Rough Waters

[Niabh]

“Do not say ‘thank you,’” the woman shot back, but now there was a definite note of disquiet and defensiveness. She was only replying because if she didn’t, she would have to acknowledge that she had brushed up against something larger than herself, and it chilled her to the bone. Words were a way of making some much-needed distance. So was actual distance: in a single movement, she was on her feet again, a tall flame pacing rapidly away from him (the gown, predictably, was pristine once more), furiously rubbing her upper arms. Only a few paces could she escape before he seemed to drag her back into his orbit. As she began to thaw a little, the full implications of what he had said began to filter in, and she added more brusquely, “And don’t swear on your true name. You can’t swear on what you don’t own. And don’t swear on your true name at all. Never-never-ever,” like a woman scolding a baby for playing with poison.

She was still deflecting, but Lugh’us Danann, betimes the man was so stupid! He thought he could flaunt the rules for the sake of proving he didn’t believe in them, but the rules didn’t care if you believed; they didn’t even care if they were broken. They were warnings. You ignored them at your own peril. Small wonder his life had been one long sorrow, small wonder indeed. What could you say for someone who broke rules, was punished for it, and survived only to learn nothing? What could you say except that they were asking for it?

Along the streets the hanging ivy shivered in the wake of a warm wind. The horizon glowed with a dawning fire. She was trying to muster up enough warmth to be angry with him, but it all fell flat, as if his queer quietness had infected her.

Her arms fell slack to her sides, her damp fists relaxing. A few steps brought her back to stand over him, curled on the earth, like something she had dropped that might not be worth the trouble of picking up again. “You frustrate me,” she said quietly. “I want to make it better, but I can’t. All I can do is give people things.”

All she could do was give people what they asked for, and it was so seldom what they really needed. Every Tuatha knew that truth and never failed to take advantage of it. It was the oldest trick in the world. Yet now the idea made her feel strangely lost and helpless.

She slipped down to one knee and tried to fish his hand away from his side, looking into his face all the while. “Here now. Sit up. Please. Do you still want to see?” Her voice went up a fraction, coaxing him. “I would rather you not be alone for it. Particularly just now.”

[Glenn]

"I want to say thank you, though." He didn't often do it. Occasionally, he'd joke at her with a good neighbor, because he found the entire concept (even vaguely understanding it) to be rather amusing. Most of his gratitude was implied or proffered in some convoluted format. This was direct and he had meant it. He hadn't moved. Instead, he strained his eyes upwards to stare at as much of her retreated form as he could. "You just said you'd swear on your true name," he pointed out. "It's much less of a risk for me to do it if I don't even have one anymore." It had all seemed quite clever at the time.

As she advanced so close that even straining his eyes didn't help, he looked to her feet and spoke to them as if they were the entirety of her. "All I ever wanted was to make things better too. I wanted to give them what I thought they needed because they didn't think they needed nearly enough and they didn't want even half of that and they wanted all sorts of other things instead. It'd just go around in a circle forever. I wanted to break the circle."

Despite the surety of his words (both about his name and about what he wanted), when she reached for his hand, he allowed it. When she tried to move him, he put up no resistance, firm in some ways but, in this metaphysical place, pliable as could be in others. "Of course I still want to see," he noted, his answer to her feeling like it was an eternity ago and his request to her feeling so current. "I'm only just beginning to understand. How can I ever know you if I don't feel this?"

[Niabh]

He wanted to see? Well, so had she, and she was seeing, all right. This was what he was without his armor of reserve, his carefully cultivated distance. As it turned out, it was an altogether dull, tidy sort of madness, far less tumultuous than she had predicted. Of course, when one kept company with Catch, one’s standards for spectacular madness were quite high, but now she near to felt the victim of misleading advertising. It was a trait that disappointed her in a lot of humans: even the ones who proclaimed themselves thoroughly wicked turned out to be no worse than anyone else.

He had once had understanding without the need to ask. Never the fear of misunderstanding or of being misunderstood. Never a misgiving that he might be lied to or that something was being kept back. Never alone. Never a moment’s peace or privacy in your own head, not ever. One wondered if he’d gone more mad from losing it or having it.

Deep in the glam he was, aye, and surrendered to it brilliantly (as of course he would be; was she queen for nothing?), but this was an eagerness she could not bring herself to admit she had not anticipated. It felt like…wheedling. The same bargain as before. He had wanted to show her. Now he wanted to be shown. In truth it mattered not what was being shown, only the showing itself, the way a drunkard would be just as eager for whiskey as wine. Glamourie was intoxicating for humans—right up until the moment it turned poisonous.

A friend did not hand a friend the bottle from which he drank his own death, but what to do when the bottle was oneself?

One might pour an ailing man a shot to steady his hands, though.

Compassion overcame instinct. With a sigh, she took his hand in both of hers, folded his fingers together, and pressed his knuckles to the warm hollow just above the swell of her breasts—that place where, now, the Other Thing was still and all that could be felt was the dim vibration of her heart. Touching was unnecessary for a glam, but something had occurred to her after Glenn crept up close and put his head to her shoulder: this was a man who likely had not touched anyone in years. What a sad, terrible thought. Her mother once said that little babies died if they couldn’t hear their mother’s heartbeat, which is why they had to be worn strapped to your front when they were new. You could feed them and wash them and treat them for grippe all you wanted, but without being held, they simply stopped wanting to live. But no grown person ever died from lack of another heartbeat. Not in any way that counted on a census.

That was as good a place to enter in as any, she supposed.

The narrow sandy strip that had once been a street, and once been a sea, first began to hum, then to throb.

As the sea had once rolled, now does a chill white mist barrel up the avenue, gathering speed and rising into a high ghostly wall with a rising shriek until it crashes over them. The riot of plant life recoils and shrivels to black in the seconds before the whiteness buries. Ice glazes the remnants of buildings, bricks blowing loose and clattering away like dry leaves. Snowflakes fly so delicate and sharp one does not feel them lacerating until the bright scrimshaw of blood beads on bare skin. The throbbing deepens a vibration hard enough to rattle teeth before spreading into the discrete, unhurried clatter of hoofs. Shadows move in the cloud.

