Target Practice

Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Wed Aug 05, 2015 7:31 pm

In the long empty stretch of grass beside the lake, along the shade of the treeline, Niabh nocked one of her new arrows and raised her bow, stretching the string to her ear. About a hundred paces ahead of her, a black-clad figure stood, its back turned to her.

She held still, breathing evenly. “Turn around, Mister White,” she said softly, and, as if at her command, he did.

She loosed her arrow. It struck him high in the left side of the chest, knocking him back a step. He roared in pain and rage, blood spurting around the shaft, and poised as if to charge her, but she had already nocked a second arrow and sent it after the first. The man in black abruptly faded into the dead, black tusk of an old, rotted tree stump.

Satisfied, she lowered her bow and nocked another arrow. Hm. Who else was there? Ah, there in the distance, the shopkeeper who had swindled them the other night, striding toward her with his suspicious eye all but branding her a thief to her face. Hanging from his right arm was a heavy iron-headed mallet, black and greasy-looking, potent with malice. Her fingers opened, and the arrow flew, and there was as always that sweet, endless moment where she could actually feel just where the shot would land and the arrow's impact in her own arm--just before the fire-hardened wooden point punched sickly through that hard scrutinizing eye and into his brainpan, the mallet dropping with a dull thump into the grass....before the shopkeeper, too, receded into the stump.

Niabh lowered her bow and headed across the thick, damp grass to the arrow-studded stump. She wrapped her fist firmly around the shaft, then carefully wriggled and twisted until the point dislodged. The wood was soft and punky enough that it wasn't much trouble getting them back out. She held one arrow to her eye and squinted up its length. Still looking pretty straight. The tips were a little blunted, but they were only wooden ones; she'd accepted they wouldn't hold up to much repeat use. At least they hadn't split. Probably not strong enough for a solid target…but then again, people weren’t exactly solid, were they?

She strode back to her mark again.

Who else? Kayden’s teacher. She had no idea what the man looked like, and so had to summon one up: a tall, broad man with tangled black hair, all cruel, sneering mouth and thick bull neck--not a little resembling a groom who had once slapped Niabh for teasing the yearling colts as a girl--stalking toward her with his hard, grimy hands twitching. The arrow went straight through the hollow of his throat. He dropped to his knees and clawed frantically at the quivering shaft, a raucous gurgle like a crow’s call rattling in the air. It took a long time, and Niabh had not patience to wait on him. She dismissed the glam, and good riddance.

She hated herself, but the sport was good. It let out some of the pent-in frustration of the past week--the past months, even. It hurt to always be so strapped in on all sides by the damn tultharian and all their customs and all their rules. It hurt to keep so sweet and demure and deferential all the time. Sometimes her cheeks actually ached from holding a smile. It hurt not to know what was happening back home, and being forced to wait and to wait, when by rights she should be there. She never should have agreed to go. They'd made her leave, but it felt more like they had left her--abandoned her to the tultharian. She really shouldn't feel that way. It wasn't as if she was suffering here. Miserable and unhappy and chomping at the bit, but hardly suffering. It hurt that there was nowhere she could go to clear her head of the smell of clochgorma...except for here, out in the open air, out by the very forest that were forbidden to her. The thought made her angry all over again. The one rule she understood completely...and, perhaps because of that understanding, the one she resented the most, the one that seemed to underline and sum up all the rest.

Now, who should be next? Oh yes: that tubby carter who had offered her a ride to the next town, then tried to squirm a hand down her trousers. She knew exactly where she wanted to shoot him.
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 06, 2015 2:37 am

However long Niabh's had an observer, it's unclear; several targets out in the distance have come and gone, each an unwitting victim at a hundred paces. Their deaths are markedly real. They bleed. They scramble. They try, in their last moments, to scoop the blood back into the holes punched into their skin, or glance around unknowingly, scanning the forest in their last few seconds to seek out the shooter. But the black-clad fellow, the shopkeeper, the others, they each die with a thwack, an inhuman report that is as cold as Niabh's repetitions: the girl fires, retrieves her arrow from her target, returns to her spot, fires again, again, an unfeeling machine that never pities nor hesitates to kill—

Never pities, because — and the spectator only realizes it after a few moments of horrified observation — the people are glamours, cantrips; they're images, composed of motes and memories, and they vanish; they flicker, fade, and leave nothing but the spongy image of a stump in their wake.

