Iron Shoes Taught Him

[Rance]

"You f-f-found her in m-m-my teeth. You n-n-need your sleep. I m-m-might creep up on you, again, and if you're n-n-not ready with glass-words, Miss Gloria, I m-m-might f-f-finish wh-what I started."

It all stemmed from a missing cygnet. The fat one. Eight of eight, the one who ate all the fallen crumbs. The one who bullied the other baby swans -- water-dragons, Catch called them, for his fantasies were so vivid and real, and his mind was like a childish loom of the wondrous -- into knowing she was the infantile queen of the flock.

"I am g-g-going to name a dragon after you, Miss Gloria."

And so he had. Miss Gloria. Hefty and dark, just like her.

He hasn't any idea what he speaks of, and where the words come from. That gentle, bumbling part of him is horrified. He leans in, and his lips seek to catch hers, to kiss as Iron Shoes has taught him, with tongue and sensuous feeling that he did not feel in the slightest, learned by rote without an inkling to the human emotion behind it.

The next day, she was not at the stables to await Woger, her handle and her escort to Darkenhold, where she learned good RETERIK and speaking-posture, the arts of diplomacy. Where she would ascertain a more efficient grasp on the Common. She would not be there the day after that. Caliir -- her favorite beast, the one-toothed, flat-faced creature she was learning to ride -- became increasingly unsettled, for his seamstress had not been around to visit him in the stables. Regularly, she chewed up apples twice a day into wet mush and fed him with her hands. It pleased him. That treat, however, had gone unfulfilled.

"Girls are supposed to be mothers. But my friend Veteran Arkessa, she told us all about how mothers become mothers, and--" a hitch in her breath, eyes that glistened, danced, "--it is not a thing that I can do, Mister Catch. Never at all."

For several days, Cherny would not see the seamstress. She left no notes, nor was she around to complain about how she could not sell bags. She did not wait for him after his schooling near Catch's stump, where he slung stones and knocked the block off the cordwood target he had painstakingly worked into the shape of a villain. There had been no occasional mugs of half-emptied broth left on Catch's wood-cutting stump, the usual evidence that an absent-minded girl had been out there to read her philosophy.

There was Catch and his hot breath, his heavy hand against her belly. His lips were dry, thick, and her reaction instinctive. The seamstress's hands shot up for his cheek, her chewed nails trying for his skin, eyes wide and glistening -- and then a bite for his lower lip from her teeth, crunching and hard, just enough to rip blood from skin.

"You are a dragon now, Miss Gloria," he breathed, the intensity of it like the fire of a fever. "A glass-dragon, and all of Jernoah sleeps on your back."

Raia would room alone; her new rooming-partner, the Jerno girl who quietly wished for potions that would lighten her hair but never asked for them, the bronze-skinned seamstress who often seemed to stay awake too long by candlelight, was not around. Her bed went too long made for several days, the tarsweat-blackened pillow not crammed against the headboard or accidentally discarded to the floor. A book, H'zlz ar G'leuse, the girl's favorite long-form poem, was left untouched despite that it was quite normal for her to read it again and again at night.

His blood is a Song on her tongue, a complex netting of feelings. Invincible, strength, intoxicating. It begs to be explored, to be studied, to be ingested, to be real. To be a covey of men, far past their years, held in thrall under black milk and thick smoke.

It had been a misunderstanding, all because of a poor, lost cygnet.

For days, the seamstress was nowhere to be found. She ran until her legs collapsed and her whole body screamed; she raked at her lips with her fingers, trying to get his taste off him. She bathed in the streams she found until the stones she used to wipe the grime from her skin tore lines in her and peeled whole slivers of flesh away from her. The underside was soft, pink meat.

A single droplet of Catch's blood fermented in one of the loose folds of her esophagus. When she vomited, it was black and like hard, twisting branches. The rotten roots of a dying tree. The black thousand-legs of a kraken turned inside-out. Tentacles. Terrible blood-things.

Things a seamstress was not meant to know.

For several days, she did not return.