Halfway

[Glenn]

Hello,

I meant to write you yesterday. I imagine you would have thought me reticent even then. I can hardly imagine what you think now (I can imagine many things). The problem, the stopping block, as it was, came with the salutatory greeting. I jotted down Ellipsis, then Ellie, then Victoria, then some form of Princess and other such ironic diminutives. Nothing felt right. To be fair, Ellipsis could work. It has a specific meaning, that being the gap between utterances, an absence, a pause, to represent that there isn't anything there. It's a more clever version of the Dot bit that led into it. Furthermore, that I could make a more affectionate, casual version with Ellie was convenient. To return to it, however, would indicate that nothing had changed, no growth, no retreat, no new ground struck, no nothing.

That would do us both a disservice.

The problem is that I'm not sure I can currently outdo Ellipsis. I am clever, yes, but any attempt would lead to an unsatisfactory, inorganic result. I feel like you choosing some sort of name for yourself that I would fully accept would unbalance things a bit too much. So here we are.

So then, I said things changed. How? You are real. I am real. There's no denying that. I admitted some very distinct weaknesses which I would likely not have through letters alone (and I write these exposing one after the next). You did the same. We agreed on a purpose, one that does not have me rushing off to your land and becoming some great strategist out of a fairy story. I deeply offended you. You violated me. Despite that, and despite my frustrating you, you did not further change me, even if you were dearly tempted to. I failed to understand all of your questions. I failed to answer some of which I understood. As such, you made certain promises to yourself not to let me get away with such a thing without consequence, even if the consequence is the look in your eyes, the slump of your shoulders, and a lingering guilt on my part. We both nearly turned the raven's feathers white with stress.

Ultimately, it was eventful, was it not?

I am travelling now. In some ways, this feels like moving backwards. It's the weather. As you're well aware, Myrken's begun to grow cold. As I move south, however, the days pull back and the temperature becomes even more moderate, more pleasant. There's less of an edge to it, less of a bite. Life moves with it. Things in Myrken were more vivid, things outside duller. It is yet another contradiction. There is the sun over my head right now and I imagine you forced to wear the grey skies like a hat that encompasses the horizon, yet the greyness has within it secrets just past the point of one's gaze. You can hear the whispers of them. You can smell them, ready to fall like the impending rain. All I have here are clear skies. I would wish this on no one.

You would have rather I stayed. You thought it better for me to stay. Moreover, another week with you would have sorted things out. You would have known where you stood and if you did not, you would have stood where you wished and conformed reality to that wish. We would have both suffered for that in the long term. Do you wonder what I am? I am the piece of reality you cannot change. The whole world may shift, from Myrken to your homeland, and all the people within, but I am out of your reach, past the sway of your right hand of kindness and your left hand of fury. You everything around you, but I will always be true. I'll be a lodestone and someday, devoted as we are, I will point you home.

Your best neighbor,
Glenn

[Niabh]

In spite of the impression he generally gave, the raven did have one gift that could only be called supernatural: once he had an idea of who his target was, he could generally find them. The skill was as innate as the instinct that told him up from down on a cloudy day, and he questioned it as little. Ravens are not migratory, but they do appreciate a little decent weather. It felt good to feel sun on his back and warm air under his wings, and to not struggle against a wet headwind.

"Here you go," he said, and set the letter before him. "Had to bully it out of her."


Dear Glenn Burnie,

In the first days, my ten-greats grandmother (or else the High Queen’s eight-greats grandmother; there is some debate over who may claim the tale) found a mortal man called Thomas the Liar, who was greatly loved among his own people as a singer of songs and a teller of grand tales. She brought him to her court where she laid upon him a geas: that while he could sing as she bid him for her amusement, he must never speak, lest he be bound there forever. He dwelled with her for seven years, and at the end of his service, his lady awarded him the gift of the tongue that could not lie. He returned to his people a prophet, and was elevated as soothsayer in his own king’s court, where he was known henceforth as True Tom. There, all the people who had loved him for his stories and his songs soon grew to despise him, for there was no way to keep their worst secrets hidden when he could not but divulge them. Where once his life had been the spinning of beautiful falsehoods, now he told only of terrible truths, buried corpses, hidden lusts, jealousies, selfishness, greed, all things ugly and petty and vulgar, until at last he came to realize that nowhere lived there woman or man or even the smallest child that did not have the stamp of cruelty somewhere upon them. But worse than all was the knowledge that this had ever been so: nothing was changed, only revealed. In the end, unable to endure the company of his own kind, he returned to the spot where his lady had first found him and begged for her to come and take him away again, though he might have to bear the rest of his time in silence. And here is the difference between the two tales, for in the version they tell of the High Queen, she came back, and cared for him until the end of his life. But in the version with my ten-greats grandmother, she never came.

I tell this tale largely as excuse to say that if you were ever bound to silence for seven years, your lungs would pop ere the second evening.

It strikes me that your preoccupation with what to call me sums up much between us. You would have no less than the one thing I cannot bear to give up. I would have no less of you. But as seems to be the way with us, yours would be but a metaphorical surrender while mine would be quite literal. That same prize that costs you but a little shabby pride and the pain of self-disclosure would cause me to value you all the more, but to have my name would obliterate everything you say you value in me. Should I force from you what I most want, you would still be able to walk away, as you have walked away from so many other injuries, scraped and battered but never quite defeated. In my name you would take even my will to walk away. I do not believe this is a point upon which we can compromise.

Even as I write all this, I wonder if I say it to shame you, or to explain myself, or because the unfairness of it makes me sad. I think it is a little shaming, a little explaining, but mostly sorrow. Before you came I told myself I cared less for your ideals than for your company, that what you represented meant less than who you are, and that it would not matter if the time passed pleasant or unpleasant so long as we were honest with one another. Now I wonder if there is only so much honesty we will allow ourselves, if there is a certain depth beyond which neither of us can go, if you are as much bound by your nature as I am bound by mine. I have said the same before, but now I have witnessed it and found that it does matter after all—perhaps not to you, but most certainly to me, and I am not ashamed to admit that what matters to me is all that must matter. You are mortal, and being mortal, are unreliable in ways that are beyond your control. I do not blame you for these faults, but I must take them into account. I ask myself this basic question: why should I trust in directions from one who is himself lost?

I am not lost, Glenn Burnie. That I am not where I wish to be does not mean I do not know where it is.

Still I was glad that you came, and glad we met, and I am glad now that you are gone. The world will always be ready for you, but I do not believe you are ready for it. Whatever of my questions you did not answer, I would be glad if you would ask them of yourself, and perhaps someday share the answers with me, in your own time. I will be here for a long while yet. Both of us may have sufficient time to change. Perhaps our time is not now, Glenn Burnie, but neither is it never.

I do wish we had said farewell, though. I wish now that I had not turned away.

[Glenn]

"I was about to send another one," he fully admitted. "But then I figured I ought to wait until I arrive." It would just be a day or two now. "Just in case the letter might have beat me there. Of course, if if there wasn't a letter then I'd have to go on about how she might be jailed again, and you could get in trouble since I wasn't supposed to know about that in the first place, I don't think." By this point of the journey (And after what he had been through in Myrken, as little as she might thought it to have been), he quite fatigued and the line between what he learned from the bird and what he learned from the fairy was a bit blurred. He looked down at the letter with some trepidation. "It's a shame I'm not going to live another hundred years. She'd probably be quite the correspondent then. If you tell her I said that, make it seem like I did it wistfully, lamenting over my own mortality and the fact that I will miss out on the opportunity of talking to her for time immemorial. Something like that. Unless you want to have something thrown at you."

The difference between myself and Thomas, or at least one difference, is that I'm never going to allow anyone that level of power over me. Any lieteller who couldn't sing his way out of that situation over a span of seven years is a wretch and a drunkard. You will tell me, certainly, that I have missed the point, but instead I create my own point. As for the rest? Yes, all humans are capable of cruelty. Anyone who may want for anything is capable of cruelty. Anyone who has never known wanting is capable of cruelty. Lo and behold, everyone is thus capable of cruelty. The best you can get is someone who has had much and then lost much. That's us, isn't it?
Blessed are we. Anyone one is likely deluding themselves or just stupid and not pure of heart (perhaps those two things are one in the same).

Yet, despite all that, despite the wretchedness in all of us, human and otherwise, it's still worth it, because these people are interesting and if you do not like that answer and want something more noble and bold, because there is a serenity and a true glory to people who are, in part, wretched, rising past such notions. For True Tom to be unable to see that, to be unable to weigh that, simply goes back to my notion that he was a louse, a womanizer, a fool, and a drunkard. Most musicians are.

