Verity nodded. “I drink.” She watched as Mizuki filled up a glass. “You’re being very hospitable to someone you’ve only just met.”
“We’re party members,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “It’s been two years since I’ve been in a party with someone, and I think being in a new one is cause for celebration.” She realized this wasn’t quite what she’d said before. She hadn’t mentioned a brief party she’d done with the Pedder boys, before that whole thing had ended in disaster. Perhaps she should have, but it was the kind of thing that seemed like it would break the flow of conversation.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Verity after she’d taken a sip. “I’m being a terrible conversationalist. I completely dropped the thread from earlier. You were explaining about the house and your grandfather. How’d you end up… alone?” She hesitated on the word, like she was trying to think of some better way to say it.
“My mother was born here, fully Kiromon, but not actually a part of Kiromo, if that makes sense,” said Mizuki. “My father was actually a quarter Kiromon himself, though the other way around, someone from the area who visited Kiromo and brought back a baby and a wife, that baby being my other grandfather. There are a fair number of them—us—in the area. Anyway, my Kiromon grandfather eventually moved back to Kiromo and encouraged my mom and dad to do the same, because the situation there had changed, and Pucklechurch was a small town in more or less the middle of nowhere. I was seventeen when they were making plans to move, and… we couldn’t take the house with us, obviously, and most of the stuff was going to be sold off, because there are limits to what you can fit on a leycraft, and I barely spoke Kiro, and had a lot of friends.” She shrugged. “I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I had gone with them.”
“So you own this whole house?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.
“No, it’s still my grandfather’s, but I’m free to stay in it as long as I like,” said Mizuki. “But if I move out, I’m going to have to sell it, and that money goes to my grandfather, which is just the kind of sneaky thing he does to put pressure on the family. I’m tied to the house, sort of. There are much worse things to be tied to though. Oh, and also a bunch of the land around it, that’s his too, which technically makes it mine, in a sense.”
Verity took a long drink from her glass of wine. For a moment, Mizuki was worried that she would drink wine as fast as she ate dinner, but the bard stopped short, smacking her lips. “This is amazing. How do you have such good wine?”
“My grandfather ran a winery in Liberfell,” Mizuki replied. “He was always experimenting with new things. He called himself a radical in both winemaking and politics.” Mizuki smiled, then took a sip of her own. It was much less fruity than she’d expected. “Did you want to spend the night?”
“Oh,” said Verity, pausing. The wine was coloring her cheeks. “I wouldn’t want to impose.” She looked past the windows, where it was now fully dark.
“It wouldn’t make a huge difference to me one way or another,” said Mizuki. “And the Fig and Gristle is halfway across town. There are lots of bedrooms in this place, and the guest room is already done up. I take overflow from the taverns sometimes, though that usually only happens when there’s something important going on.”
“And that doesn’t frighten you?” asked Verity. “Letting some stranger into your home?”
“I can blast people with fireballs, remember?” asked Mizuki, grinning. “If someone tried to lay a hand on me, or on my valuables, not that I have valuables, they would lose that hand. Besides, the last time, having a stranger in my home was rather the point.”
Verity raised an eyebrow.
“Tall, handsome, muscular,” said Mizuki with a fond sigh. “Sadly, my flirtation wasn’t up to snuff. He was a priest, but it’s not like the Order of Qymmos requires a vow of celibacy.”
Verity blushed. “Well,” she said.
“Speaking of, what are your thoughts on Alfric?” asked Mizuki. She took a drink from her glass of wine and gave Verity her best innocent look.
“Um,” said Verity. She was clearly already feeling the warmth of the wine. “As a, ah, romantic partner?”
Mizuki nodded, still hiding behind her glass of wine.
“He’s got a handsome way about him,” said Verity. She seemed hesitant. “A kind of… toughness, I suppose, a solidity. But he seems like the sort of man who goes about everything with a rigid plan, and I can’t see myself working with someone like that. Certainly not romantically, but perhaps not in any other way either.”
“Like dating someone who thinks of kissing as eighteen steps,” laughed Mizuki. “I can see that.”
“Nothing against him,” said Verity.
“No, of course not,” said Mizuki. “He’s just… a brick. The world needs bricks. Bricks are great. We use them to build houses. But a brick is never going to court anyone, and you don’t dream of kissing a brick.” Mizuki had considered it, with Alfric, until it became clear that he only wanted her for her fireballs. Their shared breakfast had convinced her that romance and flirtation were the furthest things from his mind, which was no great shame.
“Again, no offense to him,” said Verity.
“No,” said Mizuki. “Unless he takes offense to being called a brick.”
Verity giggled. “And I might do another dungeon. We’ll see. If he knew me, he’d have tried to tempt me with magic items. If I could get a lute that was like the bow Isra got today, well, there’s a lot I would brave to make that happen. An entad, something that was mine rather than on loan or bought by my parents, something that didn’t have a weight of obligation.” She took a second long swallow of wine, draining the glass, and Mizuki filled it up again, though only halfway. They were large glasses, and she wasn’t sure Verity realized that. “You?”
“What kind of magic would I want?” asked Mizuki. She thought for a moment. “Well, I already got the spoon, so I think I’m good to go.” She had used it to stir the gravy, then again to eat her meal, playing with it.
Verity laughed, but it was a bit forced, and the two of them were silent for a bit. When the conversation returned, it was missing some of the life it’d had before. Mizuki felt bad. She had joked instead of giving an honest answer.
“Well,” said Verity, after she’d finished her second glass of wine. “Do you want to show me to my room?”
“Of course,” said Mizuki. She stuck the bottle in the chiller, then quickly rinsed the glasses before showing Verity the way. “After I’d been by myself for a year, I switched to using my parents’ bed, which means that you’ll have my old room.”
There was something crushingly vulnerable about letting Verity into the room. Verity didn’t pass comment on the paintings on the wall, all Mizuki’s amateur work, only flopped onto the bed and let out a deep sigh of satisfaction.
“The bathroom is just down the hall,” said Mizuki. “If you need to take a shower, there are towels there too, and I can loan you clothes, if you’d like, but I doubt I have much that would fit you.” Verity was quite tall, and Mizuki was… ‘short’ wasn’t the word she preferred, but ‘small’ sounded too childish. “Don’t worry about using up the water, the tanks were meant for a pretty large household.”
“A shower sounds like a lot of work,” said Verity, staring at the ceiling. “I ate too much and drank too much.”