The Spirit is Willing

[Glenn]

Finn,

A brief paragraph on the topic of directness to begin. The connection between us is such that I could pick apart anything in this letter and analyze it in real time for you. We have exchanged letters like that and the weight upon this one invites it all the more, even if that would be the worst possible thing. Just in this paragraph alone I might have delved into why I did not say "Dear" or did not use a different name for you. You have been re-ensconced in your regal and courtly trappings and now some sort of honorific might be appropriate, especially if others may get their hands on this first (though that is unlikely given the messenger). Why Finn then? Why not "dear" even if you may be such a thing to me. Familiarity and abruptness. Brazen action and immediacy. Affection and brevity. Remember, for you do know, that I cannot help but think like this with every word. There is not halting this impetus in me. It does not make the words less honest, heartfelt, or resonant. In fact, I would hope this deliberation, internal and oft instantaneous as it might be, makes them all the more so. I will endeavor to leave out the usual tangents in the remainder of this letter, however, for we no longer have the luxury of unbridled communications as we once did when you had less burdens upon your time and there were less obstacles between us.

On to business then. I hope this finds you well (my idea of business? No, I cannot betray the spirit of the initial paragraph through parentheticals. I will strive to do better and trust that you know me well enough to create your own behind your eyes as you read). I have dealt with the imposition of no less than four members of your court, if one is to count the child, which you would and I'd rather not. Meg is fine. You abuse her by sending her my way but I have been heeding her instructions and I do think I grow upon her. Ask her that. No bard yet. Is that for Ainrid's sake or my own? Or yours. You know I'd say nothing incriminating to 'father.' When it comes to him, I am your perfect oathkeeper and you well know it. Ainrid though? Oh, the things I might do for your own good. A terrible thing, my affection, but what a tiny spark in the face of the flame that is your own.

If we are categorizing, that paragraph was (wry) pleasantries. Business needs come but absence calls for so much more first. I shall simply not answer any further.

I miss you. I am glad for Benedict's company. You, I imagine, miss me as well. Here is why. Had just one or two members of your court arrived, you would not have missed me at all. They would fill your heart and your mind and your time and your efforts. This, though, is likely overwhelming. The familiarity is not as familiar as it ought to be. With one or two people, you could build on the dissonance between new and old and forge wonderful new connections. Surrounded by the lot of them, that becomes less possible than it ought to be. I could help along the process. Benedict could have even more easily, if they would not look down upon him too much. Yet he is here with me and this letter is the first between us.

Pah (is it simple drama to write "Pah" in a letter?). That paragraph was wist. Another try.

My terms are simple. They benefit you more than I. Obviously we will have to grouse over every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' when the time comes (so don't look here for loopholes; this language is not close to final), but here is the rough shape of them. I do not impede you further. I do not speak of what you plan. I cannot even speak to Gloria nor write to her. In return, you do not harm her, beguile her, bewilder her, or transform her, not directly nor indirectly. Depending on how the negotiation goes, you may even have to protect her (to a level that is reasonable) from others doing those last few things. The contest will be fair over a span of time. Wins all around, Finn. It lessens the chance of outright war. It lets us continue to correspond and find a new beginning, one that could take on any number of useful shapes. It allows me to know I live my days knowing I did as moral a thing as I could have done given the severe power imbalance before me and you win a child's love, over time, 'fair and square,' which will make it all the stronger and more potent.

Or would you truly rather us be rivals? It seems a luxury you can ill afford considering the responsibility you carry. I can be very disruptive after all and you have so much more to do than you had previously. Still, if that's what you want, maybe we can agree upon a different deal.

I wrote that and decided it was entirely too provocative, so I scratched it through. How rare is it for me to do that? I hope you appreciate it.

I await.

Glenn

[Niabh]

The door flapped aside, catching Fionn dragging a slice of bread through a trencher of marrow and mutton, with a ball of it already stuffed in her cheek. She glared up at the intrusion, even though the only people who would dare barge in without announcing would be Ainrid (who had just left), Bruidda (in which case something had gone wrong), and Meg, which was who it happened to be.

Eagerly Fionn scooted her tray off her knees and chewed as quickly as she could to clear her mouth. “Meg!” Rising, she swooped down to plant a kiss on both Meg’s cheeks. “How long have you been back? I told you to come find me first.”

“I came to find you first,” Meg replied. “You were busy with Ainrid, so I went to set Tristan a list. Look what he brought me!” She raised a bundle of hairy roots wrapped in wet cloth for the Queen’s inspection. From the sparkle in her eyes, one would think it would at least be roses. Yet Fionn’s eye focused on her other pocket, half-hidden by the blur of her hand. Sharp angles poked out the pocket’s seams and a straight white edge stuck out of the top.

