Aliyah

“…And anyways, he just kept teaching me stuff,” Aliyah said.

A smudge of dizziness swirled around her head as the stream of memory trickled to a close. Her voice was getting hoarse now and the sun had risen fully into the sky, but Kionah was still looking at her with attentive interest.

“After I learned how to manage my condition, he kept showing me new things, like closing wounds. There were other tricks—rules, principles—that helped with the vasodilation stuff, and I got from his books. I asked him why, and he said, ‘I don’t know, it’s entertaining. Do you want to stop?’ and of course I wanted to know more. So here I am. That’s how it happened.”

It wasn’t exactly what had happened. She’d framed it a specific way, for Kionah. She’d left a few things out and she’d skimmed over the more traumatic parts. She’d made herself out to be less stupid and impulsive than she’d really been. But she’d told her the key things. It almost irked her, how much she’d revealed. Perhaps it was because she’d never had a chance to just sit down and tell anyone about the whole of it. Not anyone; not even Rana.

“I see,” Kionah said. She drew her knees to her chest against the morning chill. Her hair fluttered in loose strands as they touched the passing breeze; she looked almost forlorn in the pale light. In a poised sort of way though, Aliyah noted distantly. The complete opposite of how she probably looked and felt; empty and drained, a touch lightheaded.

“Hmm,” Kionah continued. “I knew Healership was coveted, but that’s impressive.”

“Uh, no,” Aliyah winced. “Not really. I did almost die. And afterwards, it was difficult. People talked. Thought I was untrustworthy, a thief, having some sort of…affair. A lowborn associating with a highborn doesn’t really go unnoticed.”

“No,” Kionah agreed. “And your friend, Rana? I assume you explained?”

“It took me a while,” she mumbled. “She already knew, sort of, but she was really worried—that I was being blackmailed, or trading in parts of my organs, or avoiding her on purpose. I told her, eventually. And she never, ever told anyone else.” Her eyes stung with unspilled tears. “She’s always been so good at keeping promises, saying the right things, stuff like that. She helped, so much. And I just—I still left, after all that. I gave her anti-haemolytic before I did, not that she knows. Zahir said she should be fine, but I—I’m a terrible friend.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Kionah looked at her intently, brow furrowed. “It sounds like you tried your best. I’m sure she will be alright.” She glanced away and picked at a splinter at the edge of the luggage chest’s lid. “I know I would not have been so generous in your place.”

“You remind me of her,” Aliyah blurted out, then cringed inwardly. Was she really that easy, she thought, or was this just her type: pretty girls showing her the slightest shred of sympathy? “Um. I meant, as in, you’re both good with court stuff. Smart. Smooth-talking. You know.”

“Really?” Kionah glanced back up and sighed. “Well, I’m flattered. But I think what you see is just…chameleon strategy, see? People like her tend to survive. I simply…emulate. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“I hope so,” Aliyah said. “I really hope so.” And then something broke inside of her, an invisible string pulled too tight. The waiting tears spilled out without her say-so. “Hellgods,” she hiccuped. “She could be dead and I wouldn’t even know. She could be dead. Right now. Zahir could be dead, too. Half of the fucking sewing circle—gone. I…sorry—I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me.”

She swiped at her face with her sleeve. It wasn’t just the sharp-toothed uncertainty of whether Rana had died, was it? It was the line of Magicians on the battlefield, and what they might do to Rana if she lived. It was wondering about those other innocent lowborns, if Nadim and Farzaneh and their charges ever did make it into the shelter of the Library.

Funny thing—it hadn’t sunk in then, not fully. Not when she’d had to crawl through the dark. Not while trudging for hours and hours through the caverns beneath the Killing Fields. Certainly not while she’d had an arrow through her stomach and a hissing faery at her back. But now that she was a city away—Glister was right there—now that Shadowsong really was out of reach, now that was the breaking point.

The burial ground of an unknowable Behemoth-creature seemed as good of a place to have a mental breakdown as any other.

“They could be dead,” she sniffed. “But I’m safe. Why?”

Kionah reached over and patted her lightly on the shoulder. “Easy now,” she said. “You don’t know if they’re dead. That’s the ah, worst possible scenario. Not the only one.”

“That’s the worst part—not knowing.” She gritted her teeth and scraped blunt nails down the reddening skin of her forearm, the sickening lines of the faery mark.