The air remains frigid but now you are insulated in a fog of blood-warmth and the sweet rugged animal reek of a herd of deer. Taller at the shoulder than a standing man, grey-brown shaggy ruffs at their throats, with antlers like a spreading canopy so that they cannot walk side by side, they stroll in stately majesty, each the master of his own path. Their breath melts the mist, and their hoofs stamps double-horned marks through the crust of snow, through the mat of vines, through the glam itself and into the cobbles that made up the city street, tattoos that can never be sanded from the stone. Like a wave around a rock, the ranks part around the two figures in their path, closing once more on the other side. One of the beasts lets out a long bellow of despair and sinks heavily to its black knees, a gash in its side revealing a streak of white bones. Its flank heaves but once, and its head thuds to the earth, eyes glazed blind. Others of its kind sidestep the fallen body, moving relentlessly north. The dead beast struggles back to its feet, shakes its shaggy head, and resumes its plodding course.

She was rarely surprised by her own glam, nor could she truly be, but now she gazed around them in and laughed, squeezing his hand. Was that not always the way of it? The reindeer always came first.

Now let the seasons proceed apace, ruthless winter shifting effortlessly into spring’s battering rain. The woman in red squeals at the onslaught and hunches her shoulders even though her silk gown never spots, her curls never seem to melt and turn bedraggled. The ground mires into purple bog and they are sinking, sinking, as fast as green shoots can rise around them. All that holds the spongy earth together now is a net of roots buoying them. Spring as fast to summer and it is glorious and green, with warm nights that seem endless by their own enchantment, no glamourie necessary. Out of the darkness wee beasts with sly grins wander to sniff at you like rabbits, clamber across your shoulders and scrabble dirty claws in your hair, and scramble out of existence fast as they came.

His mention of houses seems to be moot. There are no houses. Even permanent structures are rare, coming in the form of giant cairns that house only the dead, long shallow half-buried compounds to shelter the horses, earthen forts barely distinguishable from the green hills around them. All else is tent posts struck at dawn, hides rolled and bundled onto the backs of the ponies, leaving no trace behind. At the end of the trail lies the summer pastures where the clans will meet to celebrate the rites, where old squabbles will flare up, ancient debates will be renewed between hunts and feasts and sacrifices and seductions.

And in this may be one point to prickle Glenn Burnie’s restless mind: there is nothing new here.

In between the strange visitors, between every raindrop, every blade of grass, came a burst of ardent pride: this is mine. And this is mine. And this. And this. Bragging, true, but also inviting. If she could give it all to him, to tuck in his pocket and take out whenever he wished, she would be just as pleased as she was to flaunt it. Bottomless selfishness harnessed to equally monstrous generosity, an urge almost incomprehensible to a human mind.

And in the summer a tall slim creature glides toward you, a shape like ink in water trailing tendrils of its own form like smoky scarves. So black it has no face, no features, no limbs almost—only two glittering orbs in which your reflection drowns. From it seeps an incongruous sense of both unfathomable age and childlike curiosity devoid of either empathy or malice. It drifts nearer, its scarves brushing dry over your lips. For a moment its face coalesces. The curve of a pale cheekbone, the faint impression of a heavy, beguiling smile. A single glimmering eye the color of warm bronze. A ripple of metallic green at the hairline. And in a flash it whips its back toward you and is gone, vanished into the treeline, leaving behind a lingering trail of spice and rut-musk.

The woman in red bore down hard on his wrist to keep him still, her own heart hammering. She mouthed out a single word: grandfather, or perhaps ganconner.

The seasons cycle on, stuttering like the flipped pages of a book: sun and moon exchanging places in the blink of an eye, the air darting from freezing to scorching with scarcely enough time to feel either before the next overtook it, and why should it ever end? A life of fierce delights and very little fear in a world both vast and implacable, where danger and wonder were one and where they knew themselves to be one of the wonders. They could say things like I hope and I wonder, but only as verbal tics, an adaption to a foreign tongue. They did not have enough self-reflection to wonder or enough uncertainty to hope. They only felt.

To be cut off from the People was to be severed from the font of all feeling, all memory.

One never forgets who one is under the glam. To forget that is suicide. She did not forget, but she couldn’t conjure all these things into being without a sick longing to stumble after them, an unbearable starving ache in the belly, a darkness like a bone in the throat. Love, and anguish, and the resolute certainty that she would not hesitate to slice Glenn throat to groin and crawl through the hollow if she thought it possible that Home lay on the other side.

And for the first time in this endless flow of history creeps a sour note of disquiet. The procession of seasons slows, then tapers out. There are fewer reindeer and those that remain drip thick mucus from their nostrils, their joints swollen with fluid, lungs rattling. The hoofbeats slow. One falls, and remains where he falls.

The woman's other hand slips down to her side, where it jerks away as it encounters a flat, sticky stone matted with strands of bright red hair.

She did not put it there.

Oh no. We are not doing this. Not again.

The space around them shrinks into a small dark room lit only by a tiny red-violet moon. The ground on which they sit is old leather burnished by the sliding of many bodies. The door hangs ajar upon a bustling street in a foreign city.

The stench was back. So was her headache.

The woman in red looked down tenderly at the dark head resting against her lap, then gave his shoulder a brisk tap. “Glenn Elias Burnie.” She spoke his name as a single long word, one quick whisper. “You are going to have to sit up or this will get very awkward.”

[Glenn]

His eyes opened. There was stillness. Then, they closed again. Had she not proclaimed this about humans: they occupied every inch of this world as if it was their own? What was he except for human to almost every fault?

It had been a great many years since his schoolboy-like feud with Daveney Sauveterre (and who else would have such a quarrel with a teahouse girl but he?). Since then, he had leaped from windows, shared all but a soul with a female, and flaunted his own forcefulness even as the heart of him was gutted to nothing at all. There were very few things in this world that he would run from; this was not one of them.