"You shoot them enough," she says, "it'll stop being practice and start being pleasure."

Gloria Wynsee stands well to the side. She's in ferns so tall that her boots aren't visible, and her skirts — tattered, patchwork mosaic of color that they are — defer amid their cascade to the shape of the stubborn underbrush. Dull, gray eyes obsess over the bow in Niabh's hands, peering out from the topography of a pudgy, brown-skinned face. Against her belly, her only hand clutches the wicker handle of a basket overstuffed with all matters of everyday necessities: candles, two pots of jam, a leather-bound book.

Her gaze begs peace. A scant smile offers apology for the interruption.

"Your aim's true. I'm envious." Her left arm — the handless stump — tries to lift, straining itself against the confines of the leather harness in which it rests. The sling secures the nub to her rib, denying the mutilated appendage its want for action, mobility, and use.

She takes a step forward.

"How long until I would have shown up among your targets? Niabh, is it," Gloria asks. "Where would you have shot me?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 06, 2015 3:23 am

At Gloria's first words, Niabh started enough to do something she had not done for at least ten years: her fingers almost fumbled on her bowstring. Somehow--not even she was sure how; she'd long suspect her fingers had their own set of nerves independent from the rest of her brain--she caught herself in time to tighten her grip before the arrow flew wild. Quickly she put the string back to rest and pointed the bow at the ground. Her eyes went wide and nearly round, the whites standing all around the irises, her lips fell slightly apart, and her expression was as guileless, as guilty, as a child caught dipping jam straight from the pot.

"I can explain," she blurted out, before she had time to consider that 'I can explain' was generally only spoken by people trying to make whatever egregious lie that popped out of their mouth next sound reasonable. She said it almost before she had time to place where on earth she knew the dark girl from, or how she might know Niabh's name. Gloria. Scorch's not-his-girl.

"I'm not hurting anything. Nothing's happened. I won't do it again and you don't have to say anything about it." Slowly, deliberately, with exaggerated care, she unnocked her arrow and slid it back into the hip quiver. Voice trembling, a bit defiant, she added, "And I wasn't going to shoot you. I wasn't even thinking about you. I hold no grudges."

It was true enough. Scorch might do, but Niabh thought the whole matter was silly and a little amusing. And Gloria had taken a swipe at Mister White the other night, which if anything left Niabh on the owing side of the ledgers.
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 06, 2015 5:12 pm

And I wasn't going to shoot you. I wasn't even thinking about you. I hold no grudges.

"But you were going to want for targets eventually," Gloria reasons, leaning nearer to the rough bark of the treetrunk beside her — rather, reaching for it, as if an errant arrow might force her to dive for cover or protection. Her eyes survey the arrow in question as it finds its home in the quiver. A breath of relief hisses from her. "With — with all the faces in your mind you put those arrows through, you'd have eventually eliminated them all. But—"

She lifts her lone hand and tightens it into a fist. She only has four fingers, the ring digit being little more than a wriggling nub. Gloria brandishes the back of her fist, showing the mottled map of still-wet scabs gleaming on the ridges of her knuckles.

"But I'd never blame you if — if you needed my face for one of yours. I hit the wall every night," the seamstress admits. "I have a favorite spot, right above my bed. I kneel on the pillows, roll up my sleeve, and strike. The knotholes in the wood, they — they remind me of faces I don't like, so I batter them into submission in my mind. Sometimes I'm drunk. Sometimes I—"

Her words stop. She drops her hand back down to her skirts.

"You don't have to explain. Or be ashamed," Gloria says, her chin lowering enough that the ragged bill of her bonnet shades her pockmarked visage in its cone.

Finally, the seamstress dares to step forward. Closer, closer, she steps, until only a few feet separate them, and the young woman's odor is evident. She stinks of foul sweat, the unscrubbed aroma of the Glass Sun, of woodsmoke that's left grease like a film in her hair. She angles a thumb up along her cheek and wipes away a line of oily perspiration. The droplet gleams on her chewed-short thumbnail. A little orb of black. Of tar.

"Your blood's not like mine. I saw it."
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Fri Aug 07, 2015 4:29 am

When Gloria approached her, the girl braced her feet, her small dark face tightening. Her lips drew back in a quick flash of teeth, like a small animal prepared to stand off against a much larger one, one that it had no chance of defeating--a fox challenging a bear. "Keep off," she said, quiet but firm, and with no sign of immediate threat.

