked along the docks, Delyth gained her fair share of looks, though no more than that. No insults, no one blanching in fear or pulling children away. The citizens of La’ Cante had the largest population of Cabot Alphonse knew of, so they were used to the unusual and different. Even now, Alphonse could see men and women alike walking past, carrying baskets of fish or eels, with webbed fingers and slits in their necks that she knew would allow for breathing underwater.
Brande hadn’t been that type of Cabot, but he was undoubtedly kin to the seafaring people.
༄
“Hmm… How about my type?” Delyth said, her lips quirked in the sort of smile that one simply couldn’t help. A little awestruck. Alphonse was grinning up at her, amber eyes framed by her curls and the cute sun hat she wore, and for a moment, Delyth was standing in the middle of that forgotten stretch of Thloegr road, meeting the healer for the first time all over again.
Delyth hardly noticed the stares people directed towards her but found herself in the novel position of being the one staring. She tried to look surreptitiously, conscious of the discomfort such attention could cause. Still, it was remarkable to be around so many others like her. Or wildly unlike her, but still different from most humans.
Delyth almost forgot their purpose in her interest but reined it in. She would get to meet and talk to some of these people when they got to Brande. So, tearing her gaze from the other’s along the docks, the warrior stopped a likely-looking sailor and asked him for directions to the ship they were looking for. He responded kindly and pointed the way with long, webbed fingers.
True to his word, they found it near the end of the docks, a graceful, three-masted craft with elegant lines.
“Dancer seems an apt name,” Delyth told Alphonse, though she didn’t move to step
