One in the Same

[Rance]

She was as attentive as she always was throughout the hour of her lesson. The seamstress sat forward in an undersized chair, listening in earnest to Rhaena Olwak's instruction. She scraped numbers on her slate, occasionally thrusting high an arm high in the air to answer a problem, though she was the only student in the room. Finally, when she was instructed to complete a series of simpler equations, the girl excused herself from her bench and approached Rhaena's desk, a folded parchment in her hands.

The girl was cleaner than she had usually been: her hair was softer, untangled, her skin not so dark with filth, and her dress had been rubbed down with a wet stone to rid it of its grime. This was a matter of presentation; this was a subject to be taken seriously.

"I have a letter," she said, holding out Glenn Burnie's short missive to the gowned woman. Tall and broad as she was for fourteen, she felt like a lumbering oaf in the room, hips nudging desk-sides in her gracelessness.

"I have got that letter," she reiterated, "because I wished to speak to Regent Burnie about things. About things." She should have been doing her lessons; she should have been finding out the roots of numbers and making fractions smaller and smaller still. Instead, she glanced over her shoulders toward the corners of the empty schoolhouse as if looking for eyes and ears in the walls.

"Tea," she said. "I went to the teahouse, and -- and can we have some tea, Menna Olwak," the girl asked, crushing her skirts against her thighs with nervous hands.

"And then may we speak about Glenn Burnie. And then may we speak about--"

About things I have seen. Possibilities that should not be possible, but are altogether inevitable. About a Dream.

"--about his Myrken Wood?"

[Jirai]

Gloria was a pleasant student, and Rhaena Olwak genuinely enjoyed the hour she spent with the young Jerno - aside from the matter of dress and hygeine which the governor's lady patiently addressed in subtle ways, encouraging improvement in that area as well as in mathematics. So the girl's preparation for this meeting is appreciated, one can be sure of that. When Gloria approached her, letter in hand, the elegantly clad woman did not reach out to take the missive.

"Yes, Gloria," A smile, "I asked that he send you to me, since he is quite busy at the moment. Of course we might have tea." Rhaena Olwak always had tea, and she would set a fresh batch of leaves to steeping.

"This one is a white tea, flavored with ginger and a bit of peppermint. I find it quite pleasant, more subtle than some of the others." Words to fill the short wait on the beverage. "I am glad to hear that you visited the teahouse - young sera Kaczmarek has done a fine job with it, don't you think?"

Soon enough she would be pouring the steaming drink into matching cups, one nudged delicately towards the seamstress. She replaced the teapot before reaching for her own.

"Now, my dear. There is no need to be so nervous. Tell me what this is, of Glenn and his Myrken Wood?"

[Rance]

She took her tea and stared down into it with disinterest. While she had requested it, she did not drink -- it was meant more for its tactile comfort, its warmth against her palms, something to hold while the words she would say to Rhaena danced around in her mind.

She looked forward to her mathematics lessons with Menna Olwak. She did not always discuss them -- children younger than her might think her stupid and slow for not having learned so many simple things many years before -- but she was always excited to attend, working with diligence until her fingers were white and her brain was a quilting of numbers and precise calculations.

Today, though, she was off, a ship without a ballast.

Do I tell her?

"Please don't think me mad," she said. "I -- I know it will sound like there is something wrong with me, like I have lost an essential part of my brain, but I promise, I promise I have not."

I want to tell him. I feel sick. This is not right, this is--

The girl's chalk-dirty fingers squeezed the mug, and all thoughts of fractions and division were dashed from her mind. She blew out a sigh, setting recently-washed hair to fluttering in front of her eyes. They were dull things, ever-curious, as if trying to find some light from elsewhere that might bring them to life. "It is about him," she said, before she set down her tea and grimaced, as if the words themselves hurt like some fishgutter jammed between her ribs.

He had written, You can tell her anything you would me. In fact, I insist you do just that.

Her finger squealed as she traced an invisible path around the edge of the cup, her nose dangling a black bead of sweat. Her words were shallow, lifeless, as if she had practiced them too many times and had lost all the meaning behind them.

"I Dreamed it," she said. "Glenn Burnie is going to die."