Instead, as his eyes opened once more, he exhaled a small, quiet utterance. "Nhmm." The sound was not far off from the mud-wallowing he had done in the grip of her glam. He wasn't making a show of it now, though. Restraint had returned to him. Then there was his gaze. It was steady, enveloping. It took in all of her, every movement in every moment. There was nothing but her in the world, her and, as it was when he shut his eyes once more, the insides of his eyelids.

As his eyes closed again, still laying, but not showing any outward sign of delight or disgust, as if this was somehow the most casual, and wholly platonic picture that the world had ever witnessed, he spoke. She should have known that once he started, he might never stop again. "You'll forgive me, twice. Fine, three times, and recursively henceforth, for this becomes quickly circular, infinite times over for me telling you what to do, but primarily you shall forgive me that I am slow to recover." All that just to beg forgiveness for the fact he needed to beg forgiveness for being scattered still. What was to come? "What I am still working out is how you got me back into the carriage. You could barely get in and out of your own power, more petticoat than person. Is it that you convinced me to get in myself, to help you in?" Memories, false and true, and Utterly True, were competing with one another. "You'd want to get in first, to prove the point, even as I stood there agog. Then you'd help me in to prove a different point, but I'd be doing most of the work. Then you made me forget it. All for this moment?"

Preemptively, perhaps it was all worth it for the look of puzzlement in his eyes.

"Why this? It's only not awkward if I'm unaware? Is it the symbol of control? That your wiles, feminine and otherworldly brought me to this point? No, I understand now, better, how you can turn on a moment, how you manage to very much place the whim in whimsical." There was some lingering sense in his intonation that whatever clever bit of wordplay he was reaching for there, he was not quite recovered enough to snatch it from thin air.

Reactively, surely it was all worth it because he was asking the wrong questions.

"No," finally, as his eyes closed for a third time, the rest of his head firmly lodged where she placed it. "It's fonder than that. More affectionate." This time, it was just a brief respite, for they would open again, potent, focused, intent. "Two premises, Tuatha. Either your people are in decline because of the introduction of some element of change to their constant perpetuity or they are in decline because of their inability to change. Which do you think it is?"

Still, he made no attempt to (re)move his head.

[Niabh]

Frustrated, she folded her arms across her chest, huffed, and slid lower into the seat, with the unfortunate result of relocating the back of his head into an even more compromising cradle against her hipbone. “Glennalessha…Glenn Alisk…paugh!” She mimed spitting. “I am fairly shot of that name. I’m calling you something else.”

She immediately set her mind to coming up with something both insulting and damningly accurate, only to find a word popping up instantly and unbidden, as if the gods themselves had lent it to her: a word she had thought to herself only minutes ago and since forgotten even thinking it, thus giving it an air of inevitablity.

Wriggling herself upright again, she glared down at the immoveable lump, but the puzzlement in his eyes, his meandering attempt to make sense of out the incomprehensible, temporarily defanged her resistance. This time the sigh was softer. “Sionnach. We never got out of the carriage. You opened the door, but we never got out. We’ve not been here all that long, really.”

From her tone, it was meant to reassure him that he need not fear having lost uncountable hours or years off his life. She herself was so accustomed to living in two different kinds of time at once, inside and outside of a glam, that it never occurred to her to question the mechanics with any greater curiosity than a man wondering how his body knew to go on breathing while he slept. It worked that way because that was the way things worked.

A hand sneaked out to shake his arm, another attempt at nudging him loose, but she changed her mind. “Gods. You’re talking off your arse. More so than usual. It’ll pass. That wasn’t even a heavy glam; you were only in it, mostly, not of it. You reacted to what was given you but it was all still you.” She might have done otherwise, particularly with his name, but now, after the fact, the very idea gave her an odd cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. No, she didn’t want to do that. That would be awful.

After the third time he closed his eyes, she, too, shut her eyes and let her head thunk wearily on the back of the seat. Like trying to dislodge a tick. A particularly chattersome tick. Just now she wanted to tip him straight to the carriage floor to rid of him and his silly questions and his feeble tultharian attempts to impose his obstinate logic on a silly little glam that had been completely straightforward. Being patient with him seemed such a grand waste of time. She wanted to be alone so that she could…what?

Grieve?

That would do her no good. She was Here and home was There and she would be back There eventually, though not today or tomorrow. All the sorrow in the world would not bring her a particle nearer to being There, and going off alone to dwell on how lonely you were was completely contrary to sense. You didn’t solve being lonely by making yourself lonelier. You went out and found people. She had a person—and she glanced down once more in exasperation at the top of his head. Well. She had a tultharian. Barely a person but better than nothing. She could do nothing for her own sorrow, but he scarcely need to be left by himself just now. He’d end up wandering the streets spouting off to strangers and one of them would think him drunk and rob him. Or belt him in the gob. Likely the belting. There wasn’t much she could do meanwhile but stay near until he was more himself—whatever that meant. There seemed to be at least three of him by her count.

Talk to him until he was more clear-headed. Then make sure he found his way safe home. There. Now she had a plan. She always felt a little more cheered with a plan.

This time she gave his elbow an experimental joggle, then left her hand there, absently rubbing up and down his upper arm through his jacket while she listened to him speak—until she noticed her treacherous tongue was again stroking the roof of her mouth in rhythm with her hand. Instantly she snatched the hand away, her face flashing so hot that her scalp felt prickly. She told him to move, dash it all, and if there was one point upon which she was utterly humorless, it was mannerless men and be damned if he was going to think himself the exception. And he had no right to call her by her folk’s name. None at all.

“No-o-o,” she replied, slow and stubborn, “it’s because when a woman tells you to stop touching her the only words that need to come out of your bottomless gob are ‘beg pardon’ and then you stop touching her, understood? I do not discuss breeding with any man with his head in my lap unless he be face-down.” The next punch on his shoulder had some sting to it. “I mean it! Clear off!”

[Glenn]

In truth, given her accent, and the fact he was far more used to corresponding with her than listening to her, one guttural utterance was very much the same as another to him. His current state of mind, which could be defined at best as recovering, did not help matters. She could call him what she liked and he’d catch up, with this as well as everything else, at some point in the near future.

