A Trail of Blood

[Rance]

She saw it in the fading light of day: a droplet of blood in the dust of the pathway well beyond Catch's cutting-stump; a little red ruby, perfectly balanced in the dirt, wet and fat and fresh. Her bodice still bore crumbs from her meal of bread and carrots. She was brushing them away when, shimmering in her lantern-light, the blood caught her eye.

In Jernoah, blood spoke in the sandy avenues. It weighed down the grains like shining beads even as the sandstorms came. The butchers often emptied their buckets in the gutters and thieves were relieved of their limbs in the avenue proper. The blood weighed heavy. Nobody ever seemed to care when it squelched underfoot. That was just the way it was.

And she might have ignored that droplet until she saw another, and beyond it, another still. A trail made of erratic spatters and stains. The seamstress glanced back toward the Broken Dagger and its listless eye-lights. Night would come soon, a hot blanket of black along the landscape. Her lantern, clutched in a gloved fist, kept leading her along a winding circuit of crimson blotches. The bushes shone with dampness, syrupy and thick like red molasses. She followed the curious stains toward a split in the underbrush, as if a body had gone crashing through and had beaten down the grass with its stumbling weight.

She stood at the road's edge, cast the lantern above her head, and asked--

--asked, as if blood could tell its own story,

"Is -- is anyone there," she chattered into the brush. "Hello?"

[Jirai]

She'd left him, left that clearing very much in control. Each step carefully placed, her back straight, a tattooed hand pressed firmly against the rend in her flesh, slowing the blood that leaked through fingers. She did not relinquish that control until she was well away from Elliot Gahald, brushing through bushes without her usual precision. She'd left it too long and the runes swam in her mind, unable to link and balance the way she needed.

When the light came, a lantern held in a girl's hand, dark eyes could barely focus on the gleam from where she crouched, slumped against the base of a tree. "Gloria. It would be Gloria."

She'd intended those words only for herself, unaware at first that they'd slipped past her lips.

[Rance]

She saw a crumbled figure. Her guts froze despite the barren heat of summer and the mosquitoes that nittered in the air. Her face was a dark half-moon of tan as she raised the lantern up, up to get greater visibility. At first, she mistook the silhouette for some mutation of the tree, perhaps a half-stump that had never grown its limbs or leaves. But blood glinted behind the ink-streaked fingers, and she followed the telling brightness of her tin lantern until she heard the words and saw the lips that spoke them.

Gloria. It would be Gloria.

"N-..."

The consonant caught in her throat. Her clogs skittered down the embankment and through the clinging bushes, the Storyteller's skirts snaring on a few of the bloody brambles. Her approach to the base of the tree was graceless and frantic. The tin lantern rattled with careless abandon, splashing light in a wide circle around them. Her shadow played like a restless vagabond. When she saw the tattooed girl, the spearwielder, she thought--

--for a fleeting, heartbeat-long moment, of holding high her chin and simply turning away.

Niall is a stone, she'd said to Noura -- or had it been Elliot? Or Cherny? Niall is a stone, and one day, she will die a stone.

She squatted in front of the hunter, reaching out with a timid hand toward the other girl's arm, her shoulder, something.

"Nameless," she whispered, before: "Niall? Are -- are you hurt?"

But blood did not lie. Even seamstresses knew that.

[Jirai]

It would be Gloria, rushing down to her in a tumble of clogs and skirts. It would be the seamstress, rather than someone - anyone- else. Who worse?

The girl reached out, shaking fingers brushing against Niall's arm with no retribution from the scarred young woman's usual defenses. Generally that was a matter of choice, but not this time. Then, in classic Gloria style, the girl asked the stupidest of questions, earning a harsh, barking laugh from Niall.

"Of course... not." The tattooed woman gasped, anger that wasn't rightly Gloria's spilling out onto the seamstress nonetheless. "I am sitting here bleeding... for fun." But there's a brightness, a glitter in her eyes in the lantern's light before she ducked her head, curled over the wound in her abdomen.

[Rance]

"Then I should leave you here to -- to have the finest time all on your own. Is that what you're saying," she responded.

She could not read Niall. Niall was granite. She was the sandstone foundation of every glass building in Jernoah. She was immobile and untouchable. The seamstress saw blood like spilled wine, smelled butcher-meat in the air. Niall could have her quips, her clever retorts all she wished. The lantern was placed in the dry leaves beside them, its dull light ebbing and flickering with the fragile life of its mother candle.