Fionn dutifully lowered her nose to the bundle and sniffed. “Angelica!”

“Or something close enough.” Meg eyed the abandoned trencher with interest. “Where did we get mutton?”

“A sheep.”

Meg’s lips twisted in a saucy grin. “Where did the sheep come from?”

Fionn stretched her black eyes wide and innocent. “Some other sheep, I expect.”

One more question and she could pry the truth out of her, but the Queen was only teasing and the answer, clearly, was someone had borrowed it from the tultharian, despite the fact that when last Meg heard, town was off-limits. But there were plenty of pastures outside the walls. Meg pinched up a bit of meat and popped it into her mouth, then asked, still chewing, “Have you had much chance to speak with Tristan, poppet?”

“I spoke to him only this morning,” she replied, which was both true and not the answer Meg was seeking, since the number of people openly curious how she and Tristan were getting along had begun to strike her as a circuitous plot. Surely he was not the only ranger in all the seven isles who’d been available to join the rade.

To deflect, she crooked a finger downward. “What’s that you have?”

Without so much as a glimmer of a change in expression, Meg delicately cleaned the oil from her fingertips with her apron hem, then drew the letter from her pocket and held it out.

“Meg!” The Queen batted the letter away as though it were a wasp. “I told you he’d try to win you to his cause.”

“He did not win me. I offered,” Meg said. “I grew weary of listening to him hash out with that raven whether he would or should or could, so I told him to write his damn letter so that I could deliver it and you could do as you pleased about it.”

“You don’t understand!” Fionn all but shrieked. “That’s exactly how he does it!”

Meg’s only response to the histrionics was a faint, curious frown, as if she might have heard someone calling to her from the courtyard. “As for the raven,” she continued, “I do wish you’d permit it to ferry these things about in the future. I won’t be a courier. Not on top of everything else there is to do.”

“No worries there.” She neatly snapped the letter from Meg’s fingertips and flicked it, in the same easy movement, into the fire. The flames seized it at once, collapsing it into an oddly shaped packet of flaky ash that Fionn recognized only belatedly as looking far too solid for burning paper.

Bland and patient as a cow, Morgana fanned her fingers and the letter reappeared between them. Fionn snatched for it, but Meg, anticipating a second attack, closed her fingers. The letter dissolved, returning to its safe place in her apron pocket. Not even Fionn would dare rummage through her clothes to get at it.

“An you don’t want to speak to the man, tell him so. An he’s apt to make trouble for the camp if he’s snubbed, let me know and I’ll slip something in his tea, problem solved.” Fionn’s jaw dropped in an aborted objection, but Meg overrode her coolly: “But if you do wish to speak to him again, do it and stop agonizing about it. Really, it’s unseemly.”

As she spoke, she gathered the wadded pelt from the floor, flicking it over the bed with a tweak of her wrist, then spreading it smooth. “Unlike some, I do believe you can hold your own against a common tultharian without being overly afflicted. Particularly this one.” She paused to throw a look over her shoulder, her eyebrow twitched high. “I can see why you’d choose him.”

When she stepped away, the letter lay, neat and unassuming, at the bed’s foot. Then she walked out, in a way that was her especial privilege, already bustling toward her next bit of business without so much as a glance over her shoulder for permission.

[Niabh]

Dear however it is you wish you to be addressed,

Morgana has kept me abreast of your progress, and I am pleased to see you are improved enough to resume being a bore. She has not informed me if you are well enough to withstand an onslaught, but neither has she indicated that you are too frail to be attacked, so I will assume that by resuming communication, you are prepared.

I would miss you more had your last action not been such an insult. You are not an utter fool, Glenn Burnie, and well I know you take no action without you know in advance what reaction it will garner, but this time you have gone too far. We have played games for many stakes that were agreeable to us both, but you have decided to throw your life upon the table like so much brass. Now you must accept that I will never forgive you that act, no matter how many well-reasoned treaties you propose, no matter how many ways you find to justify yourself. There is no excuse for such danger and cruelty. Any man who would harm himself to turn a woman’s head, no matter what his reasons, is a worm. If you say you had no better choice, then I will say that you are not the man I thought I knew and so you have no impact, no influence, and no right to speak upon any decision of mine. Moreover, given the precariousness of the current situation, I cannot afford to allow you any such influence if these are the methods you deem acceptable. You have wounded me too deeply to be my friend, and you are too untrustworthy, now, to be acceptable as a rival.

