Feathers

[Glenn]

Glenn Burnie was silent as Benedict spoke. And the bird did speak. He covered the sort of ground one would expect out of a creature with a larger wingspan, a hawk, perhaps. Conking her on the head. What Glenn might get away with because of his queen-granted status (queen-endured, perhaps?). Where she'd go? Where she'd be safe, away from the Woods, away from the Town, away from Catch.

"Benedict," the sound of the chair being turned by the man sitting in it and the horrific torture inflicted upon the innocent floor it sat upon was unpleasant to say the least but it was still better than what was about to come from the mouth of Glenn Burnie and they both well knew it. "Every iota of your being is straining against this. I'd be offended save for that I know how seriously you take your charge. Offended, mind you, not due to your lack of faith but instead by the unpleasant thought that I enjoy your company far more than you enjoy mine. I'll attribute your tone to the stress of the situation because, as I told you before I am the sort of hypocrite that turns a blind eye in the name of things such as fraternal affection."

He wasn't the sort of man who liked to see anyone suffer, especially a friend, but he had his pride and he had his sense of identity and they were focused and concentrated in a very distinct and specific way. "So, let me help you the rest of the way. Let's be absolutely clear about this. What you are asking of me, because you have literally no other choice in the matter, is to figure out what the hell is going on with your Queen." Burnie opened the door, but it would be up to Benedict to fly through it.

[Niabh]

The squeal of wood on wood was enough to set anyone’s teeth on edge. The raven, lacking teeth, first scrabbled, flapping, then the force of his flapping seemed to cause him to literally explode in a starburst of black feathers that eddied away, drifted up to a shelf, and reconstituted into a ruffle-necked raven that leaned down toward Glenn, bobbing for balance.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Because you know and I know that the alternative to us figgering it out here, on our own, at least one of us but probably you, is that they’re going to try to figger out on their end, on their own terms, and neither of us are going to have any more say in it when they decide what to do, and whatever their plan is, it’s going to end bad for somebody. Maybe just them, maybe all Myrken, maybe feckin’ everyone if the big guy gets involved, and guess what? He’s already involved. And if she realized any of that, she’d snap out of this little la-la-land she’s currently stuck in, because she doesn’t want any of that to happen, either. The fact that she hasn’t realized it yet—or if she has realized it, and still hasn’t snapped out of it—means that she can’t. So great. That means it’s down to us, and it’s a real narrow window of time, and I am a bird and you are a wanker and I don’t like those odds. I am a little stressed out.”

He huffed mightily. More feathers drifted out, floating toward the floor. For once the raven looked like a cat, hunched and ready to swipe its claws if a hand reached out for him.

He blurted out, “She told you, didn’t she? That when she goes home, I stay here? She mention that I asked if I could stay?”

[Glenn]

She did listen to him, or at least heard him. Sometimes, she listened. She almost always heard, though. She gave him a great deal of leeway, a great deal of latitude. She hadn't turned him into a fish as of yet, no matter how much she suggested it and the few times she actively threatened it. There were certain things that she had warned against, that she had expressed her strong displeasure over. They weren't about asking questions of her, of wishing for things, certainly not of desiring for anything at all. Speaking about her when she was not there? Seeking to do things in her interest without her permission? Though they were doing both now, they were frowned upon and warned against. Seeking out her personal secrets, however? That was perhaps the worst and while he did not fear any sort of retribution at her hand, he did respect her and her wishes and while he tested said retribution by seeking out what he could of her people, he'd never gone far behind her when it came to her own past or nature.

Though he had made light of it, this was crossing a special sort of line, and were he to do it, it would be at Benedict's request and due not his own natural curiosity. Hopefully the bird knew that for the queen would know and she would respond accordingly.

For now, though, hearing the last thing his friend said, Glenn found himself momentarily at a loss. Thankfully, due to way the statement was phrased, he wasn't lost for long. "No, she didn't tell me." And then, because he knew her, he also knew to add, his voice steady and even. "She probably didn't think it was hers to tell."