For now, her attempts at explanation did little to quell his look of bewilderment. In the face of well-enough-meaning dismissiveness, he doubled down in his questing. “So, nothing was real after I opened the door, and I was a good neighbor ill rewarded for that, might I add.” He didn’t particularly seem to want to add it at all, but the principle was the principle. He had been concerned for her well-being, and either through the cumulative weight of her uncomfortable ride or sheer surprise and alarm at whatever he was doing, she turned her power upon him and then one or both of them benefited greatly (though if it was both, that was hardly the point).

It hardly mattered since he was still wrestling with the inexplicable. “Why did you fall then?” She half gave him half an answer and that was twice more than he required to have something to grasp on to. “You were within it as well, inclined, for the most part, to do what you’d do. You have control, but the harder you grasp on to those reins, the less real and all-consuming it is, to the point that you’d let yourself look partially the fool, because to avert things otherwise would be to stretch credulity too much?” It sounded good for an unmoored run-on sentence, better than he did, certainly more convinced and convincing. “Or maybe it’s just that you wanted to experience it, or at least the start of it, and the very end of it thanks to what I asked, with me. You can only do that in any real way if you let some things, even embarrassing ones, play out naturally.”

All that so deftly not-worked-out-in-the-least, he could move on to more pressing matters, like the sharpness in her voice and her decision to increasingly prod him. It had been predicated by his firm question, a first real attempt to not just understand what had just happened, but to pass some sort of judgment, or at least opinion, upon it. He did not move, however, not yet. Instead, his gaze became focused, far too focused for one only just recovering, and his voice, already direct, became somehow more so. “This is impolite but hardly of my making. Maybe it was of yours, maybe for kindness and maybe out of avarice. I don't know. What I do know is that I have the power to change it, and in a moment, a good, long moment, I promise to you that I will. What you did to me was of your making, a deeper violation, and I will be so bold to say, than this and now. It was wholly without consent, ran deeper, held me powerless, and left far more lasting change.” Then, finally, he started to move, the shifting slow and deliberate, but intentionally graceful as if he was a dancer moving from the finishing flourish of one act to a resetting start to the next.

“I would ask, as you did not, to keep my head there, but I can’t imagine why I’d possibly want it there in the first place.” Glenn was awake. He was alert. His gaze was focused entirely upon her. Despite his words, there was a hungry flicker in it. She had given him something. He wanted more. He was very good at resisting his wants, however, far better than she. He might want this, another taste of the glam, with all his heart, and It wouldn’t matter in the least. He was Glenn Burnie and what were silly little human wants in the face of that. "Never, ever, again without me asking. I don't want your word, your promise, your name. None of that. I just want you not to do it without permission. It's a violation when you don't ask. If I could talk back to you that way, maybe it wouldn't be, but I can't."

There was no obvious joy in those words. If he had scored some secret, silent point against her with it, then it was not one that brought him visible pleasure. He was serious, deadly serious, and becoming more himself again every moment. "Now," he swallowed, full of composure but having still gone through an ordeal. "We can talk about what I said when I could hold back nothing, what you showed me when you agreed to hold back nothing, or you can change my clothing, because mud and muck have made me miss the color brown, and we can go to a ball and speak about neither you nor me."

[Niabh]

The first time he spoke the word violation, she winced and closed her eyes, face tight and smooth as a mask. Hearing it felt as if she had swallowed a snowball: a icy lump creeping down her neck and spreading out from the belly. Immediately she tried to counteract it by reminding herself that he was only making his usual retreat of dumping a lot of words on her to gloss over the fact that she had asked him to move—nicely, even—and he’d gone on ignoring her until…well, things happened, but be damned if she was going to try and explain that part when he’d already hurled a book at her head over feinting for a kiss. Doubling over and acting as though he were going to curl up and die from a few simple, stupid questions and a tap on the forehead. She’d tried reasoning and he ignored it, tried kindness and made things worse, so she’d gone to the one tactic that always worked. Had she not warned him what would happen if she ever pushed back? He’d walked right into a glam and he’d wanted it well enough while it was happening—still did, look at him—and she hadn’t even done anything too terrible when she really could have. Giving her his rusting name—what did he expect?

And now look: he was up and out the other side and back to his usual terrible self again. So it worked.

It isn’t the same thing. Not at all

She got exactly as far as “But you were—” before the coldness permeated her tongue as well, and her jaw froze shut. But you were ill. But you were frightening me. But you wouldn’t answer.

And by the second time he said it, he was no longer pinning her knees and she could move again, skirts hissing like snakeskins, until her back was against the farthest wall and she could draw her legs up to her chest with the dress tented over them. She was a large woman, her legs long, the seat narrow, the confines tight, and the underskirts uncooperative, but she was good at curling up in small spaces under much more strained circumstances. She crossed her arms around her knees to pin down the petticoats, then turned her head away stubbornly, listening but refusing to look. Now the best she could muster up to be angry about was him making her feel terrible because he had made a point she could not refute. Weak fire indeed.

“I have been rude.” A simple enough admission, but heavy with history. She had impressed upon him well enough how rudeness was regarded, how it was punished. “I will not do such again withoutten your permission.”

The anger finally swelled back, bright and hot as it ought to be. What right had some pismire tultharian to chasten her as though she were a child?

Except.

Once there had been a stone, a flat slab of blue-black slate slid off the cliffs, lying on a bed of smaller pebbles just like itself. When she had picked it up, its underside was sticky, covered with blood, and it had gotten all over her hands. And when she set it down again oh by all the gods, he had no face left, no face at all.

It isn’t the same thing. Not at all.

Except it was the same thing. Not the same but the same. She still could not quite reconcile the idea of being violated with the idea of giving someone what they wanted. Lugh’us Danaan, what did he expect of her? That was the oldest trick in the world. Give someone what they want and let them hang themselves with it. You couldn’t be blamed if they asked for it. An that was wrong, then everything was wrong. Not just her. Everyone. All the Tuatha. And if they were wrong—

“I care not what comes next. I came here for but one reason. Diúltaím dó, diúltaím dó, diúltaím dó.” From over the tops of her knees she glared at him, eyes dark fire, full of resentment, shoulders hunched and shaking like a rabbit in snare. Her fingers flicked toward him dismissively. “I renounce your name, Glenn Elias Burnie.”