My lungs would pop the second evening? A good thing that I would have found my way free of it all by lunchtime of that self same day. We could eat it together. As someone who has known want, I can match your table manners, that we've learned. I'm also excellent at talking with food in my mouth. The trick to it is passion, which you saw first hand even if everything else was potentially disappointing.

I do not like this business of summation. It's far too quantitative when the "between us" is far more anecdotally complicated than that. I think it more art than science. Let me respond by introducing certain thoughts. There is more to you than there is to me. Should you force from me what you want, you may not walk away. Ultimately, perhaps what I want is someone, somewhere, someone of worth, who is more than I am, to trust me for who I am now and not who I was then.

In this case, perhaps it is not about your loss save for the magnitude of it. Instead, perhaps it is about me proving my worth. How human of me and how fairy of you. That could be our tale. Having written it down (and thus having faced it for the first time, for my thoughts had not progressed nearly that far previously), I don't like it at all. I wonder if you like it more in this moment than you did a moment before?

On the other hand, perhaps I underestimate the amount of power it would give me relative to my confidence in my own intentions. Perhaps my starting point is that you feel like you can do anything to me, that you have absolutely power so long as I do not walk around in a suit of iron. Now that we have, perhaps (perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, for nothing here seems sure at all), shown that power is not as absolute as we would thought, we could be a bit more even footed in this and I will swallow my pride in this and call you something else.

The problem is this: it would be a glamour. If I call you Ellipsis, that changes you. If I call you Victoria, that changes you. You take on some element of that mask, of that persona, of the attributes attached to the name. I would be creating a new being within you and stoking the fire of it over time. You think that your own sense of identity is strong enough to make this the tiniest spark (and it must be, certainly, for you not to lose yourself in your artful glamourie) but then what worth anything I say to you, if none of it can affect you so deeply.

So, I guess, this is, in part, a portion (qualifiers abound) of my hesitation. I do not want to claim you. I do not want you to be someone else.

I am trying to put aside my pride. I am trying to be honest.

I am not always sure what you are asking me. the question game started most directly. Then it became obscured more and more. In person, we were not playing it at all. Sometimes I did not want to answer. Sometimes I could not answer. Sometimes, though, I wasn't even sure what I was being asked, and in the face of that, in the face of you, in the face of what I did and what you did (what you did and what I did, if you wish to see both perspectives), I could not bring myself to admit that.

If it is so important, perhaps you ought to be absolutely sure.

Glenn

[Niabh]

Dear Glenn Burnie,

Here is something I have noticed: you like to set yourself up as the one with all the answers in order to make others question their own conclusions. Then you use their hesitation as leverage to pry them open and insert your own beliefs like a cuckoo’s egg into their minds. You ply me with uncertainty, with the implication that I do not know what is important, that I ought to be sure before I take a step to the irrevocable. You say it with such portent and such promise that I nearly catch my breath, but then you say no more and leave the question hanging. Is it because you have no answer? Is it because the final step of this game is always to make the other one ask first? Or is the doubt itself your goal? You make me suspect it is the last. You doubt yourself, and so must sow uncertainty in others.

That you did not wish to answer my questions is reasonable. If you did not understand what was being asked, then that is my failing and none of yours, and you need not feel ashamed for it. But that you could not answer at all, that is troubling, for that silence is one I know very well, the sort that strangles. That silence can do so much worse harm than any speech, Glenn Burnie, and it rarely cures itself, but knowing its nature, I am wary of meddling with it, for fear I may do you more harm than good. Only remember that when your answer is silence alone, I cannot tell one reason from any other, and that, knowing you as I do, I am apt to assume that you are silent by choice.

It makes me wonder about our honesty. It is odd that I should be the one to uphold it, coming as I do from a place where it has little value. You have made me realize that I do. Because of you, I must be honest about what I am. It is a strange sort of honesty, but no less genuine for all its strangeness. Good neighbor for that, I suppose. It will be interesting to see how it serves me moving on. Perhaps you will have spoiled me for my own people, that I will always be human-touched. I wonder if that would please you at all.

More honesty: in the same spirit that I tried to come to our meeting without expectations, so did I try to come without too many questions. I felt very strongly that I did not want anything you did not offer freely, and also that to say as much would be no less than to impose pressure upon you to reveal more than you wished, which would defeat the whole experiment. I do know the difference between what is taken and what is given. Though there be no change in the thing in the hand, there is a change in the heart that cannot be overlooked. In giving there is power that is exchanged, that both may be enriched. In taking there is only power seized by one. This power is more than mere metaphor, but something that can be harnessed and channeled. This my people have always known. It is why we neither give nor accept gifts lightly—mayhap generously, to some eyes, but never lightly—and it is a habit among your own people that has some troubled me, that they attribute more strength to the hand that takes than the one that gives, and none at all to the one that receives. Do they know the power they squander? I cannot but think they might be more proof against other powers were they not so heedless of their own.

I think about this mysterious “between us” and wonder if all that is truly between us is the “between us,” this great gulf between your insistent but desperate humanity and my own confidence in my nature. I think it would be a shame if, after coming so far, we found that was all there ever was. It would be different if by acknowledging the gulf, we might bridge it, that there may be reconciliation, though what form that reconciliation might take, I could not say. I wonder on whose side it is, yours or mine (though I realize in truth that a gulf remains the same no matter which side one stands on). But even more, I wonder if what is between us is only destruction: that the only way you can believe you are still human is by proving your humanity can best me, and through me all the inhuman monsters that have undone you time and again. Or else you must let me destroy you, so that you can at last know the final, fragile limits of your own humanity.

If it were so, it would not surprise me. This is an old, old contention between your folk and mine, Glenn Burnie, deeper than I suspect you know—a river of blood that runs beneath the world, for more blood has been spilled on the face of the earth than the earth and all her oceans can hold. Moreover, it is a river that ran in you long before I came, going back to your old troubled times. Still more, it runs through your very race. Either they would be us, or they would tame us, or they would be rid of us altogether, but there is never a one who would can accept us, for to accept us would be no less than to accept their own limitations—a subject you have railed against on several occasions ere now.

I hesitate even to write this, for it seems so final, so bitter—and so easy for you to dismiss. Usually I do dread your tedious denials, but in this case, I welcome them. I want to know that I have read the signs wrong, for if you gave me any cause to believe rather than merely suspect, I would withdraw myself at once from this game of ours. I do not doubt that if this were truly your goal, you could readily discover another to test yourself against, but it will not be me.

Between us two is not only power and pride, but also feeling, with feeling being ever the more slippery and elusive of the three. I find a need to prove myself to you as well, that I am not some dread creature of your imaginings. I want to help you to find this thing you say will complete you, and if I cannot be any help, I would like to be of some comfort. I want to best you, but I want to best you in your own domain, by your own rules, to show you that they are not failproof, for well I know that you would take even the least glimmer of glamourie as a victory. This last feels like the rankest hypocrisy and goes against every grain of me, as well as every instruction I was given before coming here. But that same sense of rank hypocrisy is all that makes me feel I am in earnest about it. When that vanishes, I know I have been cheating. It is most vexing.

As for what you would have of all this, I still cannot tell. Is it as you say, that you want only to be trusted? That you must have that as proof you have moved on from what you were, and to be once more worthy to walk among men? If that be all, then for only the sake of kindness and friendship, for the challenges you have presented and for those you have withstood, for your bravery, for your gallantry, for all you have offered of yourself and the pain it cost you to do so, and for all that you have tolerated of me and my transgressions, I would grant it even before you did request it, and call it a bargain that you ask so little when I was prepared to offer much.

But I would say too, and sadly, that it is not something I can bestow like any mere favor—not because it is not in my power to give, but because it is not in your character to accept. You will strive to win it again and again: from me, from any other that crosses your path, from whatever distant hill you next perceive as an obstacle. That is another key on the belt of your jailor, and until you humble yourself to beg it from him, or steel yourself to steal it, there will be no victory for you, only relentless pursuit. That part of you is one I cannot trust, because you do not trust it either. Written thus, it feels even to me as if I am shifting the blame to your shoulders, and perhaps that is so. But it is the truth of my feelings and I offer it to you to abate or confirm, as you will.

At the same time, I know, and you must know, your place in all of this. We two together are a passing idleness. That we might learn a little from one another is no small thing, but my larger place is elsewhere. That is what should be important to me. That is what separates the princesses from the queens: princesses can afford their passing fancies, putting their hearts ahead of duty, but a queen never can. In spite of all your intentions, your wants, or my own fondness, I cannot give up myself. I belong to my people first, and must never risk belonging to any other, for a queen cannot be compromised. Even if there is no threat in you, danger can still come through you. You yourself are well aware of your own reputation. You have your own enemies and your own failings, your own cracks that might be exploited by others. You have direct attachments to your own Court and your own Crown, both of which might find interest in ours. Compared to what could be lost, you are not and never will be worthy. It gives me no joy to say that. Betimes I feel my own worthiness is but an accident of birth and blood, but that accident does not lessen my responsibility.