[Niabh]

“Well then, now you know.” A curt flip of the tail, stiff and uncomfortable with the admission. When the lady hadn’t mentioned it to Glenn when he came to her in the Woods, Benedict assumed she must have written him about it and that the whole thing was agreed and foregone. Another good case for literacy. “So now that loyalty’s off the table, can we get on with this?”

He hopped off his shelf and fluttered to rest on the back of the chair, inconveniently just over Glenn’s shoulder, casting a bulky shadow across the wall. “It was the letters,” he said, sounding surprised. “She’s been tryin’ to clean out the old place. One day I swung by to see if she planned on eating anything that day and she was just sittin’ on her stump with a big pile of letters. Reading. And the next day, she talked. That’s when she wrote to you.” His wings wilted. “And then the day after that she stopped again. It kind of comes and goes in spurts. I don’t think she forgets how; I think…maybe she forgets she needs to? Like, she forgets not everyone speaks in head-nuzzles? Which is another thing. She forgets to eat. I don’t think Catch needs to eat, and if he doesn’t, she doesn’t either. Only she forgets for like three-four days in a row and she’s starting to look like the baobhan-sith.”

[Glenn]

"Nothing's off the table, but this matter is tabled for now, at least," because that decision had just raised any number of other questions. One shouldn't jump to conclusions over someone else's significant decisions. "The matter at hand is pressing, after all."

It was pressing enough that she wasn't eating, for one thing, that she wasn't hiding that fact or the effects of it, for another. Burnie had spent days with her, not many, but enough, and in that time, he rarely saw her true form. She wore a glamourie like others wore clothes so this meant she was walking around functionally naked and not caring the least about it.

"Benedict, you need understand that I've spent over ten years of my life studying Catch, that I've delved deep into your Queen and her people and their power, that I've not nearly devoted that sort of time to Gloria, no, but that I have some working knowledge of her culture and of her misadventures here in Myrken and abroad. There's so much that it's hard to know where to start. If it is the intersection of the three of them that might be the issue."

Yet despite that, despite what he had been told, he wasn't convinced. Gloria was a beacon to power an disruption in a similar way to how he was. Maybe she had internalized it more. Maybe she had embraced it more earnestly. He had been affected by it, changed, but had not become magical at all in his own right. As much as he would like to, he couldn't be fully assured of that with her. But whatever she was, it was not Catch. "He exists in all times. At any moment, he sees yesterday, today, and tomorrow, all at once, though tomorrow is, I think, less vivid, shifting. Even an inhuman mind learns not to look at that. I think he may see multiple pasts as well, not just his own, but that of others who had been close to him. If this doesn't end soon, someday, he may see hers as well. Her power stretches the perception of time. I have personal experience with such. I've starved as well in similar settings. Catch saved me then, actually," and the memory of that experience, the hunger, the hallucination, the Catch that had appeared to him after Rhaena died, as he was so close to his own death almost halted his ever escaping voice, almost but not quite "But her glamourie combined with his presence might be turning it all back upon her, especially if she has reason to escape from the understanding of time's passage, from reality.

"So," he shifted, in his seat, within the conversation, but not his own internal position, so rarely that. "It's time you told me about the torc then, Benedict."

[Niabh]

“The torc? It’s the torc.” He blinked, wondering if Glenn was simply having him on or waiting to see what he said so he could catch him lying. “The Niall torc. I told you not to try to take it off her because you can’t take it off while she’s still alive; it would kill you. I mean, I guess technically she would kill you but it comes down to the same thing because she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. The queen and her torc are one.” The weary intonement sounded like a quote, which it was. “She only wears it when there’s going to be a battle. That’s what scared me. Thought she was plannin’ to go out there and wipe out the whole town to get you back again.”

He twisted his head toward Glenn, curious. It was the last question he expected and he hoped Glenn knew where he was going with that particular line of thought because Benedict sure didn’t.