In the back of her mind, she was racking and tossing about reasons why anyone would know that. If it hadn't been so obvious, it might have dawned on her sooner. Sweat had been rolling down her bare neck and into the short, shallow cut there all morning, and it drove her mad itching. But she'd had her hair down the night she got the cut. Hadn't she? No one could have seen it.

If she had gotten this far only to find her whole ruse hung on whether she'd bothered to braid her hair or not, she would laugh herself sick. Possibly from a gaol cell. Or worse.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Confusion and curiosity nibbled away at her, along with a strange charge of excitement. The feeling was electric and familiar, but somehow she could not place it. "What do you want of me?"

And why on earth was she telling her all this business about punching the walls? Her hands...Niabh frowned, her delicate tangled brows creasing over the bridge of her nose. The scabs smelled muddy, faintly tinged with clochgorma--as they all did--and sweat and smells she did not know. Why would she even bother saying such a thing if she only planned on telling?

If she had not been in such a panic over being caught out, the obvious answer might not have been so slow in coming.

Still watching the woman closely, Niabh finally eased her hand off the bowstring. Slowly, deliberately, keeping her hands in plain sight all the while, she put the bow back over her shoulder in a plain gesture of truce.

"You know," she began hesitantly, "you can do that to the earth, too. It gives a little, so you feel you're really doing it some damage. And it won't leave marks, so when you're finished, no one will know."
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Fri Aug 07, 2015 11:08 am

"But I want it to leave marks. I deserve them."

When Niabh draws back and demands Keep off, Gloria pauses in her gradual forward saunter. She ceases mid-step, her hemlines brushing across the the bedding of overgrown grasses and long-dead leaves as if they refuse —independent of the heft girl's decision — to stop. Her single hand lifts. She presses a calming palm against the air, encouraging ease the way one might diffuse a coiled animal.

"I — I won't touch you," she says. "And I won't hurt you. You're nimble and spry; I'm slow and fat. You could nock and release an arrow well — well before I'd even drawn the knife out of my boot. I'm not here to antagonize you. I heard the arrows; I followed the noise. And here—" she slowly presses her fingers against her breast, then extends her hand in a sweeping, circular motion, "—we are, women who've managed to hide away their cathartic endeavors from — from everybody else."

She jerks her chin toward the spongy stump as if to say, That is yours. And Gloria's fists, they were hers.

"I saw you bleed," she says. "You wiped it on your trousers, blue-green as — as a lake." Then, unceremoniously, Gloria tugs the collar of her dress and folds it down enough to show Niabh the cotton. What was once white and clean is, anymore, filthy and black, and the same vile perspiration glints on her wet cheeks like diluted tar. The message in the motion is implicit: I'm different, too. "We met the wrong way. Just because I've got an unfavorable opinion of that ignorant boy doesn't mean I have the same of you."

When the seamstress smiles, she shows the brown, broken ruin of her teeth. Poor teeth. Commoner's teeth.

"Where are you from?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Fri Aug 07, 2015 4:16 pm

"Plainly not from everybody," the girl said, her voice rueful and a touch gruff, "else we would not be having this conversation." She'd thought it would be all right. She thought there was enough space to see anyone coming from any direction save the woods--which by rights should not have been a concern, but clearly she had underestimated the ability of this place to stack one person on top of the other like a pile of turf. No wonder they were all mad; there wasn't any room to move. All useless resentment now, since she needed to be thinking on talking her way out of this right now.

But the woman...seemed lonely. These days she was oddly susceptible to loneliness.

"I told you. I don't bear you any grudge. Justin Scorch has pissed off half the world, it seems. I just thought the whole thing was funny, really. Only then you ran off into the woods, and it stopped being funny after that." She went silent a moment, then said, as if admitting a guilt, "I'm from...away. From the north. By the sea."

Her slim brown hand went up and rubbed the base of her throat as if to massage a sudden cramp. Her eyes darted away, sullen and embarrassed.
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 09, 2015 5:03 am

"You're afraid of the woods?"

Gloria looks back over her shoulder, her eyes scanning the long, dark smear of the woodline behind her. Though the foliage and growth was vast, verdant, and green, the shadows under each leaf held more power and sway: even in the brightest hours of the day, the webwork of branches seemed impenetrable and black, a thing given power by the fears and phantoms in the minds of those peering into it.

