Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Wed Oct 22, 2014 3:26 pm

What she had learned in Myrken Wood was that the autumn nights were often as heavy as iron: gray, stern, unfeeling, all of them a herald serving only to announce the death of summer at the hands of infringing winter. It was a time for woolen skirts, layers of smallclothes and petticoats, an opportunity again to line the sleeves and cowl of a dead man's cloak with knotted fists of fur.

But sometimes, the bowels of the Broken Dagger were too warm, and phantoms dancing in an unchecked mind stirred her limbs from their sleep. Gloria Wynsee crossed the lawn with tromping, indelicate strides, bearing two loads in the night -- the ninth-month burden bulging against the waistline of her common dress, and across a shoulder, a lumpy burlap filled with a harvest's bounty: apples, all recently fallen, with black, soft-spot eyes staring out from their skins. Imperfect. Meant for compost.

She used the edge of a mud-caked boot to coax open the door to the stables. The warm, horse-hot air greeted her with its odor of shit and wet hay. A nightlamp wanly flickered on a peg jutting out from a vertical beam. Shadows formed creases for her to step over and across.

She came to feed Caliir, her steed, her boy, but another task summoned her, too--

Thoughts could not be left too long to rot.

"Vara," she whispered into the stalls. "Vara, are you here? I sought you out in your room, but you didn't answer."

She dropped the sack of apples to the floor.
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Wed Oct 22, 2014 3:56 pm

"Well, I cannot answer in my rooms when I am absent from them, can I?" came the rather small voice, carrying its reply from one of the empty stalls, otherwise draped in darkness, where the light from the lamp did not bleed.

"Of course I am here. Where else should I be?" A sniffle followed the question, though any tears lingering on still burning red cheeks were quickly wiped away against the wool of that grey dress, covering knees drawn up close to her chest.
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Wed Oct 22, 2014 4:17 pm

The voice crawled out of the musty corners of one of the stalls. Gloria -- who cast a long, distorted silhouette across the floor and the gray-wooded wall -- turned her cheek toward the sound. Her bonnet-strings snapped against her thick cheeks and the stalk of her neck. In the scant light, her mud-colored skin was almost black except for the prying lances of her eyes.

"I suppose you can't," came the reply, her tone weighed down by the baggage of an accent that dragged each vowel out to its furthest reaches. "But I suppose, too, that I cannot see through doors to be any the wiser."

As she stood in the entryway to that unoccupied stall, the lamplight revealed the young woman's other disproportions: the broad boards of her shoulders, the unusual height that set her inches above other girls of her age, and the swollen mass of her stomach that seemed great enough to offset the sturdy balance in the rest of her rugged frame. Yet, for all her clumsy mass, what fingers remained on her only hand clutched gingerly to her patch-littered skirts and drew them away from ankles and shins so she could squat down beside Vara in the dark.

"Plenty of -- of other places. In a bed, perhaps, or sipping a mug in good company. Or with your nose in a book. Or," Gloria ventured, "somewhere that guarantees better seclusion from busy-bodies like me.

"But in the absence of that, may I sit with you," she asked, "and share a -- a little piece of your sadness?"
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:18 pm

"I have no company to keep, good or otherwise--they have all gone," Vara informed the slightly older girl. There was no one else now, save herself. And this was the most secluded place she could possibly think of, without having to venture out too far away from the inn in the wet and the dark.

"Sit if it please you. As far as I am aware, Myrken Wood does not suffer tyrants." Not like Thessilane, apparently.

"And I am not sad," she lied, though it was only a half-lie, or if you would, a half-truth. "My mother has been sad for as long as I can remember, and it only ever got her institutionalized. No, I shall not be sad, despite tears. I am angry."
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Thu Oct 23, 2014 3:57 pm

"Anger," Gloria said as she put her bare palm down into the tangled hay to help lower herself beside Vara, "is just sadness burnt over a different kind of fuel." A pause. "Is it from what Cat said to you?"

She cared little that the hems of her skirts, where trimming-tape dangled loosely off the hem, dragged in the dried lumps of waste hidden like unpleasant secrets in the musty hay. With a grunt, she settled next to Vara, the stone of her knee unabashed as it gingerly pressed against the other girl's. Gloria stank of the night, of the dew that saturated her tarnished clothes. Black, smoke-matted curls scattered across her forehead.

"Institutionalized?" she asked, piecing the word out along her curious tongue. "Put somewhere, for the sake of her mind?"