“Sooo…I think I’m going to have to break a few confidences for this one, Glenn.” They were way too far down the road for it to matter much anymore, but it still mattered to him. It would matter later, in a future he imagined would contain a Queen capable of being angry with him. The time he spent exiled to silence still burned behind his sternum like a hot coal, a mingle of resentment and indignation and the curious native instinct related to neither: the one that made you avoid things that got you hurt the last time, long after the things themselves were rendered harmless. “For starters…please tell me you already know Catch has a kid.”

[Glenn]

There was a method to this, to all of this. That is what Glenn had tried to express to the raven. There had to be a method to this, because there was simply too much information. The intersection of Catch, Gloria, and Fionnuala was incredibly complex. Just Catch and the Tuatha Queen would be hard enough. He had to swipe at the largest and most specific gaps. "If I want to understand what's going on, I need to understand the powers at play. You're most likely right. If I took it off, she'd kill me. If I fail to understand what Catch can and can't do, how it might affect what she can and can't do, I might well get her killed in an attempt to get her out. So yes, she and it are one. She wear it when going to battle. You can't take it off without getting killed because she wouldn't be able to stop herself. None of that actually tells me anything though. Does it have power itself? Does it enhance her power? Does it allow her to channel power within her that she can't otherwise access? Can she usually access that extra power but not safely? Is it because of her blood or her mantle? Does having this power make her the queen or does being the queen give her the power?" The questions came quickly, but he didn't actually expect answers out for most of them. It was primarily pedagogical in showing Benedict the sort of things they were facing.

So then, when the bird sent things askew with an seemingly unrelated question, it brought Burnie's hand up to his face, energy dispersed into a tasked rubbing of eyes. "In the general sense, I think he has the memories of children from over the centuries within him, perhaps. In the specific sense, I have some suspicions, yes, but no more. That's partially on purpose. It felt rather best for everyone if I didn't delve too deeply into such matters. It gave my intentions a certain level of honest deniability." Discretion was within Burnie's skillset but restraint was certainly less so. "You're saying that we no longer have that luxury though?"

[Niabh]

After about the fourth question, the raven began to first twitch, then flap his wings as if warding off a predator. A wingtip tapped Glenn’s ear and the raven, catching himself, settled a bit, still antsy and unnerved. “Glenn, Glenn, I don’t know all of this stuff, what? You want backstory, you go to a bard. I’m a raven. I only know what she’s told me. I know you get the torc when you become queen, and after that whoever had it last isn’t queen anymore—either they’re dead or they’ve abdicated. I know they wear ’em into battle because it’s good luck, and if you haven’t figgered it out by now, anything a Tuatha calls ‘good luck’ is probably at least partway magic. And I know that the one she wears ain’t the real one. I mean, it’s real enough, in that whatever it does, it works, but it’s not the one she should’ve inherited. The High Queen took the real one when she killed the lady’s grandmother. It’s a sore point, but I don’t know if it means anything. Not in the way you mean it to mean something.”

The last question, by sheer happenstance, he could answer. “It’s both. Being the queen gives her the power and having the power makes her queen. Like two halves of a lodestone—if they’re close enough, they snap back together. It’s the one point His Lordship’s actually gotten right all this while: if she wasn’t really queen, she couldn’t bear the power.”

To his surprise, and something of his amusement, Glenn seemed to reel back his enthusiasm on the subject of Catch and kids. He wondered which Glenn liked less: the subject of kids in general or conversational turns he couldn’t predict. An interesting debate, but unfortunately not one of much relevance under the circumstances. “Yeah, I hear you, I kind of wish I knew a little bit less about this subject, too. Short version: Catch has a kid. Lady is Tuatha. Tuatha like kids. Lady likes Catch. Lady likes Catch’s kid beyond all measurable reason. Gloria has kid. Lady does not like Gloria.”

He managed to fix Glenn with a pure blue stare, though his body wobbled under the strain of focus. “Lady has been plotting about this for a long, long time.”