"I'm not afraid of the woods," Gloria adds, her voice desperately trying to hide the lie trembling on her tongue. "That Red Devil, I — I looked it right in its eye and told it that I wasn't frightened. Mekarie — the madwoman, have you met her? — capitalizes, I think, on her reputation as its herald. And Mekarie's words are usually piled high with bull's shit.

"No Red Devil will kill me." The seamstress's words burn with unnecessary bravado. "I intend to live longer than anyone in Myrken Wood. I won't fold to something as paltry as death."

Bold creeds from a girl who'd worn the same dress for months at a time.

She shakes herself out of her furious muses and locks her eyes back on this curious, curious girl standing in front of her. Niabh is at times wholly aloof, and at others, perfectly endearing; she's two halves of a blade, one dulled that it might be used for show and display, and the other sharpened to a hair, silently vicious and prepared to nick and swipe at anybody foolish enough to come close. But Gloria Wynsee, she's a habit of pushing, of driving her fingers too deep into the mud of other people's lives.

"From the north, by sea," she repeats. "From the north, by sea."

She squints, referencing some map just behind her eyes.

"The Red Caps? What kind of ship? What was its cargo, if any at all?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Sun Aug 09, 2015 6:06 am

"I'm not afraid of anything," the girl replied, sounding both matter-of-fact and a touch insulted. "The good lady bade me out, and so I've heeded her. Some places are not friendly; I understand that." There had been places at Cnoch-na-Niall where clan was welcome and no one else was. They were places of the blood, that was all. One understood that if one went there, it was at one's own risk. Back home she'd had the advantage of being clan and having Grandfather to guard her--whether she needed him or not, in most cases. Here she had nothing but a sad weak bow and her wits. Decision made. "I am a guest. It's rude to do otherwise. It would not offend your tultharian gods to do the same."

Nor would it offend thy tultharian gods to take a bath once per fortnight, she thought of saying, her nose crinkling delicately. She held her tongue. Best to remain cautious, try not to offend anyone, until she figured out the weather of this conversation. Mostly she was only cursing herself. Of all the dozens of little ways she'd fretted about giving herself away--that! For a few drops of blood! For a cut that sealed itself in an hour! And Scorch had even seen her drop glam, and he hadn't put this many questions to her. Maybe living piled on top of one another as they did left them all with no sense of common privacy.

She frowned at the question. "I came by way of my mother. People owe her favors; she called one in for me." In spite of herself, her head tipped to the side, like a curious kit. "What about red caps? You have red caps? They won't bother you if you don't go where they are." Really, if she was being warned out of the woods over red caps, she wouldn't have bothered coming into town at all.

Cautiously, she stepped closer to the other girl. Something lured her; she smelled a barely checked vulnerability, a note of fear that was not feigned. The bravado was a cover for it. "Why do you ask me these things? What would you have of me?"

Bargaining, she understood completely.
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 09, 2015 7:29 am

"Of course you're afraid of something," Gloria says, her black eyebrows lifting so high that her round face became, for a second, almost alien. "Everybody's got fears. And if you don't, you're either dead or stupid. You have a pulse, and if you're stupid, you've ." A pause. Gloria shifts the weight of her basket against her hip. "And of whom are — are you a guest?

"Do they know about your proclivity for imaginary murder?"

There were always questions. Questions must be asked; nobody survived based solely on their limited observations.

The questions about red caps stir in the seamstress a vague and almost apologetic smile. Oh, she'd red about Niabh's red caps, about troublesome, violent little sprites in tales and myth that preyed on disobedient Granger children and dipped their hats in virgin blood. Gloria takes from her basket a tiny, clay pot of jam and holds it out to Niabh — "Marmalade?" she asks — in the cup of her palm. Then, she says: "I mean the Red Caps. The islands up north. Where ships full of undesirable cargo often stop before being ferried into Myrken Wood. A place under no jurisdiction of the Crown, where rich men broker deals for poorer men. But clearly," she adds, "you aren't familiar with those."

When Niabh draws closer, however, Gloria doesn't move. Instead, she lifts her chin and angles her head faintly sideways, meeting the other woman's prying stare with her own. The marmalade is still between them, sweet and already calling to the flies. In fact, she takes a step forward, too, touching the lips of her wooden-soled boots against Niabh's.

Why do you ask me these things? What would you have of me?