Her face turned away again. Very quietly, she added, “Fionnuala. Finn’s only what my friends call me.”

[Glenn]

She gave ground. She gave ground and then she gave more still. This was a different sort of surrender entirely. It was the sort where one might cut her losses and leave the field altogether, never to return. It was enough of a concession that he would not chase after her to seek further reparations. Even he would not be so foolish as that. She could save face, even if nothing else, and have some semblance of peace.

“Thank you,” said simply; politely was the word. It was the exact word, of course. “I will respect physical propriety to the best of my ability.” Was she surprised? She may have been a queen but he had been a governor. She had seen the creatures, large and small, human and inhuman and inhumanly human all, that had inhabited Myrken. She was royalty, and even though he so rarely utilized the knowledge except for in defiance (being its opposite), he knew how to speak to royals. Ladies too, though that was even rarer.

Then she went too far, far too far, and any chance of him allowing her a reasonable retreat went out the carriage door. She had thrown her name at him with as much and as little purpose as he had done to her. That had led to this. What would this lead to?

She stared daggers at him as she did it. His face registered unmistakable but quite brief surprise, then his whole body registered acceptance. With an exhale, he sank back into what meager space was allotted to him in the carriage. There was weight, severity in the air. He could not help but embrace it’s opposite. Even here and now, he was Glenn Burnie. And she, apparently, was Fionnuala. “Shall I be traveling to Myrken in two months’ time to return it to you? You could have just asked me. When do we ever ask each other for anything? All assumptions and proclamations.”

It was a fell statement, mostly true, except for one large contradiction that hung heavy over this moment. He shut his eyes once, brazenly retreating from the doom of her regard. “We humans change every day. Maybe not as a people, but as individuals. It’s the danger in making deals with us. Who might we be tomorrow? What might we be? Other than disappointing? I asked your name then, but I was satiated by Finn. As you said, it is what your friends call you.” He swallowed, physically so, but gave no indication to its meaning save one: his eyes closed more tightly, as with some strain. “It’s what I’d call you given choice.”

That proclaimed, the last bit of tension left him. His eyes opened afresh, cool and compassionate, not holding anger or weariness, angst or strife. “Now I have seen your heart and you’ve seen mine. It need not be this. I see a pathway through, Finn, one for myself that was previously obscured, yes, but for the two of us as well.” She was wound tightly but he was unveiled. He extended his hands palm up to her, though it was anyone’s guess what he expected her to do with them. “Shall we try again? You and I? I'd like to.”

[Niabh]

Once when she’d been a moody young woman (much younger than Glenn already judged her to be: an adolescent only just comprehending the permanency of the constrictions under which she would live the rest of her life), she had gone out to the white cliffs east of Cnoch-na-Niall to posture and brood while listening to the sea crash below. The sea before a storm was a good backdrop for a bad mood. She perched with feet dangling over the edge and dwelled darkly on how easy it would be to lean forward until she toppled, and how sorry they would all be if she died. No genuine urge to destroy herself, just a desperate desire to badly inconvenience everyone. Maybe once she was gone, they’d finally see how hard she tried to accommodate them and how unreasonable they were all being. Mother would be inconsolable, which was almost enough to make her feel bad for even considering such a thing…but His Lordship would be simply furious, all his fine plans dashed, which would near make even the risk of Meg’s misery worth it.

After a long grey afternoon of indulgent sulking, the thunder began. She unfolded herself from her perch and stood up to turn back for camp before she was soaked when a chunk of rotten stone gave way underfoot, sending her sliding down the sheer wall with only a heartbeat to realize that there were people she loved and things she badly wanted to do and she was going to die anyway. No one would ever learn what became of her. The sea would drag her away. Instead of a body, they would bury a bronze tablet in the mound beside the bones of her grandmother: twelfth Lady Niall, lost.

And then with a brutal crunch she landed on a narrow ledge some eight or ten lengths below. Scraped and battered, bright hair dusted hag's-grey with chalk and both hands bloodied from clawing the cliff face as she went down, she sat stunned but very much alive with one leg twisted and broadcasting agony beneath her. If she wasn't back by nightfall, they would start a search, but unless someone stood right above her, they wouldn’t hear her calling over the waves and the coming thunder. The sea rolled endlessly far below. There was no way out but up.

You didn’t grow up at Cnoch-na-Niall without you spent half your summers clambering up and down those cliffs, even the ones the adults warned you to steer clear of. Choking down whimpers whenever her weight bore down on the leg, she dug out handholds and dragged herself, length by grim length, back to the edge.

And when at last she rolled over the stony lip and lay belly-down, gasping and gripping the ground with both hands…at that very moment thunder cackled down on her misery and the clouds opened up, drenching her. And the thought that on top of everything else—the agony of chomping down on a leather strap while someone sat on her chest as someone else set her leg straight again; explaining to Bhaisailli what had happened and how, then dealing with his forthright, stern-faced disappointment; His Lordship inevitably gaining another biting, perfectly valid barb to hurl the next time she acted too slowly to suit him, or when she needed more explanation than he felt like giving; spending the next few weeks limping through her chores and drills—all of that, plus having to walk the two leagues to camp on a broken leg in the rain, caused a half-mad shriek of laughter to spill out of her, ragged between gasps for breath. Foot twisted outward like a misshapen root, rain pouring like piss out of a pail, but she was still alive and could still laugh, and that was all right.

What she had forgotten was the strange sense of inevitability that swept over her when she knew that she was dead and that there wasn’t anything more to be done about it. Perhaps there was no choice but to forget. If you carried that memory around with you for the rest of your life without some merciful blunting, there would be no room to feel anything else.

The moment she handed over her name, the memory of that same stomach-dropping plunge returned, as powerfully as though it were happening again. Now as then, she felt oddly calm, gazing at Glenn with accepting eyes. A bit curious to see what he would do. No dread of what it might be. No desire to stop him from doing it. The sense that the pendulum of the world had swung heavily to the far end of its arc and might be permanently fixed there. All in the time it took to breathe three syllables.