[Glenn]

"You don't know," which he wasn't about to hold against his companion. It wasn't that he exactly knew Benedict didn't know, but he certainly assumed much would be unanswerable. In fact, he also assumed a bard would only help him so much. They didn't think about the nature of their power any more than humans thought much about how they spoke or breathed. Some might, yes, but very few generalists would have that sort of knowledge. It was hardly fair, of course, since the Tuatha could both speak and breathe as well, but that was Burnie's burden as a human dealing with them.

That he knew about the torc at all was appreciated, though the specific bit of knowledge was not particularly helpful. "Does the high queen's madness come in part from wearing a torc not meant for her?" At that he shook his head. Speaking of not helpful, that was the very definition of it. "Nevermind that. Does Finn still wear the torc or has she taken it off? Does she still think herself in some sort of battle?"

Even despite Burnie's barrage of questions and the point behind them, that there were such powers at play and only by understanding the intersection between them could they untangle her from all of this, the conversation careened in a very different direction. It was an understandable one given the revelation however, and this, more so than almost anything the bird had witnessed Glenn read or hear, brought forth a silence in the former governor. By now, despite the differences in their cultures and physiology, the constant churning of Glenn Burnie's mind should have been rather obvious. It may have been difficult to know exactly what he was thinking now save for the fact it was substantial in quantity. Occasionally his eyes darted to the raven. Occasionally his lips pursed into a frown. Only once or twice did he seem like he was about to talk. Eventually, he allowed his eyelids to droop downwards for three long, tortured seconds of darkness and silence, before opening them again and finally, staring Benedict down, words escaped his lips.

"First and foremost, I do not blame you. Not only do I understand your burden and how unprecedented all of this is and how unprepared you or any of your line would be for it, but you made numerous attempts in your own way. It's frustrating, I'd say," and here, just a spot of hesitation as he looked for the right thought to pluck and place into audial reality. "frustrating that this comes after I mention my hypocrisy. It makes it difficult to make excuses for her now. That her manner is so different when she is with me does not help matters. Truly, it confuses things. It invokes nature in a way that I have spent years learning to scorn. It's hard to see her avarice as anything but primal, however. The root of it may do with the survival of her species, but such an instinct has grown into a tree of desire instead of simple necessity. I suppose we humans are not much different."

He placed two fingers upon the top of his nose, one at either side, in a small pinching motion, and pulled them back and forth slowly to rub at the top of his cheeks. Now, again, he shut his eyes. When he continued, it was without apology or much further sympathy. "Tell me her plot, then."

[Niabh]

He was so used to dealing with his mistress, who tended to feel things all over the place. Grand proclamations and arm gestures and dramatic posing, as if whatever she felt was too huge and urgent to be contained. By contrast, Glenn hardly even smiled. Like their writing. Happy humming versus the inscrutable steady scratch of a sharp pen on coarse parchment. All conflicted by the fact that Benedict was hard-pressed to read faces anyway. He didn’t know. He could guess. Glenn stared him down and the raven was forced to look away.

“I wouldn’t be tellin’ you this now, either, if I didn’t think maybe we’re at the point that none of it matters anymore. Or that I didn’t believe you’d see your way to helping her anyways, no matter what she’s done.” Rather, he’d believed that until about thirty seconds ago, or about a hundred-fifty heartbeats for him. “If this is the moral bridge too far for you, you can step out of it. I’ll handle things until her folks get here. I’ll still keep you posted, either way.”

The whole speech felt like an awkward farewell, one of those that never quite reached a resolution and only got stickier the longer it went on, particularly since about halfway through that one, he realized he was trying to reassure Glenn, of all people, who had never seemed to either require or appreciate reassurance. The raven folded himself sleek, straightened himself up, took a few blinks to get his scrambled thoughts in order, and launched into it like a formal report. Reconnaissance.

“She convinced Catch to make her the kid’s godmother. I don’t even know what that means. I know back home it’s your tionscnóir, your…like if you wanted to join the clan, you’d need someone who was born into the clan to say ‘sure, I know that guy, let’s let him in’—that’s your tionscnóir. She’s real insistent that she wants to get hold of this kid before it gets too much older, and she doesn’t want to keep it Here because Here’s too close. Especially now that Gloria’s sniffing around. But like I said, I don’t know how she plans on sneakin’ it back home without sneakin’ herself back home, too. But she’s said…well, not really said, but she sure as hell implied she’s got someone on the inside. For a while I even thought the person she had on the inside might be you.”