"Niall," the girl said again. Her hands found Niall's shoulders, supported them with surprising strength. She tried to push the other woman back against the tree, to steady her eyes so she might look into them. "Niall, you are going to -- to have to sit up straight--"

Her jittering fingers reached down to try to nudge aside torn garments and reveal more of the wounded flesh. The seamstress' breath was quick and frightened, but for as much as she despised Niall, her touch was not prejudiced: she was tender as she tried to take stock of the wound, to see exactly how much damage had been inflicted. "Let me help you. Please," she said, that last word a desperate demand as, from her bulging satchel, she unwound the tattered remnants of a bone-buttoned sweater. "Let me -- let me look at it. How did -- how did you get hurt?"

A little voice tittered in the back of the younger girl's mind, a Dream-spun reminder that smarted like an old ache.

You damn well better do it right, you moron, or else.

The voice of Elliot Brown.

[Jirai]

Niall ought to have a reply for the seamstress, even if it was simply agreement with the girl's words - yes, go away, I do not need you. But there is nothing but silence to greet Gloria's words, the tattooed girl curled as best she can with a look of hurt on her face that is nothing to do with the blood still oozing from between her fingers.

Hands met shoulders, urging them back and the scarred young woman did not fight their guidance, leaning her head back against the tree. The shifting of her torso left the wound visible, the thrust of a sword right through the young woman. There was less blood than there should be, that much Niall had managed, but that was all she had managed. The young sorceress showed no resistance to Gloria as the younger girl looked over the wound, made no pained sounds, no noise at all save to reply to Gloria's question after a long moment.

"Elliot." She answered, her voice raw. "It was Elliot."

[Rance]

She had gotten blood on her hands before.

Treadwell had been so much skin and so much blood. It had been under her short-chewed fingernails for days. Weeks. Despite her hatred for the waste of water, she had scrubbed her palms and knuckles until they'd gone pink and raw.

Her touch was not so hesitant in regard to Niall. She fought against the brimming tension between them, ignored -- as best she could -- the hollow echo of pain in the spearwielder's face. She worked with focus, folding tattered strips of the blood-wet cloth back on itself to reveal the grievous wound drawn into the tattooed flesh. She remembered seeing that primitive ink brighten and glow in the past, some wild phosphorescence permanently bound under the huntress' pores.

But when the response came, she stopped. Her fingers went cold.

"E-...Elliot?"

The name was question enough. Elliot Brown, in all his armor and finery, his pristine words, his gleaming smile. The thoughts blinded her as she haphazardly stuffed the torn sweater into Niall's fingers and said, "Press it roughly. Keep -- keep in the blood and keep out the summer air. Too much of -- of the wetness and mildew in the air will make the wound angry and white.

"I -- I want to help," she said, her face long with honesty, betraying all the arguments and displeasures she'd experienced at with the tattooed woman. "I can sew it. I am with a needle what you are with a spear. The -- the stitches will not be able to stay long, but they'll do until I can help you get to the Rememdium. Do you understand me?"

She dumped out her satchel into the grass and began sifting through the cluttered belongings. Trying to find thread. Something strong, thin, and without a dye.

Over her shoulder, while a a tear dangled like a crystal from an eyelash, she said:

"Why?"

[Jirai]

The leather vest was a tough thing, even soaked in blood as it was. Beneath it though, her stomach was as tattooed as her arms and hands, the bloody gash a violent severing of those runes as well as the flesh they were tattooed on. The markings remained dull and lifeless as the seamstress worked, tacit permission.

"Close it." She'd not made a sound as the seamstress looked at the wound, would not, despite the paleness in her face, the tension in her jaw. "I don't... need anything else." No Rememdium. "...Just close it." She closed her eyes briefly, opening them only when the younger girl asked her question.

Why.

If she hadn't been sitting here with a hole through her middle, Niall would have a tirade to answer that question. As it was, she managed only a few words.

"Why do... you think?"

[Rance]

A pale thread was procured. With bloody hands she unwound it from its bobbin, then unsheathed one of the steely needles from her rough sleeve. Despite the wetness on her fingers, the girl managed to lance frayed edge through eye and wielded the needle like a miniature dagger.

But before embroidering-point ever found flesh, a gloved hand reached out to touch Niall's cheek. The girl's fingers quivered almost as if they yearned to squeeze into the hinge of the spearwielder's jaw, snap it like fine porcelain. But all she did was brush the pads of her fingers against the skin there. An attempt at comfort. A friendly ease while--

--a Dream-born discomfort flickered behind her eyes.