[Jirai]

Rhaena sat there, with her perfect posture, immaculately groomed as she always was, teacup cradled in hands that were gloved with lace - more for decoration and propriety than to hide her differences. She sat patiently, with a small smile and tiny, pleasurable sips of her tea as Gloria thought and debated and finally began to speak. Bronze eyes watched the girl calmly as her tongue tumbled and twisted and finally gave up the words she had come here to speak.

"Everyone dies, Gloria dear. But tell me, what's this of dreams?" Rhaena Olwak knows Myrken's dreams, dreams of fire, dreams of death, dreams of that salty warmth spraying across one's face, into one's mouth, only to open one's eyes to see...

Glenn Burnie's body was on the ground. His chest was a crater and his head barely attached to the rest of him. Attached it was, though, and the look that was locked upon his his dead face was one of grim determination, matched by his cold, still open eyes.

No.

Perhaps the woman is not as calm as her first words might have seen, when she sets her teacup down, she does so with too much force, the amber contents threatening to slosh over the top.

"Tell me more, Gloria."

[Rance]

Tell me more, Gloria.

The woman's teacup struck the table like the rockbreaker's hammer. Despite the request, the girl stood like a mindless statue, the half-lively segment of some great frieze, a Jerno hiding under the mask of a Myrkener. With her own hand shaking and warm peppermint tea soiling her skirt-front, she dissolved into a chair across from Rhaena's desk and dug her fingers into the worn armrests.

"I like the teahouse," she said. "The ladies are pretty. Menna Nela is nice." The phrases were simple, synchronized with her quickening heart. Words, they were, offered in replacement, an elastic answer to the statements that Rhaena had made before--

--before talk of Glenn Burnie, when things were normal and they were girls meant to talk about mathematics.

"Please," she whispered, shrinking in her seat and crushing her skirt between her palms. "I am -- I am not mad; I know only that I can no longer sleep, that if I do, I am afraid of what my mind will show me. It is like it is poisoned with things that have not happened, but must. Do you understand," the girl asked, leaning forward, as if trying to see some kind of reason in Rhaena's face. A commonality. "They sang songs. I Dreamed a terrible, horrible world, and they sang songs of it--"

She had been a choir-girl once. She gripped the side of the desk, and though her diaphragm was constricted and her spine was bent, the girl had a voice to her. It dipped into the wild dishonesty of an old shanty, a work-song plucked out of the depths of a moment that had been wholly in her mind.

"Driven deep in his heart, the righteous’est blade
and like a dog, like a lamb, the goov’nah was slayed.
A traitor to men! Raise your mug, make a toast!
To the good soul that killed him, who he trusted the most!"

The words were rotten fruits littering her conscience. She recited them, bellowed them, as if she had sung them a thousand times before, her gaze never moving away from Rhaena.

”’For the good of our town,’ he would say, he would write,
’For what must always be done will not always be right!’
She gave a lop to his neck, though, and cut off his head,
and like a traitor should be, Glenn Burnie is dead, is dead is dead is--"

The song trickled off. She flattened a palm against her forehead, as if trying to hide her eyes behind the dark skin of her wrist.

"What awful mind dreams of verses like those, Menna Olwak? I feel them in my guts. They burn behind my eyes."

[Jirai]

The teacups were pretty things, painted with a fine brush, decorated with wild flowers whose likes had never been seen in Myrken Wood. Fortunately, the little cup had not broken.

"And what, Gloria, makes you think that these things must happen? What makes you think this dream is not a dream?" A cage, some might think the gowns, the powder, the paint, the propriety. Not for Rhaena Olwak, though. They were armor, and Gloria would see nothing but the woman's face set into a pleasant expression as she spoke. When she sang, though, for a moment there was a tiny crack, a flinch, tiny but telling.

"You have a lovely voice, young sera, even if I mislike the words." A wry twist of her tone, a small sigh, and Rhaena Olwak reached again for her teacup.

"I would know as much of this dream as you would tell me. And then, Gloria, then I can help you."

[Rance]

"It is like mathematics," she said, as she leaned back to gather up her slate and its accompanying chalk. She flattened it on the desk, then scraped long numbers on it. She then turned the piece so Rhaena could see. The seamstress had scribbled on it a simple addition: 2+2=4.