Perhaps the best way to ensure I miss you more would be if you went away longer.

Wait until doom.

[Glenn]

In the time it took to read the letter that had arrived and write the letter that was to be sent, Burnie looked up but once. He spoke to his friend but once. It was not any sort of dialogue. Any response was ignored as he returned to work. To make matters worse, it was quite early in all this, before he had finished reading and before he had started to write. "For the first time, she deemed me capable of addressing myself how I might like. I'd call this the height of irritability, but then I have read the rest of her letter so I know the mountain rises higher."

Dear Finn,

I'd ask this of the guard but it seems cruel and you would not wish me to be so, certainly not for the sake of our continued correspondence. I do not know how you and yours process memory. You have told me that a minute for you is akin to a minute for me, but how does that minute seem five years down the line for you and for me. Do I remember it better as it is part of a smaller overall whole and therefore more momentous (an interesting unpacking of the word, no?). Or do you simply have some sort of preternatural recall necessary to not lose one's center over the span of time. Perhaps the only way to deal with centuries of knowledge is to be able to crisply recall each and every second. Or maybe it all becomes a washed out blur given meaning and coherent substance only through storytelling and glamourie.

Many things can be true at once. Isn't that a lovely notion? For instance, I might have thought that you would have stopped me from drinking the entire draught and also have falsely remembered how much or little I was supposed to consume. Likewise, I may have thought it was entirely safe for me to do what I did but also would have done it even if it was not safe at all. You see how this doesn't exactly help my case, if I am to be judged along these lines in the first place.

I argue that I should not be, that you and I had already come to an accord on this matter and you drove me to extreme means by playing the letter of the accord instead of the law of it. That is to say, you played me false, that you fell victim to your own avarice, and in doing so, you chose not a child over me, but your own greed over an agreement that we made in good faith.

So then you claim me to be unfaithful or untrustworthy or unsympathetic, but deny that you created the situation to drive me to such a position in the first place. In the face of this, you throw a tantrum. You huff. You ask why, if we are now in this state, ought we be friends or enemies or have any connection at all? Why not wash our hands of the whole matter. I see the value in what we had, in what we have, and what we may have in the future. My future is finite. You must always live with that as I do, but how is there any reason in tossing every possibility away simply on the notion that all possibilities will one day end. What tragedy in forcing that ending to occur now instead of later!

You've made every effort to mend my body. I am making the effort to mend our friendship. It is worth it to me despite what you have done and what I have done. I offer a true accord to find a path past this. With this, we might avoid the necessary mistakes of the recent past and will be able to craft a more fulfilling future. I'm sorry for having hurt you and seek to forge a new peace between us.

Glenn

[Niabh]

Fortunately for Glenn, Morgana had just supplied the raven with a surprise saucer full of crumbled suet, bread crusts, and raisins, which meant Benedict was distracted from the implications of Glenn’s tone.

“Shows what you know,” he muttered thickly, between gobbles. “She denied your name. You’re basically not a person now.” He was still stubbornly determined to give Glenn a beginner’s guide to Court, even if Glenn swore it didn’t apply to him. Maybe some of it would stick.


Your messenger caught me convalescing. Have no fear; it is nothing prolonged or serious, but it is being enforced by the very long arm of my bard through the body of my lady sister, and so I must heed. In truth, I needed it, but convalescing is so very dull. I expect you would know that. There is a game I used to play with some of the older girls: if you were dying of thirst, would you drink a draught of poisoned mead, or would you die thirsty? I always chose the poison. It seemed to me that if you were going to die either way, why not have a drink with it? Now I shall read your letter.

The rare I’m sorry. Why does it ring hollow? I recognize the tune the bell plays, and that song is called concession, sir. I do not like the sound of it. The other option is that you mean it, in which case I must, if playing by your rules, forgive you. The first allows me a healthy skepticism of your motives, by which I lose nothing but make no progress; the second leaves me with but one path, and that to your threshold.

There is a third option: I refuse to play by your rules.

Who are you to chide me for my avarice as though such charge should hurt me, when your people tell a thousand tales of how avaricious I can be? You lecture me on endings, when it is I who write them. You have forgotten who I am. Your excuses are a load of horseshit, for if there be any any true north that had guided you since we were acquainted, it is that I could never drive you into the least thing—nor threaten, nor cajole, nor trick, nor beg, nor compel, nor seduce, nor bribe, nor strongly hint. It was the one rule I always obeyed with you. I could go so far, and so far, but in the end there would be a line past which you would be but a puppet, and I knew you would hate it, so I acquiesced. And in that way, you made me forget who I am.

