Sometimes people who knew Amarantha were surprised to learn how much she liked the Golden Thread Festival, though she'd often thought that a lot of them were simply confused by her fashion sense and imagined that she was only interested in death-related subjects. Or at least subjects that were less brightly colored than this. True enough that most of the decor wasn't really to her aesthetic taste, but that wasn't why she liked it, or not the only reason—there was something about the aggregate, the glitter and the street food and the parade, the celebratory mood that seemed almost to permeate the air, that filled her up and made her happy. Not to mention all those conversations with tourists, fleeting moments of connection with people she'd never see again.
This year wasn't quite going that way. This year something complicated had happened in the museum's hierarchy that nobody had bothered to explain to her, and while she and Grethel were usually pretty good at deciphering these things, this time they hadn't been able to work it out, but whatever the reason, someone had been needed to show around this mysterious guest during the festival—he was some sort of donor, maybe, or tangentially involved in some research, somehow.
Amarantha, lover of strangers, had volunteered. She hadn't expected him to be so unpleasant.
His name was Rodion-at-Sea, which she privately thought was probably an ill-conceived pseudonym, and he was a gousankke, which wasn't itself a problem; she'd never met one before, and while she admitted to having some preconceived notions she was looking forward to being disabused of them. And it wasn't that he seemed to look down on her exactly, except in the literal sense, because he was huge. It was just that he walked through the city like he was being held at gunpoint, and faced every attraction she pointed out with a kind of grim, disinterested acknowledgement. He hadn't appeared to be listening when she told him her name.
At the moment he was following her in the general direction of the parade signups, but he didn't look at her, just gazed stoically into the distance. Not that she could easily read an expression on that face anyway.