"You do not need to hypothesize or even perform the functions any longer to know it shall be," she said, speaking the way Duquesne had taught her: calmly, with purpose, each word always linking to the next, never one wasted, for each was a progression, a foundation of the following. "The knowledge is innate. Two and two will always be four. You may try to tell yourself it will be five, that the numbers have been wrong all this time, but you would be be lying; you would be fibbing yourself.

"That is how it is with my Dream." She steadied her eyes on a knot in the wood of the desk. "Two and two. I do not want it to be four. I want it to be five, six, anything. But that is not how mathematics work, Menna Olwak. They are exact. Aren't they?"

She reached for the pot of tea and took it within her rough hand. She poured herself more of the soothing liquid then whispered over the steaming cup.

"I don't want to become what I see in that awful place. I don't want to kill. Not Messa Tenant, not Master Cherny, not anyone. And the -- the town was starving, people were as thin as cornhusks, and everything was so bright. We -- we all called it Glenn Burnie's Golden Myrken Wood, but he was dead, and the Marshall, the Marshall--"

She swiped at her nose with a bone-buttoned sleeve.

"There is so much," the girl admitted, drinking tea and caring little if it scorched the inside of her mouth. "How -- how can you help, Menna Olwak?"

[Jirai]

"Mathematics can be proven. I can put two apples before you, and two more, and always you will have four and you can see this and touch this and taste this. Dreams, on the other hand, are tricky things, Gloria. In dreams, two and two might seem five or six, might seems so very strongly. But that does not make it so."

A small sip of her tea, bronze eyes considering the younger woman over the rim. "I think the future might be predicted, my dear. But I do not think it set in stone - it is a fluid thing that might be changed."

She set her cup down again, straight-backed, hands neatly folded in her lap. "I have some small skill, Gloria. If you wish, I might... mmm, not change what you recall of this dream. It is yours. I can, however, speed what time itself would do; so this dream is not so hurtful, so that you might sleep again. So that you need not fear dreams. But first, tell me of the Marshall."

[Rance]

Dreams, on the other hand, are tricky things, Gloria.

"But -- but not this one. It is there." A tap against her temple. "It is two-and-two-is-four."

It is a fluid thing that might be changed.

"What if I do it wrong, Menna Olwak. What if I break it further?"

It is yours.

"It is mine," she repeated, like prayers spoken in jerethedrals, hollow and repetitive. "It is ours."

Tell me of the Marshall.

She turned away, as if Rhaena were too bright a light for her to look directly into. She dragged her sleeve across nose and eyes, leaving glistening lines of tears and snot on the edges of a black-stained sleeve. She was the stone-tough refusal to cry; she was the stubborness of a girl who demanded of herself not to bend in half, to break at the whims of things that had not yet come to pass. The seamstress whispered as if the words were blasphemy. "The Marshall, she -- she was nothing, Menna Olwak. She sat straight-backed, obedient like a child, pliable little girl like some tool of the State for her assassin. The leader of Myrken Wood as she might become, she was a weak fool, a twig.

"Not like Menna Ariane," she said. "Not like my friend."

She swallowed. Her eyes were distant, lifeless, dull as lumps of tin in cave-dark rocks. She saw that--

--the new Paladin of Myrken Wood had his weapon. He had his silver. He had his false dreams, his shattered reality, his misconceptions of truth. The corpse of a withered seamstress with worms rattling in her mouth lay slumped on the Regent's great throne. The countless paper wings rained pulp down across them all, and glass-thin cracks began to spread out from beneath her feet. She raised the schiavona in the Assassin's direction, its tip quivering as the ceiling started to spill golden crumbs to the floor.

After a minute that stretched into years, she looked up to Rhaena, and with all her math forgotten, she said, "Help me, Menna Olwak. I'm scared. I don't want anyone to die."

[Jirai]

Gloria asks a question, a question that Rhaena does not answer. She listened, listened carefully as the younger woman spoke. And then, finally, she began pulling those lace gloves free of her hands, the hands that Gloria had seen before.

"Who was her assassin?" The gloves were set aside, neatly folded and placed beside the teacup. Then Rhaena Olwak smiled gently at this girl who would claim Ariane Emory as a friend. She stretched her hands out.