It is the same story told twice, isn’t it? What became of Catch’s horn? It went the same way as my crown.

We could never be rivals, for to be rivals, one must be equals—and you, as we have confirmed, never wanted me as an equal. I know you well enough to know you will never accept me for who I am. And I care for you enough never to ask.

[Glenn]

There was a pause. It was undeniable. It was, in its own way, to his credit. Benedict spoke. He listened. He almost responded. Then his head gradually looked back down and he began to write instead. Burnie's credit wouldn't even buy a rumcake, but it was credit nonetheless.

Hello Finn,

I would come up with some other contrived solution and ask a thousand questions looking for a loop hole and this is why none of the older girls would want to play games with me. The question of our relative ages is hardly a question at all, but if you seek to make a challenge of it still, that likely answers it.

Your story cannot be true. And yes, you shall be annoyed with me for this as well, yet I write it anyway. For your story to be true, a human would had to best you with a sort of glamourie of his own. Our kind can trick your kind, but this would be something else, a modulating of reality to suit my own purposes. I did not convince you that I would hate it. I convinced you that you would hate it. That's entirely different. You were not acting out of mercy. You were not tricked. Instead, a fairy queen was bested at her own game, where she was at the absolute strongest, by a mortal who happened to be more stubborn and persistent and committed than her. Were we to look at it that way, no amount of vengeance could balance the ledger. It would be a new song that would change the nature of all songs to come. Instead, we ought agree to not look at it that way, to leave the mythology out of it, to focus not on what you are but instead on who.

Two sentient entities with thoughts and beliefs and feelings can come to accords. Only by doing so, only by doing what we did, can they grow and change. Am I better than how you found me? Not heartier or healthier or more active. Not more once again of who I had once been. Am I different in a way that you, being as objective as you can, see to be improved. Am I a better, stronger, wiser, more compassionate person even if I might be a worse human? Are you a better person even if you may be a worse myth? Might you be a better, more potent and impactful queen because of it?

Without change, we die. Without change, you perpetuate. This suits your father figure well enough. His goal isn't meaningful improvement of a broken system, just a rotation of power at the top. Has being away for so long, being enmeshed in our injustices, made you fond and sentimental for your own? Or has it given you all the more clarity at what needs changing?

I care enough never to settle for what you are. I care enough never to settle because I do accept who you are. Those two things are not the same. It has nothing to do with your title either. All that can do, if you let it, is further define what you are. You have the character and the imagination and the fortitude and the capacity for so much love in your heart to force who you are to define it instead.

Glenn

[Niabh]

When you say things like this, I am reminded how circumscribed was your childhood. You do not understand the nature of games. The answer was never the true question, and in any case, there were only two real answers: take the poison, or don’t. It was how we arrived at our answers and what could be gleaned about each of us from it. One lass made an argument for her fear, that she did not know what sort of poison it might be, or if it might leave her in greater agony than simply dying of thirst. Another said that no matter what, she could never choose to end her own life, that she would persevere past hope, however much she might suffer. For myself, I am impatient and wanton: if there were no choice but to die, I could not bear to lie around doing nothing save wait for it, and of course a drain of honey mead is always a welcome friend. By these games we learned one another’s minds.

With you, by that answer, I would say you try to change the game to suit yourself, and never mind how impossible you make it for anyone else to play. You cannot play by any rules other than your own, therefore you demand the whole game be changed to accommodate you. Do it often enough and I expect you would very quickly find yourself uninvited, and behind your back we would mock you and call you tedious. Perhaps that would not bother you much, but it would certainly limit your opportunities, further down the path.

This is where you find yourself now. I am making the rules. Now you are no longer the exclusion. If anything, you are tolerated. You will learn to accept this, but if you do not, still you will be bound to it. Your opportunities in the future shall be limited by me, according to my sufferance.

On one point of yours I do agree. Two people with similar sympathies should be able to come to an accord. However, you have never yet shown the least sign of compromise. That has always fallen to me, to lower myself for your comfort. I am not in the humor for that anymore

What mean you by mythology? Am I not real? Are not my people real? Aye, and our land, too: real and living and beloved, unlike your own, which you use to serve your own ends with no care for how it is spoiled, for you shall not be the ones who must live with the damage. Our law is real, and it has served us as well—nay, better—than your shortsighted and selfish ways have served your kind.

