Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Fence who really loves it when it's shiny, please bring us a shiny again
"Hedda!" her cousin bellows from downstairs, and Hedda curses, yanks her comb through her recalcitrant hair a few more times, and carefully navigates the staircase.
The flash-grown elven New Towns might go from acorn to picturesque winding dells of naturally hollow trees, large enough to build entire dwellings inside, in a decade; and they might be prettier than any equivalent that humans would have put up; but the architecture simply can't compare to an old-growth alfton. The grown-in steps are over-steep, and the risers are over-tall and crooked, each tilted a different way.
I'm up," she says crossly, entering the kitchen, having managed not to fall down the stairs this morning.
"Your crowgirl's on the lawn," Thea says through a mouthful of porridge, leafing through letters from back home.
"A crowgirl. The neighbourhood crowgirl," Hedda says defensively, picking a handful of dried fruit out of their jar. The neighbourhood oh-an-adventurer-found-it merchant, who finds ways to connect the goods, services, and money of local commerce with those of roving menaces. A fixer or a fence, to the less polite.
"Sure-sure," Thea says dismissively. "She's on the lawn."
Hedda shuts the kitchen door behind her a little more sharply than she needs to, and slinks up the couple of root-pillowed footholds out of the trunk-base hollow sheltering the doorway.
"Hello," she says awkwardly, smoothing her dress.
Kark is, indeed, standing on the lawn. She cocks her head when Hedda speaks, to fix her with one bright black eye, then hops sideways several steps to bring herself to Hedda's side, and rubs the crown of her feathered head against Hedda's shoulder, clacking her beak.
She's wearing her favourite and only coat, an inexplicable memento of some human sailor's time at sea, long and stoutly woollen and a faded dark blue.
When they'd first arrived here, things had been fairly desperate; terms with the family so bad that they'd fled with little more than the clothes on their backs. Thea took occasional trips as daily-rate muscle for adventurers heading west into the deepwood; Hedda did whatever odd jobs washed up around town, cleaning and mending. And, desperate to make a good impression on whoever she could, for the chance of further work when they had it, she put as much effort as she could into whatever she did.
She'd polished the brass buttons on the old coat from dullness to a warm gold gleam they probably hadn't held in years.
It was only rather too late that she wondered if perhaps she'd accidentally done something which, in crowgirl terms, meant she'd acquired a girlfriend. And not knowing, and still not being at all fluent in crow-calls, it's terribly awkward to ask questions about.
"Do you want some breakfast," she says, holding out a cupped palm of dried fruit, and Kark delicately picks through it with the very tip of her beak, managing not to so much as nip Hedda while eating all her favourite bits first, and Hedda tells her about the week she's had, and digs in her apron pocket to hand over treasure: five smooth, round glass marbles, filled with bright metal-foil flecks.
Kark makes a throaty noise that Hedda thinks of as meaning Shiny! and fluffs her feathers and rests her head on Hedda's shoulder, and Hedda, just for a little while, lets herself rest her head on Kark's.
The crowgirl, she thinks wistfully, is far from the worst girlfriend she's had.