She'd listened. As the girl spoke, as she rifled through pages teeming with Genny's thoughts, the swordswoman had listened. Words becoming phrases, phrases cascading into statements; Ariane Emory may be the single soul in all of Myrken Wood who is
benefited by the inquisitor's hesitant stammer. Words cannot overwhelm when they hesitate from one moment to the next.
"She didn't 'see' -
you," she'd murmured very early into this, with a speculative narrowing of pale grey eyes.
An asset, she'd said long ago. An asset and a clever one, to have hidden so much for so long. But the moment does not allow for such words; her mind does not, and of all Myrken, Genny might be best positioned to understand this. The things she'd glimpsed, in that lightning-swift merger of minds; the things she'd immediately known.
But only that. Only that, as one word tumbles haltingly into the next: as Agnieszka becomes Rhaena-swain - had the very breath stilled in a swordswoman's throat? As a Governor absent became a Governor
stolen; as the girl gathers momentum and there's no mistaking it then, the weight that must have been crushing her all this time: the weight of whole months spent as the sole sane historian in a province gone increasingly mad.
Not a word. Not one, the realisation - not of what she must do, but what it would
cost - launched her fist against the wall, and again, and then again until the knuckles are stinging raw, and she has left a girl flinching who'd deserved far better by far. Even knowing this, she pauses here. With her hand flattened to the stone and narrow shoulders that do not sag, even when it shivers through her like exhaustion.
"He - "
Pauses, because the word had felt ashen and she hated the sound of it. Because it seemed to herald ignorance and it seemed to be the beginning of so much more: things that were
unsane, things that had ceased in particular ways to matter, burned away upon sunlit stairs beneath the everywhere scent of summer flowers. Lost beneath the tender weight of a thousand rushing recollections, but they were things that were
hers all the same, hers as surely as any other part of this, and for that alone mattered as surely as the breath in her lungs. She might have said
he promised me moonlight
but is this is not so much madness, as an artifact of the lady-thing that once she'd been. A fever dream half-recalled and as elusive as oil on glass, and when the soft, soft earnestness of Genevieve Tolleson describess the man as 'unchanged'
my lady, we have been swept up in this belief -
half-formed suspicion swells slow through her nerves, crystalising into an understanding that she does not want; that she accepts because by her very own reluctance she cannot avoid it. Some sound escapes her, soft and stunted; a chill crawls silently across her skin, and she does not speak until she can trust her voice to be steady; says not a word until she can trust it will not be a
shout, careless steel swiftly following. None of this is Genny's fault. It would be criminal to allow her to pay the consequences for it.
"Tell me where he has gone. And then, sera, it is time that we part ways."