Partners [Prime Thread: Age 19]

===1 Wintertide 1377==========

Curry's grandmother was several inches taller than me, a bit on the stocky side, with salt and pepper curls cut in a bobbed style, and sharp eyes that made me worry she already disliked me on sight. She was dressed simply, in linen tunic and trousers, but I could tell already that she had the sort of personality that took up tangible space in a room. When he introduced us she greeted me with a curt nod and motioned me to sit on a stool by the tall kitchen table where she stood rolling up filling into little dumpling skins, eyes on her work, not speaking yet.

Curry drew up the stool next to me and took a seat too. He had warned me beforehand that I shouldn't take silence or brisk treatment personally, for she didn’t warm readily to most people at first.

Despite this notice, after almost ten minutes of nobody really talking I was beginning to feel a bit anxious about her aloofness. I had known Magnus Curry almost two seasons now, and we got on all right, especially compared with the other trainees. Now that we were the only two new guard officers requisitioned by the fourth ward, we had been paired together for our first guard assignment as patrol constables.

I liked Curry, and I appreciated it that unlike some of the people in our graduating class, he wasn’t a prick, or full of shit, or worse, stupid. He would make a good partner, and I had been lucky to get assigned him, if I didn’t fuck this up.

So I fixed my face in a pleasantly neutral expression and tried to think of something suitable to say. It was important that I impress favorably on my brand new partner’s only family, because the fourth ward watch house had already told us that if we wanted to succeed there we must be prepared to invest ourselves—which meant that for a while at least, until we were older and earned the right to grow out of patrol duty, most all our waking time would be together.

I myself had no family to take him home to, and after we graduated and left the academy barracks, I would be staying in some shitty little bedsit so I could save money for a place worth spending real time in, once we advanced a bit. Curry would be living here at his grandmother’s house, since she had the room, which meant if we were any kind of decent partners we’d probably spend a lot of time here.

It was therefore critical, that at a bare minimum his grandmother must not hate me. He had coached me intermittently over the last week, which at first felt reassuring, except now I worried the coaching would show through and make me seem disingenuous.

I looked over at Curry, who was leaning on the tall kitchen table, contentedly watching her work. He, of course, wasn’t anxious at all. He reached up and scratched at his jaw where his beard was beginning to fill in.

Earlier in the week we had strategized how best we could look a bit older and more responsible to better live up to the role—the result of which was that Curry was using the Wintertide holiday spanning between graduation and our requisition date to get through the awkward interval between quitting face-shaving and having a respectable-looking beard. For my part, I was trying to work out the most reasonable thing to do with my rather wimpy, fine hair while we were on duty. Being on the short side, it seemed to me critical to avoid any style which might brand me as cute, rather than as a serious-minded, capable officer suitable to the detective career track.

Neither of us was even twenty yet, and we didn’t want to squander the honor of having been chosen for the prestigious fourth ward guard by looking young and dumb. The Fourth was the oldest watch house in the city, and the most impressively appointed besides the First, which barely counted as the same thing since the First had to share their fancy Citadel offices with both the regional and municipal courts as well as the city administration. Our assigned house boasted two of the most important investigative divisions in the entire watch, and the chief watcher’s office was housed there as well, and even as low-ranked constable officers every day we would cross the bridge to Vox Castle and be surrounded by almost two millennia of eventful history.

I eyed Curry’s grandmother. I wanted to ask her if I could help somehow with the cooking, but wasn’t certain how this severe looking person might react to that, or whether I even knew enough to do anything other than be in the way. And Curry hadn’t offered, so perhaps she preferred to do things herself. “So you must do a goodly amount of cooking at home,” I remarked, just to give myself something to say.

But it was Curry who answered. “Mostly we do. If not Nan, then me.”

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said in surprise.

“Well, of course I don’t in the training barracks,” he pointed out.

His grandmother glanced up at me. “You don't cook?” she asked in accented Tetran, her face creased into a vaguely censorious frown that made my heart sink a bit.

Oof, I thought privately, then shook my head. “I wasn’t ever taught. I guess I don’t have much gift for that kind of thing.” I stifled the impulse to apologize for this deficiency, because that would be ridiculous, and it would make me seem unconfident. I made myself look back at her as if I didn’t care about admitting I couldn’t cook, or do anything else she might think mattered.

“Do you at least like to eat?” she asked, looking disapprovingly over the table full of dumplings as if the two of us had conspired to make her feed somebody who wouldn’t appreciate it properly.

