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‘What part about it seemed brilliant, exactly?’ Beau huffs, sprinting down the street just ahead of Jester. It’s clear that she’s slowed down for her, because Jester knows she’s ordinarily much faster, and she searches quickly left and right at the next junction for any sign of Crownsguard.
‘Well, you know,’ Jester wheedles, trying to remember exactly what it was that had got her so excited. Truth was, everything has been so stressful lately, so tense as they waited for the inevitable knife lady to come and fuck their shit up, that when Jester had seen the open door to the wizard tower, well, it had seemed like a good idea! Go in, have a quick look around, maybe leave a few pamphlets to the Traveller in out of the way locations where some bored students might find them… ‘How the hell was I supposed to know they would have the place alarmed?’
Beau laughs, a bit raggedly. ‘They’re wizards, Jes! They’re all as paranoid as Caleb!’
‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ Jester denies. ‘Caleb is—oof!’ She loses her words and breath as Beau grabs her hand and pulls, yanking her out of the side street and into an alley. ‘Beau—‘
‘I saw them, they’re coming this way,’ she gasps, eyes wide.
Jester feels her pulse jump in her neck and she grimaces, eyes flickering around the alley. ‘I can’t teleport us, I’m out of spells,’
‘And I dragged us down a dead end,’ Beau drawls. ‘Good work. Stupid. Okay—Jes, do you trust me?’ she asks, reversing her cloak from blue to brown and tugging at her bun, letting her hair topple down around her shoulders. ‘Jes!’
‘What? Huh? Yes—yes, I trust you, Beau, of course I do!’
Beau gives her an odd, strained smile at that and nods. Weirdly gentle, she takes one of Jester’s hands in hers. Glancing toward the mouth of the alley, she grows tense.
Jester can hear them now as well—the tramp of boots on stone, the raised shout of orders—and she whimpers, clutches hard at Beau’s hand.
‘No, hey, it’s gonna be okay, I won’t let anything happen to you,’ Beau whispers, leaning in. She’s very close now, backing Jester up against the rough brick wall. Her eyes flick to the exit again, and then her other hand cups Jester’s cheek and she whispers, ‘Trust me.’ Her breath is warm against Jester’s lips and smells of…sugar and crisp apple, like the toffeed treats they’d picked up earlier in the day. And then she is kissing her.
It’s gentle. Sweet. Literally. When Beau pulls back a fraction to ask, ‘Okay?’ at the stupidest moment because, Hello? Crownsguard looking for them? Jester licks her lips on instinct and can taste not toffee but caramel and it is oddly endearing to think of Beau going back for seconds, to try a different flavour. Jester pulls her back in, her heart pounding as she hears an unfamiliar voice announce,
‘Sir! There are two people in this alley—hey, you! Have you seen two traitors to the guard come this way?’
Beau keeps her arm raised protectively and pulls Jester’s head toward her shoulder. Her hand, Jester now realises, has been placed so it covers most of Jester’s face on that side from anyone looking into the alley and her first thought is smart and the second is a really weird, strange, unexpected drop of ice into her gut as she realises oh. right. This is fake. She goes with it, hugging Beau tightly as if they were two lovers caught kissing by a guardsman. And really, she thinks, it isn’t far off. Except obviously for the lovers part.
‘Fuck off,’ Beau calls to the guard. ‘Do I look like I’ve seen shit?’
Jester tenses. A second later, she feels Beau’s other hand press at her waist and rub gently as if to reassure her.
A moment passes, excruciatingly long, and then, ‘You’ll want to be careful, miss. Dangerous folk out and about.’
Steps fade away.
Beau stays where she is, hugging Jester, turning her head to mimic as though they are kissing still, until they are both sure—ears straining, hearts pounding—that no one is following up on the two strangers in the alley.
‘I think we’re good,’ Beau rasps, and she eases Jester back.
‘Um.’ Jester can’t quite look her friend in the eyes so she looks literally everywhere else—surprised when she sees what looks like blood smeared across her dress. ‘What—Beau, is this—are you?’
Beau bats her hand away, chucks a crooked grin up in the face of Jester’s concern. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she insists. ‘I just missed one, that’s all. Lucky shot.’
Jester recalls, then, a moment when they had been running from the tower. When the stone archers had first been shooting at them, and a volley had come perilously close to them. Jester could swear she had felt one as it nearly grazed against her—somewhere vital—but it must have been a trick of her imagination because nothing had happened.
‘Did you catch it?’ Jester asks.
Beau looks away. ‘I think we can make a break for it now, get back to the others.’
‘Did you catch one that was gonna hit me, and you got hit instead?’ She isn’t going to be put off. She takes Beau by the shoulders and, with surprising ease spins them so she’s the one pressed up against the brick work—either Beau is hurt worse than she looks, or she likes to be manhandled, and both options make Jester’s stomach swoop again. ‘Beau—‘
‘I made a split second decision, okay?’ Beau confesses, spitting out the words and not meeting her eyes. ‘I could see them coming and I knew you had already been hurt and I wasn’t going to let you get hit like that, I couldn’t carry you and run fast enough to get away, so yeah okay I caught the one that was gonna hit you. I couldn’t—I wasn’t gonna let you get hurt on my watch, okay?’ she ends on a stubborn, almost angry note. Chin jutting out. Cranky scowl daring Jester to disagree.
Jester’s heart slams against the cage of her ribs. ‘Okay,’ she whispers. She’s not sure what else to say. She definitely can’t put words to the dozen thoughts that had just occurred to her—chief among them Oh no, and Wait, do I like Beau? and She saved my life and Oh this isn’t cute at all it happens in a yucky dirty alleyway I am not telling my mama this version—and so instead Jester lifts her hands to Beau’s cheeks.
And panics.
‘My hero,’ she pretends to swoon, laughing a little, and Beau grins that sharp grin that sits so well on her face but holds only the barest scrape of humour in it. There are smiles Jester likes more and she makes a stern note to herself, and the Traveller if he is watching, to be sure to earn those better smiles. The goofy ones, the sweet ones, and—Jester realises as Beau pushes away from the wall and folds their hands together, moving to search left and right for any trace of the crownsguard remaining—those smiles that are saved just for her, just for Jester, that fill her with warmth. Small, tucked into the left corner of Beau’s lips. Scrunched up small, as though shoving it aside, embarrassed, like Jester might scrunch up a bad drawing.
They walk in silence back to the inn. and when Jester is done examining Beau’s gut shot, and stitching her up, she puts a hand on Beau’s shoulder while she is trapped on the bed recovering and presses a kiss to that corner of her mouth.
‘Thank you, Beau.’
The other girl stutters, stammers for a moment, cheeks filling with colour. And oh, she is not smooth or suave or charming. In fact, she is often none of those things. She has roughed herself up around the edges, cut away the pieces that had kept her smooth and delicate and easily handled. It isn’t at all what Jester had expected; after all, everyone knows that love is dark flowing hair and glinting rings on fingers and charm and eyes deep like the ocean that speak of desire and love—but maybe the hair can be brown and some of it can flow but some of it can be chopped away into a cool pattern, and maybe the fingers aren’t bejewelled because they are adorned with scars, because they give their rings away to friends and their jade bracelets to children, and maybe their eyes are a little more like the sky than the sea, but still look like desire, like love. Maybe.