I wonder, then, if this be less a summation than a conclusion, for there seems no further step to take.

There, you see? That is a sentence that invites an answer.

[Glenn]

There is much to say,

I would like to get to the heart of the matter, but you've raised so many obstacles to be overcome. Still, my hand is steady and my mind is sharp (even with an egress blocked and a book of Jerno lore to confound me). If I can do anything in this world, I can do this. You lead this dance. I will bow to queens for very few things, but such a dance is one. One request: keep this notion in mind: what does it mean if all of your questions lead to the same answer?

We question everything. That is how we grow. That is how we are sure. If I raise a question and do not provide an answer, is it because I value your freedom? Because I value the journey as much as the destination as a way to grow and change? Is it the point of the question itself? Is it because I fear my own direct manipulation and it assuages guilt and dread at my own wickedness if you come up with the answer yourself, even if you are led there? Or is it because I have no answer? Or is it because doubt is the key to accepting the possibility of new opinions? Should I just leave this paragraph full of questions and move on to the next? You've invoked the idea and as such, I cannot. Here is what I hope: I leave things as questions so that we may find an answer together. This serves both of us as well as the both of us.

May I turn things back upon you? I admit, with the shame you would not have me feel (apologies), that I did not always understand your questions. I do wonder if it is not a failing of yours, though not one that speaks to a lack of competence. For you and your kind, I think questions have an air of finality. For me, they open doors. For you, they close them. As such, you, not wanting to face the answers (or not wanting to be bound by them), danced (as we dance now) around their asking. In your mind, they were asked, clearly and cleanly, and it was I who avoided their answer, who avoided being pinned down by any of them, thus draining so much meaning from our interaction. In my mind, however, I wonder if you did not hide them in a way so that I, even with my squinting and leering, might never see, that you wove
a figurative glamour around them, so as to fulfill the letter of your own requirement without ever reaching the spirit of it. Perhaps you did this knowing that I would be far too prideful (in this one area alone) to ever admit I did not understand. If I admit it now, do I trap you? What a weapon to wield against me and against yourself? Maybe we can find another way.

As for how you are changed (human-touched), well, isn't that the point? I have ideas but so do others. Some are unique to me, maybe, but it is not the content of them but the lens through which they are refracted that matters. That's what will let you bring something new and different back to your people. It is the manner of them, of me, and increasingly of you (which again leads to an us, you see?)

I dealt with the matter of questions above. I think your words match well with mine. You may reflect here, and also on my own pride. In the spirit of honesty, I struggle in this exact moment, between my previous words and my next, with what you took from me and what you gave me. I fear that is for another letter, however. I fear that if it were not, there may not be another letter for it to be for. So what I give you here is a grace I've been able to manage with almost no one else in my life. One other, though that was with closed eyes. Here, it is in the form of a reprieve. You may value it and curse me, all in one, later.

For we have reached the heart of the matter. Us. Between Us. The Gulf. Humanity. Immemorial. You speak well of it, but I ask you not to be afraid of that. I wonder, princess and queen, which of our people has the harder time finding Purpose. My people with our short lives and lack of power, buffeted by forces we cannot influence or control (save for through breeding, is it?). Do we contrive artificial meaning and purpose for ourselves because otherwise we would have nothing else but despair? Or is it yours with your endless lives, repetition of days, exhaustion of possibilities, for in the end, you've the time to try them all. For us despair, for you malaise. Can purpose be sustained over an eternity? You were born to your purpose, you fortunate, tragic soul, endlessly rich and endlessly poor. I was built to mine, and it is sharp and clear. I push back against the unfairness of humanity's lot. I fight those things that would be bigger and stronger than any one of us. I defy magic and mysteries and death. And thus, you are right. So long as my purpose is crisp and pure, there will always be a gulf. But what if I am wrong? What if it is not the beings themselves that are the enemy? What if the true enemy is the gulf itself? The inequality itself? The distance? What if the gulf works both ways? There are inequalities on both sides. What if the purpose is not to be defiant but to eliminate the very need for such defiance in the first place? Questions without answers, save for an expectation to quest.

I rescind my request for your name. I defy (for if I have but two tools to utilize in this world, one would be to question and the other to defy) the notion of conclusion. I would instead make a new request, that instead of you giving me your name, we work to carefully and meaningfully define "ours."

Glenn

[Niabh]

Dear Glenn Burnie,

If all my questions lead to the same answer, then the meaning will depend on the answer, for unlike some, I do not believe in questions for their own sake. With no answers forthcoming, I must reach my own conclusions.

For example: in my last letter were two points where I all but begged you to say that I was wrong. You know how I feel about begging, but I thought you might be moved by humbleness (and at that moment I was in truth feeling quite humbled). But my gambit failed. Therefore I may assume a few possibilities:

The first, your answer was so patently no that you did not feel it necessary to say it.
A second, your answer was so patently aye that you did not feel it necessary to say it.
A third, your answer was aye, but you realized that telling me as much might cause me to break our correspondence, therefore you have determined to conceal the truth for as long as you are able.
A fourth, that your principles are so deeply held as to be unmoved by pity, or so all-encompassing as to blind you to it (in which case I will have no more to do with you, as this is not a trait I find admirable in anyone).

Three of these four lead to the same outcome. A gambling girl does not like those odds.

If the conclusions are not to your liking, then that is but the risk of freedom, is it not? It is the price you pay in letting other people answer all the questions for you.

When you say these things, that you defy mystery and magic and death, what do you mean? Do you think that by defiance alone, you can make them disappear, or steal the power from them? Would you make them bow before you, or would you banish them forever? And what would that mean for anyone else? What would it mean for me, whom your people have determined to be magic and mystery and death all in one form? What if you did manage to get rid of death to become something like us—would you then succumb to our malaise? (I confess I do not rightly understand what malaise is, but what I do understand seems far too boring to be of much interest.) What will you do, Glenn Burnie, if you should win?

The problem I see with your Purpose, then, is that it is much like your questions: it seems a thing more to be pursued than resolved. You ask if a purpose can be sustained over eternity (and here I feel I must dissuade you of an assumption you have made several times over: my people are not eternal, only long-lived). I say that purpose was never meant to be sustained—one takes it up in the hope that, one way or another, it will come to an end, else it was never a true purpose but only an idle occupation. Then one finds the next. At least it is so for us.

Betimes I feel I must see these things differently from your own folk, for your people do speak as if there is only one of everything in a lifetime: one love, one god, one purpose. (I was quite shocked when I learned that women here are only allowed to fuck one man as long as they live. If someone proposed such a law at home, we would laugh at them, until we found that they were serious; then I think someone might try to kill them.) Then I wondered if it might be that your lives are so little that you only have time for one great thing because you do not live long enough to find out how many more there are. I am not sure how that makes me feel, only that if I were only you, I would be terrified always that I had chosen in haste and that there might be something better had I only waited longer—save that then one never knows how long one has left to wait.

Belatedly I realize I have spent this entire letter unravelling the very things you call the chiefest weapons in your arsenal: your defiance and your questions. I am not apologizing, only noticing.

How then to bridge a gulf that is in part composed of all these unanswered questions? (Am I doing this metaphor business right?) I do not believe there is any inequality—not in the way you seem to see it, in any case. That is, I believe there are things that are grievously wrong, both on your side and mine, which could be improved. But I believe those are things that could be better remedied by both of us applying our varied skills to them, not by one gaining power or the other losing so that the two be evenly matched. The problem is determining what the problem is. Betimes I go through these letters of ours like an errand carpenter roaming the countryside, hammer in hand, desperately questing for a single peg.

I offered you my friendship outright in Myrken. You tied yours to the condition of my name. Now you say you will have this other thing, which you call “ours,” instead. I can only suspect, based on our other interactions, that what is “ours” will very quickly become “yours,” for you cannot seem to help yourself. I feel I will become one more of your endless pursuits with no resolution, an occupation, a brief balm for your restlessness, and in the end I shall become frustrated and you will move on no wiser, no better off, no nearer to your own ends.

So I will ask you one more question, and you will answer, or this will be the last of me: do you pursue this “ours” for its own sake, or for yours?

Whatever your answer, I expect a very convincing argument. A lady has her limits.

[Glenn]

Princess (and this is a title, not a name),

A queen tears down the foundation of a man so as to rebuild him for her need. A princess comforts him instead repairing the cracks and helping him to stand tall as she wants. Betimes (your word, not mine, with a fairy lilt), a queen can do the latter out of benevolence or a princess the former out of selfishness, but in the case of the queen at least, necessity drives possibility. You act the queen when it comes to your own state of being but the princess when it comes to mine. Is that a luxury you have? Is it one your people have?