"This place," the seamstress says, "is full of people who despise difference. It's full of men and women who frown upon what they don't understand. Whether you're black of sweat or blue of blood," and now, her face hovers closer, her visage all but a black smear beneath the shadows of her bonnet, "they'll damn you. Because they'd rather target the monsters they create in their minds than — than the ones that destroy their homes. I don't want that for you.

"I doubt your mother, for all her favors, would want that for you, either."
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Sun Aug 09, 2015 8:06 am

"I doubt I am the only one here who imagines murder. I'm just the only one with the means to play it out." She shrugged as if it didn't matter. "I come, I have a game or two, I go back, I put up with the people again. Unless someone walks up on me--" She took a small, deliberate step out from under Gloria's shadow "--or gives me offense, I can keep myself in check. I did not come to do harm, and I will leave them soon enough."

A small, bitter frown, this one cast at the ground. She hated being caught out. But it, too, was part of the game: if you're caught out, you don't begrudge it. Nothing less pleasant than a bad sport.

"I was invited in, therefore I am bound by hospitality. Just because your people don't know proper manners doesn't mean I've forgotten mine." She studied the girl. "But these are not your people, either, are they? They're..."

Tultharian, the word came, but she needed a better one. Tultharian was everyone who was not Tuatha, and here there were all kinds--so many more than she had been expecting. One needed a new word for each one. It seemed needlessly complicated.

Frowning a little, she brushed the trailing remark away.

"It doesn't trouble me, what they might think. The only thing that might bother me is the inconvenience. I only wish to be left be." Her tongue crept out, touching the corner of her upper lip. "I just...it did not occur to me that being left alone would be quite so boring." Or lonely. She shook her head. "Look, this is no good. I'm fair caught and I've no right to be hostile. And I've promised not to do any harm, so there's no need for you to be so cautious. Let me start again. Civil. We'll discuss this like two ladies."

Her eyebrows went up. She offered a small smile, like a shy gift, to the girl. "I...there's some bread in my satchel. We could share?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Sun Aug 09, 2015 9:11 am

But these are not your people, either, are they? They're...

"Myrkeners. They're Myrkeners," Gloria says. "I'm a Myrkener, and so are you."

Niabh's recession causes the seamstress to do the same. She settles back on her heels, still holding the clay pot of preserves aloft as if it might somehow establish a peace between them. They were going to start again; they were going to be civil, a word that registers an almost animal reaction from the stout girl standing in front of Niabh. The moment Gloria hears it, her face smooths to one of ease and regard. The tension leaks away from the boulders of her upper arms. She nods, a vigorous motion that sends the wax-dipped strings of her bonnet in a wild bounce against the upturned collar of her dress. Yes. Yes, they could be civil; they could wring away needless hostility and posturing. Could be ladies.

Like Menna Patience, like her sister before her. Like Ariane Emory had been after her mind had been shredded to—

"Your bread," Gloria reasons, "and my jam. I've got no spreading-knife, but I suppose we'll make do, as they say. The company's most important. I dread being alone, truthfully; if it's company you require, then while I'm certainly not the finest, I am a — a suitable countermeasure against loneliness."

Her patch-littered skirts and voluminous underpinnings rustle like dried leaves as she squats down in the ferns and gently places the clay pot of marmalade between them. The stump of her left arm lowers the basket carefully to the ground, and she removes from it a rather ornate square of cloth. Dots of blood stain its corners. The fabric wears a thousand imperceptible stitches, all forming unfamiliar letters and text, little images of running herds, and symmetrical embroideries worked with a careful flourish. "For the bread," Gloria announces, sitting cross-legged behind it.

This was civility. This was how a lady did a thing.

"That word. Tule-tharin, was it? What does it mean. My tule-tharin gods, as you said. Will you explain it?" The inquiry is genuine, curious. "And why do you plan to leave so quickly after arriving?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Sun Aug 09, 2015 10:13 am

Anything of value in Niabh's satchel had been well-disguised and scattered about her small room at the tavern, most of them in plain view, with a few caches tucked away in case of disaster. The only thing she kept in the satchel now immediate necessities like a ball of twine--now only about the size of a duck egg--and some spare patches, a whetstone, her old sling and a few pebbles, a small silver flask, and whatever was going to be her snack should she go wandering. She went and fetched it from where it leaned against a tree and dug out the stump of a loaf. Probably not enough for two, but enough for a symbolic meal. Mother had been much on the ceremony of breaking bread; it didn't matter if it was only a crumb, so long as it was enough to split in half. On second thought, she brought the flask too.