When first I came, I found your people sweet and sad and precious, like so many flowers in the field—born in the morning, dead by evening, and the next day replaced by another crop. You may argue that this is your advantage, that this is what gives you your perspective, but outside your own lectures, I have seen no sign of it. Only weak, frightened, vicious and ignorant creatures, wholly wrapped in their concerns, and why is that? Your very laws keep the mass of your people so deprived that they do not dare seek better for fear of losing the little they are given, and this is considered their unalterable state. Your women are enslaved and your children—those that may live, for in addition to all this you are so filthy and benighted that you cannot keep them alive—are little better than property, no more than I would say of my horse. The lowest among you expend all their strength in seeking enough bread that they may find the strength to toil again the next day. What you call civilization is so many swine pens stacked atop each other, breeding misery and disease and the foulest secrecy, and yet you are all so proud to call it your own, this dungheap you have amassed, that you are in no doubt that anyone would have the same could they but witness it. There is nothing you offer of such interest that I might give up a particle of myself to possess it.

But no: let us say that you are not responsible for the squalor you create. Let us even say—for you have spoke of it many times—that the state of your people offends you, that you wish things other than they are. Let us keep the argument between us.

Aye, you have bested me, that is true enough. Bested me with your rules and your fair play and your insistence that any advantage I may have is unfair. You never had to tell me it was unfair; instead you lectured me on why your way was preferable. You bested me with your mortal helplessness, with the notion that your life is fleeting and that you must gather meaning as you may and that I have no right to rob you of it. You bested me with the argument a sheep must give a wolf, that your life is worthy though it be short, that you were owed your freedom and your choices because there were so few available to you, poor brief human, and here I must agree, for you are none of mine and owe me no fealty. You were not mine to command. What bonds between us were (I thought) based upon respect and fondness and companionship. What it came to is that you made me question that there was something lacking in myself that only your mortal perception could recognize, and that I, being too near, could not see.

You are curious how it is to hold a memory for longer than a human life. You have been curious before, and I tried to explain to you how it is for me, for us, for I thought your curiosity natural. I, too, wonder how it must be for humans, who scare have time to be young, or indeed to be any age at all, before you are forced to move to the next stage, the next set of responsibilities, with no time at all to be accustomed. And then to die, to know from the very beginning that death barrels toward you like a wave on the sea, to know even before you set yourself to the task that it will be left unfinished. Small wonder you are creatures of regret.

Yet when I try to explain how it is for me, you deny it. You impose your own explanations upon we who are not, will never be, fettered by your brevity. Moreover, you behave as though these are matters we ourselves have never considered. What use is long life without reflexion? The ability to consider oneself is not limited to humans. The College is full of those who devote their lives to contemplate our condition and seek the meaning in it. Yet you cannot be dissuaded. It is something I have noticed about your people: that you believe yourself to be the center and original, that by your humanity you are somehow blessed with perception, that this is a gift restricted solely to your kind, and that is such good that you must forever be imposing it upon things that are not yourselves.

Likewise I have told you this before, and you did not believe me then, either: your people are so lacking in natural perception that betimes I truly do not understand how you survive. Moreover, I do not understand how it is that you create. It is as though you are so separate from the world that you are driven to make your own—as though in your hearts, you understand how deprived you are, and this is the way you have chosen to compensate. All of it is nothing, but it is all you know to do. You, too, are trapped by your own base humanity, and you cannot see it, and you will not believe me when I say it, and even I must wonder if it is too cruel to tell you that there is more in the world than you can possibly imagine, but that you will forever be blind to it. No effort, no striving, will permit you to see the least part of it. With all my power, I cannot change you from a human. Yet you seek to change me.

What I am is who I am, and you will never separate the two just by insisting on it. You deny me. More than that, you deny the reality of my people, and that I cannot tolerate.

I shall tell you this much: without change, you die anyway. You always have, and you always will.

[Glenn]

Finn,

We wrote of this in one of our first exchanges and while it has not been true for most of what came after, it threatens to be so again, so it's worth mentioning.

Were I to be shut off from our correspondence, my options would be both limited and limitless. Your presence provide a steady, comfortable, fulfilling path, one that might actually be quite productive in a number of broader and less strictly personal ways now. Without you, I would have to find another path. I might enjoy writing a treatise on interacting with your people. It would be one of those books of mixed appeal. For someone, they would see it as a craftily designed fantasy, a parable for many things that they actually encounter in their own life; people write of ancient kingdoms that never were, entire false histories to express their own ideals of government and the nature of man. Others would take it as literal truth, driven by their own experiences, first-hand or otherwise.

