So much to drink, so much to smoke.
Dame de Lanz ("You name a daughter Dame if you expect great things from her," she'd earlier slurred to a younger gentleman at the tea-house) wandered out the gates of Myrkentown with her skirts dragging like a muddy tail behind her. She did not step as much as she galloped, trying to compensate for the loose, altered state of her mind--
("These are great things you're going to do," the sweet man with the smooth, black hair had told her. "It's simple: you pierce this little nugget on the end of this awl, here, and dance it just above the fire, like so."
"Like this? Oh, this is positive debauchery," Dame tittered, watching as vaporous snakes of brown, opaque smoke curled up from the skin of the tiny pill. "And do you breathe it in?"
"You breathe it in," he whispered, "like incense, and you let the smoke carry your mind into tranquility. Here, lean over it with me...")
--hours ago, it seemed, but couldn't feel the cold, couldn't give a piss for the cold anymore, could she; no, no, because what was she anymore, she wondered, but frigid within and without? Nothing, she was nothing, nothing at all with a head full of sweet-smelling smoke. A floating, sagging lump of fifty-two years of unrealized potential, a farmer's daughter who'd fucked a starry-eyed scholar for a ring, had taken his name, de Lanz, de Lanz. Over a year ago, she'd done such fine work for Lady Rhaena, had battered skulls and bodies that weren't dressed adequately, and how she missed that ashplant cudgel! The hollow knock it made against dirty skulls! The masquerades, the balls, where she hoped she'd catch a shine in the Lady's eye--
She blinked.
Where was she?
Dame de Lanz stood like a lost foal on the snowy outskirts of one of the forests well beyond Myrkentown's borders. Trembled, too, like a stupid, palsied child. She'd forgotten her cloak, and her steely hair draped itself as a veil over her wrinkled face. But by the One God, she felt beautiful with the opium warming her blood and setting her pores ablaze; she could just drift along the winterscape for years and years and drag her boots. Crisken would still be scribbling away on his books. Wouldn't he? Wouldn't he?
She sprawled a knotted hand in front of her unfocused eyes, lifted it into the moonlight.
"I miss my ring," Dame de Lanz told the sky, "and I miss you, and I miss us. Don't you miss me? Don't you miss how we used to dance, you old fool?"
She blinked.
Where was she?
The midnight woods bent in around her, and the wood, the snow, the sky, they weighed so much!