"Take off your gloves, Gloria. Put your hands in mine. Everything will be alright."

[Rance]

The governor's lady had a hand that was not natural. As she removed her gloves, the girl's eyes shot to it, both admiring and apologizing -- apologizing, without words, that such a thing should have happened at all.

Who was her assassin?

She peeled off her own glove, prying the black thing from beneath her linen-bloom sleeve. The reflective skin was shown, shining against the schoolhouse's idle candlelight, her fingers like well-polished steel.

Lying was no option, not to someone she respected as she did Rhaena. But it did not keep the girl's face from contorting like she had smelled something heady and offensive, as if the truth itself had the stink of bloated bodies on a sun-soaked battlefield. "Elliot," she said. "Elliot Brown. And -- and everything that made those around him stronger, more formidable, he stole it. He made it his.

"He -- he spoke so nicely to Cherny and I. Like we were toys." She reached out to place her hands in Rhaena's, her large, shivering fingers without elegance or grace. "I don't want him to go sour. I will do what I must."

Everything will be alright.

[Jirai]

Rhaena was quite fond of that hand, unnatural though it was. It was hers, and better by far than not having a hand at all. She knew from experience. The woman smiled as Gloria set her hands - both natural and unnatural - into Rhaena's own. A match, yet not, for where Gloria's shone with reflective silver, Rhaena's dark gray rippled with bright colors.

"Elliot Brown walks close to the edge as it is." She murmured, absent words as Rhaena's attention was elsewhere, bronze eyes having already lost their focus.

Some things were easier with skin to skin contact, and this was one of them, Rhaena's presence within Gloria's mind an exceedingly subtle and delicate thing. She had always had a lighter touch than her brother and time has only accentuated this difference between the siblings. Once there, she would do as she had promised to Gloria - but that was not all she would do. No, there was a dream to view in full, the work of a moment, and other, quieter things.

"I worry about him," She continued speaking after a moment, still holding gently onto the other woman's hands. "But for him as well, Gloria, everything will be alright. I promise you that."

[Rance]

"I will make it alright," she said. "I -- I will speak to his family; I will appeal to them as his friend. I will--"

Rhaena touched her hands. The sentence was lost somewhere distant, as if she had forgotten how to speak. A black dot of blood stuck within the cavity of a rotten, hollowed tooth started to throb. She sucked in air, a gasp, let out a faint noise like a cricket's neigh as all the muscles in her throat turned to stone.

The Dream. Troughs of milk. Games of bones. A song ringing in the eaves of buildings of gold and alabaster. Hawks. The needy and starving in lines around the Meetinghouse. The hairless seamstress, the Killer; leather-faced Cherny, the Gatherer; Catch-Catch-Catch in his wild splendor, the sower of some seed that had taken shape between the girl's thighs and had blossomed into a child, knowledge of Soodsy, a daughter, she was so good with her knife, Killing as she was meant. A cart of the dead. Yellow-bead eyes of the Hungry. A silver-bleeding Regent, Brown's power-hungry hands. Cherny's final, violent death; the fall Myrken in a single, sand-tarnished, world-crushing Song--

The girl's fingers twitched against Rhaena's. She knew her seams, she knew her rhetoric, her simple math; she knew her glass words and right from wrong in the eyes of the Nameless. But what she had no knowledge of were talents. Rhaena's conscience prying against the soft fleshwalls of her mind, piercing, digging. There were artifacts there that spilled over with the Dream as if she had shattered a seal of wax on a cork of over-fermented wine, spurts of other memories splattering out from between the cracks--

the sweltering heat the the the stink of maddening incense incense prayers lifted up to the nameless no names nameless don't have names wrap the thread around your fingers twist it just like so the nameless roll it down across the thumb you fool you--

Th-that one must be Jernoah.

Ye are right about words. Ye have wronged me with yers, lass.

We went on th-th-the boat, and all went away - I sang to th-the Others. They wanted to know why I wasn't with th-them. All th-through the boat, I sang.

a conversation.

she killed him. just a seamstress, but she did.

i know. she was afraid. she feared being broken.

but she killed him. she killed the Calamity--

but her parents, her mother is mad with smokeroot and her father makes shoes.

a cobbler's daughter is expendable. he will have another. it is blasphemy to slaughter a Calamity.

you will not concede because of her fright, then.

we need a cad'vak. the festival draws near. a reliquary for the horrific deeds done this year in our State.