And Chapter One and Chapter Ten, the bookending structures? The notion that in dealing with your kind directly, one mustn't overthink it. That is to say, one must not get lost in his own head. It's simplicity itself to get tangled in the idea that I am doing what you want me to do, or not doing something because I am trying to avoid what you act like you want me to do and therefore am secretly doing what you want. Or that, by knowing this, I am yet being driven down an unseen path. A fleck of uncontainable glamourie, the nature of your own bloodline, the patience that comes with eternity, the stubbornness that comes from a crown. Do you contort yourself in just the right way to draw me forth?

To this, in said book, I would advise a weighing and measuring of one's responsibilities in life. If you have six mouths to feed, best to avoid such interaction altogether. If you are adviser to a king, let alone the king itself, expand yourself but balance it with your people's needs. Be more daring in what might be obtainable but more cautious when it comes to your own personal pleasure.

And if you are Glenn Burnie...

Finn, your people are here. Either that means that you are free to return or that things have gotten so dire back home that they found the need to squirrel themselves away here as well. Are they here for your recovery alone? Once you are well again, by Healer and Bard's standards if not yours, you shall be packing up and heading off? That's not the impression I get from Father. Schemes continue to roil. Might the pernicious tulthurian aid in them or hinder them? Some of it is just passing the time, I imagine. As you say, you convalesce. You pass the time with this letter. But there is more.

You give gifts. You make deals.

I can accept your gifts but then must also accept your benevolent and absolute rule, not over myself, necessarily, but over all that you survey. I must then accept the what of you and fall in line. We can make even more significant a deal. In doing so, do we mix business and friendship? One is never to lend money to a friend for it changes the nature of the relationship in a way that can never be stepped back from. The deal I have suggested removes me from one situation entirely and is quite limited in its nature.

What you seem to require is more than that.

Let us return to that shortly. You claim that I ask you questions but do not listen to the answers. This is no small claim. I would argue that I ask questions and then I do listen to the answers. Those answers then help me to shape my own perception of the situation. It is not that I do not believe you. It is not that I do not respect you. It is instead that I seek to take what you give me and synthesize it to find patterns and broader truths. If I repeat a question, it is, perhaps because I am still struggling to do so. If I ask a question again and again, it is because I am trying to find a different angle to approach your answer, because while I can document what you say, I am still working to fully understand it and how it compares with the world that I know.

This takes us back to eternal patience and regal stubbornness.

In the end, I am I and you are you and we are who we are, regardless of what we may be. It would be nice if we could move forward with that alone, but it seems unlikely as other constraints have arrived and disputes have come up between us. That is not unusual. Circumstances had allowed for near unlimited selflessness between us in previous years. Meaningful relationships, if they are to be truly meaningful and lasting, need to find ways to survive such constraints. Therefore, we likely have to strengthen the deal to allow you a greater sense of security, dignity, and to feel both respected and revered.

If I were to follow one and only one of your rules so that we may not toss away the proverbial gameboard (a place of playing together and honing one another, not of winning or losing) of our friendship altogether, what would you have it be?

Glenn

[Niabh]

As a start, you might try admitting that poisoning yourself to thwart me was a disgraceful and stupid idea that you chose of your own will and which had nothing to do with me. Will you now tell me that on that night alone, for as long as we have known one another, I caught you without any option save that? You, who pride yourself on always and forever having another plan? I thought you more subtle, I thought you more cunning, I thought you more worthy than to be reduced to such methods. Now I must reconsider all I thought I knew.

On the one hand, I should be grateful that you have made it easier to disregard everything you say and do and offer as mere manipulation. That is where you have put yourself with me, and none of your explanations or excuses will alter that position. Asking what effort might be taken to repair our friendship is a good start—perhaps the only way to begin, and certainly the only time in my recollection that you have humbled yourself enough to broach the question—but I cannot set you one single task that will make all right again, for I cannot even imagine what that task would be. Only with time and sincere effort to make amends can we be healed. But you will never make amends, for that would first require you to admit doing wrong.

For myself, I know I have been foolish. To assuage a minor embarrassment, I should have kept myself well apart from you during my season, no matter the circumstances. I thought that because we have met before in my season that it would be the same again. In truth, I thought myself angry enough to resist, though this sometimes miscarries. Moreover, and more to the point, knowing you, I concealed my intentions. I told myself that it was because I knew you would stop me, but I know that if I were truly proud of my plans, I would have told you them, and oft did I wish I could, for you would have been the greatest ally to enlist. But I knew you would never be enlisted, so I turned my effort to keeping it from you. In part, my intentions were honest. You live under the shadow of your own misdeeds here, and returning here has exposed you to scrutiny. There would be enough trouble for you for merely associating with me, and I did not wish for you to fall with me if mine own plans were uncovered. I truly felt you had earned a second chance in Myrken, and I did not want to be the one to spoil it for you. Doubtless you will manage it all on your own, given enough rope. But in the end, I did it because I did not wish to be stopped.