“Six months,” she said, words spilling out without regard. “You came to Myrken in the autumn because it was right at the start of the season and I worried it was going to be awkward, but then you proved unattractive which was quite some relief, let me tell you, and you asked for my name and I told you nay. Then six months later you gave me your name and I didn’t want it so I came here to give it back and now you have mine. So in another two seasons, an we keep the same schedule, you’ll come back to Myrken and give me back my name and we’ll figure out what fool self-destructive game we’re going to play next.” She half-smiled, wryly averting her eyes downward. “Steal someone else’s true name. Catch’s, mayhap. I’ve always been curious but I also suspect that if I ever pried it out of Him, my face might melt off.”

In spite the lightness of the tone, she sounded entirely sincere about it.

Casually she unfolded herself, keeping one knee to her chest while setting her other foot back on the floor in an informal, chatty posture, as of a lady prepared to share gossip across a tea table. “I do not recall when last we asked anything of one another. You tend toward rhetorical questions. You ask things, then answer them yourself. You don’t trust me to answer for you. Mine tend to be accusations: I never want you to answer me, really; I want you to answer to yourself. If you ever do, you don’t tell me about it. I wish you would. But the last time I remember asking you anything—a real, proper question I cared about—was when you said you no longer wanted to go your path alone. I asked you why. I did want to know why you’d said it. I wanted to know if something had changed for you, or in you. I hoped it had. I worried about you, you see. You don’t need to be alone. You don’t even really need to be with me; we’ve just proven that. You need your own people. The ones who know you, the ones who understand you best. Even if they all hate you now. At least you’ll understand what you’ve done that way, by seeing what it’s done to others. That’s why you write all the letters—well, part of it, I suppose. That’s why you wrote to Catch. Only you must never, ever write to Catch. He’ll never understand it. He has no…” and for the first time, she paused, brow creasing as she tried to come up with the word. Finally she shook her head. “Things like Him, like my grandfather…they’re not meant to really know what they are. They're meant just to be. I’ve wondered before if that’s why He is as He is. Somewhere along the line, old as He is, He learned to see Himself. Else someone taught Him to see.” A brisk, dismissive shake of the head. “Anyway you mustn’t write to Him anymore. You must leave Him alone. I should really leave Him alone but I’m in love with Him. We do silly things for love. What was I talking about? The letters. Yes. But you don’t write letters to other people, not really. You write them to yourself. You’re still trying to justify everything. Small wonder they’re upset with you.”

A flash of her throat as she swallowed in breath. The headache had dissipated like a summer storm, small favors. Except now she was compelled to answer every single question.

“I don’t. I don’t think we should try again. I think we’re on the verge of something awful, Sionnach. You’re the sort who would starve to death in a glam an you were allowed. You’d want to stay until you found an edge and unraveled it, only you wouldn’t ever find it because there isn’t one. I know you think you would but you won’t. You never listen to me when I say I know how this works.” Her face, upturned and pleading. “So unless you have some other plan for what we’re meant to do, then no, I don’t think we should try again. I think the temptation would be too great. I don’t want to be saying that, for I shall miss you, but I’d miss you worse if you were dead. You should start dealing with your own people and let them be cross with you. Lugh'us Danaan, even if they should kill you, you’d be better off killed than going on living like this. And stop referring to having feelings as lapses. They’re not lapses.”

[Glenn]

She had said it herself: how liberating it might be to no longer bear responsibility for what might happen. Maybe she hadn't said it quite that way. Or it could have been that she had said something else that focused more on the liberating power of good intent. Was it both? Despite his general composure, he likely wasn't quite as recovered as he was trying to let on. Though with the shift in her posture, the shift in the air of the carriage itself that came along with the shift in her mood, he began to wonder if he was, in fact, entirely recovered, and was instead trying to convince himself otherwise.

Were he to write this in a letter, perhaps one to Calomel, whose trust he had so casually betrayed here today, there were so many words he might use to describe the breadth of her and her emotions. They would be necessary, because of her and because of him. Calomel would hear the first word and paint a picture of the rest. He would hear a second and do the same, a logical mind filling in gaps in logical ways, and thus would miss the entirety of her. With enough words (and he very specifically prevented himself from focusing on any one of them now) he might be able to manage it, even of her, even with him.

His attention so split, it took a moment to catch up to her. "Six months," a stalling utterance, though one with meaning. "Strange that I would lose track of time more than you." Seconds for her, more than one percent of any possible lifetime for him. "We could do it, I think, you and I. Steal His name. Capture whatever we wanted. Who could stop us? Once we had it, though, I don't think we'd be able to even speak it aloud. It'd all be for nothing." That was true of Catch's name. Somehow, he was sure of it. Was it true of anything and everything? Did their intent matter more than most? "Except for the journey. Call me a fool mortal, but I think the journey would be worth more than the name."

He was caught up to the conversation by the time she began to speak again. Despite that, he didn't interject. He leaned back in his seat, just as he had been, and he listened. She'd never said so much in one go, not like that, not in a way that he'd actually listen as he did listen now. At the end, he had but four words for her, for words that he knew in his heart to be so very premature, but also so very true: "Now, something has changed."

He had let her speak for quite a while and he had breath enough stored up because of it. Without providing her a chance to respond to that (it would come later), he powered on. "You're wrong. I know you're wrong because I've spent my life learning it, specifically that. Magic has rules. Magic has a sense to it. Finn, look, every sense has a sense to it. Our sight? That's all something. I've heard theories, argued them. Smell. Taste, touch. Everything. The stars themselves. We don't have all the answers yet, but we know enough to realize that the questions are worth asking. Including how all of it works. I know more now for having experienced it." But she had said her share of truth, her truth, and and not all of it was inaccurate, no. "You're probably right about one thing," and here his tone had grown both hungry and frustrated,and his gaze refused, at least for a brief period of time, to meet hers. "It would be very, very difficult to work it out from inside and even if someone were able to, well, that person wouldn't be me, would it?"

