Chapter Twenty-Six: Ragfish in the Corner

 

“You’re lost, aren’t you?”

“It’s around here somewhere! I remember a strong smell of fish!”

“Kyosti, we’re by the sea. Everywhere smells like fish.”

Kyosti scratched his head, turning his head from side to side. “I promised you the best ragfish kebabs in the world, and I will get them for you!”

Sanji squeezed his hand, letting out a low chuckle. Her arm rested against his, holding him steady even in the pushing, rushing crowds of Mordaland. The smell of fish hung heavy in the air, and Kyosti’s nose twitched as he thought longingly of his seaside apartment in Chithoobra. The creak and groan of old fishing ships and sea cruisers surrounded him, and he took a moment to ground himself with the steady, firm hand grasping his own.

Sanji tugged at him impatiently. “Kyosti, I’m hungry,” she insisted. “At least tell me what ragfish look like, so I can find them!”

They found a vendor hawking his hot kebabs a few minutes later. Kyosti told Sanji what kind of coins to give him, and they snuck to a deserted corner of the docks to eat their food. Since his kebab was burning his nose with just the steam it gave off, he waved it in the air a few times and said, “Sanji, tell me what’s happening around us.”

She had let go on his hand, and he could hear her giving off little panting breaths as she tried to eat her food without burning her tongue. “If I had a penny for every time you said that . . .” she muttered, elbowing Kyosti in the side.

“You could probably buy the kebab cart,” he finished for her, grinning.

The ship had landed in Mordaland only that morning, and the four travelers had only been too happy to be back on solid ground after weeks at sea. Kyosti was especially relieved because he had been to Mordaland and other parts of its home country, Tenash, many times. Rodriguez’s family lived on a ranch only a few days’ travel up the river from Mordaland, so he had visited there a few times with his friend.

For the first time in weeks, stuffing his face with ragfish, Kyosti found himself thinking of Rodriguez. He wondered how his strong, silent friend was doing in the capital, and his heart ached for a moment with the longing to be home in his little house by the docks, choking on the smell of fish, playing card games with Rodriguez and the other guards late into the night, watching the sun rise over the Ben Sea. At this point, all his carefully tended plants were probably dead, since Rodriguez was hopeless at keeping anything alive. But he had to go back, even just for the smell of the ocean water and the waves breaking against the cliffs at Chithoobra’s back.

For a moment, his mind slipped back to the day he had left Chithoobra, and the little garden he and that guard had slipped through, with the tree covered in white flowers despite the coming winter. He had to find out what that tree was if it was the last thing he did.

Sanji leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment, then drew back. “What are you thinking?”

Kyosti realized with a start she had been chattering away and he hadn’t been listening to a word. “I’m so sorry!” he said. “I was just...thinking about Chithoobra. I had a Tenashi friend in the guard there. Hearing his dialect here...it’s making me miss him a lot.”

She hummed. “What will you do when you get back to Chithoobra? I mean...I realize it’s my fault, but your eyes…”

“I’ve considered it,” Kyosti told her. “Probably I’ll get an honorable discharge. I’m not sure if you should enter the city with us, though. The Queen won’t be happy to have someone altered by a Windfeller Eagle coming in.”

“I have to go there,” Sanji reminded him. “I have family there, remember? First, I’ll make sure you’re safe with your friends there, and then I suppose I’ll have to find them.”

He nodded slowly. “Right, you did tell me that. Where in Chithoobra?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It’s a distant cousin of mine who went there ten years ago as a merchant. I suppose I’ll just have to ask around until I find them.”

“Until you find them, you can stay with me,” Kyosti told her, all in a rush.

Her body shifted as she turned to look at him. He could feel himself blushing and hoped she couldn’t tell with his brown skin. For a long time neither of them said anything.

“Um, didn’t you say you live in a tiny one-room apartment?” Sanji said finally, her voice shaking with suppressed laughter. “I believe the word you used was ‘cell.’”

Kyosti rolled his eyes and tried to extract his arm from hers, but she clung to him. “And you said most of the space is taken up by plants? Where will I sleep? Eat?”

“You can freeze out on the streets if you want,” he retorted.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sanji laughed, pressing their shoulders together. “No, I’ll come and stay with you. I doubt they’ll let me stay with Anglorae in...whatever palace they’ll stash her away in.”

Still stinging from her teasing, Kyosti said, “She wouldn’t want you anyway.”

For a while they ate the ragfish, even going back for a second helping. Here in Tenash, a mostly desert country, the sun was hot and bright, but a chill wind blew from the south. Soon, they would be travelling back down toward---Kyosti felt a thrill just thinking about---that wall of darkness that was the border of the Innis holdings. He was returning to the south finally.

As they walked back to the inn where Anglorae and John were, arms linked, Sanji asked, “Are you sure you want me to stay with you? It won’t...cause problems? I mean, you don’t have some spouse you haven’t told me about, right?”

Kyosti laughed. “No, no spouse. Funnily enough, no one is lining up to marry an Innis in Chithoobra.”

“Right, of course,” she said, then tugged him to a stop, right there in the middle of the street, and kissed him. For a moment, Kyosti didn’t understand what she was doing, standing like a cold ragfish as she pressed their lips together. Once he had finally gotten the message, they stood there for several long minutes and kissed as the crowd parted around them. If anyone disapproved or whistled at them, Kyosti certainly didn’t hear it.

After a while, Sanji pulled away and pressed their foreheads together. Pressed against her like this, Kyosti realized she was slightly taller than him. “Guess I’m the first in line,” she told him, “although I wouldn’t say no to a little fighting over you either.”

It was only much later, when they had gotten back to the inn and Anglorae had yelled at them for ruining their appetites and John benchpressed Sanji forty times and the four of them fought over who would sleep where on the floor even though they would eventually just sleep side-to-side that the joy worming in Kyosti’s heart finally drained away and reality reasserted itself.

The knife. That was in his bag. The one he had to get to the Innis.

If the queen found out he hadn’t given it to the Seers, what would she do? Certainly he would be court martialed for merely disobeying an order from her. Probably he would be executed publicly.

Forget Sanji being unable to enter the city, Kyosti couldn’t risk it himself. He could never give Sanji some kind of idyllic life cramped into his tiny cell with the plants, living on his disability stipend from the army and visited by friends on weekends.

They still had a few weeks before they reached the city, and he had to find a way to get the knife back to the Innis before then. He certainly couldn’t bring it into the city.

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Photo by Hamid Roshaan 🇵🇰 on Unsplash