I had a dream, or a delusion—I cannot say which. I cannot even say, now, if it were after the fire or in the midst of it. Catch’s child was there. I gave her a name, a good one. But she did not want it. She did not want me. Now Catch is gone as well. Now you are gone, and though you wish to come back, I feel that for once in my silly, selfish life, I should do the harder thing and refuse you. For I do want you back. But there can be no good end in this, Glenn. For all that you seek patterns and broader truths, that much is plain as day.

[Glenn]

Finn,
These things are intertwined.
The child denied you? It's one thing for the parents to deny you.
No, there needs to be rules to this. Before the child is born, the parent can sell it away. That's what happened to me after all, albeit to a less preternatural institution. When the child is too young to have an opinion of its own, no one has any right to it. At that point, it can be simply stolen away. Once the child reaches some age of consent however, the child has to agree. You can trick it or tempt it, but in the end, that amounts to the same thing. Only a child of a certain age and understanding can outright refuse, and only, I imagine, if approached with such good faith that they would realize what they were refusing.Your desire, your affection, your desperation was so that you came to the child directly thinking but of the gift and joy you meant to offer.
Were you tempting or teasing, it might be a scenario of three. Three offers to come. You overplayed your hand and offered it all at once, a name as well.
The night of the fire, you say?
I wish you had confided in me. By the time I got close enough to disrupt your plans, they barely even mattered anymore.
Consider again, what I tried to gain for you.
Decades to build your case. The child spurned you, but the teenager is sure to spurn the world. They all do. You'll offer an alternative.
I will allow myself to be enlisted in that vision, if you would so have me.
Glenn

[Niabh]

You just did it again, you know. Pray, if this is more of your extrapolation, kindly confine it to your own skull, for when it spills upon the paper, I must assume it is addressed to me. Really, Glenn Burnie. If you were anywhere near the truth, do you think I’d tell you?

No: I would be indignant. I would deny all, and then, perforce to show you just how far off the mark you were, carefully explain everything I knew. I would spin you a phantasie, turning everything strange and shimmering and tinged in mist, and from there, you would extrapolate further in the wrong direction. And with every falsehood, you would be further and further from the mark.

But no. That would be cruel to write, and foolish of me to give away such an important strategy. Kinder and wiser to write that there are things no man may know nor woman tell. You may explore the shape of that through its absence.

So you enlist. Shall I treat you like any other new recruit? I am spared the listing of your status and accomplishments, and I shall spare you the oath-taking; you’d only question it. You are a canny soldier in your sphere, that much I grant you, and it might be wise to keep someone in Myrkentown. But—and again, I will be kind—we have already discussed that as an implement, you cannot be trusted to obey a set of orders, nor to rely upon anyone’s judgement save your own, even when you are entirely ignorant of the circumstances and duties that would be required of you. You reject explanation and reason. In this respect, I cannot even trust you more than I do my father, for while he is tiresome and argumentative, I do not doubt his allegiance to Cnoch-na-Niall and to the Tuatha as a whole. You, by comparison, by your blood and by your nature, will forever be a foreigner, with one foot in the opposing camp. Even in offering your service, I can too clearly see that you do not offer out of a wish to serve my goals, but only to place yourself in a position where you may more easily convince me to serve yours.

What, then, do you truly offer? What is there to recommend you?

It is not remiss of me to demand a test of those who propose to serve my interests. Here is yours: apologize, and I’ll consider it.

[Glenn]

"Alright, point of clarification." They had gotten into a rhythm of sorts in this writing. She was convalescing, much like he was, or so she claimed, but he imagined she was surrounded by familiar and welcome faces and still getting business of all sorts done, whereas he had been focused on the letters and little else. Her business and how it was done. He imagined a bedridden king signing one paper after the next. That wouldn't be it all though, would it? "Two points of clarification," this said with grit teeth and clenched eyes, for it was a thought that interrupted his initial thought. He'd just looked up from the letter and it was hard enough to hold back his response for the sake of simple curiosity. "Don't answer the first. Not now at least. Messages come through ravens. There's no royal seal. No letters at all generally. You repeat back the voice exactly. Is there some way to ensure that what they are hearing actually came from the person in question? Is it all taken on faith? You'll forgive me. It is difficult to imagine a society with so little writing sometimes, even though I spend much of my time with you. But answer that later."

