A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby Rance » Wed Aug 07, 2013 12:28 pm

...you can't breathe while they're in the room.

For the barest, most lonely moment, she couldn't breathe. Tennant was in the room, a washcloth draped over his shoulder. He smoked one of his smokeroots and the serpentine curls of gray dispersed in his fiery hair. He said things like Lovely Gloria and Beautiful Gloria and held her hand so tight she thought she could feel his bones trying to become hers. He had orange and cinnamon on his breath. They shared wine -- I spent two shillings on this wine and I don't know anything about wine, she'd said -- and he told her bonnets and gloves were things to hide behind. He was standing right there--

--but he wasn't. He wasn't. Just her. Just Agnieszka Kazmerrik. Just a comical, child-scrawl image of Rhaena Olwak. Just dresses and scotch the color of piss from a body that wanted for water. And Jerno piss was always so yellow, so dark, film on the fingers, sediment on the tongue, but you drank, you drank what you must, and--

I was like that, too, always hitting things and people and running around breaking shit because I was hungry and poor.

"I'm sorry," she said into her glass, shrinking in her seat, hoping the individual threads in the upholstery would grab her skirt, the hips of her blouse, the bottoms of her elbows, drag her in so she could just vanish, so they could stop talking, I'll make your dresses, I'll make whatever you want. "No -- no girl, or woman, or child should be forced to do such a thing. I wish you hadn't. I wish--" more scotch, hot in the head, a red mottle to her cheeks, glass in her eyes, "--no girl was forced to kill someone she cares for so deeply.

"But if you think I am judging you, if you think I can judge you, you assume too much of me. I offer you another perspective. Like -- like you offer me. But if--"

Beneath her skirt, her left knee pumped, her clog-heel drumming a cadence on the floorboards, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.

"But if you think you're the only one who's ever been forced to kill?"

You aren't.

The Councilwoman sat. The seamstress did not admire the curtains because sometimes she thought there were shadows behind them. She scrubbed her palms off on her skirts as if trying to clean them, so hard, so viciously and with such wild, remote vigor that the palm of her bare hand was littered with tiny dollops of skin.

(until you've spilled the guts of someone)

"Not just a Dream," she whispered. "A vision. As sure in my head and heart as if it had been etched into my bones or growing in my belly like -- like a baby. A thing which must be. A thing which shall be. The Storyteller, she -- she..." Tap-tap-tap, but this time it was a gloved finger that drummed against her own temple, drilled with a hollow knock against the side of her skull.

"Glenn Burnie was dead. The whole town sang songs about it. About his death, about treachery. I went to Rhaena and I told her, I told her because I was afraid. She put her -- her little invisible fingers under my scalp and my hair and my skull and into my brain." Her words were fast, silent as a hoarse breath. "She took it out of my -- my stupid head. She made it hers.

"Do you want to hear the song? Do you want me to sing it," Gloria asked.
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby channe » Thu Aug 08, 2013 1:33 am

"Made to?" A pause. A swig of the scotch. "No. I chose to. I'm Chairwoman of the Defense Committee. If I wasn't able to make these choices, Gloria, I wouldn't have said yes when I was appointed." A pause. "So if you're worried about me not being able to make the decision about Rhaena when it comes time, don't be."

She steels herself; there's tightness in her shoulders and around her mouth, and she listens to the girl's story with greater incredulity. And then, something clicks, and she asks --

"Yes. Yes, I'd like to hear it."
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 08, 2013 3:37 am

Old hymns were easy; she knew thousands of words, hundreds of lines, all the melodies and harmonies for songs of praise and sacrifice. They loved the songs in Jernoah; they adored the little choir-girls in all their finery -- proud mar'daks and par'daks looked on to see their children eating their sand, knowing every right note.

A choir-girl never stopped singing even when she saw the flicker of a glass knife and heard the final, rattling breath wheezing out through the new hole punched into the chest of a prostrate sacrifice. The Sisters and Brothers would know. They would know if she stopped, and so would the Nameless.

She drew her knees up against her chest, fingers sprawling across them, her mouth stuffed against the bend of a thick leg as if to muffle the melody that came out of her--

"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!"

Never a stammer. Never unsure. The song rose up with its excitement and lilted down into her throat when her voice meant for softness. She hit every note; her register was perfect, her pitch able to reach high toward unexpected octaves and low enough for a baritone, an earthly rumble that would have set grains of sand dancing across smooth glass--

”’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.“

Her palms clapped against her forehead. The song welled in her guts like mud and echoed in her ears, a ringing tine. It relieved the pressure in her to blow the tune out from her lungs, but left her brow streaked in black sweat and her hands shaking, unsure, slippery.

"That's it," the seamstress whispered under her breath. "Those are all the -- the words I heard."

More scotch.
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby channe » Thu Aug 08, 2013 4:38 am

"That's heavy," she says, finally, quietly. A swirl of the scotch, a narrowing of her red-painted lips. "Do you think it's still a prophecy? Or do you think it has already happened?" Gloria doesn't need to know what happened at Golben, not quite yet, and she's not exactly sure that what she saw was even real.

And then --

"Are you sure it's Rhaena that the song is talking about? Do you remember any images?" She pushes out a sigh. "I'm not good at this magic shit. I wish Aleksei was here. He would know exactly what you've felt and heard and what it means."
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 08, 2013 6:32 am

"It will happen. It is happening."