It hurts to see madness. Twisting and writhing at whispers you can't hear, hissing out another girl's name through bubbles of white foam between her lips, and she forgot you'd ever even come from her loins--

"Gone?" Her aunt, then--

Her keeper?

"I'm not," the seamstress whispered.
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:18 am

"Absolutely not," she began, pulling out the handkerchief she'd tucked up into her sleeve for safe keeping. The very same embroidered one that Gloria had examined the night of Vara's arrival, used now to wipe at her eyes and cheeks, to be sure that her face was clean, dry. "Cat is just a baby with nothing better to do but annoy people. And that Barnyard boy is just some...well, I hate him, and it has almost nothing to do with the fact that he hails from Derry." Boys were stupid, she'd decided.

"Nurse said it was not her fault--that a common...well, someone born and raised the way she was, had never been meant for such a life. That she had always been...delicate. She said that my mother had been stolen away once, from my father, from me--stolen right through her mirror, upstairs...just there." Vara indicated the inn with a nod and a cant of her head. "That she had been locked away, down in the damp, in the dark, by a drow who...put things into her head. And that my father left her there for days." Narrow shoulders rolled beneath the shawl wrapped around them, as Vara had no explanation for that part. "And when he finally came, she was changed. She tried to kill him." Vara had been too young at the time to possibly remember any of it, as evidenced by the way she spoke now--recanting someone else's story. "Nurse said that he put her away--for her own safety. For his, undoubtedly. For mine as well. They told him she died. Nurse said that he was never the same; that they were both changed. Both gone mad, in their own ways."

Fingers toyed with the handkerchief within them--folding the fabric, only to unfold it again and smooth it over knees. It was all idle work, to give her something to focus on, something to look at other than Gloria next to her. "Nurse said theirs was once a great romance--one that made for a lovely story." A fairy tale sort of story, told to little girls so that they, too, might just hold out hope that one day their knight would come, sweep them away to another land, and make them a princess. "Do you...do you think I shall ever see them again?" she asked, her voice very quiet, as if it might break should the question be spoken any louder.

But there came another question then. Vara cleared her throat and nodded. "Gone." And without so much as a fare you well before they'd gone. "Left a letter to say that they were already overdue and were meant to be further south. They never had any intention of staying. They were merely a means to see me here until Ariane came to collect me. But she has not come." Her tone indicated that she very much doubted that she ever would, but it was just as well--Vara didn't know the woman.
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:34 am

The tale rolled out from Vara as though she were constructed to tell it: mirrors and murder, an allegory elaborating the depths of insanity as if it had stolen itself from off this mad mother's tongue and been transplanted in this slip of a girl as truth--

--stolen right through her mirror...

And while every scant glimmer of logic in her mind blinked, gleamed, and tried to blind her to the story (it must be exaggerated somewhere; silvered glass cannot come to life, cannot consume a woman whole!) she could not draw her gaze away from Vara's turned visage. Gloria Wynsee knew what mirrors could do.

Gloria Wynsee believed her.

"Nurse," the seamstress assured, "was correct. A porcelain cup won't throw itself off the mantelpiece; the mad don't inspire themselves to shatter. Your mother endured what -- what sounds like a great deal of anguish. And I should wish for you, for her, that she never had." Trembling fingertips picked at an errant fabric on her own skirts, and for a few minutes, they were reflections of one another, if bred from wholly disparate stock. "I was twelve," she whispered into her sweat-darkened collar, a stiff admission that demanded her voice remain sturdy. "My mother went mad, too.

"And will you see them?" she interjected, an emphatic retort that both her eyes and her voice sought to answer. She bid Vara do the same, touching the girl's chin with a broad, up-curled finger. "Yes. Whether or not those who came with you are gone, if your mother lives still, there's -- there's no power or barrier too great to keep you from finding her or your father.

"I'd go with you. If Ariane could not, or would not. I would."
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:53 am

They made an unlikely pair, settled there together in the lamplight. Each with their own stories of mothers and madness. "I thought that perhaps she had overcome it all--at least until now." Until she'd sent her daughter away like a rebuked lover in the middle of the night, with no promises for her safety--only words.

"I shall keep my wits about me, no matter what is to come," she pledged. No matter what.

But then Vara laughed of a sudden, and it was a strange sound, given the mix of emotions--a shocking reaction given the gravity of it all, as Gloria hefted her chin, eyes for eyes. "No. Not much at all to stop me. Only the Crown's entire army."
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Fri Oct 24, 2014 5:02 pm

Only the Crown's entire army.

