He glared. They parried angles with their words, their stares. Every time that his eyes came across her, she ceded, turned her cheek against the slatted planes of her bonnet. Every accusation and sharp retaliation for the sake of right and wrong brought with it the need to absolve, expiate, explain. Talk of games, of playing; he said it all to the twinkling pin-pricks in the black canvas of the sky as if it would hear better than she ever could.
But over the off-time flickers of the candles, each nestled warmly within the glass and iron of the lantern at their feet, he struck. It was not a knife-point or a spear-head, but a sledge--
I'm not s-stupid, b'lettah.
"I never said you were stupid," she said, a wheeze of vapor coiling out of her lump of a nose. "I would never say that. I would never, for a moment, even insinuate it. And don't -- don't, for so much as a half-blink's time -- lie to yourself and assume that's what I think. You know me better than that. More than anyone else does."
A particularly brilliant fleck of snow became her victim. She hiked her skirts, turned her foot at the ankle, and gave a great sweep of her boot, dashing away the offending flake with a broad heave from her boot.
"I despise knives. Particularly ones wielded by little paws that haven't earned my trust. I'm fighting with you right now, not because I enjoy it, but sometimes because your eyes shine far too brightly on everything around them to see all the miniature shadows. You see friends, playmates, and a whole legion of underprivileged vermin. I understand that. It's -- it's who you are; it's why you're a squire."
She inhaled and mounted her hands on her hips, drawing calmer, more composed circles in the snow with the edge of her boot.
"But I see forty-six days on a boat. I'd -- I'd never seen a boat before. I spent forty-six days covering my ears because the splashing and gurgling of the water against the other side of the hull kept telling me that at any minute, it was going to blast through all the knots in the wood and drown me. Forty-six days surrounded by men and women I didn't know, emptying my guts into my lap and -- and shitting on myself because there wasn't even a candle to see anything by, and my legs were too tangled in everyone else's to move. And if the water was calm, if the rest of the slaves and human cargo in that vessel stopped their coughing and whimpering and whispering enough--"
The girl rubbed a finger along the bulging dryness of her lower lip, giving the skin no more respect than she might a swollen pustule.
"Scraping in the walls, between the outer hull and the inner compartments. Claws making music as they scrabbled back and forth, back and forth. Hundreds of fist-sized stowaways chittering and -- and nickering. Bulging bodies scampering across your feet or gnawing and sucking at the sweat at your sleeve-hems. The strangest breathing, sniffing, croaking creatures with worms for tails dipping their -- their hands into puddles of sick to taste it, eat it, and savor it. Men and -- and women finding the meat from the warmest parts of their ankles and palms gnawed off in patches and pinches as they slept.
"And to imagine," Gloria said, "if they'd had swords."
She hooked a blunted fingernail underneath the snag of a brittle tooth. Chewed. She scraped at the inside of her cheek to rid it of a redolent gem of sea-salt that wasn't there. She didn't know why she thought of those things, right then; relevant, indeed, but unnecessary, disconnected from fact. He might say But those rats aren't Forzo--
So when he asked his question -- why w-would F-forzo leave d-dead rats as a w-warning -- the girl bit off a hinge of yellow nail and spit it into the snow at her feet.
"You know Son's penchant for eating: meat, bone, even marrow. Forzo isn't a fool, Cherny. He knows a jab from a makeshift sword wouldn't dissuade Son in a fever of hunger. He's taking precautions, as any beast might. He's -- he's marking boundaries and belongings with blood.
"This is my territory. I have got family to protect."