Because I do not think you grasp the cost. I would like you to grasp the cost because the entirety of my defense against the queen's necessity is tied up in it.

There is much. Let us start with this. I will not win. I do not expect to win. Humanity will not win. It will not certainly not win within my lifetime. What I hope instead is that the purpose drives an improvement. It is a tool, a forge, a crucible and all that. It is a means, this purpose, not an end. Why? Because the end is unattainable for me with my small, short human existence. The chasm between me and it is so wide, so impossible, that even all the ingenuity in the world could not have me reach it. I can, however, improve the chances for the next one of us to try. In the process, maybe I can improve the lot of others in need, others with a more immediate gap.

If we had forever, we would not be us, but in battling death and all of its causes and all of its symptoms, we can improve our way of life. My purpose drives me to do this. It's crystal clear. If I thought I might ever actually reach the destination, I might feel otherwise. Do you pity me for that? Do you think me a hypocrite? It is not easy to turn the assurance of failure into a strength, at least not with open eyes. If I can have but one thing in life, I choose this.

To have a purpose instead of a goal, to have this after I have lost so much else, allows me some freedom that neither a princess nor queen might have. An answer then. I pursue this ours for its own sake.

It is a pursuit. The point is that we are working on the us. For now it is for my sake. For now it is for your sake (I have regard for that, in my own way). For now it's for the sake of your people far more than it is for the sake of mine. Do not look at that as a detriment. Look at it as an opportunity. Here I am, afraid to take action for my own people, limited to taking action for myself, but wholly willing to act for you and to act for your people. All of that energy and imagination and ingenuity and frustrating abandon, everything I've learned and might learn, all at your disposal because I am too wary of it for my own purpose as of yet. Of course it's a risk, but a queen learns to manage that. That I am so keen on making it for "our" sake, and I define that narrowly for yours and for mine, not for my people's and your people's, well, that's a notion to appeal to a princess. It is a secondary purpose I am willing to take up. Maybe, just maybe, the end goal of it would be for our people to learn to work together and lean on one another, to marry each other's strengths and overcome each other's weaknesses, but that is not the our I currently seek. I pursue this ours for the sake of reaching it, so that it might exist and so that it might be good. I do it for you and I do it for me. I do it to see what the idea of that friendship, that partnership, that relationship may look like. I do it to assuage my ego and to translate yours into a language we might both speak. I pursue it because you may, in fact, not be wrong. You have your limits; I have mine. I cannot speak for you who wears her glamour like a cloak and has a (near) eternity to try on so many ideas and purposes and partners and lives, but, for me, that may well be the cost. If I stretch too far, the value in me (both your people and for mine) may be diminished, may be snuffed out.

But I think the effort is worth it. It is far away on the horizon. You have time that I do not. Your risk, I think, is losing a queen's resource for a princess' fancy. Your people may suffer. My only risk is losing myself and I am half lost already, despite all of my efforts otherwise. I pursue this to learn its worth, to see if its value is more than the sum of its parts. I pursue it to see what it may look like. I pursue it because I am curious, because I do not know and I cannot claim to know. I pursue it because I deem it worth perusing, more so than its opposite, which would benefit me more and which would benefit you more. This, if done correctly, looks to benefit something else. That is all I have to offer a princess. If it is done poorly, I am sure the queen will let us both know before long and we'll be all the worse off for it.

Glenn

[Niabh]

The raven was back, seeming both sullen and slightly dazed. Before he even gave Glenn greeting, before even relinquishing the letter he carried, he landed with a flop and made his way to the nearest lighted lamp, fluffing his breast to gather the ambient warmth. "You skipped town just in time. It's fine down here on ground level but that feckin' lower cloud deck's murder. Ice pellets straight to the face for most of it. Brr."

Warm at last, he cocked his head to Glenn. "I told her what you said, the whole wistful lamentin' thing? She thought it was funny. Then she asked if you were serious. I told her I didn't know, I didn't think so. You weren't, right? I mean, she still thought it was pretty funny, so neither of us are in much danger of gettin' anything flung at us. Small favors."

He trotted back away from the lamp and, with odd grace, gave a deep bow to deposit the folded letter. A faint blue-green smudge roughly the size and shape of a thumbprint marred one corner, both innocuous and jarring against the off-white paper. Someone had made a decent effort to blot it while wet, but had given up when the smearing made it worse.

"Her blood, not mine," the raven clarified before he could be blamed for it. "Mine's red."


Dear Glenn Burnie,

Yesterday while in the town, I heard a child screaming and went to see what the matter was. I found a child badly beaten in the face by a man I took to be his master. I shouted at him to stop. He told me to clear off, unless I wanted the same. I glammed him, got him to the ground, and kicked him in the face until I judged him to be as bloodied and bruised as he had left the child.

But I never should have done it in front of the child. He was terrified and tried to run away from me, but was so badly injured he could but crawl. In the end I had to glam him as well so that he would trust me enough to let me help him. I took him to the Rememdium. It was all I could think to do. I told them I was a neighbor and that he had fallen from a ladder. I do not think they believed me, but I threw so much silver at them that they did not question further. The man I left where he lay and I do not much care what became of him. I only wish I had kicked him more. I wished I could kick your whole miserable species in the face for allowing things to go so terribly wrong. I still wish it.

There is yet another part of me that wishes I had heard nothing, seen nothing, and so had never had cause to intervene. I hate that part.

I have just been to the Rememdium and he is dead.

It has been now two full days between this sentence and the last. Writing the thing down is like reliving it, and I am furious all over again. These words are far too small and calm and too evenly spaced for what I feel; they should by rights be nothing but a blur, a scrawl. I do not even know why I am still trying to write it down, for never have I felt less like coming to accord with a human, any human, even you. I am sick to the teeth with dissections and definitions, with statements of purpose that unravel themselves into nothing but words and more words. You would talk to me of costs? I was born to a debt of six hundred years of poor decisions and lack of compromise and it has fallen on me to repay it; there has been no waking moment when I was not conscious of the cost. But even we do not sacrifice our children to it.

I am torn in two terrible directions. This anger exhausts me, and yet I do not want to cease being angry. If I let it go, it will slip away in course of days until all this wanes in one more tragedy, indistinguishable from any other tragedy I have witnessed here. Every time I tell myself I will not forget, but in the end, I must always let it go, if only to survive. I cannot live with my own rage here. Your people would not allow it. I want to turn my back on all of you and leave you to your fates, for it is none of my concern and you deserve it, but yet I want to make someone answer for it. If I had to name my purpose now, it would be this: I would display that child’s body before your whole town and make them every one of them tell me why they let it happen.

But that is the last thing you want, is it not? A vengeful fairy wreaking havoc upon your precious people. Or perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps that is exactly what you want: another monster to vanquish. Confirmation. Validation. Sometimes I feel it is what they want. Something to attack them from outside, so that they never have to look at themselves. Not that I care much for what anyone wants just now, except that you would try to stop me.

And of course, that is why I am telling you. If I really meant to go through with it, I would make certain you never suspected until it was too late. Already I have considered putting this to the fire and sending you another letter, one of our ordinary ones, for I have veered so far off course that I do not see any way of setting it straight again. The other thing I have learned from letters, other than the way they toy with time, is that if a thing is not written down, it is as if it never happened. It has already crossed my mind to keep it from you in case the day should come I must act the queen and tear it all down. But if I do not act the queen here, for this, will I ever? What worse am I waiting for?

Is that why you insist upon calling me princess? Because it is safer?

If I am pledged to be your safeguard, then you must be mine in this.

[Glenn]

"Where have you been?" It wasn't an accusation, of course. That would be insane, accusing a Raven for not showing up. Who would possibly do that? "And what if you gave her the message too soon or too late? The timing of these things matters. She's been downright dire in these letters, all but begging me to end them. Or begging me to find a reason not to. I don't want to stop writing her." The words came quickly. There was no rum cake.

There was blood and a letter. "Wait, let me read this." And read it, he did, quickly, as if he was devouring the thing. Finally, he looked back up, wearing a dire expression of his own. "Hang on, okay? I need to find something." What followed was a fevered, though not frantic, digging through papers that he kept in a drawer in his desk. After skimming two or three, and ignoring any subsequent requests, he poured through one at length, punctuating the effort with a slight groan. "Alright, this is going to be a little bit. Let me go find an eager urchin to get us some cake."

No definitions. No dissections. One distraction. Finality first: I will be yours. You will be mine. Assurance second: I do not want another monster to vanquish.

Then the rest.

I call you Princess because you are a Princess. I call you a Queen because you are a Queen. When. I've not seen you as a maiden, despite your youth, or a crone, despite your age. Certainly not as a mother. I think this is because you being a Princess and a Queen supersede these possibilities. Do your people follow a rule of three? I've used it once with you. What would the third be then? Have I seen it? Am I truly that blind?