Thessilane. Earlier in the evening, the talk about Thessholes, the offense taken to insults thrown by the urchin; these things formed fictions in Gloria's head that gave explanation to the anger surging under the other girl's pale skin. She knew so very little about the tenuous relationships between the nations, knew nothing of politics or disputed borders, of Derry or Thessilane or the Crown. But what stood by was--

"If we are struck by a fist," the solid girl whispered to her friend, unblinking, resolved, "we get back up, no matter what is to come. Swords and shields rust eventually. If your aim, one day, is to return home, then I'll do what I may for you, in order to keep you whole.

"No one, if ever there's a choice, deserves to -- to be estranged from their home."

They were bold words from a pregnant girl, as if she knew the future or could derive some prophecy to guarantee this truth to her friend. But her gaze was dull, listless, still too puerile to understand the complexities. Amid the sodden hay and the blinking lamplight, Gloria reached across her swollen belly to place her Sun-warmed palm against Vara's knee.

"May I ask you a thing," Gloria asked, "which I hope you don't take as untoward?"
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Sat Oct 25, 2014 5:40 am

"Dearest Gloria," who was dear now for these words spoken, for gifts given, for care taken when no one else had shown as much, "I worry that it may already be too late for going home, even had I an entire army to see me through." It may have already been too late for her father, who did have an entire army at his disposal. And what of her mother and brother?

"My fear is not that I shall never see it again, but that it will be so very -changed- whereupon I chance to make it home again. Changed because I fear--," she continued, her voice breaking upon the very word. A breath, a moment taken to find her voice anew. "I fear that they will all be gone when I return. I fear that they will all be killed if they, too, do not leave." And a man in red would never fly a flag of white.

"Ask what you will, Gloria. Tonight I have no secrets."
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Sat Oct 25, 2014 10:08 am

"Changed or not, home is home. And should you return to find it razed or destroyed?"

She knew nothing of vengeance or recompense measured in blood, but in the weak light of the lamp across the way, her brown-skinned face was as sharp from forehead to chin as a tarnished blade; the light reminded her that she was a Jerno, and Jerno logic crawled from her, then, for this new girl she called friend.

"Then you smother the fire of -- of anger by ending those who ruined your family. But in time," she said. "When the proper moment dawns. Until then, you listen to patience. You find comfort in friends. And always get back up."

There it was again, that repetition, that mantra--

Advice for Vara. Advice for herself.

The hardness faded from her countenance. Ask what you will.

"The White Woman," she said, her volume falling as she buried her sullen inquiry against her dirty collar, "would -- would be a laughing stock in a court, you said. And me? Unwed, fat with a child fabricated through impulse, teeth like broken rocks.

"Would I be one too?"
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Sat Oct 25, 2014 11:38 am

"The only people that I actually knew have gone. And forgive me, but there does not seem to be an abundance of others who care to be friendly to anyone who has come -from- Thessilane, let alone a Tass--..." Vara coughed. "Let alone someone like me." Someone born to something better than anything they'd ever had.

Wait for it, Gloria was saying. Be patient and wait. Wait for the time to come when she might rise up and end those who have ruined her family. The pregnant girl beside her spoke treason, without a clue that she was doing so. "You have no idea what you are saying, Gloria. But you ought not to speak of it. In doing so, you place yourself on the wrong side of things--without any intention of wrong-doing. Our side...-my- side is not, I think, a side on which to place yourself--not when it pits you, and yours," she said, with a nod to the child growing within her womb, "against the Crown."

The mention then of the White Woman had Vara frowning--she'd been cruel, unnecessarily so, and already her chin was falling from its lofty height, too proud for her own good. What she thought began as admonishment for her words ended in a question that she would rather not answer. But she had to, didn't she? She'd given Gloria leave to ask anything.

"No. You would not." It wasn't a lie, but a truth without reason. "You would never be at court."
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:36 pm

You would never be at court.

The honest response was met with a long thread of silence. Her palm stroked along the hillock of her belly. Her Sun-darkened cheeks tightened as teeth gnawed their inner lining. When she spoke, her tongue darted out to moisten cracked lips so that the sounds issuing forth were a woman's, not a petulant child's, not a maggot's. "Then perhaps I am fortunate," Gloria said, her mouth stretching wide, a liar's grimace. "In the commons, a blasphemy can only be hidden under your dress for so long before men and women who toil in sweat and mud and shit realize you belong to no man. They think words like whore and strumpet are suitable labels for the bearers of bastard children.