He would concede that, but he would not concede the general thrust, would not concede her merciful attempt at escape. His eyes were driven when they finally found hers again. "We've come too far to give up. Maybe we've come to care too much to keep going? That's what you're saying?" He shook his head but never let his eyes drift. "Maybe you've seen too much loss with we mortals," and what had he felt of himself when she saw him as nothing but a man already dead inside the glamour? "But this is my life, my one life, fleeting, and I'm going to choose to live it how I see fit. Even if it's for just a few blinks of your eye, I'm choosing to remain within your vision, whether my body or just my words. It's my choice. You can choose to look away if you want, but I think we're both too stubborn and too alone for that."

His lips had been tugging upwards for most of the last minute. Not even her talk of lapses could stop the tug. He'd been fighting it up until now, but it was a fight that his heart was not in. He was inclined to smile. "A lapse is to give you my name with only a vague sense of what that means. That's a lapse. A lapse is to write Catch when I know it'll do neither of us any good. A lapse is to challenge Egris to retake Myrken because I wasn't sure what else to offer her. To ruin Ariane's peace and to suggest to Agnieszka that there's something else of value in the world. A lapse is to spend built up capital disrupting a ball to help a few and let many more rot later, all to please you. If I was better at handling my feelings each and every day, maybe they would not build up so. I don't know.

"As for a plan? Here's the plan. We saw things in your glamour. I saw things. Your grandfather. Your people. Your worries. Whatever was happening at the end there. I saw things I'd ask you about, but I said things as well. Now, I have questions. You have questions, new and old." And his curiosity would almost always be able to overcome his baser instincts. "The plan for the next few minutes at least is this: ask your questions and I will try to answer. Then, I'll ask mine and you do the same. We'll see where we are at the end. Then we can decide if the path forward is truly that hopeless and tragic."

[Niabh]

“You’re a fool mortal,” she said at once, mostly because she meant it. “See, this is what I mean. You can’t just do things because they’re there. He would stop you. He might not stop me.”

The animation in her face abruptly faltered, her only movement to brush away a stray strand of hair tickling her eyebrow. He might very well not stop her. She’d used Catch’s trust to her very mild advantage before, mostly only to keep him from things she suspected would upset him, always with the vague rationalization that she was doing it for his own good—or someone else’s, to keep him from flying into an unpredictable rage. More than the suggestion itself, more than the consequences, the very idea of using that advantage to steal from him was…her mind automatically reverted to her own language for the enormity of such an offence. Gníomhartha toirmiscthe. That was Law. Normally her own mind would have brought the matter to a full stop right there and she wouldn’t allow herself to think further, but now…

Now she stared in quiet horror at Glenn as she began to realize the full enormity of what she had done.

She sighed deeply in frustration. “This is one of those times I wish my bard were here. She could answer in three words what takes me thirty. I am not wrong in this. It’s like you explaining tears to me—you can explain all you like and I’ll never really understand them. All I know is that I never even knew the word magic ere I came Here. What your folk call magic is just…me. Just us.” Some of the sickly dread waned from her features and a note of the old, easy pride came back. She lifted her head gracefully, chin thrust forth, dark lips bowed in what was not quite a smirk. “You may study magic from books but we are written of in books.”

Her head lowered again. “Part of it is caring, aye, though I wonder quite if it’s how you mean it. I think you care not about yourself enough not to do yourself ill, or to do others ill, but that you would sate yourself in idle curiosity to no good end. Despite all you say, I do not believe it is worthwhile to know things for the simple sake of knowing them. The salmon in the pool knows everything, but what use is that to a salmon? A salmon knows how to swim upriver to breed, and that’s all it needs to know. It knows not even that there is more to know. It’s cruel to give something knowledge it can’t ever use. That’s only showing it what it can never have. A salmon who can’t jump the dam will go on trying until it wears itself out and dies. Men will do the same. I care enough not to give you means to try. Make of that as you will.”

Another thing she had forgotten was that losing one’s name was not only frustrating and exhausting but embarrassing. Her face was so flushed right now it was a wonder it didn’t glow in the dark. “Sionnach, please.” She held up a hand to stay him. Her eyes were slightly glassy, as if she were drunk. “You keep hurling questions at me and I keep wanting to answer them all at once and I can't. If there’s going to be still more, may we get out of this carriage? It smells like someone used a bucket of goat piss to dowse a campfire in here.”

[Glenn]

"I've done plenty and I could well do more." That set the tone. He may well have been a fool mortal but he was one with agency. He was one who had done his share of right and wrong by Catch, by her, by Myrken. That was the point. He was here because he had been a danger. That was one reason at least. Though she was right in the end. "What I call lapses are less when I do something with meaning when I might not otherwise, but instead when I do something without meaning or purpose just because I may want to? Because I'm curious."

The tone did not get better with that admission. She challenged him more and brought tears into it as if that would matter. "I can explain tears to you. Maybe not over a letter, but here, in person, here and now. I know you and I know you can understand. You need not have my name for that. You've a heart. Maybe it's not exactly like mine, but we can reach that point between us. I can understand your glamour, even if you are of it and I am not. I don't want to do it, Finn. I just want to understand it. The last thing I want is to wield it." He had come far with magic and in admitting his own hypocrisy, but there were still limits. "You're the story? Fine, I'm the one who's going to write it and if I decide to give you six missing teeth, so be it."

Then she pushed things further still. "I am not a salmon. You're a fucking fairy queen, aren't you? Look at what we've just gone through. Whatever I am, whatever my failings, I am not simply a salmon." He had her name. How could she possibly say that his knowledge didn't matter in the face of that? He did not use it as a point of argument. Instead, though, with burning, passionate eyes, ones that she may have read in his words or heard from the raven, but that she had yet to truly see in him, he went the other way entirely. "You're a fucking fairy queen and we are friends, not just friends, but two that are willing to quest against the deepest troubles the world has to offer. Much of that is due to what I've learned and who I am. Is there a salmon in the world that can say any of that?" Instead of falling towards dark places, she had certainly inspired some level of escalating melodrama in him. Maybe he was not recovered after all. Maybe he was just changed. That is what her people did, was it not? Maybe he had come out the glamour changed. "Anyway, I need not do any of it alone. We're not alone." He finally admitted, as he had more than once before.