Your last question then. If not act the queen now, then when? Queens balance hard decisions every day. They balance cost and benefit. They allow one injustice today in order to stave off a hundred tomorrow. Where is the line though? Is it one for a hundred? Two? Three? Ninety-nine? Who gets to decide? Queens do, that's who. That's is the why of their existence. Blood and consequence. It is why people cede power to them, to make those decisions so that they do not have to.

What worth one human child?

There is a woman. She thinks I am here to stand strong against the corruption of this place. She thinks I will be dissolved by it. She thinks more highly of me than she should.

Do I not exile myself because I cannot answer that question? I wasn't born to be a Queen, though. On paper, I have luxuries you do not. In truth, I don't, just more cowardice stemming from failure.

Here is a letter to someone else (not the woman). I thought there might be an answer in there. There isn't.

When I was your age (which is a very presumptuous way to start a letter, but you're going to have to simply live with that if you want to continue to correspond with me; you're equally presumptuous in your own way and I doubt you would even deny it which is both refreshing and infuriating), and I had been in Myrken and elsewhere for a few years, I wanted nothing more than to go home and burn the place down. It was not a place of gross injustice, not relatively, you understand, for there is so much injustice everywhere, but it was my injustice and that makes a difference.

I was sold in the womb? Did I tell you this story? You'll forgive me for not remembering entirely. I don't think I did. In some ways, the clarity of possession and a lack of autonomy in your homeland is, well, I won't use the word refreshing again, but it's transparent at least, and that's something. Where I am from, people were manipulated on a daily basis for their own good. I'm not sure what an Odos was, but know that I was sold to be part of this great machine (in truth I was wold for money but there were structural drives to this, as per the manipulation, and if I was wold for money, then I was purchased, in the womb as I said) to be part of this great machine of manipulation. It manipulated not through ideas or ideals but mainly through base possessions and the accumulation of such. Land, livestock, horses, yes, but also trinkets and especially trophies. A thousand achievable accolades and some that were not achievable at all. Distractions.

The irony of it all? It was driven by religion. The Order realized that more conventional methods of placating the populace simply didn't stick where I am from; this was after generations of bloodshed and likely due to a combination of overlapping differences over dogma and geography. Certain reformers paired with hapless nobles and devoured the whole endeavor from the inside out, consolidating power immediately thereafter by implementing the purchase of youngest sons to create an indomitable bureaucracy driving the whole thing over time, churning numbers, controlling markets, fixing odds. I'm simplifying all of this, especially the span of time. It didn't happen over night and it could have gone so many other ways. What's important to know is this: I was sold in the womb to further my eldest brother's polo career. It was considered a minor and lucrative honor for my family. A glen is a place, of course, a valley generally, surrounded by hills or not, with water running through it or not, often straight. So often terms like it are interchangeable to the people doing the naming, one of many banes for cartographers. Why did they name me that? I haven't the slightest. I never spoke with them.

Were someone else to burn the whole thing down, I wouldn't shed a tear, but it shan't be me lighting the flame. Were you want to do it to your homeland, I wouldn't try to dissuade you. Better not to know why you are named than to know and for it to be that.

Glory, Gloria. It's how to make Glory itself, religious or otherwise, have breasts (a more vernacular term would have sounded pithier but pithy is not always best). It suits you far better than Glour'eya ever did and certainly better than Dor'eya ever would have.

Our letters will be cordial until they're not but they will rarely be completely satisfying. Be warned of that.

What a toothless letter. I'm sorry for it. To her, to you. The whole point of it is why I don't want to burn down my homeland anymore. I never give that answer. I just sound old and tired and pass that off as wisdom. Let me engage with it now, for my sake and to a lesser extent for yours.

I say it is a small injustice in the grand scheme, again, a child's life. Is it that I feel hopelessness in the sheer face of morality and immorality and disproportionate power? That there is no hope and thus no point? Why even try?

I do not think that is it. I had every opportunity to tear down Myrken Wood's inequalities. Would that have helped the children or would it have just caused more chaos and loss? A more literal series of direct injustices to take the place of more subtle, metaphorical ones? I was trying to lay the groundwork for a new system, a better one, to replace the old. A new order, to build something up instead of tearing it down.

I failed. I mean to try again. That is why we do this.

The final two sentences were last second additions. He'd almost sealed the thing before going back and writing them. One had all the time in the world to write letters. There was no possible reason to be impulsive about it, but there he was. The cake had arrived before he had finished but it had been a near thing. "There's another letter folded into the middle. It'll make sense to her. Maybe take your time getting back with this, ok?"

[Niabh]

The raven drew up in indignation at the perceived slight. “Wasn’t I in feckin’ damp-ass Cnoch-na-Niall, runnin’ business for herself?” Then, in a slightly more apologetic tone: “I go where she tells me. Kind of the way this works.”

He settled on the top of the desk, the cake clearly a secondary concern. “Huh. That’s…weird. I mean, I noticed she ain’t dashin’ ‘em off every couple days anymore but it seems like if she didn’t want to write you anymore, she’d just stop writing, not put it off on you. There some kind of trouble? You two didn’t fall out or something, did you?” All in all, a falling-out was preferable. He didn’t much feel like being a go-between the sort of trouble the Nialls got themselves into—not like he had much say in the matter. The realization that these two had been exchanging perfectly ordinary letters had come as something of a relief, considering what else it could be.

The raven relocated himself to the top of the desk, well out of the way, and absently preened and rearranged himself while Glenn scrambled through the paperwork. It was hardly the first time a delivery had resulted in panic, and the procedure was to remain discreetly out of the way, but available, until one was either called into service or formally dismissed. He did break protocol when the cake arrived, and ended up startling the hell out of the urchin when he swooped down on it.

The page he sent her had been carefully refolded along its creases and tucked inside her own.


Dear Glenn Burnie,

What to say now? As you would put it, there is much, but words themselves becomes difficult when my mind still clamors so loudly. There are many things I want to ask you, about value and worth, about our failings, and about children. There is still the matter of the letter I left unanswered before all this happened. There is, of course, “all this.” As it stands, I am quite discouraged enough to simply agree with you: what use is it to try? I am not good for either comfort or company. I keep waiting for the feeling to pass, but it is like the weather. One knows there was a time before it and that it must end eventually, but while it lasts, it feels as if it has never been otherwise.

No sooner than the letter did leave my hand than I wished to take it back. I wrote things born of anger and sorrow that were both unfair and unkind, and for which I cannot apologize because I meant them. The nearest I can say is that you were more gracious about the presumption than I was in presuming, and good neighbor for it.

I tried to claim the child, but they said they had already taken care of him, which I took to mean they burned him. I tell myself that they were closer to being his people than I am, so it was better they care for him, but it distresses me to think of him separated from his family, and it is dishonorable to destroy a body so that its kin cannot take it back. I have been trying to learn if he had any family, with no success, as I do not even know what he was called. I cannot find what became of the man, either, which is just as well since I would have to ruin him if I found him still alive. (I considered not mentioning that part, since you would then have foreknowledge of a crime, but I think we are well beyond that now. If this should leave in you in the position where you must contact the local authorities, be sure I will bear you no grudge.)

None of my people would ever ask what you did, Glenn Burnie. One child is everything, even one human child, for I see those as our own—that they could be one of us. That potential alone means they must be protected. If I had been killed in the attempt, even though that would leave my own people with no queen, it would have been little different than if I had died on the field in my own country. Would failure be so much worse than letting it happen? It may be said that he died despite all, but no one can say he died because I did nothing.

But it is the queen that says that, not I. Mayhap she even believes it. I would like to believe it. But all I can think of what chaos there would be if I should die here. It would near be a relief to be dead because Father in particular would never forgive me the inconvenience of scrambling for a new plan.

But what else was there to do? There was no one else. I could not have done otherwise.

I near to said, I could not live with myself if I had done otherwise, but I think you would call that a very princess-like thing to say. People live with far worse, both in the things they do and in the things that are done to them. Better to say, I do not think I could very long remain myself if I had not, or if I made a pattern of not striking back wherever I can, and that I do not wish to be the woman that would make of me. Then I think of my father, who has been striking back as long as he has been alive, and who no longer cares what it does to him or any other. I do not think I could be that, either. And I think of you, who struck back against injustice once, and who cares so much about what it did that it has taken all this time, all this courage, to find the strength to strike again. I do not know which of the paths is best, or if none of them are. I do not even know if it is right to say best. Most effective, mayhap, but that seems very much like something my father would say.

Would you say those who are worth less are always the lesser injustice? How does one calculate that worth? And can you rightly say the worth should be the same to everyone? A silver crown in a beggar's hand is worth more than it is in a rich man's purse, for all they are the same coin.