There was a glut of scotch in her stomach, burning like a tiny fire. Her teeth clapped against the edge of the glass, trying to coax what little remained from it -- now, the process was simply habitual, an occupation to remedy her quivering hands.

"Whether or not it was Rhaena, the governor's lady has ensured that the song is about her. She has taken on the role described in its verses. Whether he is dead, whether he is missing, the governor's been -- been removed. And the city prospers as a result. The song finds new truth.

"Perhaps she means to prevent what she saw that I'd tried to desperately to hide away. But in doing so, she -- she unwittingly excites its inevitability."

She scrubbed her gloved hand down the contours of her round face, pinching together thick cheeks, surveying the numbness of lips and skin as the scotch flared with excitement in her bloodstream. Two glassfuls done, she went for a third -- her grip was unsteady, and the decanter nearly slipped. Her eyes were blurry, her voice began to wilt.

"Dogs who walk as men. Many-Fights," she whispered. "Birds. So many birds, like those Cherny has been teaching to obey his signs and rewards. Golden streets shining yellow against the Sun? The dresses, the fineries, the lace are all precursors. A Lady Marshall like a puppet. Elliot Brown, changed and modified. Altered.

"Some of it's realized alternatively through Rhaena Olwak's perceptions. But the paths all converge. Spellwork is a foreign and frightening beast to me, Menna Agnieszka. What it means is only what the Lady makes of it."

The girl stifled a clicking, moist revulsion in her throat by stuffing the back of her wrist against her mouth. She looked to Agnieszka, wishing she did not need to say--

"You weren't in it. You weren't in it at all."

And neither was Rhaena Olwak.
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby channe » Thu Aug 08, 2013 12:35 pm

"Well, of course I wasn't in it. You didn't know me at all. We can only dream about the things we know." And she's starting to look a little green around the gills, isn't she? She doesn't want to believe it. And maybe, if she were anyone else, she wouldn't. But she remembers how desperately wanted someone to believe her, back when she was fifteen and toting around a kitchen knife.

And Ariane was the only one who gave me the time of day.

"I think I have to go talk to her," she says. "I -- I'm no spell-worker. I'm blood and guts and tactics, that's me. But I will have to talk to her."
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby Rance » Thu Aug 08, 2013 12:49 pm

You didn't know me at all. We can only dream about the things we know.

"Right," the seamstress said; by now, she could barely keep her eyes focused on a single spot, and when she stood, she thought she'd gotten her patchwork skirts tangled around her knees and ankles before she realized she was leaning, the world around her given quite a spin, a tumble. "Certainly," she bleated.

But there were faces in it I didn't know. Faces in it I only recently came to know, the girl didn't say. The only ones that weren't there were--

"I should find my bed." A proclamation more for her own worth and steadiness than for Agnie's. The emptied glass of scotch was still in her hand, dangling from her fingertips. She should find her bed, though the sun was still fresh and infantile and the drawn curtains were flooded with morning light. Her skull felt large, inflated, waterlogged. Her hips gave a few jerky starts as she stepped toward the door, the sluggish shackles of the scotch hanging like invisible chains from her ankles.

When she found the door, the girl pressed her head against the wood, pressed the cool surface of the scotch-glass against one of her cheeks, and said, "When -- when you did it, it was someone you loved.

"When I did it, it -- it was someone the whole city loved."

Too much to drink, too quickly swallowed; there was one knob to the door, and then a second and a third, and she tried to work the brass handle with a desperate hand. The air was suffocating, there was no wind, her guts were starting to tilt.

"That was -- was nice," she slurred. "That was a very nice talk."
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby channe » Thu Aug 08, 2013 11:44 pm

"Oh, for feck's sake," she says, grinning a little. "You can't even open the door. Have you ever drank this much, ever? Look, it's early, why don't you come to the back an' crash it off. I'm not leaving for the Council meeting for a little while." She sticks a thumb over her shoulder.
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Re: A tailor, a hairdresser, a girl...

Postby Rance » Fri Aug 09, 2013 2:30 am

The doorknob was a formidable opponent -- between trying to hold the empty glass and work the mechanism with her sweat-slick hand, she found no success. Pupils were as large as eggs as she turned to Agnieszka and said, "When you go, you -- you tell them there's quite a lot to fix. Quite a lot. And when you walk in that dress, you're to hold it like this."

She demonstrated with a weary hand, lifting up the side of her skirt to hold it out from her hip. Anywhere else, with any less to drink, the girl might have thought her footwork graceful, but her clogs scraped against the floorboards in weary search of the back room.

The glass of scotch found its way back to the table.

"You talk to her. You talk to her," she repeated, "and you'll find that words will do nothing but -- but infuriate you. Sometimes maybe being blood and guts is best. Why change when everything else refuses to stay the same? It's good to be reliable. It's good.

"We're going to learn the knife, you and I," said the seamstress, spoken more to her opened palms than to Agnieszka at all. "And we'll draw whatever dresses you want."

The girl ambled into the back, slithering into an uncomfortable lump on whatever bed there might be. Trying to sleep away a song, a Dream, her forehead cradled in her palms like a precious bauble.
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