Then came her final shift, her final push, and he sank back in exasperation. "I wanted to get us out, Finn. I wanted to grant you relief, and for my regard, I ended up..." violated. He could not say it a third time. Instead he shook his head and reached for the door. "Of course we can get out." There was a glance to her gown, for they had done this all before. "I'll get out first and help you down. We'll do such a job of it that if anyone comes by and watches it in passing, they'll wish they had a fucking painting of it to hang upon their wall."

[Niabh]

The trouble with true names was that the situation, howsoever it worked, left her ill-equipped to cope with rhetorical questions. She would open her mouth and get as far as a small noise, somewhere between a choke and a chirp, then just as quickly shut it, her head insisting that it did not require an answer while it felt like the rest of her guts were banging and clamoring and scrambling around behind her ribcage demanding that she must. By comparison, it still wasn’t purely painful as the headache but it was a similar sort of interior panic. Her eyes were tight, her mouth crumpled downward, her body tensed between obeying instruction and simply fleeing. Any mortal woman wearing that expression would surely be on the verge of tears—but of course, she couldn’t be. This was more akin to a rabbit freezing in place in the face of a predator, torn between remaining unseen or escape.

In a frantic last effort, she tried to summon up the wherewithal to be cross with him. That ended in her mental fingers grasping for and closing over nothing. That terrified her. Offering fire for fire was the Tuatha way of engagement; she simply had no idea how to respond to people who were chill to her, who did not snap and spit sparks as furiously as she did. Under normal circumstances, this would have been her element; she would have been positively delighted to have him match her passion for passion. To have nothing to offer him in return was a bitter disappointment. She did her best, but it was fragile.

“I’m not a fairy queen,” she said, because it was true and she had no choice but answer it and because it was the only defense, weak though it was, that she could produce. “I’m not a fairy anything; I’m Tuatha. And no, no salmon in the world could say that because salmon cannot speak. At least not in any language we understand. Mayhap they speak amongst themselves.” Her fist pounded her knee in frustration. “I know you’re not a salmon. Dash it all, you know I am not good with metaphors! You’re not even a metaphorical salmon. You asked me if we cared too much to carry on. I can’t speak for you, but I told you how I felt. I don’t turn into a prophetess once you know my name; I can only tell as much truth as I know, and that’s what I know.” In the face of his barrage, she managed a little defiance. “If you feel differently, you shall have to start telling me. I am not Rhaena.”

Inwardly, she grimaced. Outwardly her hand crept to her throat as if to choke off any more unwitting blurtings, and she rubbed the knob of her collarbone nervously. She avoided mentioning his late wife part as a courtesy, as she knew it still hurt, and part as a way of avoiding her own distaste about the whole subject. Now she had, and right on the heels of the glam and while his emotions were already flaring.

After that it was probably wisest not to say anything at all. She moved her hand from her throat and sat in grim silence waiting for him to see her out. See her out: as if she were a dog whining at the door to piss.

But she had taken his last sentence as instruction. There was nothing to do but wait.

[Glenn]

For a moment it seemed as if he was going to explode upon her with bile and rage. That she had seen before, back in Myrken, though the situations were very different. He bit back that impulse. Yes, there were harsh and bitter words on their tongues, but there was the notion of caring as well. He was a fool mortal but not fool enough to see that was driving so much of this.

Then, for an even longer moment, it seemed that through the effort of biting back his fury, something else was born. Some things else. Tears. There they were in artificial light, so little and so much distance between them. He was going to cry.

He bit that back as well, for his sake as much as hers (or her sake as much as his?). There was a cost to that though, as there had been a cost to denying his anger. The passion left his eyes, which were, mercifully, at least mostly dry. Yes, he swore as expressed how they would leave the carriage, but it was for appearance's sake as much as anything else. His movements were graceful, but lacked flourish. A door opened; legs shifted; his body seemed to simply slide out, and then, without looking at her, his hand stretched out out. "No, your'e not, and I'm not your people. We'll just do the best we can. Come on. It'll be better than last time because we'll do it together." He believed it still; that was obvious, but it was no sort of declaration of purpose. There was more of a cold acceptance to it now.

[Niabh]

Her eyes, pitilessly sharp even in dark, saw the first crumpling of his face. She squeezed her fists in her lap of sheer helpless rage. She’d driven him mad and made him cry, all in a single evening. Even with her efforts to understand the reason for them, she could never shake the feeling that human tears were like cheating—the one weapon against which she had no defense. One look and she didn’t care what occasioned them; she only knew she wanted them to stop.

Gods, but they were a field full of thistles, these tultharian! All of them! You never knew when you were going to step on something. Color of the walls, for pity’s sake!

Perfortune, exiting the carriage was much easier than entering it, as she was long-legged enough to avoid the iron steps entirely. Her face was tight and purposeful, but, foresworn, she swept her train into the crook of an arm, slipped her other hand into his, and, with a dip of her shoulders to avoid the top of the tiny door, swung herself with regal grace to the walk and landed before him, every inch a queen out of lore. Now there was no denying it. Glamourie suffused her in a haze so thick she seemed to be emitting her own soft candlelight, rendering her both completely unrecognizable and utterly unmistakable; if he took his eyes off her for a moment, he would instantly be unable to recall any details other than that she had been beautiful.

In spite of his instructions, it was a bit much for a crowded street. People were slowing down, staring, murmuring. Her eyes flicked to the side where even the street lanterns appeared to be dimming in comparison. The thought crossed her mind that mayhap it would be better all around if she faded a bit but…no, fuck it. He’d said painting. Everyone else would just have to suffer.

She slipped her hand from his to shake her skirts, which were now hemorrhaging gold dust, back into shape, then locked eyes with him, wholly unamused, with a faint pain in their depths that clashed with the rest of the grandeur. Humility? Humiliation?

Her voice trembled with restraint. “Will this suffice?”