For there was something more pressing now. "The point I need help with," which was not usually how he phrased it, especially on a matter of understanding but now that she was back surrounded by her lot, it was increasingly obvious that he couldn't avoid these matters altogether. "Letter before last, she named me in the last sentence, simply my first name. In this last letter, she named me in the first paragraph, surname included. Neither letter is addressed to me or anything else. Is there any sort of significance to that?" The undertone in his voice was not quite irritability, but it did border on impatience.

[Niabh]

Though he would never admit to Glenn that he had been shirking, the raven had taken a small detour prior to delivering the Queen's missive in order to be hand-fed bits of candied orange peel by Acorn. Part of him had known better, but the combination of sweets and Acorn's charming astonishment whenever he plucked a sugared coil from her fingertips had caused him to linger longer than he should have and eat far more than he ordinarily would have done. Now his guts were tangled up like a fishing line in the weeds, and he sat in the cold ash of the bedroom's fireplace in anticipation of the inevitable. His expression at Glenn's irritated question was as close as the raven came to looking genuinely annoyed.

"I don't even understand which fecking question you want me to answer," he grucched. "That first question was like three questions. Can you just ask the question you want answered and then not ask the question you don't want answered? Sheesh."

His black tail flashed upward, and liquid droppings splattered into the powdery ash. Immediately the knot in his belly relaxed. He stepped onto the hearthstone, careful to scrape his dusty, scaly feet upon the hearthrug.

"Names have power," he said curtly. "Using them, withholding them, giving them. Why did you give me a name?"

The question was rhetorical, but the danger in voicing rhetorical questions to Glenn was that, rhetorical or not, he would do his best to make an issue of them. Hopping down to the floor, he carried on speaking while nibbling a dirty claw. "She's callin' you a name, she's not referring to you as 'that one,' like they do, which means at least you're somebody. When you're that one, you're not anybody. Ask her what she means by it."

[Glenn]

The raven asked him a question that was not a question. In a pique of rare mercy, Burnie supplied no answer at all.

Instead,

Finn,

Apologies are difficult things. Shall I push this boulder up a hill?

I am sorry that you were upset because of my actions.

That could have been worse. Another step though.

I am sorry that I upset you.

Not bad, not really. More direct. I put the onus upon myself. My action caused the effect. The effect, however, was you being upset. Not some sort of absolute wrong but instead based on your perception of the situation. The boulder rolls upwards still. Why did my action make you upset?

I am sorry that I frightened you. But then why were you frightened?

I am sorry that I was reckless with my own life, at all, and most especially as it pertained to you, your schemes, your gifts, your traps, your hopes.

I was reckless, not suicidal. Apologies are difficult. This is harder. I did not realize drinking as much as I did would be as dangerous as it obviously was. Moreover, I didn't think you would have allowed me to in the first place. I expected to be allowed to take just a sip and even so, I did not realize, though I should have, though I take the blame and do not lay it in your hands, that I would be at such risk in taking it.

So I apologize for that as well. I apologize for so thoroughly being wrong.

I do not apologize for opposing you. I do not apologize for the fact you were spurned as you were. I do not apologize for so successfully stifling your plans.

As for potential enlistment, it is solely in this one matter. If you wish to put in the work and make the effort to honestly win the child's heart over time making no attempt to outright sabotage your rival, you will have my support and my discretion. In all other matters, you will have my friendship. You may not always like it. Additionally, the only promise you will have is that I will be less reckless in the moment. Any recklessness will be premeditated and as possible, discussed with you ahead of time.

Glenn

[Niabh]

You are terrible at apologizing, but that is to be expected. I did not anticipate much better than this. However, after much pushing of boulders, you did get around to apologizing for the appropriate thing eventually. That much of your clumsy apology I do accept. For future reference, admitting you are poor at apologizing is not an excuse. I do not necessarily mean your future with me, as I have not yet decided what, if any, such future there will be.

Mark well my words: I have not done, nor will I do, any such foolishness as will require you to risk your life for it. If such should be required, I will inform you.

Herein lies my difficulty. We, between the two of us, have created a situation in which there is no way of moving forward without considering you. To include you would be too much a risk for you and too much a liability for the current circumstances. Likewise would be excluding you, as you will make yourself known, will I or never-so. The third option should be clear, but I am not, at present, considering it.

But the Queen must consider it, Glenn. The Queen cannot afford to be undone by a mortal man. The Queen cannot allow any peril, however distant, to approach the clan.

Therefore you bargain not with the Queen, but with me. I will resolve to win the child’s favor by my own merits. I will make no attempts to outright sabotage my rival.

I am remembering how to be Queen, but it is not as easy as it once was. Is that you? Then you have done me no favors.