Cause no trouble, the Constable had finally instructed, when all was muted and calm, and the travesty of his rough, bearded face with his wind-bitten lips somehow became lodged in her brain, a sad, necessary sight emblazoned like an afterimage in her eyes.
She resisted the burning urge to bend back her arm and throw Glenn Burnie's ring into the gutters, befoul it like it was some kind of crude, inhuman effigy, but--
--
deference to authority, Glenn Burnie had written about her over a year ago, and while
this commentary (she'd had no access to it, knew not at all that it even existed) had once been accurate, it was now defunct, ridden with the lice of liberated will.
(If, many years from now, she might come to thank Rhaena Olwak for one thing, it would be this: that authority, she'd learned, was not godlike; that here, in Myrken Wood, governments were not progenitors of divinity, but mere constructs of human control -- and Duquesne,
Duquesne would have reveled in this discovery, might have kept her up late hours for tea to discuss the differences she'd come to discover.)
But ask a seamstress left standing in the wake of speeches and discord if she knew what she believed in, she would, for once, have no words except--
"Liars."
(
agnieszka is a liar, a liar; but isn't it right that she should? Isn't itnatural
to want to forgive her?)
Time passed. She converged eventually with her brother, with Noura, with Mister Catch. For each one of them, a touch, a kiss, a timid embrace.
She said little. She simply spun the Governor's ring around her middle knuckle, next to the space where a ring-finger
should have been, but was left--
--left rotting in Golben, next to shattered edges of blood-browned mirror.