"So I think of their faces in my room. I think of -- of their dirty faces," she said, breath blasting out from her nostrils in rapid bursts, "and punch the wall until I imagine they're screaming."

Until I am, too.

With her remaining fingers, she picked from the floor a broken spine of hay, spinning it between her thumb and index as if it might take fairy-flight between them. The filthy stalk whap-whap-whapped against the hem of her off-white petticoats. "I will speak of what I wish, Vara. Am I beholden to sides? To Glenn Burnie, that -- that fucking fool of a man?" Here, from between a frangible set of teeth, she leaned side to spit into the hay. "I fear the wolves in the woods and the beasts that rape people's minds more than I ever could a whole legion of boys with their fine little swords. I've earned my title as Myrkener by bleeding, but my very last drop of blood will still be Jernoan."

To bloviate on and on was catharsis; to finally breathe, in conclusion, was a relief. Into Vara Tassenhoff's lap she bestowed the single stalk of straw and tapped it against the other girl's frock.

"I put myself on the side of -- of my friends and those I love. Would you be so bold to demand I alter my convictions and think any other way?"
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby SuperRy » Sun Oct 26, 2014 9:36 am

The honesty was painful, for words could wound if not issued with care. Vara, however, for all of her faults, could not lie with any ease to this girl who had seen fit to be kind to someone she did not know.

Her brow furrowed at the telling of beating walls, further creasing at the mention of this Glenn Burnie, whose name she must have heard before for it rang familiar somehow, though she had no idea who the man was. "Who...?" she began to ask, but Gloria continued and Vara thought it best to let her speak, to let her say what she would on the matter.

"I would demand nothing of you. I would, however, be bold enough to pray that you would stay your...convictions, when you have no idea of who, or what, it is that you are siding with." A breath. A pause. Head turned so that she could look over at the older girl whose shoulder pressed against her own in that stall.

"My mother sent me here blindly...perhaps thinking that she might protect me, that I might find some sort of political asylum. Some sort of sanctuary in Myrkentown, because although I am guilty of waging no wars of my own, I bear my father's name--his blood flows in my veins. I am guilty by association. By birth.

"Lenore...that is my mother's name; she was a chambermaid here. She worked with Ariane. And she met, and fell in love with, the Duke of Thessilane, in the inn just behind us. Burel Tassnehof is my father." Shoulders sagged with some relief, if temporary, giving up or giving way to the weight of the secret she had been carrying, the one she had shared with Lilja and Ayelet until they left her own.

The one that she now shared with Gloria Wynsee, for better, or for ill.
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Re: Might Then Call Themselves Ladies

Postby Rance » Sun Oct 26, 2014 10:38 am

Royalty.

Gloria knew nothing about hierarchies of the courts, the science and logic and designations; she knew a duke was a great being, that a king or queen often set forth concords and decrees that could shape whole countries and their pursuant histories. And perhaps it was this ignorance that found the plain-clothed girl with a plain-set face remaining wholly still as Vara Tassenhoff bestowed her weighty secret. It seemed uncanny, really, that the hot, acrid aromas inside the Broken Dagger's stables should be the scaffold for such news--

"I side," she told the hidden treasure beside her, returning the gaze she was given with stony resolve, "with my friends, and you are among those, Vara. I'm neither perfect nor intelligent, experienced or wise, but -- but should you find it in your heart to forgive me my stupidities, my mistakes, my impulses, you'll never find my back toward you for paltry matters of politics.

"Whether Myrkener, Thessil, Granger, or Jerno, we're all the same here. Mostly," she confided.

Heels scuffed against the soil and hay as she labored to find her knees. Despite the round counterweight of her belly, she eventually stood and held down to the other young woman her only hand.

"I'm -- I'm the salt of the earth, like they say; you'll find few confidants as reliable as I, for that I mean so very little means no one would ever listen even if I sought to shout your secret from the rooftops. Be steady; I wouldn't." Her grin widens. In the darkness beneath a wrinkled bonnet-cap, her smile betrayed its broken components: were it not for her poor teeth, she could have been pretty. "But what I will do is honor your mother's love for you: I'll make her proud she chose this place for your sanctuary.

"I wouldn't let anything happen to you. Take my palm," she said, intonation soft, secure, unafraid.
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