Curry let out a huff of laughter before I could reply. “Yeah. She likes to eat, Nan.”

“Well, that’s something,” she muttered in Csoglaran. “Better at least than that awful bird-boned creature you brought home to show me last season. Looked half-starved but scarcely ate a bite. At least this new one doesn't look like a war refugee come straight from tent-town. No man who takes a frail woman to wed is ever glad for it in the end.”

I frowned, and Curry shot me an apologetic look as his face flushed with embarrassment. “Don’t be rude, Nan,” he reproached her in Tetran. “We talked about saving the old tongue for when it’s just us at home—and anyway, I liked that girl, and you—”

I cut him off and switched us abruptly back to Csoglaran, having gathered that his grandmother had drawn a host of erroneous conclusions about me, including her—admittedly reasonable—assumption that I didn't know her first language. “—listen, I can't speak to whatever intentions this poor Bird-Bones had concerning your grandson,” I told her irritably, enjoying it more than I should have when her face transformed with startled surprise, “but my intentions are that I’m assigned to work with him, as in, our paid daily occupation. And neither of us wants dismissed from that post—which means I’m going to be harder to get rid of than the war refugee, if that's your aim. So, would you like to start over, now that you’re a little better informed?” I demanded. “At which point, I will gladly eat you out of house and home! Because that food smells pretty good even if your company is a bit wanting!”

I ran out of breath here and had to stop.

Curry stared at me with a sort of slack, half-shock dominating his face. “I didn’t know you—” He left off. His chagrin at me having heard and fully understood the extent of her disregard for me was written all over his face. He probably would have warned me about that, too, except we hadn’t yet gotten enough quite well acquainted for him to know I spoke very good Csoglaran.

It occurred to me belatedly that perhaps I shouldn't have shouted down his little old grandmother in her own kitchen.

“Um—I’m—” I faltered. But before I could muster a proper apology his grandmother laughed aloud with an expression I read as genuine, unexpected delight, and clapped her hands merrily, sending flour dust into the air where it caught the light.

“Do you realize how many of those proper little things he brings home ever find the nerve to sass back to such a rude old bitch?” she asked me in excited, rapidfire Csoglaran, ignoring the flour settling in her salt and pepper hair. “None. Once upon a time I tried being welcoming but all they see is some million year old foreign granny with a too-thick accent and embarrassing grammar. At some point I started trying to see what kind of a horrible shit I could act like and get away with only a hand slap. They’re all determined to be so fucking respectful!”

I laughed.

“Nan,” Curry protested. “Respectful isn’t a bad thing.”

“It is when she’s obviously barely half a million years old,” I said, deciding recklessly to take the liberty.

Curry’s nan cackled cheerfully at us, her entire demeanor utterly transformed, then found a spoon and used it to scoop up some of the cooked dumpling filling. “Here, try this.” She handed it to me. “And then we start over. And anyway, where did you ever learn such good Csoglaran? You can’t be native—your Tetran is too perfect!—but hardly any accent to you, either!”

“There was this nun—” I began, then decided not to get into detail. “I was pretty young,” I said instead, when a middle-aged woman came to the doorway, rubbing her eyes like she'd been asleep. I hadn’t realized anybody else was here.

“Nicely done,” the woman told me in Csoglaran, showing me a tusky grin much like Curry’s, and raking one hand through her messy curls. “It’s well time somebody put my mam in her place. And in her own tongue, no less.”

I couldn’t help grinning back at her. “Maybe it was an unfair surprise. I don’t quite look like I should talk fluent Csoglaran.”

“What’s fair, anyway? Teach her to assume things about people. Call me in when dinner's ready? And tell my mam not to put horseradish on every damn thing.” The woman gave me a lazy little wave and walked out of sight into the front room.

“We will,” I called when neither of them replied, returning the little wave. But when I looked back Curry and his grandmother both looked puzzled.

This made me recall I was supposed to be sampling Nan’s dumpling filling. I took a taste from the spoon. “I know what she said, but this actually would be awfully good with horseradish,” I said, hoping I wasn’t sparking some family controversy to come out in favor of spicy condiments. “That’s your aunt, I guess?” I asked Curry, cocking my head the direction the woman had gone.

“Fuzzy?” he asked, glancing in the same direction.

“He’s lucky I answer to that nickname at all,” I declared saucily to his nan. “He’s trying to make it stick, but it never will.”

They shared a glance, but neither of them replied.

I realized with a sudden sick rush of comprehension that neither of them had seen the woman.

Oh… fuck—fuck—fuck!