by Rance » Thu Sep 05, 2013 5:23 pm
He clenched her hand in a blacksmith's vice. She wanted to slither free, tell him you're hurting me, but her brown, Sun-soaked bones and sandstone knuckles could endure his strength. They were both lonely figures underneath the flecks of moonlight pouring in through the summer branches, and they were both young things, fresh and inexperienced in the matters of the world. They were frightened together. He was sulfurous fear; she wanted nothing more than to turn back and deny the water, refuse it.
But Tenannt was her friend, and what patience the seamstress hadn't ever thought to extend to Elliot Gahald, to Noura the wildling, to even Ariane Emory, she gave to him. She might argue, days, weeks, months, years later how vastly different that moment was from those she shared with others of Rhaena's ilk--
--but the stars stitched the word hypocrite into her bronze skin, even as she watched the enthusiasm in his face trickle down through the funnels of his skin and take shape as invisible blisters of terror. The water darkened his trousers and cast eddies of diluted moonlight across him.
She took each step with him. The wetness crowned her ankles, then her knees. Her bedgown crawled out across the water around her, a dirty balloon. The girl waited to fall, take the next step and feel nothing, teeter too far forward, vanish into Silver Lake -- no, into the sea.
"H'zlz loved his G'leuse like a heart loves to beat. H'zlz cut through swaths of marauders with a glass blade and dipped his toes into the gashes he left," she trilled, a rhythm in her quivering voice that bespoke poetry -- her favorite, a romance, a love between mythical soldiers. "H'zlz cleaved men like meat from the rise of the Glass Sun until the reign of the Crawl Moon. Bodies fell into priestly patterns. H'zlz shed much blood from many men, for a thousand of them could not equal his G'leuse."
Deep as the knees. Then submerged to the hips. She quaked, a scrabbling branch of a girl with water licking at her sweater, at the crest of her belly just below her breasts. She turned her chin, clenched his hand, and said to him, "Sometimes I think about you when I'm very lonely. I wonder if -- if you are washing little glasses, or laughing with other ladies. My guts sink and I look into my reflection and I whisper to myself that I wish I were older, I wish I were prettier.
(Would he ever remember it, or had Rhaena burned canyons too deep into his mind? Better he never did; better the seamstress tell him now, that he might stir from his fugue and never recall her words, the wine, the wetness of the Lake pulsing around them.)
"I dream that I am H'zlz, and you are my G'leuse. I know there are other girls finer and more deserving; I know that I am afraid. But who among them would ever have this chance? To -- to swim with you," she said.
Something had awakened a fright as deep as buried bones in him. He was like a tiny boy. He was helpless. She cried like a braying jah'zoon, her face clenched and wrinkled into a prune -- tears for him, for the water -- but her voice did not falter. "I won't let go. I give you my word.
"Show me why we're here, Tennant."