Serese took a brown roll-up from her pocket and struck a match to light its tip. The smell of hazii weed filled Nico's nostrils as she inhaled life into the stick and exhaled.
'Smoke?' she ventured, passing it over to him.
His mother had claimed hazii was bad for the lungs, worse even than tarweed. True enough, she herself often coughed fit for dying after a heavy night of smoking it. Nico almost waved her offer away, but then he thought, why not, and took it warily. He drew a trickle of smoke into his lungs. With a cough he passed it back to her.
'Am I interrupting something?' Serese asked at his silence, for Nico was still partly back in the hills of Khos.
'No. Only a few memories.'
'Well, in that case I'll leave you to them.' She stood up in one single graceful movement, like a big cat.
'Don't go on my account,' said Nico quickly.
She held out a hand. 'I'm only playing with you. If we're going to spend the afternoon together, I'd rather it wasn't here.'
Nico couldn't help but agree, so took her hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. 'Where do you suggest, then?' he asked, their hands still clasped.
She shrugged. 'Let's walk a while.'
She released his hand, and instead slid an arm through the crook of his own. The air was growing cooler as the sun dipped behind the surrounding buildings. On all sides, pedestrians hurried to and fro; and iron-collared slaves carrying heavy burdens balanced on their heads. They passed several restaurants with the scents of cooking wafting from their open doorways.
'Are you hungry?' asked Nico, though he himself did not feel any need to eat.
Serese shook her head, her dark hair rippling around her shoulders. 'I need some fresh air. Don't you like to just walk sometimes?'
'Of course,' he replied quickly.
She passed him the hazii stick again, and he took a deeper pull this time.
'You and Aleas,' she said, 'you seem to have become friends after all.'
'I suppose so. Not that Baracha… I mean, not that your father approves very much.'
'No, he wouldn't. You are Ash's apprentice.'
Nico looked at her with questions in his eyes.
She shrugged. 'Master Ash is the best the order has, and all know it. That is something that displeases my father, for he has always had a consuming desire to be only the best. He can't stand it when he's not. But you mustn't hold it against him. My mother told me of his childhood, about his father, who was fierce and overbearing, but also small, in his own mind. He put down his son at every chance he could, and showed him nothing but contempt, till the day that he died. It has shaped my father's spirit in some way, and he can do nothing to change it.'
Nico considered this, and tried to match it with the overbearing Alhazii that he had come to know.
They strolled past side-street cafes, the chatter of the patrons becoming loud and raucous. The shadows began to stretch further.
'My mother is like that, too, in a way,' he said after a time. 'Something in her past still shapes her now.'
'Her parents?'
'No. My father.'
Serese said something in return, but he didn't hear it. His steps faltering, he came to a stop.
Straight ahead of them something was spinning quickly to the ground. As it landed, he squinted down at it.
A cicado seed, its fresh greenness contrasting with the dull greyness of the cobbles. Around it, all across the street, fallen leaves lay trodden and torn, and amongst them were similar winged seeds, though smaller than he was used to, not as large as they should be. Nico looked up, his eye travelling past floor after floor of the building they were walking alongside. Over the edge of its lofty roof hung the branches of a tree.
Serese followed his gaze. 'A roof garden,' she explained. 'The wealthy like to keep them.' Her lips pursed briefly. 'Come on,' she said as she ducked into an alley running to one side of the same building.
With Nico following her, Serese stopped beneath a ladder fixed to the brickwork over their heads: a fire escape running beside a window on each floor all the way to the top. He realized what she was thinking.
He felt distinctly light-headed as he gave her a boost up on to his shoulders; himself grinning, wobbling under her weight, as she flexed her knees and made a leap and a grab for the lowest rung of the wooden ladder. She hauled herself suddenly upwards, and Nico admired her lithe figure as she tugged on the latch securing it.
The sliding ladder clattered down, with her aboard, and came to a stop right beside him.
'What are you gaping at?' she breathed.
*
It was a small roof garden, though beautifully arranged. A careful hand had allowed it to grow naturally, without appearing overly wild. Around its edges stood undersized trees in clay pots, and bushy shrubs in troughs of soil covered in wood chippings; wild grass grew over most of the space between, dotted with blue and yellow flowers. At the very centre were a small fountain and water course constructed from smooth but irregular stones to give the appearance of a miniature mountain stream.
The artful combinations of growth screened off the surrounding buildings, giving Nico and Serese the impression of standing anywhere but in the midst of the largest city in the world. A shack with a doorway stood at the rear of the flat roof, obviously leading to some internal stairs. It was locked, when Serese tried it, which was only to her satisfaction. Together they sat on a bench beside the flowing water, both appreciating the secret garden in silence. From here the constant buzz of the city could only dimly be heard.
Serese lit another hazii stick, blew smoke into the fading light.
'You did well,' she said 'Last night, I mean.'
It was the one subject neither had yet mentioned.
'You think so? I was so gripped by fear I was numb with it.'
'So? You were hardly the only one. But you did what you had to do. You showed courage.'
Nico looked long and hard at the girl by his side eyeing her properly, without shyness or agenda. At once he noticed something else behind the mask of spark and beauty. Serese was on edge, and badly in need of company.
She took another deep puff of the stick, then passed it to him.
'Courage?' Nico repeated, as though trying out the word for the first time. For an instant the face of the one he had slain rose before him; the man's determined glare even as Nico stabbed him, changing first to wonder and then, by degrees, to a terrible awareness of everything lost to him. 'No, it wasn't courage that prompted me to stick my blade into that man's belly last night. It was fear. I didn't want to die there. I didn't want him to kill me. So I killed him first.'
He felt surprised at how he could speak so plainly about his deepest feelings. He wondered if something had changed in him, if he had grown a little older since last night. Perhaps it was simply the liberating effects of the hazii smoke.
'It's funny,' he said, still thinking out aloud. 'Since leaving Khos, I've come to realize a few things. My father for instance. He was the bravest man that I knew, though at the time I hardly understood it. I think, deep down, I always feared that he was a coward after all – for running away from everything like he did. I had such notions, when I was younger, of bravery, courage under fire and all that. The stuff of stories, of course. But now I've caught a glimpse of what my father must have gone through every day there under the walls. I wonder now how he was able to live that way for so long, to rise each morning knowing what faced him. I can see now why he chose a different life, away from it all, wherever that may be. I only wish I possessed half his strength.'
Nico looked again at the hazii stick in his hand: all but forgotten, it had gone out. He passed it back to her, his head swimming. 'Courage isn't something I know much about, Serese – not when it comes down to it. Whenever there's trouble, mostly all I feel is frightened.'