“Ah,” Kionah said. Then, in the indecisive, coaxing tone of someone talking to a small, injured animal, she said, “come on. Let’s walk, hey? Take your mind off things. We can walk slow and steady to Glister, and we can crash at a friend of mine’s tonight, get a real meal into you. I can take you to Luxon’s to get that mark looked at later.”

“Alright,” she said, because what else was there to say? Kionah hadn’t lived her whole life under the shadow of the castle. She had not lived the shame of a failed scion, had not lived the life of a sickly maidservant where the faintest glimmers of kindness shone brighter than sun over salt plain. How could she possibly understand?

Kionah stood up and stretched. She frowned at the luggage chest when it floated up sluggishly, gave it a little kick. It swayed and sank back down.

“Ah,” Kionah said. “Poor Alhena, how her enchantments did outlive her.” She opened the chest and pulled out two travel-packs, filled them swiftly and efficiently with bundled clothing, medicine kits, a knife, pouches of coin. “Let’s carry and go, shall we? Best get moving before the heat sets in. Glister summers can be a real bitch, let me tell you.”

Aliyah made a nondescript, agreeable noise. She shouldered her pack. They left the Behemoth’s skeleton to slumber on in it’s forever-sleep.

===

Glister City did not have a wall encircling its citizens. Instead, roads trickled past lone shacks and loose clusters of cottages before they delved into the thick of the stacks and spires which dominated the landscape.

Kionah paid a passing farmer a copper coin to let them hitch a ride on the back of his pumpkin cart. They hopped off at a large market corner and Aliyah’s head spun at the onslaught on her senses. Already, the square was filling up with people of all sorts: women with roses garlanding their shoulders, children in coats of sequins that jingled as they walked, a man holding the leash to a pair of iridescent lizard-creatures as long as she was tall—even a few faeries, out and about. Some faeries walked among the crowd, while others flew overhead. She marveled at how no one seem to pay them any mind.

Early-morning hawkers called out across the vast square. A busker plucked out a song from atop an upturned crate. From every direction came the clatter of footsteps, the wet sizzle of frying meat. The air was fragrant with spices, heavy and oily and sweet. Kionah grabbed her by the wrist and tugged her into the fray. The soft chill of the valley had dissipated entirely, leaving her smothered under the relentless morning sunshine. She staggered blindly through sweaty, noisy throngs of people buying and selling, hands exchanging coin and packets and bottles, trusting Kionah to lead the way. A whirl of shadows from something passing overhead—she craned her head back to see. A flock of witches dashed across the skies, all pointed hats and silk ribbons fluttering from the ends of their broomsticks.

They ducked into a dank alleyway, wallpapered with faded notices. She tried to catch her breath without choking on the stench of rotting fruit.

“Way’s clearer through here,” Kionah said, letting go of her arm. “We’ll loop around the main street to a station. Shuttlebus is fastest.”

Kionah led her through a maze of alleyways, through passageways where the sky was blocked out by washing strung overhead. Glister felt so tall; in Shadowsong, only the castle loomed above the rest. But in Glister, every structure seemed to claw at the sky, fighting to tower over the rest. Aliyah had spotted the great spires in the distance, but navigating the spaces between so many buildings was something else entirely. People flitted through these alleys too; men carrying packs and parcels, women with watchful eyes perched on doorsteps, girls with knives at their waists. Kionah’s stride was confident, loose and easy. Aliyah stuck close to her side, even so.

A grubby-looking child careened headfirst into them, yelping as he bumped up against Kionah’s side.

“Sorry miss,” he yelped, taking a scrambling step backwards. He face was smudged with soot and some sort of sticky candy detritus.

Kionah came to a stop. Her hand shot out and latched around his wrist.

“Give it back,” she said with a voice like ice.

“Eh? ‘Scuse me, miss,” he stammered. “Could you please let me go? I didn’t mean to knock into you. Honest!”

Kionah’s expression twisted into a scowl. “Release my belt pouch, little varmint,” she said. There was a growl at the edge of her voice that Aliyah hadn’t heard before. “Else I’ll black your eye out and send you to the cleavers, y’hear?”

“Oh, crabs!” The boy fished Kionah’s pouch from his pockets and waved it into her face. “Here, here! Take it! You looked like moneybags marks, I swear!”