If they ever try to take you back to Jernoah, Mister -- Mister Catch, I -- I promise I'll not let them.

you would have her eat the sins. you would take her hand away and give her the silver.

if i must. she will share the burden.

and when she dies--

what Jernoah has done wrong will make barren the earth where she perishes.

this year's cad'vak? for the nameless.

like a piss-white prophet. for the nameless.

so they cut the hand hand hand how will i make the make the make the mending you will learn again such a good seamstress share the share the burden burden my father makes a shoe and mother smokes a root promise me promise me me me you will not tell anymore stories stories stories mirrors a shard mirror bad stories i am no oracle

Th-th-they p-p-put in silver chains, and I was so p-p-proud, everyone c-c-came to see me, and they threw flowers at my feet, and g-g-gave me the grandest cart to pull.

an old woman with stalactite teeth smiled--

the growing rat'vak. the one who grows. black smoke and black smoke and black smoke and all for Jernoah.

A mug of white peppermint tea spilled over. It hit the floor and shattered, precious porcelain bursting like a cracked egg across the wooden schoolhouse floor. A collar of black sweat made sticky the neck of her dress. Her palms disengaged, knowing naught but the lapse of a sluggish, weary second--

"I am -- I am sorry," the girl whispered, chair scraping against the floorboards as she squatted, a puddle of skirts sprawling out around her like a filthy, half-torn halo as she frantically scooped jagged pieces of cup into her silvered palm.

[Glenn]

All things had a price. The Man in Black knew that better than most because he had paid and collected both. He'd paid such a price at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, and part of that price paid was the onus of collection, at the beginning, in the middle, and now and here, at the end.

A mug shattered and a door opened. Giuseppe entered the room. To say that he looked healthy and hale would be a lie. Rhaena had seen the man, Glenn's former bodyguard, his former accomplice, looking far more charming and whole. Gloria, on the other hand, had seen him oozing and leaking, returned to death's door for a second time but refusing to knock. Now, he was somewhere in the middle. The shadows seemed to pulse and quiver through his presence, but his clothes were neat, his face, pale and gaunt, was not riddled with expressions of pain and effort.There was an easy pressure pushing him forth, but it was all pleasant enough so long as he went with it the flow of it.

"Miss Olwak. You're looking well. Few wear the veil of a ghastly retelling quite as beautifully as you. And then we have our young bella," said to Gloria with only a slight but of cruelness and enough earnestness to make one wonder, "you are dropping things and making a mess, yes?" He leaned back against the wall of the room, staring at the two women and beginning to clean his fingernails with a rather nasty looking dagger. "When people ask Giuseppe what he does, he has an answer. He solves problems. Today though? Today, I am here to clean up a mess."

[Jirai]

The Dream, then, and more. A moment's time, enough for flashes, skittering from one to the next as she finished her tasks - hawks, masked Cherny, the Regent, death... an old woman's face, silvered hand, stories and mirrors. Much and more, enough that Rhaena will need some quiet to sort through what she has found. She does not have time for that right now, though. An instant in which to finish her tasks - the one she had promised Gloria, the other for herself. An instant is all it takes, all it can take, for Gloria is pulling back, the delicate, painted teacup shattering on the floor. Enough.

Another moment passed, Gloria falling to the floor to fix what cannot be mended, Rhaena's bronze eyes regaining their focus, a door opening.

"Enough, Gloria," she soothed. "Leave it be, don't cut yourself on the pieces." Words for the seamstress even as the gowned woman was looking up at the door, taking in the arrival of the man in black.

"Giuseppe," she said, a certain fond note in her voice. "What a pleasure to see you again; you shouldn't be such a stranger. Though I must say, you are not looking all that well yourself." She slipped to her feet, shaking her skirts into order and paced unhurriedly around the table, extending a hand to the seamstress.

"Come, dear. I was going to have one of the children clean that, but it seems that Giuseppe is offering. Isn't he so helpful?"