"Trust me, Elliot. Trust me for this."

She yanked the thread through the skin-holes, the string gummy with clumps of drying blood. The seamstress was two stitches in before the breathing stopped. Everything about Niall stopped.

Stitches couldn't help everything.

"No," Gloria blurted, before she crouched close enough to Niall to see the wound again and smell its sour, sucking odor. "No, we -- we are not going to simply trust this to stitches. When we are done, I am going to help you to the Rememdium. Seams cannot fix what may be wrong within. A punctured air-lung or -- or a pierced organ.

"The more quickly you heal, the less chance that -- that Elliot Brown can do this again to you. Do not be stubborn. Do not be a stone."

Her patchwork skirts were splayed out in a pool. There under the tree, by way of guttering lantern-light, she roughly pressed together the edges of the wound, blood crackling between her knuckles. With one final warning glance to the spearwielder, she touched needlepoint to flayed flesh, gave a faint jab, and slid through the first suture--

--trying not to vomit, for skin was so much like tough fabric, and the point probed with resistance before finally lunging through and drawing thread along with it.

Why do... you think?

"Because he is -- is not Elliot Brown anymore," the girl said, with disgust. "Because he is a knight."

[Jirai]

Niall would have bitten the girl's fingers off for that familiarity, fingers dancing along scarred cheek - literally or figuratively - had she been herself. But she did not have the energy or the will to yell at or argue with the girl who was doing her best to help the irascible young woman. All she could do was sit there, leaning back against the tree, and watch as the girl thrust a needle through tattooed flesh, a quick catch of her breath the only reaction Niall gave. It was a small pain, compared to the other, after all.

"Because..." she breathed, "I am... an idiot."

[Guppy]

The wildling finally felt strong enough to venture into the woodlands to search for her forgotten traps. She had neglected them far too long and it was long past time making them more functional. She had aimed to annoy her Lady by making certain that she did not catch anything, but the Lady did not seem to care. Ineffective rebellion was hardly worth her time, was it? So, with the rising sun at her back, she had slipped into the treeline and let her soft, well-made boots carry her forward. Trap by trap was adjusted and made operational. Satisfied, she brushed her hands clean on her uniform and made a sour face at the sight of the Lady's colors.

Exhausted, for she was not fully healed, she was heading back towards the tavern when the scent of blood startled her senses. Eyes narrowing, the tracker stooped and peered at the bright splashes of rust-colored blood against a leaf. Her head lifted and her gaze narrowed. There was some hesitation as she glanced at the tavern in such close proximity and wondered if she should leave this task to others.

Curiosity won and she moved forward, hearing voices and seeing the bright light of a lantern ahead as night gathered like a blanket. Her feet carried her closer, seeing the stooped figures bent close together. "Gloria?," she called, for she knew that voice. Eyes searched the other, struggling to see in the fading light.

[Rance]

"Yes you are," she agreed, but added with no hesitation, "and so am I. Which supposes that you and I are more alike than you like to admit, Niall."

The stitching was a delicate process; it was not a matter of sweeping up-and-down, up-and-down, but of biting free each and every suture after the needle was drawn so that she could tie the stitches separately. The wound kissed together unevenly, its red-edged lips an uneven pucker as she worked a second--

(She watched the rise and fall of Niall's chest like a vigilant bird after the second, as if she feared that the heart might stop and the lungs might cease to drawn breath)

--and a third. Her whole body seemed to tighten every time steel punched itself through tattooed skin. She watched as thread turned from white to red as it dragged through the soft tissue. But what Niall might have seen was not a flighty, foolish girl, but a woman whose eye followed each draw of the string and whose fingers stopped shaking the moment they were put to task. "Then you know," she said. "You know that -- that something is wrong with Elliot, and something must be remedied. Don't breathe too heavily," the seamstress warned, "and loosen up; I don't want to pierce a muscle or to harm you any more than you already are.

"But that doesn't explain why he -- he stabbed you." Why he tried to kill you, she thought to say, because no blade sought out its target except to kill -- not here, not in the guts. "Tell me. Tell me why he would do that to -- to someone he cared for as deeply as you."

Gloria?

Noura would find the seamstress squatting at Niall's side, her tangled hair and skirts like an apron to hide the other girl's wound. Her bare palm and gloved hand were saturated with the tattooed girl's blood. Threads hung like lifeless filaments from her knee, and the lantern illuminated the pair like they'd been discovered in a secret, a conspiracy.