Are you only telling me that a child is the lesser injustice because otherwise you might have to be outraged for yourself, for what was done to you? If you became outraged for yourself, what else might you be forced to feel outrage for?

I wish I had some better answers, for both our sakes. I understand that you must care for them, for they are all you have. But they are not all I have and if they are bent on destroying themselves, who am I to say they should not? They are not my responsibility. I only wish that they would go about it a little faster, to spare themselves some suffering and clear the space for those who could make better use of it.

We do have a rule of three, and a rule of nine. What we do not have is princesses—at least, not as you seem to. One is queen, or one is nothing. I was a mother once, though, for a little while.

[Glenn]

Did they have a falling out? Often times, questions lingered until the next letter. It was the nature of this strange arrangement. He looked to the bird with a suitable level of exasperation, right down to rubbing his eyes with some sort of truthfully feigned exhaustion. "I'm corresponding with a fairy princess. Fairy Queen. Niall. Whatever. She's got it in her head that it's her job to save her people from a creeping extinction. Maybe she's right. I've got it in my head that I want to do something about my people's constant extinguishment," said as his nose wrinkled a bit, not happy with the word choice, "with the only practical difference between the two is that they last longer and we breed faster. There are a thousand impractical differences."

Then, softening a bit, he turned his gaze to the newest letter, skimming a bit of it, as if to get a sense of it. "Did her bard ever please her? Recently, towards the end? Or was it all like this?"

Princess,

You leave me wondering where to start. Do not take too much pride in this, for you've not left me here for long. I wonder quickly, at least when it comes to the matter of words. Starting actions is an entirely different matter. You know this.

I can see why your wars are messy. You say the queen would burn everything for one child while the Princess sucks her thumb and thinks of her people. I believe you, too. You see, however, that it inverts the very idea of tactics and strategy. There are rote philosophical questions I've avoided up until now because I thought they would bore you, but here is one: What if you could save ten children who would die without invention but only by sacrificing one that would live if you do nothing. That sort of thing. I think they might be useful for you to ponder. They are a symbol of everything I fight again. To a degree, they are the decisions human queens (at least the idolized sort) might have to make. You make it sound like you are more apt to make a decision such as that without the crown upon your head than with it, that a fairy queen's role is to stomp around and burn it all down in righteous fury, no matter how many children might die. There is a distinction between queen and princess and I am afraid you must continue to engage with it, but in this case I wonder if the distinction is not between Fairy and Queen instead.

You ask many questions there about worth and value. My answer is that the answers to those questions are personal ones. We, either individually, bilaterally, or as a society, decide those answers. There is no universal truth or worth. That is also my everything. I care about them and because of that I know they need to be better. Changing hearts will take generations. Changing minds only took magic but it would have defeated the purpose for they would no longer be them.

Comfort and company, then. There are gifts and there are equal exchanges and there is what you've asked of me. You've spent the last three letters trying to talk your way out of it. You want me to notice. You want me to grow impatient at best or despaired at worst. I do not provide you comfort. I am not the sort of company you enjoy. You've recast me, convinced me to recast myself, and that was very queenly of you. Queens have to live with consequences, however. I am going to continue to push, poke, and prod at things. Some of this is my own doing. You led with a summer friendship. I ensured a different path for us. Was that for you or for I, to spite you or to spite myself. Would such a thing have consumed me utterly? Would it have given you comfort and company but nothing you need, you ever able to find (or dare I say it, create) those things in most others. You cannot scare me away with your own personal winter.

I would hear of your time as a mother (one does not introduce something like that if not to share it, you know), but in the letter after next. Find order in our chaos first.

Glenn

[Niabh]

“Might could answer that if I knew what ‘like this’ was. All I know’s you sit and read those letters then start rubbing your eyes like your head’s about to split. She’s not much better.” Sidling a companionable distance nearer, the raven cocked his head to peer with apparently concern in Glenn’s face, assuring himself that the man’s head wasn’t going to turn inside-out like a balsam pod. If he knew nothing else, he knew how people reacted to receiving a message: they were happy, or anxious, or furious, or relieved. The very fact that the letter had come, and from whom it came, and when, often carried as much weight as its contents. If he had anything like a guiding philosophy, it was that. A simple bird with a small brain could only cope with so much challenge to his routine.

“But aye, I reckon they pleased each other well enough. Ainrid’s been around ages. Baird don’t have to stick by through your shit; they’ll put in for another assignment if they don’t get on with you, queen or not.” He blinked at Glenn once or twice, curious. “Why do you ask?”


Dear Glenn Burnie,

Of course I wanted you to notice, you twit. I have spent three letters all but begging you to notice, and I thought myself plain enough. Now I shall be plainer still.

I have been impatient with you at best, and near despaired at worst. I offered you comfort. I extended to you my company. I acquiesced to your need to define yourself, to reject all other definition, and it was the least queenly I have ever been, yet in the very act of acquiescing, I accepted the potential consequences, for that is what a queen does. I allowed you to choose the path that would allow you to spare whatever remnants of yourself you deem worth salvaging. In return you offered nothing I needed, but I did not hold that against you, for I was taught that people can give no more than they have. You wished to be of service, for that is how you feel most yourself. You were willing to go so far as to invent reasons why you could be of use, all but throwing yourself at me like a shameless suitor, and you insinuated that if I did not accept your aid, you would pursue them without my consent—pure folly, as there is nothing you can know that I do not tell you and nothing you can do that I cannot undo, but still something that could not be allowed. There is power enough in generosity to blur the line between the hand that gives and the hand that accepts. In short, I let you think you were doing me a favor to keep you from doing me any more favors.

Then circumstances changed. For one instant, our goals seemed to align, and I did need you. I needed the reassurance that you were there. I needed someone to understand why I would be so angry and frustrated, but also one who knew the danger of such recklessness. You were the only one. This makes the gesture seem calculated on my part, and now that the heat of the moment has passed somewhat, I cannot entirely discount that it was not. But I was correct to come to you. You become much more fearless when you have something genuine to offer—brave enough to tear down your own walls and look at what lies behind them. Do you not sense the difference in yourself? Am I seeing only what I wish to find, or were you showing me what I wished to see?

Now that I read this again, one thread becomes apparent: your need to be of use. Pursue it long enough and you will surely find someone who will be more than glad to use you, though you may not like it much. It troubles me when you say I have convinced you to recast yourself. Even the word you choose: recast, to cast, as your people cast a spell. It is rare my people have ever found a mortal man and resisted the urge to meddle with him, and send him back to his people changed. But you evade all my best efforts simply by refusing to acknowledge them at all. Is it that I am too right or too wrong, or that you will defy them on principle, even when they fit you or flatter you? How do you define yourself, when you are alone?

I have played your game of what-if before. The answer was never the same twice. Sometimes it played out better than we anticipated, sometimes worse, but never was it precisely what we predicted it would be. My father liked to use the word tolerable. These were tolerable losses, though I never heard him call a loss intolerable. I quarreled with him over that word, for it seemed to me what he meant was that all losses were tolerable—that one can do nothing but tolerate them once they have happened. Unavoidable I could live with, or even foreseeable, but tolerate I could not. He told me to call it whatever I liked, for they all ended the same. He was right, of course, but so was I. I believe there must be feeling. I believe there must be a sense of the intolerable, a sense of outrage, that we must not become deadened to it. All power is but one power, and that is the power to change what does not suit us.

A poor one you choose to impose order upon chaos. Also I keep pronouncing it as “cows” and I am certain that is not right.

Things here are better now, by which I mean that I am better. I am still disgusted by the apparent indifference that permeates your people, but it is not much greater than my ordinary level of disgust, which bodes well for us all. I have plans. That should worry you, if nothing else does, but be assured that I would not share that fact were they plans that need concern you. They are for the most part innocent, more meant to appease me than because they were required. Having a plan cheers me considerably, mayhap because I feel less helpless and less hopeless, and because when I have something to do with myself I am less prone to the sort of idle mischief that would truly cause you to raise objections.

More odd is that I find myself considering to any degree your objections. Have I cultivated a conscience, Glenn Burnie, and are you then it? How fearsome for us both.

[Glenn]

What did it say then for him (and her? Maybe her) to always be quite glad to receive the letter and so rarely to be pleased after actually reading it? At some point, the pattern should break, should it not? It never, did though. "Ainrid." He worked through the name. "I wonder if there's different sorts of them. Stories are history for her, but in two thirds of them, the fairy's named Poisy or Fizzlesticks or some such. Maybe it's all a way to keep us ignorant and foolish and powerless, but she'd say that we do it to ourselves anyway, so all they have to do is put their lips together and give a little blow."

That led to an almost dramatic exhale, with just enough restraint to keep it dignified. "I ask because most of what I have to tell her, to help her, is hard. It's not pleasant and she's someone who likes pleasant, who deeply appreciates it. I just figured it would have been the same between her and her baird. I guess not, though."

