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Pix’s hair sticks to the exposed flesh of his neck despite his best efforts at drying it. The swamp presses heat into every breath and demands a certain languidness; Pix bows to it tonight, letting the cooling air soften his demeanor as he pulls a qabā over his sárapis — for all the kindness Jimmy has shown him, for all the mercy, they are still rulers and this is still in its own way a formal dinner.
Jimmy’s house is low-ceilinged and only a few rooms; were it on the outskirts of Pix’s home, it would go unquestioned as a merchant or weaver’s home. Here, it goes unquestioned altogether, stilt-raised and wooden with doors to both land and water.
Jimmy’s mask is painted brightly, greens and yellows shaping the contours of a stylized face. It lacks the aged dullness of the first; in this iteration, its wood is the marbled red of native tupelo and provides Jimmy a more lively appearance, particularly with her wild-braided hair.
“Pix!” Jimmy stands abruptly, all unfolding limbs and boundless energy. “I was getting worried; you swallowed a lot of water, or at least coughed a bunch up.”
“Not all of us can breathe the stuff.” Pix steps onto the wooden dais with a small duck of his head. “You’ve been well, then?”
“Yeah! Or — well enough, I mean, considering everything. I don’t know if anyone’s doing well right now.”
Pix laughs, soft and rumbling, and something about Jimmy seems to shine. “I suppose not. Still — it’s good to see you happy.”
“It’s good to see you back. I thought — disappearing like that, I thought you’d been knocked out of the sky or something! Nobody could tell me where you’d gone, only that they’d just about gotten a look at you before sunrise.” His hands are in hers — warm on cool, personal enough it would draw looks from the clerks were they here to see it. They are alone — alone save the mask, and alone save the patterns woven into Pix’s qabā. Were it another day — were this not the first time they had seen each other since fate changed, were Pix not still wearing the rivulets of a renewed alliance, were Jimmy’s hands not gripping at his wrists, perhaps he would have pulled away. They are kings, and they have responsibilities; but so too are they human.
Pix presses his forehead to Jimmy’s; warm on cool. When they separate, it is total, even if Jimmy’s fingers linger at Pix’s pulse a moment too long. It is not a kiss; were it, then it could be political. Were it witnessed, it could be political — a woman such as Jimmy is, to what the Coddish people would call a man; Pix, taking a woman as a man would when he is not.
Pix disengages, settling on the dais floor with his legs tucked neatly beneath him. Jimmy clears her throat; takes a step toward the low table, then away from it again. “We could eat.”
“You cook?”
“I–!” Her shoulders are raised, voice loud. Pix smiles and her hackles lower. “A little? I’m learning — it’s not easy, it’s — all the pieces, having to get the order right, it’s—”
“My mother would chase me from the…” He pauses; a bread oven is no kitchen, placed in the yard as it is, but neither is it the smoking fires of a Coddish hunter’s camp. “She would chase me away so the bread could rise. Searing meat, I could handle, but I’m so bad with the bread she thought it better I be nowhere near.” It is as true as every story — it is as much of a lie as every truth. In it: your cooking does not make you.
Jimmy’s laughter isn’t subtle. Pix smiles at that, too — at the unbalanced jubilance, at the suddenness, at the very fact it worked. “Did she really?”
“As the wind blows.” In common parlance: yes, in some place and time, but perhaps not here, and perhaps not the way I have said.
“Well, I — it’s not going to be any good, but I have some stew. It’s got — uh, can you eat crab? Shrimp?”
“I can.”
“Great. Great, yeah, okay…” She returns from her stove carrying a stone tureen decorated with paintings of small fish. Pix smiles — it looks rough, likely made by a local family. Even covered, it smells of the ocean — fish, shrimp, seaweed. Jimmy settles as she places it only to jump up again. “Oh, you need — a bowl, don’t you? You can’t — I mean, it would be — you’re not meant to drink from the same thing I do, right?”
No, but: “I doubt the bowl would tell.”
“You’re — are you sure, Pix? I have bowls — at least, I think I have bowls. I should have bowls somewhere.”
Pix rises once more and takes Jimmy’s hands again, fingers intertwined. Quietly: “Have I not seen your face, Codfather?”
“Well — I mean —”
“And have you not twice had me in nothing more than a sárapis and shalvar, both stuck to my skin with water?”
“Okay, okay! I get it, this is kind of… different?”
“If the stars shine sour upon us, then so too the roots should have held me fast when I came.”
“And they didn’t.”
“And they didn’t.” Only now does Pix release Jimmy. She reaches out, brushes a hand to his wrist. Pix, softly: “The stew.”
A kiss would be political, even here, but if they are witnessed sharing a drinking vessel, Pix can call it local tradition. If they are witnessed, Jimmy can claim ignorance. If they are witnessed, there is nothing in the stars or the willow-tree to call them lovers, and so lovers they shall not be.