She took her pouch back, hefted it in her hand, and released him. “Get going,” she said, clicking her tongue in disgust.

“Was that…?” Aliyah asked as they watched the kid scamper off into some other alley. “The pickpocketing, is it common around here?”

“Mm, depends,” Kionah said. “I suppose we do make a pair of fine marks. Travel-tired and weighed down with packs and all. They look out for that. Keep your valuables close by. We’ll be heading through a bit of market soon and the little cutters do love crowds.”

“Okay.”

All she had were her nausea-keys and coin pouch. They were in her pockets, and those were securely buttoned. She untucked her shirt and let the low hem cover the openings anyhow, just to be sure. What kind of city was this, where children scampered around like crooks?

Kionah led her through more alleyways, past trash cans piled high with food-wrappings and the occasional dead rat, through corridors so narrow they had to slip off their packs to edge through sideways. They emerged in a market square through a gap between two storefronts; Kionah grabbed her by the arm before she was swept away by the sheer tide of citygoers.

Shimmering banners and colourful bunting fluttered overhead, and shopkeeper’s cries warred for her attention. Here was a lady selling fried bready-looking things, and over there was a witch hawking magnificent plumed hats. The air smelled of caramelised syrup at one spot, then of spiced meats at another. Her mouth watered; days of swallowing down mouthfuls of vegetable-broth potion had done something to the part of her brain that craved real food: sugar and fat and salt. A handsome street performer had set up on a corner, juggling several melon-sized gemstones—or at least, coloured glass cut to look like gemstones. All around her, people chattered and called, some in off-continent languages, some in the trade-language, others with hissing, clicking sounds that formed an odd sort of resonant song. When she searched for the sources of that melodious language, she realised that it emerged from the throats of faeries.

She didn’t know how Kionah did it, slipping through the crowds pressed shoulder-to-shoulder without so much as a glance towards the glittering marvels on show. Twice, Kionah turned her head to glare at a scrappy child walking a little too close. The pickpockets scowled and backed away as soon as they were seen, but Aliyah hadn’t even spotted them until Kionah had moved.

Kionah pulled her onto a low platform, just as busy as the encircling market. At the far end—what looked to be the boarding side—huge pylons stood under a haze of protective enchantment. Chariot-like compartments, large enough to fit a dozen people in each—shuttlebuses, Kionah had called them—hung from cables as thick as her wrist. The cables sloped down into a huge hole cut out of the earth; half-light glimmered from it’s depths. People jostled for space at the waiting benches; Kionah steered her over to an empty corner seat half-blocked off by a rusting ticket machine.

“Sit,” she said, pointing.

Aliyah shimmied past the gap and perched on the edge of the seat, knees angled so as to not hit the side of the machine.

“Rest up for a minute while I unforget how to use these darned things,” Kionah said as she handed her a pastry out of nowhere. “Eat. You look like you’re gonna pass out.”

She took the pastry without thinking, didn’t realise anything strange about it until she’d swallowed the first mouthful.

“Wait. Where did you get this?”

Kionah turned around to punch at the keys of the clanking ticket machine.

“Just took it,” she said as she slotted coins into the collection device. The machine whirred and spat out two squares of shimmering green paper.

“What? You mean you didn’t pay?” Aliyah asked without thinking. Wait—but of course she hadn’t paid; they hadn’t stopped once on their way here.

Kionah paused, her fine features contorting rapidly through a series of expressions—confused, to thoughtful, to alarmed—before it smoothed back into it’s usual detached, almost inscrutable state.

“Ah,” she said. “Don’t let it weigh on your conscience. The vendors in market squares inflate their prices to the stars. But if you don’t want it, I’ll eat it.”

She blinked, tried to recall if she’d seen Kionah swiping it on the way here. She couldn’t, but then again, she’d been busy gaping at processions of lordlings and acrobats and on the lookout for child-pickpockets. Her stomach rumbled; she sighed and bit into the pastry again. It was soft and flaky, flavoured with cream and cinnamon, a dessert that she wouldn’t really be able to afford back in Shadowsong. Was it just her, or did Kionah’s expression seem approving?

Kionah handed her one of the green squares of paper.

“We’re taking the Falsewater line,” she said. “When you get in there will be a automaton of sorts inside, sitting by the door. Usually, they are fashioned after a creature with sharp teeth. You’ll have to put this into it’s mouth.”