He sneaked a glance at Glenn again, as if it still might be, then shivered and stamped a scaly foot.

“But I knew you’d never go along with it, not in a thousand years. But then I thought…what if she’s nudging him? What if she’s making him do something and he don’t even know it?”

Another bleak, fleeting glance, helpless.

“I promise you, if I thought for serious she was doing something like that? I’d’ve told you long ago. It’s just…I don’t know anyone else she’s that tight with. She’s got deals with people all over this town, here and there, and I know there’s even a couple of folks she’s holding something over, but there’s no one, but no one, that I know about, that she’d go so far as to let them anywhere near Cnoch-na-Niall. Even for a kid. It’s got to be either someone she trusts with her life or someone in hock up to the eyeballs.”

[Glenn]

"Let's look at the practicalities." Benedict had seen him as raw, unbridled energy. That was not this. He'd seen him afflicted and, as Burnie said, allergic, reacting certainly, to his mistress' power and presence. That was not this. He'd also seen him restless, all but tearing at himself out of boredom or malaise or a certain lack of purpose. That was certainly not this. Here he was poised and primed, like a predator preparing to strike. There had been that moment of some constrained emotion, perhaps grief, and the rubbing of nose and eyes to go along with it, but now that was no longer this either. "I am uniquely ill-suited to achieve her ends with either Catch or Gloria. There was a time, in Razasan, where out of shared experience and distant familiarity, Gloria and I were becoming close. It was Finn herself who served a catalyst to disrupt that."

Finally, a wave of his hand, dismissive, begrudgingly admitting a need to go back one step to go forward too. "Do not misunderstand me, Benedict. I see now certain behaviors of hers that I previously took for granted or accepted without suspicion in a new light. That light does not implicate her in all things, but it does create the need to examine and reexamine many of them. Coincidence becomes less acceptable at face value. Still, I do not believe she has been grooming me," as one might a pony, "for that role. I am uniquely ill-suited for it," he repeated that turn of phrase, emphasized it once more, and punctuated it even further with "uniquely," spoken once again, this time as its own entity. "A distraction, maybe. I'd serve as that.

"But no," he demurred, still staring down the bird that refused to look back, "primarily, I think she wanted her cake and to eat it too because this is what she always wants, and the best way to have that, at least in the short and medium term, would be to keep me as far away from it as possible." Now it was his turn to reassure Benedict, though in a true and bleak manner. "I'll have words for her, but not until we are sure she is safe and of sound mind once more."

That said, clearly and directly, he doubled back again. "I am not impractical, Benedict. I'm not Ariane, nor will I ever be. My lines to cross are sketched in and can be moved if necessary. I understand the need to repopulate her people using our own. I understand the benefit to starving, abused, parentless children to be offered a different fate. I can see a mutually beneficial arrangement, even a merciful one, when it is before me. For all Gloria's deficiencies, this is something else. Gloria herself took great steps, brave and cowardly ones both, to control for those deficiencies. Still, Fionnuala deserves an opportunity to admit that difference, and I'll see she's provided it, free from the thrall of Catch's proximity. For now, it's but one more thing to worry about, one more element of time, for if she has a plan in motion, that motion may have continued to move forward without her."

[Niabh]

“Yeah,” the raven replied, gloomily. “To be honest, that’s kinda how I knew you couldn’t be her man on the inside. She wouldn’t want you to be involved.”

The true reasons why were a matter of speculation. He could be kind and believe she wanted to keep Glenn innocent if it all backfired. He could be cynical and believe that she knew that no one would put a stop to her faster than Glenn. Or he could split the middle and believe that in spite of everything else, she didn’t want Glenn to feel differently toward her. He’d juggled the three possibilities for months. None of them seemed any weightier than the rest.