"Well, I suppose we are still ladies even if we have to spread jam with our fingers," she said cheerfully, flopping down on the grass. "I'll not tell if you won't." The cloth was almost too fine to eat from, blood-stained or not. It was a struggle to keep her fingers off the patterns, as if she could read the strange letters by touching them. She almost wanted to ask, but there were more pressing matters. Like how she was going to get out of this one.

"I am not a Myrkener. I am myself, which suffices." She pulled her little bronze knife, barely longer than her hand and sharpened so thin it would probably snap if dropped on a stone floor, and split the loaf down the middle so that neither of them would be stuck with the crusty end. "And tultharian..." her voice was a gentle correction "...they're..."

She hesitated. They were being civil. It was very hard to translate 'tultharian' in a way that didn't make it sound like the obvious insult it was.

"They're...mainlanders? They're everyone who is not us." She shrugged lightly. "Myrkeners. I can say that too. Myr-ken-ers." Her gaze sharpened again. "But you are not? Who are your people?"
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:47 am

She watches patiently as the bronze knife cuts through the loaf of bread. The knife looks so frail, so flimsy, but she knows better than to judge it by its fragility: a knife can always stab and slice, can pierce flesh and puncture organs; a knife can and always will call forth blood, if wielded gravely.

Gloria takes up her bit of the bread, eats it dry, and says from around a mouthful of crumbs: "I had a — a knife made out of glass," as if the statement matters, or has some reason for being interjected at all.

She does not eat like the lady Niabh pretends they are. Her mouthfuls are overlarge, forcing her cheeks to bulge. Crumbs spill to the lap of her skirts. Tiny refugees of bread cling on her flaking lips. She dips a corner of the bread into marmalade and tears at the dough like a ravenous beast. "I'll not tell if you won't," she repeats, a pact, grinning through stained teeth. Why, they could spread jam with their fingers all day long and nobody would ever know; they could tilt the pot and drink it like ambrosia if it suited them.

"Tultharian," Gloria says, taking care to repeat each syllable around the half-gnawed gob in her mouth. "Mainlander. Though I hesitate—" a swallow, "—to see how — how mainlanders have different gods than—"

Who are your people?

"I'm a Jerno. Was. Still by blood, but—"

She stares down at her skirts.

"I'm a Myrkener. And whether or not you want to be, or choose to be, you are. This place puts its teeth into your skin, Niabh. Doesn't let go. You earned that the moment I sought to put a mug against that ju'k'ad's skull. And even if your gods are different than mine, we're the same."
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Re: Target Practice

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:52 am

Jerno. The name rang familiar, but as something that had been important to someone else once, not to her. A name heard in passing. She frowned, her head tipping to the side, and put the name away for later. Somewhere near home? Some place she'd passed through? The gods knew some of those places had been a blur while she'd allowed herself to be bumped along, numb with shock, passed from hand to hand without even raising her eyes enough to see what color the sky was.

But maybe...maybe if Gloria knew how to get here, she knew how to get back.

She dipped a finger full of jam and smeared it across the bread, then licked the sticky stuff off the side of her hand while watching Gloria eat. She couldn't tell if the woman's ravenous gobbling was due to hunger or poor manners, but either way she wished she'd brought enough for two now--not the least reason being that she was a hour past a growling belly herself. She returned Gloria's grin and started in on her bread-and-jam.

"Mad dogs also put their teeth in your skin," she replied archly. "It never ends well. I prefer to stay a guest. I don't plan on being here long, which is why I would keep myself private and not interfere with people and keep to your ways. A good guest doesn't demand more than is offered." She bowed her head briefly. "Though I'm grateful to you for being a good host. You didn't have to defend me, but I was glad that someone did. I...I was debating whether or not to break hospitality."

At her size, she could have either killed him outright or submitted to whatever he would do. The consequences for both would have amounted to the same thing: break glam, stand exposed, run or be captured. Questions. Punishments. Moreover, the humiliation--a man's hands running all over her on a filthy tavern floor with a dozen eyes gawking. The absolute loss of face. Even if she hadn't been fully caught out, she would have had to go back to the same place every day and know that everyone knew.

The corner of her mouth turned up in a wry smile. "And in spite of all the evidence, I would rather not spill blood as a guest. It's rude."
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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Niabh
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