She gulped down the last of the purloined pastry. “Into it’s…mouth? But— the automaton will have…sharp teeth, you said? Does— does it have a functioning jaw?”

“Certainly. It cuts down on forgeries.” Kionah sounded amused.

A series of scenarios flashed through her mind, most of them consisting of blood pooling on the floor and screaming fare-dodgers being dragged off the shuttle while the other passengers watched on in horror.

“You’re joking. Right?”

“Well, maybe a little. It wouldn’t actually bite your hand off. But it would leave a mark. Most people think they’re quite cute, actually.”

She stared at the ticket in her hand—a genuine ticket, that she’d seen Kionah buy from the machine, so there was nothing to worry about, really—and closed her fingers around it. “Right.”

“This way,” Kionah said with a quirk of her lip.

Aliyah slung her pack back over her shoulder and followed her across the platform, over to where a fresh set of shuttlebuses were easing into their docking stations. They lined up to the one with ‘Falsewater’, stenciled on it’s side in flaking blue paint. The door dinged as it slid open.

Kionah stepped on first, nodding to the white-bearded driver before turning to the ticket-automaton. Aliyah watched it from over her shoulder; it was a blunt-nosed, silver-scaled thing, twined around the nearest stanchion. It had chips of yellowed glass for eyes and a worn spot on it’s chin from years of hands brushing the surface to a smooth sheen. Its jaw ticked slowly open, gear by gear, and she saw that there were indeed teeth in it’s mouth—slightly blunted at the tips, but teeth nonetheless. Kionah put her ticket inside. A moment after she withdrew her hand, the snake-like automaton swallowed it down. The metallic, muscled coils of it’s body flexed as it did, unnervingly life-like. The bar raised to let Kionah through. She walked up the aisle, heading for a seat by an open window.

Aliyah fed her ticket to the automaton and hurried past seats upholstered in hideously clashing colours to where Kionah sat.

“You made that sound a lot more frightening than it was,” she muttered.

Kionah arched one perfectly tapered eyebrow. “Did I? I thought I said it was cute. Perhaps you filled in the fears for yourself.”

She bit her tongue and slid her pack off to place at her feet. Perhaps so, but could Kionah really blame her for that? She didn’t know Glister like Kionah did. Everything had the potential to be terrifying under the rule of this cobbled domain, it’s bone-coloured spires blocking out the sun—not to mention strange children brazenly lifting coins from your person and colourful crowds boiling over with lights and noise. She’d spent most of her time in the castle, after all—sometimes the halls were flush with maids, and sometimes the dining hall was a jumble at breakfast time, but the busiest hours that she’d witnessed in Shadowsong hardly held a candle to this.

The shuttlebus juddered off, light runes flaring to life throughout its interior as it slid into the dark. The gently-sloping tunnel was nothing but stone and shadow. She turned her gaze to the other passengers: a trio of girls dressed in the same mud-brown uniform, women carrying baskets of groceries, two people having an intense conversation about the price of silk these days. But then Kionah nudged her with her elbow and said, “Look!”

Out past the window, lights glimmered below. Very, very far below. She gripped the edge of her seat, hard enough that her knuckles paled. The shuttlebus was completely safe, right? The other passengers—locals, she was fairly sure—didn’t seem concerned. She leaned in to peer past Kionah. They’d descended into an enormous cavern, with walls that shimmered with faint whispers of runelight; vast pillars of rock stood here and there, but the far wall, the opposite boundary of this inhumanly large cavern, was disturbingly far away. Kionah had mentioned this in one of their conversations trekking through the tunnels under the Killing Fields, but she hadn’t really considered the implications of underground apartment towers—until now.

As the shuttlebus rumbled past one of the pillars which cemented the floor and ceiling together, she realised there were homes carved out of them, nooks and crannies with steps and doorways, little circles of yellow light where windows had been hewn out of the stone. If each of those lights down below was a house, and if every single one of the pillars was like this, then that must mean—

“No way,” she muttered. “You could fit all of Shadowsong in here.”

“Probably,” Kionah said, “though I don’t think they’d be very happy about it. Pretty cool, don’t you think? This is the biggest pocket, but there are a few more around.”

“What? You’re saying most of the city lives under here?”

“I don’t know about most, but certainly, very many.”