Princess and Queen,

You've asked many questions and I think this might be the letter which drives you to where you have not yet been driven if I choose to answer them in a way you find unsatisfactory. Let me begin with an apology instead. Occasionally, I lose myself in this. In as such, I lose perspective. In as such, I am a creature of these letters, of this interaction and the history of it. We've a story of a man who falls asleep under a tree and wakes up a hundred years later. It's a romantic notion to think this is because of your nature (for that is a fairy story) but I think it is more of my nature than yours. My failings so much as what you offer (and as I have recently mentioned, your kind is very good at pushing upon our failings to invoke your changes, maybe even without trying, maybe even without being able to stop yourself).

The point being, there is a useful tool, one important to me, one picked up by someone who woke up from a life with eyes closed one day and decided to try to figure out humanity, herself included. This tool came second hand from Cinnabar Calomel, who is a man who also tried to discover humanity, for very different reasons (he is a recluse, a man who fought for an won a happy ending, as if that was the very point of human life, the poor, lucky soul. If you ever meet him, ask him of tears). It would have applied here. There are lines we will not cross and things we will not endure. I wonder if she would define values as such. If she responds to me again, I'll ask her. Every line crossed changes us forever and brings closer the next line. I think where she maybe had it wrong is by thinking the change only occurred with action, with the crossing. Enduring is, by its nature, inaction. Does every bit of endurance bring you closer to a crossing, as she thought? Or does it make the next bit of endurance easier and the next crossing more difficult? What cost action? What cost inaction? All of this is moot. I apologized at the beginning. I'll apologize at the end as well. I spent years with sword in hand and such questions upon my lips. She'd rather the second than the first, but I paid for the first with the second.

Enough of that. Are you ready for comparisons and contradictions? I need to be of use. You need to have a plan. That's a nice pair, right? Being of use is not actually a new concept to me. I pledged myself to Calomel upon his coup (Helstone, Bromn, Calomel is how it went. There was a dragon at Haberdasher's Row when the first gave way to the second. And she rode it. It was before my time but not much before). While he was my friend and I admired him, it was still a hard decision. Freedom was much more important to me then. You know the story of my youth. You can imagine why. No one has claimed that I need to be "of use" since. It's always been much more about the power to change what did not suit. Then I had it only by being of use. Now? Do you not see it or do you feel it important that I actually say it, either because I wouldn't admit it any other way or because I must offer you something you feel is of worth in the face of your impatience and despair? Now, I would choose to be of use because it absolves me of responsibility. I'm afraid of making the decisions. It gives me the power to influence change without the moral consequence of it all going wrong (lines and endurance again). That is less so every day, and that should worry you in kind, even if you might cheer it in your own way (independent of whatever I actually might do, you understand). Is it all so simple then or is it all endlessly complicated. Can it be both? Can that be the wonder and misery of life? Do I overstate?

I could ask him to say chaos and cows for a few minutes in your voice, but I like to treat him with the dignity of his station (he can do my voice, so you may imagine that I do imagine that he has such range. You may do no more than that).

I have not provided you with the satisfaction of your first two paragraphs, even if I think and feel and yes, even hope, that I have provided you with other things of worth. Some of them were things I have not shown you as of yet. They were not what you asked for (even if they were what your words led to, naturally). I will contrive to provide you some of the satisfaction you actually demanded (directly or otherwise) now. I pull apart my words and thoughts to do this. It's not easy. You played with my words. I played with some of your playing above. It's tempting to go further in this. I am trying not to:

Please see recast not as "casting a spell" but instead of forging, of "recasting metal." I understand you might find that notion offensive, but change is change.

Also, don't underestimate what I can or cannot know and what I can or cannot do. Such notions are inspirational. If you find that sentence charming, understand that I found your paragraph charming as well. We share many things between us. Delusion is likely one of them.

Charm aside, I never show you what you wish to see. I've never become what you wished me to be, except for perhaps in one moment, and I think you quickly learned that (and I pause here because the correct words are a web difficult to unravel, even for me). This will be unsatisfying. I apologize again: The walls are up for a reason. You saw them down once. In that moment, I meant you no harm, but I needed so much, everything there was. Know that I wished to offer so much as well. It's easier when responding to a clear need of another. It's easier to channel it. Easier to control something for which trying to control it defeats the purpose, defeats every purpose. This is all probably too dramatic by far, but as I said, I struggle with the words. What I don't offer you is not for lack of trying, except for sometimes it is for fear of it.

I am not your father. Maybe in a thousand years I could be. One reason I am not your father is that I do not have a thousand years. I do not have the time for tolerable losses. Do not rejoice, though. I also may not have the power to reject strategic ones.

You needen't sow mischief, idle or focused. I've given you a mess here. Take some time to clear the cows away instead.

Glenn

[Niabh]

“Awn-reed,” the raven repeated helpfully. He felt safe enough giving it. If a bard couldn’t keep a handle on her own name, no one could. “Well, yeah, you think they’re gonner give anyone their real names? You saw how she blew up.” He had avoided that particular subject, though the curiosity itched like mites.

“You’re not her bard, though. She’s got a bard. They’ve got a bond. Has she talked to you about baird? There’s like, legends about queens and their bairds, goin’ all the way back to the Sister-Queens. You’re just some guy.” But he said it apologetically. “Look, what the hell’s goin’ on here, anyway? I got over the idea of love letters a while back, just because I’ve seen people send love letters. You two have the intensity but not the nauseating cutesiness. It ain’t political. I don’t think she’s here for a land-grab; they’d never send her off alone for that. She acted like she was pissed at you, but now she’s definitely not pissed at you but she’s not pleased with you either. And then you’re over here tryin’ to play like you don’t give a toss whenever she sends a letter but gettin’ antsy with me every time she skips a day—and I don’t even know what the hell it is you do here, except that she calls you an unctuous tultharian politician. So what gives?”



Dear Glenn Burnie,

Let me be plain again: the only unsatisfactory answer is the one you do not give at all. I can do with disagreement, even with absolutes, but cold silence I cannot countenance. (I near said tolerate, but considering I only just told you my feelings on tolerance, I felt it would be hypocritical.) I do feel it important that you say it, else I would not have insisted so hard and staked so much on the admission. I did not insist for sake of being cruel, no more than I believe you withheld to be cruel, and I should hope by now we are both beyond the pettiness of having the upper hand for the sake of it.

Now it is I who wonder if the thing need be said aloud: You know better. You are absolved of nothing. You are too conscious of what is at risk to ever distance yourself; you are responsible for as long as you still know the meaning of the word. Removing yourself by one step only makes you responsible and cowardly—too cowardly to stand behind your convictions and too responsible to forsake them. I cannot say if your cowardice does the world a favor, but it certainly does you no favors. What damage are you so afraid of doing? For whom do you fear now? I wonder if you have made such mountains of your failings that you cannot but imagine avalanches. I would ask you to remember Myrkentown, remember how it was to see it had survived and moved past you in spite of all you did there, but then I wonder if that is what you feared most after all: not failure, but that it will all mean nothing.

Inaction is a choice. If a man is drowning and cannot be saved, it can make no difference to him if one offers him a branch he cannot reach or calls for help that cannot come or if one holds him under to hasten his end or if one does nothing at all, but there is a difference in oneself. There is elegance and poetry in such futility, in recognizing the futility of the futility. There are ripples strong enough to tear the fabric of the world. Therefore the gesture must matter.

You are mortal, Glenn Burnie. Your every cause is doomed. Yet you do go on striving. Why is that? Will you tell me it is a mere idle occupation to pass the time between here and the grave? Shall I hold out the branch, or hold your head under? What would that make of me? I do not ask what it will make of you as you are doomed in this scenario, but for myself, I will hold out the branch. Make of that what you will.

You make it seem as if every choice is its own set of chains, and to some degree, I can see that perspective. A queen’s power is such that she may be queen of whatever she chooses to be queen of. She can set her hand to anything she pleases and claim it for her own, but once claimed, she is bound to it, much as it were part of her own body. If she cannot tend what she claims, then she is no queen and never had the right to claim anything. It is not the claim, but its claim upon her, that makes a queen. By this measure the lowest vassal may be a queen, has she but the will to keep to what is hers.

But that one may choose where one’s loyalties lie rather than be born to them by inescapable circumstances, that one may choose what duty to take up and which to reject rather than be assigned one’s lot by another, that is all the freedom there is. Even when the choice is between waiting for the blade and throwing oneself upon it, even when the only choice left is to think, I accept or I do not accept, even when one’s acceptance or the lack of it changes the outcome not at all, that choice is freedom. These are lines we cross within ourselves, compromises with our own hearts, battering down the voice that warns us we cannot turn back. Most such lines are crossed without knowing, a gradual slipping away only noted when one looks back and sees how far one is from the place one started, and these are the most dangerous of all, for there can be no choice when one is not conscious. I do not see them all as detrimental. Sometimes we must dare take a step to reach the place we need to be. There have been times when I wish I could have had the choice without the trial, for the step was so small compared to the pain it took to take it, but we all have such thoughts.

