Page 35 of Monster Married
He nodded and moved us to the table. “I’ll go inside and order for us. Is that okay?”
I tugged on my scarf, noticing how his eyes followed that movement. “Yes. I don’t know what’s good anyway, but I’m ready to explore those billet beans.”
He nodded. “I’ll be right back.”
Inkiri vanished through the restaurant’s sliding door. The windows were too high for me to see inside, so I looked out over the square instead. Now that I knew about Raikengana, I managed to spot a group of them, four bagua dressed all in black, and sure enough, their horns didn’t have any kind of makeup on them. They seemed to be arguing about where to go, two of them intently looking at a booklet while the two others pointed.
A kid’s higher voice drew my attention to a family—or a sentenmen. Senfesmen? I had to ask which word included kids. In any case, the kid had a lantern in their small blue hands and was excitedly dancing around the square with it. That reminded me of the stuffed unicorn Gran had brought me from one of her trips once. Just like the kid was doing, I’d danced around the house with it.
Unlike me, the kid had a group of three grown-ups—possibly parents—keeping pace and joining in the excitement while also making sure they didn’t bump into anyone else.
That was nice. Realistically, I knew there were probably bagu parents who were as minimally involved with their kids as my human parents had been with me, but so far, I hadn’t seen that.
I looked away—and straight at one of the two bagua I’d seen staring before. He looked away again as if he hadn’t meant to be caught looking. Huh. Maybe not everyone here was used to humans.
The door of the restaurant slid open, and Inkiri came out with a tray in his hands. He beamed at me over the rims of several small bowls. “Sorry for making you wait, sweet thing.”
I chuckled. “You better be. I was about to get bored and run off.”
He cocked a brow and folded his taller frame onto the chair next to mine. “Where did you want to run off to?”
I huffed. “I was going to figure that out then.” I looked at the tray. There were five bowls, and there was something red in all of them, some of it looking like creamy porridge, though two bowls had the bean texture visible. They looked like small red peas. “What’s all this?”
For the next half hour, Inkiri explained about billet bean preparation. The longer you cooked the beans, the sweeter they got. There were things that were typically added too, and I could taste that in the porridge. There was some kind of root that tasted like orange, mint, and ginger all at the same time, and combined with the sweet millet beans, I’d found my new favorite dessert.
After we were done tasting our way through the billet bean dishes, I stretched and looked up at the bright sky.
“Where next?” I asked, turning to Inkiri.
“Wherever you want to go, sweet thing. Is there anything you want to see?”
I was about to tell him I didn’t know what sights there were when I realized this was basically our honeymoon. My cheeks turned bean colored.
“Well…I know there are moors here, and there’s the wall Vergis is working on. Can we go there? Nokim said the moors are haunted.”
Inkiri leaned forward, the small chair creaking as he moved. “We can do that, but you don’t have to worry about ghosts in the moors.”
I grinned. “Ghosts don’t scare me. Anything that doesn’t want to eat me doesn’t scare me.”
He clicked. “Nothing’s going to eat you, Sadir. I’ll make sure of that.”
Inkiri took our dishes inside while I reveled in him being so protective and probably determined to protect me from ghosts, demons, and zombie ligua, if such things existed in bagu stories.
Before long, we were making our way toward the wall, and I liked the thought of this being our honeymoon more with each step I took. It was almost like I was getting right back into the vacation mood the apocalypse had so rudely interrupted, except this was better. I was no longer alone and never would be again.
We spotted another couple of the car thingies, which Inkiri informed me were called kodesh and steam powered.
“The nicer ones use magic for power rather than any other kind of fuel,” he said as we walked along a street that looked much more like home, with sidewalks on either side and other traffic in the center. Still, everything was very walkable.
“Which means if you have less people who are doing magic, you have a problem, because you won’t be able to make any more co-dashes.”
“Yes. Some see only this problem, but our scientists are working on alternatives, and since the lagasar and the merging of the veils, travel to Earth for research has become easier. Before the lagasar, Earth science has given us the radio and recording cylinders among other things. Now there are many more possibilities. But some like to see the vanishing of magic as a big, scary thing for all bagua. They say we need magic and have to do everything we can to make sure the next generation has access to it still. They’re not quite where the Koa Esher are in their thinking, but much too close.”
My attention was drawn to a round plaza with a statue in the center carved from black stone. The flagstones of the plaza were much lighter sandstone, which made the sight eye-catching. I craned my neck, and Inkiri changed our course until we were walking up the stairs to the plaza.
“For someone who wanted to convince me about how awesome whatever I can do with magic is, you don’t seem to care about it in all the other bagua mages,” I said.
Inkiri cocked his head. “Not so, sweet thing. My point was that if you have magic, it means it’s in you because it is a part of you and supposed to be there. Of course I want you to be able to understand and use it as you choose. I just think…how can you choose how to use it if you don’t understand what you can do? You have to know that before you can choose.