“Don’t you have to go up and down all the time?”

“For me? I did when I lived here,” Kionah said, raising a hand to prop her chin upon. “Not sure about anyone else. But it’s not so difficult; there are more shuttle buses, plenty of stations—or just stairs and ladders, if one has the time and masochism for it.”

“But how—how do you even know where to go? I’d get lost all the time…this is…it’s…”

It was disgustingly vast, she wanted to say. Not like the Higher Library had been vast. The Library was her only real frame of reference for anything so labyrinthine. Yet it had made sense, that a dimensional horror would have twists and turns enough to hold millions of books, not to mention what Jackal had told her about hills of knives and seas of red grasses. But this place, a real city of brick and mortar, it didn’t seem natural.

Back in Shadowsong, she’d always kept to the familiar halls of the kingdom castle—maybe take one well-worn path out to market now and again. But this cavern, this city—it was one big stew of everything, easy to fall in and get lost and to never find your way out again. There were no safe landmarks. If Kionah left her here, she felt as if she would be crushed by the horde.

The shuttlebus shivered its way downwards, heading for a blank white platform tucked into an alcove formed by a stack of dull, jagged boulders.

“It’s home,” Kionah said with a loose shrug. “Not a great one, but I’ve known it all my life. Haven’t been gone that long, and it’s better than Shadowsong in some respects; they don’t behead anyone here, for one.”

“Then why would you leave?” What was the point of risking anything with Alhena if she’d had a good life back here? Aliyah didn’t realise she’d murmured that last part aloud until she caught the look on Kionah’s face.

It struck her then that she knew next to nothing about Kionah’s past, about her reasons for allying with Alhena, how she’d even won herself the dubious title of a princess’s spymaster in the first place.

“I didn’t,” Kionah said.

The shuttlebus creaked to a slow stop and a bell dinged. “Crow’s Ear Station,” the driver called.

“Ah, and that’s our stop,” Kionah said in the tone of someone firmly finished with a conversation. “Out we go.”

Aliyah reached for her pack and stumbled into the aisle of people filing out, Kionah at her back. They stepped onto the station platform and she was hit with the stench of sharp smoke and damp stone.

“This way,” Kionah said with a jerk of her head. “Shouldn’t be far now.”

Aliyah followed her, almost tripping on rough cobblestones, down quiet streets lit with paper lanterns and bioluminescent blue moss growing in glass jars.

“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked.

The streets looked as if they were caught in the eerie minutes between the dying blue of twilight and full dark. No colourful pop-up market stations to hawk their wares here—every now and again, menacing people skulked by: women wrapped in shawls of warding runesign, flint-faced boys perched on windowsills, groups of men with knives and corded muscle bulging from every limb. Kionah paid them no mind, but that didn’t ease the slowly tightening knot in Aliyah’s chest. A fleeting thought occurred to her: there was no guarantee that Kionah would keep her safe.

“Friend of mine’s,” Kionah replied. “A courier. We both need a meal and a hot shower at the very least, and he owes me a favour.”

“Right, right. Um. Is it…you know, safe? Down here?”

Kionah gave her a side-eyed once-over. “Sure. I know where I’m going. I don’t fuck with shortcuts. If it’s the foray-men having you looking so nervy, cheer up. They won’t pay the likes of us no mind.”

Aliyah snuck a glance at the clusters of rough-looking men, chatting quietly among themselves in the shadows of alehouses. “Foray-men?”

“Mercenaries. Of a sort. Good at putting holes in heads. Some of them are decent folk, if they’re not after you.”

“Ah…are you sure that we should be going this way?”

“Relax,” Kionah said. “The people here, they’re here for a hot meal, a cheap bite, kill time and play dice before the next job—that sort of thing. If you can see them head-on, they’re usually not interested in hurting you. This way, now.”

They turned a corner, and another, cutting through crooked side-streets with words and pictures painted into the surrounding walls, most of which were vulgar in nature. Aliyah tried to avoid looking up; the rock ceiling of the cavern lay what seemed like leagues above, reminding her with dizzying clarity that she was stuck in a hollow bowl scooped out from solid stone—or at least, she hoped it was all solid stone. The idea of it coming crashing down was far worse than the minor vertigo.