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean that. I may have been sliiiightly overdoin’ it when I said I could handle this alone. I’m just sorry you had to find out this way.” He thought it over. “Well…no, I’m not, because you didn’t have to find out this way. I’m sorry no one told you from the start. The reason she took my voice that time is because I threatened to tell you everything. Actually I threatened to tell everyone everything, but I knew mentioning you in particular would snap her out of it. Only she kind of snapped more’n I expected.”

The raven had a good sense for a predator. It made him want to get a little distance from Glenn. He abandoned the top of the chair for the corner of the desk—the far corner, closest to the pinnacle of the shelf and the ever-present escape hatch of a window—and blinked as his eyes readjust to the direct harshness of the lamp, which was a lot simpler than acclimating himself to Glenn’s shift of mood.

“Look. Why I’m tellin’ you this now is…I wonder if Gloria knows. It’d explain why she sent in the whole town after her, but it wouldn’t explain why it all just ended. Gloria don’t strike me as a one-and-done kinda girl, if you get me. Especially over something like this. Either way, if she doesn’t know, she ought to. I mean, it’s her kid too, right? And this probably just feels like this blew up out of nowhere for her. I just don’t see anyway of tellin’ her that wouldn’t lead to her going back out there.”

He felt like a damn goldfinch, picking and pecking daintily amid a whole lot of bad blood and hurt feelings. Glenn. And Gloria, who he didn’t even know and didn’t give a hang about, except that she’d gotten the short end of the stick somewhere. The lady had come between Gloria and Glenn. Like Glenn, he now had to wonder if she’d done it on purpose—broken a potential line of communication, covering her tracks—and it wasn’t a thing he liked to wonder about his lady. But she was still a Niall. No matter how preferable a Niall she was compared to His Lordship (to whom he had once, by mistake, referred to as “His Loudship,” and hadn’t she laughed at that?), the Niall would out, somewhere.

“I just got this feeling. Things are doing whatchamacallit. Gatherin’ up from all sides in the same spot. Converging. There’s a piece missing. I want to find out what happened in those woods before Catch showed up. Maybe he knows. And I want to find out who this inside man is. Maybe if they find out she’s incapacitated, they’d be more willing to spill.”

Leverage. Bad leverage. Revealing that the queen was weak, that she couldn’t carry out her threats or make good her promises. Outright treason. His wings drooped. “I feel like kind of a shitty raven right now.”

[Glenn]

"In all my life," he began that statement with some real weight behind it, gravitas; Benedict had some idea of what he had been through, even if he didn't live nearly as long as the Tuatha, "I've never met a person who radiates with the sheer notion of cost more than Gloria Wynsee. I almost want Finn back just so I can explain that to her and see her face when I do. Around Gloria, the maximum price is paid. Consequence is somehow maximized. If there's a moral cost to something that she does, that is done to her, that is done around her, it is paid to the utmost. There are no lucky breaks. There is no chance for something to be hid away in some closet. The other way is never looked. She is literal. She is unwavering. The world is unwavering to her. The world is unwavering around her. So, when I tell you that we should not tell her now, I know full well there will be a cost to that. But no, of course we shouldn't tell her now, for those very reasons. This is not the time to escalate matters. It's the time to avoid further escalation from outside parties. It's a time to bring your little queen back into herself, and yes, so long as we act with some haste, to give her a chance, on her own, to do the correct thing. We'll pay for it, but my existence is an endless list of decisions that cost me Gloria Wynsee's regard in order for some greater good." That was all steady, perhaps a bit overdramatic but warranted, absolutely warranted. Now, though, his voice dropped again. "If Fionnuala does not do the right thing, however, then yes, we tell Gloria, but not until we give her a chance."

The raven, was, however, absolutely correct about one thing. They were missing things. They did not know enough, and the things that were converging were great powers indeed. "Benedict, we need to know more. I've been holding back somewhat, out of regard and respect for her. That's over now, as per your request," because he couldn't just do it without the bird opening the door. He'd used that excuse before with her; not out of simple friendship but because of an official summons from her herald, "but first I need to know if there's anything else you haven't told me."

