On a desk in the Marshall's room sits a page upon which she'd detailed the threat which Myrken faces. She'd written it months ago, and it begins with this:
an amateur's fumbling demonstration of two minds existing in near-Perfect tandem. What is known by one is known by both; a trouble shared is a trouble
magnified, a circumstance that is made all the more acute by the fact that what they share is everything.
Everything. This, as explained painstakingly by Aleksei River, by Lamai Carver; even hating what they'd described, she had not failed to understand.
Everything which follows the diagram intends to map out an approach towards stabilising Myrken while managing a Governor who is not capable of being stable at all. In ink on parchment, a fatalist's assumptions war with a swordswoman's unyielding sympathies; expecting the worst only brings the best into sharper relief. Pragmatism falters, again and again, upon the slopes of precious humanity -
If I were to picture all of Myrken as a single lake, she'd told Darkenhold's architect, months ago - for her approach of this had begun
that far back.
If Myrken is a lake, then every action is a pebble flung into its surface, and because we number thousands there is no end to this, each rippling into the next, each touching and corrupting and embracing and effecting
patterns as far away as the opposite shore. It is not possible to act in isolation. Even the smallest thing has its repercussions.
If I am to unseat a man, she'd begun, her words already stumbling.
You must teach me this, she'd insisted, this woman who was never so demanding.
For what I will create with the solution to this problem is an avalanche. And I need its ripples to touch only one man.Because her fear had been civil war, the bloodsoaked, spiraling chaos which comes so naturally of an absence of leadership. And her error - as she saw sign after sign of a Myrken sinking into disarray; as she witnessed one madness after another, each one stranger than the one before - was not inaction, although there was that: a swordswoman's long and uncharacteristic hesitance.
Her error was believing that the problem was Glenn Burnie.
***
And now it is everything that she'd intended to forestall, conducted with all the quiet, stern care of which she is capable. By the time they've surrounded the Inquisitory, they tread pavements littered with blood. Here, where a small detachment of militiamen had collided with with a clutch of civil constables, a moment's shock evolving quickly into clubs and ready fists.
Here, where an attempt at ambush had fallen prey to keen-eyed archers;
here, where they'd chased a handful of crimson-clad men because the memory of stocks and whips was bright in their mind, and they'd cheered,
cheered when they found the stocks burned.
Vengeful, that lot. She'd knew there'd be no avoiding that, not completely; made her orders damned clear all the same and regretted, furiously regretted, that she had let it come to this at all.
Civil constables rally at the Foundation's square, where the fight grows heated and protracted. Atop rooftops, mustard-bright flags signal for reinforcements: men with rough barricades and perhaps the Shadow Militia hastens to join them, men and women who just moments ago saw - could have sworn they saw - perhaps
imagined they saw - a silver-stained wraith, pale beneath the sun....
The group which moves directly for the Meetinghouse is smaller than might be expected - given the importance of the location, given the nature of what they expect to find there. But these are men and women chosen specifically for the purpose: level-headed, quicker to think than act;
capable, all the same. They infiltrate the building at speed: move quickly amongst staring eyes and hesitant hands; they
search -
Not a word, when all of it comes to nothing: no sign of the woman who'd made herself Queen in all but name, no sign at all of the un-sane thing which had flung the Governor down into a labyrinth. Not one word, save for the quick instructions which she gives to her men, and:
"Time to leave," she murmurs - towards those clerks and secretaries that remain, as she retraces her way into the foyer. Towards eyes that have turned towards her, uncertain and wide, and with a jerk of her head back towards the Meetinghouse doors and the distant ring of conflict.
Take your chances, her eyes say, and they are a flood of sudden motion around her as she strides back into the sun.
Hrimfax. Haste. There is only one place that Rhaena Olwak might be hiding and heavy hooves devour the distance between Here and There; she does not dismount until she's come within two streets of the woman's home.
It's when she sees what's waiting here, narrow and dark upon the street-corner, that she pauses for the first time in days.