"Noura," the stout girl said with some relief in her voice. "It's Niall. The lantern," she instructed, the black sweat on her cheeks hiding the fear she had buried for Niall -- but Noura knew her, likely enough to see it. "She's -- she's hurt."

[Jirai]

What Niall might have seen... had only she been looking. The young woman's breathing was uneven, dark eyes moving about ceaselessly but only rarely resting on the seamstress, poised over the scarred girl's middle. Relaxing was quite out of the question after all of this, and with Gloria's questioning on top. The seamstress was quite right, of course - this was meant to be a death-thrust, even if the knight had missed his aim somewhat. The wound was still bad enough, and made worse by the twist he had given it.

"I thought..." Her voice was quieter, now, intentionally or not. "I thought he... wouldn't. ...Couldn't." Not true, and the proof of that was writ on the girl's tattooed body - and not just in the wound Gloria was stitching. That was only the worst of it. Her hand still dripped blood, and there was a cut on her chest as well.

"I tried..." Dark eyes flickered at the approach of another. "...to talk... to him."

[Guppy]

Gloria was hunched over a shadowed figure and the whelp's brows furrowed. Gloria glanced up and their eyes met across the untamed lawn of the tavern. Her fearless friend held raw despair within her gaze and there was cold sweat upon her brow. In a moment, so quickly it seemed that her feet had spawned tiny wings, she was at the other's side.

Startled, woeful gaze swept across Niall's prone form and she moved to nearly collapse at her side upon her knees. Unthinking, for she should have been more aware of the danger touching the scarred one posed, she moved to grope blindly for Niall's hand. She tried to entangle their fingers in support. Her eyes were fastened in horror upon the wound that Gloria was tending to, the blood seeping across the torn skin and healing hands. Unable to look away.

With free hand, she moved to fish for the lantern with hands that felt so clumsy to hold it high for Gloria. She would need all the light she could, in this gathering darkness. Her brain felt slow, sluggish, and she sought to catch understanding in their words.

Niall's words made her feel as if someone had gathered icy water from the lake in the depth of winter and poured it down her back. Him. Him was always the same person. Not to mention that hurt in her voice was unmistakeable. "El-- Elliot did this? He -- He did this?," she asked, her voice numb as the hand holding the light aloft quickly sunk to the forest floor. She stared into space as if she had lapsed into some kind of comatose state. Abruptly, her hand tore away from the other, if she'd managed the grasp. She got her feet and stumbled a short distance away before collapsing. She turned away from them on hands and knees and vomited up the bile left within her stomach in great sobbing heaves. There was nothing left by the time she turned back, tears damp on her cheeks.

And then, red rune flared to life upon the nape of her neck and black color flooded her eyes. "I will rip him apart so that his unborn children's children feel every second of it." Cold. Factual. The creature was awake and furious. How dare he.

[Rance]

"He is -- is unamenable. He is -- is something different, Niall."

She'd eyes wholly for her task. Her lip twitched, her jaw tightened, and she pried each thread through with careful grace. The wound was an exclamation point, a closing line with a tongue of blood that refused to do anything but trickle down along the tattooed girl's navel. "We must talk, but not here," for however she'd asked such questions, demanded direct answers, "else you'll breathe too much with the words, and the stitches will not take; they shall pop right out, and there will be too much--"

Noura was there, the tin lantern raised, spilling light across the thrm. The black wound of a torn stomach, the seamstress' red-washed hands, the needle looking more like a sliver of ruby than of steel.

He -- He did this? she asked, before the lantern-light shook, shifted, and spilled them into darkness as Noura turned away and burst like a sickly child into the grass. It was by the grace of the Nameless that the girl knew well her seams and splits; she'd worked enough of the sutures already to continue, if with reduced ease, in the dark. "We have had our differences," a cool, truncated explanation for the spearwielder, "but -- but it behooves us to act as compatriots for now, Niall. I hate blood; I hate seeing someone hurt. Anyone."

When Noura returned, though, the seamstress felt a cold and creeping weight underneath the wool of her winter-proper dress; an instinct, a tugging sense of threat, the hair on the back of her neck and a timid belief that something in the grove was not right, was suddenly very wrong.

The voice told her so. It.

The seamworker's response was sharp, head turned, copper-shilling teeth gritted with displeasure at the interruption.

"You will not, and -- and if you value Niall's life in any way, you will be silent. Do you hear me," with acute, Jernoan impatience. "You will bring Noura back, you will have her hold the lantern, and you will shut up while I do my work."

But never did a stitch slip; never, even in the dark, even as she started putting the final suture to flesh.