[Niabh]

“That’s why I said she ought to be told, not that we should fly right out and tell her.” That right there was a whole conversation to be had about the difference between moral obligation and survival, but the raven was not in the mood. Glenn could write someone a nice fat letter about it, he was sure. “Druther tell her than Catch, really. I think she screwed him. By that I mean she swindled him.” With the lady, one always had to clarify. “I’m bettin’ she didn’t tell him what she was up to when she got him to agree to this tionscnóir thing.”

Glenn described Gloria as a force of nature. Catch, meanwhile, was an actual force of nature. Between the two, he knew who he’d rather face with nasty news.

“I know tellin’ you not to do something’s the best way to make you do it, but just to clear my accountability here: the worst thing you can do is tell her she can’t have that kid. Tell her she shouldn’t do it, discuss the ethics or whatever the hell it is you two talk about, lie to her and act like you’re all for it, whatever, but do not tell her to her face that she can’t. A kid is a whole other fish. Please repeat to me what I just said and don’t do that thing where you explain to me why your way is right and mine’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. It’s also the only way this is gonner work.”

Now Glenn presented him with the difficult challenge of trying to think of every damn thing he might not have told him, and to look at them through the harsh new light of gleaning for things that might have seemed perfectly ordinary but could have meant more. Trying to recall every single time she’d gone to town, and if she’d mentioned why, or if she could have told him one thing and done something different. To his credit, he put a hard five seconds of thought into it.

“Glenn, you gotter understand. She’s got dozens of scams that she lives off, day to day. She’s got scams I didn’t even know were scams. Apparently it’s illegal Here to tell someone you’re a Crown revenue officer when you’re not. Who knew, right?” He shook himself, then sneezed. The sneeze seemed to jog loose a thought. Brightening, he straightened up, very pleased with himself. “Oh! There was some ring of yours she’s trying to steal. Does that mean anything?”

[Glenn]

"If the ring's the next biggest of our worries, then that's reassuring," though he wasn't entirely convinced it was the next biggest, only that it was the next biggest that directly involved Glenn. Even that was helpful though, when they were half wondering if he might be some sort of enchanted patsy for a kidnapping and was just being used all along as part of an extended scheme. Still, there was so much to cover and this was a false trail. "We don't really have time to linger on it, but I don't want you to think I'm holding things from you. You don't know what's in the letters. I don't know what she's told you and what she hasn't. Our disadvantage in communication is not knowing what the other doesn't know."

That wasn't an answer. Instead, it was a path that would waste them even more time with little gain, so he put a hand upon the nearby table, as if to brace himself, and went through it quickly. "Old enemy. She's as responsible as anyone for what happened to Rhaena. Other than me, maybe, but that me wouldn't have existed if I hadn't been trying to get revenge on her. Anyway, she sent me a trap. The ring's a trap. A temptation too. Not much of one. She has high opinions of herself. Higher than your queen's and less warranted. I might want to spring the trap at some point. Finn wouldn't trust me to so she'd rather take the choice out of my hands, because that's what queens do. And that's that. Not important for now." So long as Benedict knew who Rhaena was, that should have smoothed that bit over. In the moment, he wasn't sure, but he wasn't going to open the door by doubling back. "It's a relief if that is the biggest scheming I don't know about."

There were more important things by far and he'd choose to revisit them instead. "If she's tricked Catch that's a price she'll have to pay later, I imagine. One might say she's paid already, but we both know that's probably not the case. If she'd been honest about it, she might have gotten her way. I'm not sure he would have been opposed to the idea. As for the rest, how I deal with her will depend on how I find her and how much progress we make in restoring her." It was that simple. There were too many unknowns as of yet. "The only way it's all sunk is if she honestly believes that she was sent here to Myrken specifically to abscond with Catch's child. I don't think that's the case, but if it is, we'll have to prepare for the worst."