You chose the form your bondage would take, and in my own way, I came to choose mine. There were ways to reject it: we might have both chosen to be extremely bad at it, let’s say, or to take advantage for our own gain and the rest of the world go hang. For all that he says otherwise, my father would certainly rather I take this queening business less seriously and let him make all the decisions. I would make a pretty figurehead. Why we did not choose those paths is the mystery and wonder both. For that, I have no answers. I am a stubborn thing, Glenn Burnie, but I do not believe that pure stubbornness accounts for it all. Even that has its limits. There was a time when stubbornness deserted me in the face of fear and pain, when I would have given up anything if only to end it, when I even forced myself to pretend to have been broken just so that the pain would stop, but I could do no more than feign it. I could not make it let me go, even when I most wished it would. That part frightened me, for it seemed not of myself, and yet more myself than I was.

I am sorry. That was harder to write than I expected and I had to set my page aside. I have said before that to write things down makes it seem as if they are happening again. I meant only to go for a ride, but the ride turned into a day, and then I went dancing. I confess I did feel a moment of wicked gratification in imagining you waiting, infuriated, while I danced. See there? You are not forgotten.

I have my plans and you have your uses. That troubles me more than any action you may or may not take, Glenn Burnie. It makes it seem inevitable that one day my plans and your purpose will coincide, that I will have no choice but to call upon you. I expect part of you lives for that day. That only means I must insure it never happens. For all our affection, for all our conflict, that is something I would not inflict upon you if there was any other way around it. If that day should come, I would need all your walls down, and I do not think you are ready for it. We both need the one thing the other cannot give. If you would have my name, you must give me your heart.

[Glenn]

"I'm sure there are," legends about queens and their bairds, that was. "There aren't enough legends about ravens. There aren't enough legends about 'just some guys' either. Let me read."

After he read, three things happened, one after the next after the next. First, he began to actually write upon her letter, to draw arrows, to cross out words and suggest others. Then, he ended this effort (about two paragraphs down) and put her letter aside. At this point, quite logically, Burnie started a new letter of his own. Then, after four sprawling sentences and in a large departure, for it had never before happened in the raven's eyesight, he stopped and drowned it all out with ink. He had seemed amused at the start of it all and annoyed by the end. "It can't just be about me," he said to Eyoo, who never asked or interrupted when he was in the midst of letter-writing. "I have to treat her with compassion and regard, even when I want it to be about me. I think she'd rather I go with what I actually want, but that's wrong, no matter how right she thinks it is."

I see a worrying trend in your most recent letter. There are points you raise that I know we have discussed, that I have contested outright and qualified entirely. Yet they are still there. A case in point: you invoke my visit to Myrkentown and how I witnessed the survival of everyone in my absence. You suggest that I am afraid of this? You suggest that it diminishes my ego and thus I am blind to it? You suggest that I cannot imagine how they might live without me and how thus, there is nothing to fear?

Survival isn't the point. Being alive isn't the point. What damage did I do? Let us look at an example: The woman I love is dead. Before she died, she had become a monster. Before she became a monster she had become a vapid, empty thing. Before that she was a quiet, broken recluse. Before that, another monster, a monstrous black queen instead of a monstrous white one. Before that, she was fine for she had not yet met me. Her death was very much the least of it. Am I to blame for all of it? Not directly, but certainly indirectly. And the larger picture: they survived me. They survived without me. Hurray for them. Myrken is made of hardy stuff. It's people are the salt of the earth, resilient and unyielding even in the face of hunger and death. There is a cost to survival. Their hearts have closed just a little more. Their minds have dulled. Their hope has withered. Their world is smaller for me having been in it. They have retreated into themselves when I wished for them to grow into something better, to grow past just surviving and into actually living. They'll be all the more wary and doubtful of education, of civility, of art and culture and bettering themselves. Those ways led them astray. Those ways put them in danger. The danger almost destroyed them (again). I meant to push them forward, not today, not tomorrow, but within a generation, certainly. Now they teach their children to be fearful of what's different and to embrace only what they already know. I wanted them to be better and I gave them all the more reason to be worse. How is it that you do not see this? I forgive you for it. I cannot fix what I have broken within the span of my life. That is a level of powerlessness that you simply cannot understand.

That is one. Here is the other. I do not want your name. I do not even want the trust that goes along with having your name. This short-lived mortal has moved past that in the last two months. I told you a number of letters ago that it was unsatisfactory, that what I wanted instead was something more, something new, something different, something unprecedented, something outside of the rote old stories. I do not want your name and power over your soul and three wishes. I do not want you to beguile and change me and teach me some lesson to make yourself feel snug and superior. I do not want to fulfill an arcane question for you to receive a flower made of gold that withers to dust only when my heart no longer can feel love (which having the flower would somehow surely lead to, thus teaching me and all humans to follow me yet another lesson about how they should remain constrained and in their place and stop arrogantly breeding so much and marking so much territory or whatever is your problem with us). I do not even want to sally forth with you upon a massive white unicorn (not Him), guiding and counseling you in your grand war where I may lose all of my own terrestrial woes and problems and forever more live in a martial fantasy-land of righteous causes, visceral victories, easy answers, and your doting admiration and regard (though, if you wished to conquer me with the last in this very moment, I am likely not strong enough to break that "spell," as I did your last. You'd be doing neither of us, nor your people, a favor and you well know it, though, so I say this with blatant abandon and little worry).

I want nothing less than what is new. A new name crafted. Not in wedlock, but in betterment and mutual understanding, maybe. I want a new path, one that our people have not trod before. I want to make something worth remembering (though not a child; there's no imagination in that). I want us to find what has yet to be sought. Is this a distraction instead of a purpose? I think of it more as a journey. Will you not let me be romantic (not in that way) with the Fairy Queen with which I write? Let us craft a glamour together, one made of logic and reason and possibility and loss and pain and hope, one that can shatter some of what's broken with the world and mend it again, that can reset the bones of it so that they might heal, so that we might. Along the way, you'll learn what you need to learn to save your people. Along the way, maybe I'll learn what I need to learn to give mine a chance. You are a being of stories but every story has already been told. I want us to write a new one. Say that you are willing to explore this and we'll find a way to make the figurative literal and the abstract concrete.

I am mortal. I strive because I believe we can shape this world, a shared truth of it. I strive because I think in terms of generations and not just of myself. I strive because I have seen courage and hope and determination and monstrous excess, because I know there are things in this world that are not simply mundane and animalistic. I strive because I have seen nature overcome and have found it worth striving for. We define the terms of victory and defeat and death is an unimaginative, cold, and empty way of defining defeat. For us, it is the most worthless of ways.

You are not just a stubborn thing. You are young. Don't argue with me about that. I don't care that you've lived more years than I or seen more death (you haven't, by the way) or whatever else. You. Are. Younger. Than. Me. I put a period after each word so that you might truly understand that. In the ways that matter, you're younger than me. Deal with it. I am older and I have lost everything while you have everything to come back to and I should "know better" by now. But I don't. And it's not just stubbornness either. At some point, we should stop caring, because it's safer and easier, and maybe even, as leaders, it's the right thing to do, because then we can make logical decisions for the best of all instead of emotional, sentimental, dangerous ones. We care, though, despite ourselves, despite our lot, despite our role, because we see the inherent value in it, in them, my people and yours, respectively, in what they have made and in what they could make, in how it might be. We cannot shut that off. Life, if it were able to, would have done that for us by now. It tried with me in ways that I do not think you fully appreciate, though I have explained them in multiple ways, and I defied it entirely, to horrible, horrible result. It is our gift and our burden.

But then a burden is more easily (and far more successfully) carried by two than it is by one. If I have learned nothing else, I have learned that.

Glenn Burnie


Then, finally, he looked back to the raven. "The problem is the legends. I think that's the point. It's not love. It's not about me being an unpredictable human adviser to help her surprise her dad and her enemies and all that, though it could have been. It's about the stories and the legends and about how they're all wrong. It's about us breaking them and deciding what a better one might look like. It's about leaving the comfort of what we always believed and making something better, because it's worth doing. It's about admitting that they were wrong, seeing the worth in them anyway, and figuring out how to make the unfair fair. I'm not sure she's with me on it though. If not, I'm probably going to break on those rocks eventually. If she has to put me back together after that, I don't think you'll like what she comes up with. So we'll see, I guess, won't we?"