An early morning's trek to the Inquisitory had her on unsteady feet. She'd not slept in the night, could not, refused to, so when the red-throated roosters rattled their morning greetings, her heels were already crunching through the streets. The girl knew she should have been more awake, more alert. But on the heels of the weariness weighing down her eyes, the nervous insects scrambling around in her stomach seemed less like fear and more like natural aesthetics -- side-effects of merely being.
When she entered the Inquisitory, she did not do so easily. There was a hesitation at the stout front doors, a thought to turn and simply be off -- it was a fool's errand, and she already knew that. She had struck out on so many fool's errands, had made those errands foolish in the first place.
But she was stubborn. Stubborn and swollen with unyielding principles. That was what Noura had said.
What did Noura know, what did she even think she knew--
No more than a seamstress.
"Giuseppe," she said to one of the errant bodies in the Inquisitory, squinting her eyes beneath her bonnet and pausing the figure in passing to ask after the Man in White. When the Inquisitor stopped to ask her what reason she had to see him, she hooked her finger into an edge of parchment sticking from her blouse-sleeve and dragged it out. Giuseppe's letter.
"I am here to see Giuseppe."
The young Inquisitor that led the girl to the High Inquisitor's chambers did not turn back long enough to see her hide, amid her filthy patchwork Storyteller-skirts, a mirror-bladed knife with a hilt fashioned from a tin cup's bottom.