Dangerous Offspring by Steph Swainston Page B

What else could he do to show his anger or make his presence felt? He sat cross-legged on the coach roof, reached a hand down through the torn window and brought out an apple. He began to examine it with the delicacy of mime.
    ‘They don’t belong to you, Dara.’
    ‘I’m a Shira. That could be the reason why I am finding it so entertaining to break them.’
    ‘You’re quick,’ said the old man, smiling.
    ‘I’m the quickest,’ said the boy.
    The man took a tight grip on his cane and tapped the cobbles for a while in thought. The boy, seeing this, threw down his apple which rolled under the folds of the man’s long coat. Enthralled, the boy watched it, head on one side. His instincts were to bolt, but this man was the first person he had spoken to in a year. Indecision rooted him to the spot. He swore in Scree, but all those insults about goats didn’t seem too relevant in Hacilith.
    The man gave a rustle of coughing laughter. ‘Well, I need an assistant, but I never thought I would have to tame one…I will turn now and walk away,’ he continued slowly. ‘You can follow me if you want. No one will hurt you. No one will force you, but it will be best for you if you come.’
    The man walked on and did not look back, and gradually disappeared into the smog. He did not seem to be a threat; indeed, he could be a saviour. The boy watched from his precarious perch, then fluttered down and sauntered after him, still prepared to run.
     

    Dotterel and the boy walked through the wall of the bar and disappeared. I sighed. Any Rhydanne would have been naïve in the city, but I had been naïve even by Rhydanne standards. I was quite the little foreigner; it’s a wonder I survived at all.
     

    I need a drink after seeing that, and besides, the rain was running down my neck. I investigated the bar, plated with brushed and burnished bronze along its whole front. Smooth almost featureless metal statues with folded arms and stylised wings like blades stood with heavy elegance on either side of its doorway. It was done up to look like Aver-Falconet’s square palace, in the new Decorative Art. Its sign said: The Jacamar Club. An Awian pub, then, the sort popular with the few tourists who came out this way from Fiennafor. As if to prove my thought, some frightful shrieking laughter resounded from inside. I have never understood why travellers and expats feel the need to go to a pub mocked up with all the features of a bar of their homeland to drink wine at ten times the price. There were any number of Morenzian inns nearby where they could drink beer, eat boar pie and hear the citizens speaking their own language.
    I went inside, flapping my half-closed wings to dry them and flicking drops everywhere. A couple of students at a nearby table yelled, but when they looked up and saw me, they shut up abruptly.
    The pub’s fittings were the most up-to-date design but the floor was sticky with spilt drinks. Square columns were bolted to the walls, all painted black but with gold lightning flashes and pointed feathers on the tops. A strikingly graceful fresco of a deer chased by hundreds of hounds fled along the walls. All the way to the rear wall the hind ran with the hounds ever at her throat and, below her outstretched legs, on a leather sofa stained with nicotine, sat Cyan.

CHAPTER 6
    Oh, no. I could hear Cyan’s voice from the doorway. She was too conspicuous, blissfully unaware she could be attracting every thief and rapist in Galt. She was recounting an anecdote at the top of her voice to a group of students and she hadn’t noticed me, so I approached slowly, watching.
    Cyan was no longer a child. Her blonde hair hung perfectly straight to the level of her bodice top. Its straps and laces showed and so did her armpit hair. Her short skirt kept riding up and she kept pulling it down. Her stockings plunged into huge black boots. She didn’t have wings, she took after her mother, and she was willowy; slighter and more