She wondered faintly why she was getting anxious about it now—she’d already crawled through a tunnel barely wide enough to move in, she’d fought rogue faeries in a forested cavern a little like this, though much, much smaller. Perhaps it was because this hollow was so large—the dream of drunken architect—and therefore looked prone to collapsing under the weight of the city above. Or perhaps it was because she wasn’t fighting for life and limb at the moment, that her mind latched onto the stupidest things.

Kionah led the way through a busier segment of street; still roughly cobbled, but wider, with just enough room for two mage-chariots to pass each other by—not that there were any, at the moment. Instead, people walked or pushed carts piled high with scrap: dented pans and emptied glass bottles. There were shopfronts here, open shutters on the first floor of tall and narrow buildings with what were probably living quarters stacked on top of them. She saw a butcher’s with a short line of people waiting in front of it, a dusty shoemaker’s with the shutters down.

Kionah made a beeline for one of the larger shopfronts. The sign overhead looked half-rusted and half-scorched. Aliyah had to squint at it for several moments before she could read it: Whistle House, it was called. A man stood to one side of sage-green double doors carved out in wood and glittering with warding sigils. The back of her neck prickled as she looked him over: muscled arms, dagger at the hip, leaning his back against the wall as he surveyed the people passing along the street. It was the leisurely pose of a man secure in the knowledge that he was able to inflict violence as necessary.

The man roused as they approached, kicking off the wall and uncrossing his arms. Aliyah tensed as they began to approach striking distance, weary thoughts scrambling for vasodilation even as she wondered if her stash of borrowed magic could take it. But the man simply raised a hand in a lazy wave and grinned at them through a mouthful of crooked teeth.

“Hey,” he said, “Look who’s come crawling back! Old Sadrava’s girl, and with a friend too? They said you pissed off to the other side of the continent.”

“I only wish I went that far,” Kionah growled. “Is Shasta in?”

The man shrugged and scratched at his ear; the cartilage was lumpy and deformed there. Aliyah had seen the same type of injury before, usually on older guardsmen. “Think so. But it’s a talking morning; pay up, if you want in. Them’s the rules.”

“Oh, come on. Shasta knows me. I’m visiting, not buying or selling. You know that.”

The man sniffed. “How should I know what you’re planning now, after you ran off to who-knows-where? Sabine said City Watch got you, but most of us know better than to trust a word out of that girl’s mouth. Me, I figure that you’ve got some new loot in those bags of yours and it’s a shame you don’t want to share.”

“Loot? You’re dreaming. The only loot I got was some warden’s shitty shortsword, and he had to be half-dead for me to take it.”

“Well slit my throat and throw me in the river,” he whistled.

“Oh, I will,” Kionah said without missing a beat. “With the very same sword, if you like. A spare change of clothes and enough bloody bottles of water to break my back, is all else I have.”

“You want me to believe that you’ve run all that way and back with naught but a silver ingot to your name? Go on, what’s in the bags?”

“Let us through, Ianis, or my friend here’ll have you shitting through the teeth.”

Aliyah cringed inwardly as a spike of alarm flashed through the pit of her stomach; Kionah was bluffing, surely. She’d given her the transfusion of magic not three hours ago; surely she knew it wouldn’t be enough for an actual fight? Her thoughts flitted to the nausea-keys in her pocket. Shitting through the teeth indeed; that was a possible strategy, if it came down to it. She really did hope that Kionah was putting up a front.

“Silly little waif like her? Not unless she’s a better mage than you, she’s not,” the man—Ianis—said.

“Let us through and take it up with Shasta later,” Kionah huffed. “Or call him down now. Or don’t, and take your chances with my friend.”

Aliyah hoped, fervently, that he would not take the third option.

“It’s a hard life, being a doorkeeper,” he complained. “Wrangling idiots around all day, people screaming and punching you and threatening to cut your balls off. Meanwhile, you get to go skipping off to some foreign country, probably drinking your weight in fruit-liquor, getting a nice tan and a packful of loot—and you won’t even share it with an honest man.”

“Ianis…” she said, as if she had heard this sort of thing countless times before.

“Fine, fine,” he huffed. “But Shasta’d better give me a look if you end up having dragon parts in there.” He pulled the door open and made mock-bow, complete with a flourishing gesture from his free arm.

Kionah huffed and rolled her eyes as she swept past.

“Th-thanks,” Aliyah said to the doorkeeper, and followed.