by Rance » Mon Jun 10, 2013 12:29 pm
The contraption, the bridle, was meant to keep her tongue silent, at a pause. Its bent steel and leathers were a bramble of inhospitable coldness -- where in Myrken had they had such a thing forged, for what use had it beyond the freezing of a Storyteller's tongue?
Glamours. Things appearing differently than they were oft perceived. She inclined her chin to Rhaena Olwak, leaning with desperation upon the woman's advice. Her fingers were splayed across the Mathymatics, her short fingernails digging into the tome's cover as the Storyteller spoke.
"I do not want you in agreement with me," the seamstress said, sharp and stern, never looking at the bound woman, but instead off to one side--
In the young woman's imagination, there was a steep pit, wet and musty, stinking of shit and blood, and there were children, eleven children, tumbling from the edge and falling down, down, into the hungry maw of a many-toothed beast -- Cherny on the edge, and behind him, Cat-Talon, and behind the urchin, more, and more, and more...
"A court is not unfair; a trial is your right," she said, as if one of her book was opened before her, and she could read straight from the pages. "If you are not the Greatlady I knew, that will be discovered soon enough. And then we will be done with all of this business. But if you are--"
In her voice, a glamour -- no product of magic or cantrip, but a fabrication of cordwood courage. She never looked at the Storyteller, but instead sought to study her own fingers.
"If you are, be silent. Nothing good comes from you. Nothing."